August 14, 2005

Frenchman Kidnapped in Gaza

(Gaza City) A French television sound engineer was kidnapped by three gunmen outside his hotel in Gaza City and bundled into a waiting car just hours before Israel commenced its withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. The technician works for French 3 Public Television.

In another report, TurkishWeekly.net:

Palestinian security forces have said they are investigating reports that a member of a French television crew was kidnapped by gunmen outside his Gaza City hotel.
At this time, there's not much confirmation of the story. It's understandable in light of the fact that the Israelis are presently shushing settlers out of the Gaza Strip. They have 48 hours to leave or be forced out. Expect trouble.

Companion post at Interested-Participant.

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Let's Go. (Updated and Bumped)

So I head over to the American Spectator's site, like I do every weeknight, and I see the graphic for this weekend is a shot of the Bush Admin bigwigs at Crawford, which I shall reproduce here before it changes again Sunday night:

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And I'm thinking, what does that photo remind me of? It looks oddly familiar...

Oh, yeah:

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"We're gonna stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can't do that, you're like some animal, you're finished. "


UPDATE: via Michelle Malkin, I see this wonderful photo over at a blog called Dr. Sanity. Just for a little perspective:

hearnoevil.jpg

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Zaqueery's men flee from Ramadi In the face of local Sunni opposition.

Oh yeah, it seems more IraqiÂ’s are getting fed up with the terrorists and their insurgency. When they posted warnings on Mosques that all Shia should leave Ramadi or else be forced out their Sunni neighbors took a stand for them. So while they may not like the US being there they really donÂ’t like Zaqueery and his followers. I like how these brave men who in a group of 4 or five can handle a bound man well enough to saw his head off were forced to run by local militia.

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers. Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said. The leaders of four of Iraq's Sunni tribes had rallied their fighters in response to warnings posted in mosques by followers of Zarqawi. The postings ordered Ramadi's roughly 3,000 Shiites to leave the city of more than 200,000 in the area called the Sunni Triangle. The order to leave within 48 hours came in retaliation for alleged expulsions by Shiite militias of Sunnis living in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq

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Should Mr. Fitzgerald be reappointed?

US Attorney Patrick FitzgeraldÂ’s term in office is just about up. He will need to be reappointed by President Bush if he is to continue his work. What does he do? Well letÂ’s see. The CIA leak case, he is after the Chicago city government, he is holding my former governor GEORGE RyanÂ’s feet to the fire. You bet we should keep him. ItÂ’s refreshing to see a man go after both parties and hold them up against the laws they make for everyone else. I mean like they do us. Too often people in power think that the laws are just for you know people like me. Well Patrick Fitzgerald goes after them. America is far better off when politicians know there are people like him who donÂ’t give a ratÂ’s ass about the D or R next to your name. Is he overzealous? Yep, but he is not going after poor little people with no ability to defend themselves he goes after the top. Mr. Bush, give Mr. Fitzgerald to another four year term. I know itÂ’s kind of like letting the fox guard the hen house. But Mr. Bush has iron balls, WeÂ’ll see.

DEAN POLALES: I don't think Democratic or Republican Party politics has anything to do with the way he does his job. And I think his track record in Chicago demonstrates that -- when dealing with political corruption cases, he's an equal opportunity prosecutor.

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McCain Interview and Bill Kristol goes off on Rumsfeld

IÂ’ve been following John McCain for a bit. Today he was on FNS. Pretty good interview. It might seem if you asked Bill Kristol that the good Senator from Arizona is a better spokesman for the president on Iraq that is old Rumsy.

Or will we? The president seems determined to complete the job. Is his defense secretary? In addition to trying to abandon the term "war on terror," Rumsfeld and some of his subordinates have spent an awful lot of time in recent weeks talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq--and before the job is complete.

That was Kristol.

Now for McCain.

I don't know, because the president, I think, very appropriately made it very clear in the strongest terms that we are there until Iraqis are capable of carrying out their own security responsibilities. He could not have been more forceful or more clear, in my view. And I totally agree with him, and I think his statement was unequivocal. And now you're seeing these statements, both before and after, which are in contradiction to what he had to say.

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Terrorist supporters flock to the Jawa to see their brotherÂ’s handy work.

It never ceases to amaze me the fun I get to have watching stuff scroll by. RustÂ’s post from last week on privateers. Well the fact that so many terrorist web sites always have to move around or hide makes it kind of difficult for them to find each other. So when they feel the need to watch olÂ’ Zaqueery saw some poor bastards head off. They come here. Then they read all the nice little comments everyone leaves and well they just canÂ’t resist now can they. So check out Fridays comments on this thread. They guy is too nasty for me to put up here. LetÂ’s just say heÂ’s all invited us to entertain him sexually. I think we should oblige him donÂ’tÂ’ you. But not quite in the same manner as he suggests. First of all old believer whines about us ruining his and other fine Muslims reputation. Sorry Seray it not us itÂ’s you and the people who Sawed off poor Mr. BergÂ’s head. IÂ’ve watched a total of 2.000001 of these and I can tell you now thatÂ’s freaking evil, the executions, the Beheadings. So if you have a problem with it and you think itÂ’s our fault. You donÂ’t have a leg to stand on bother.

So while we are here ItÂ’s worthwhile to note that a big fat security update has been released by Microsoft. It delayed me a bit this AM but letÂ’s all take the time and add it. Mac users have a good time relishing the fact that you donÂ’t need 5 spy tools, two virus scanners and on and on and on. Linux users too.

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August 13, 2005

The Troll from Seoul

You folks might be interested to know from whence hails My Pet Jawa's cuddly, loveable troll who calls itself "Downing Street Memo". Well, if you read the title of this post, I gave the game away.

His IP address tracks back to Seoul. Seoul, South Korea, a free and prosperous democracy, thanks to... whom? more...

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Blog Sabbath Caption Contest: Led Zeppelin Edition

Caption this photo. Winners announced Monday with much fanfare and linky love.

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The REAL Iraq - al Qada link

Did the 9/11 Commission Report leave out mention of Iraqi agents arrested in Germany that could link Mohammed Atta's Hamburg cell of al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein's regime?

Captain Ed had made this speculation earlier here, not claiming that such a link existed but only that this needs further investigation.

I replied in this earlier post that maybe this should be looked into, but that the speculation that such ties could exist were unwarrented by the facts.

He in turn put up another post on the subject, this time wondering whether or not the evidence for Mohammed Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent in Prague ought to be looked at again.

Captain Ed and I have been going back and forth on this both in the comments section here and through e-mail. The gist of what Ed was saying was that in light of the Able Danger revelations, it is possible that the 9/11 Commission was predisposed to leave out certain bits of evidence that would run contrary to their findings. It is a good observation, one that I would agree with, but on the grounds that that is just par for the course in any type of research that has to sift through tons of data points.

Another valid point he makes is that his earlier post simply calls for an investigation into what the Iraqi agents were doing in Germany--with a bit of speculation thrown in their to boot. Fine by me. The 9/11 Commission Report is a flawed document just like all other government reports. It is not the final word on 9/11 and those that treat it as such fail to grasp the enormity of the task the Commission had under time constraints. I suspect the next twenty years will produce countless dissertations on the subject by Ph.D. candidates, each one contributing a new piece of information to the overall story of the attrocities that took place on that day.

One of the points that I made to Ed in an e-mail was regarding the validity of his source and his interpretation of the story. My objection was simply that an English synopsis of an Arabic newspaper in Germany may not be the most reliable source. Especially when that source claims the CIA was brought to Germany--something that I am sure they could not have known. My experience with Arabic papers is that any person wearing a business suit and working for the U.S. in any peripheral capacity can be accused of being a 'CIA Agent'.

Ed took up the challenge, and lo and behold, one of his army of readers was able to produce a corraborating account. So, according to MSM reports at the time, we have two Iraqi spies caught in Germany. The non-Arabic sources also mention nothing about the CIA or FBI getting involved and also nothing about a plot for Iraq to involve itself with fundamentalist Islamic terror groups to strike at US interests.

Ed is right that it would be nice to know what those Iraqi spies were doing in Germany. I second the motion. I'm not sure that such knowlege would have improved the 9/11 Report in any fundamental way, but it might have.

To imagine, though, that the fact that there were Iraqi agents in Germany somehow may be the missing link connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11 is grasping at straws, in my opinion. Many of us on the right would like to believe that such a connection existed because we believe that that would somehow bolster support for the war. But the justness or unjustness of the Iraq invasion ultimately does not rest on whether or not the Baathist regime had anything to do with 9/11.

Further, the war we are fighting in Iraq now is a different war than the one we fought to overthrow the Hussein regime. It is not simply another phase of the same conflict, it is a different war. We are fighting different people and we now have different goals. In the invasion of Iraq we had the goal of toppling a hostile government that we had been at war with for a decade. Now, we are fighting Islamist jihadis engaged in a struggle to build a Taliban-like state in the vacuum created by the fall of the Baathists.

The second conflict is directly connected to 9/11. We do not need to look to a German Iraq-al Qaeda connection to see this, we simply need to look at the facts as they exist on the ground right now.

What is the name the jihadis have taken on themselves in Iraq? Al Qaeda. Who have they pledged their allegiance to? Osama bin Laden. The three main insurgent groups in Iraq (al Qaeda, The Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, and The Islamic Army in Iraq) all share the same general political philosophy as the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. All are part of the network of global jihad. They are our enemies and it they who we are fighting in Iraq today.

We are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, today. Unfortunately, many in the MSM do not understand the nature of the enemy in Iraq. To concede Iraq to these terrorist forces would be to create a nation state parrhia just like Afghanistan. Iraq would become the next place where large-scale jihadi training camps would operate openly.

We do not need to rewrite history to create a link between Iraq and 9/11. But if we wish to prevent another 9/11 attack from happening again, we must begin by making sure Iraq does not fall to the hands of al Qaeda terrorists who would love nothing more than to create another safe haven from which they could operate.

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When America Gets Nuked, What Will the Extreme Left Say?(Caption Contest Winners Announced)

Noam_Chomsky.jpg

CONTEST WINNERS ANNOUNCED

Bumper Stickerist: Reaping the whirlwind: Women and minorities suffer most during the inevitable aftermath of EuroAmerican patriarchal hegemony.

Cassandra: Why didn't the U.S. military PROTECT US????? [sound of hideous shrieking]

Flea: Militant activists attack occupied Aztlan! Free Aztlan from American imperialism!

More fun stuff below and in comments section. more...

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Iraqis: Constitution will beat deadline

Uh Oh, another Entrenched Media whining topic down the tubes.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Most points of disagreement on the country's new constitution have been overcome and will be ready before the deadline, President Jalal Talabani said Saturday.

"The meetings are still going on and we have gone forward," Talabani told reporters. "There is a meeting today and another meeting tomorrow and God willing we will finish the job tomorrow" - one day ahead of the deadline for parliament to approve the charter.

Talabani said the meetings are concentrating on federalism in Shiite areas of central and southern Iraq, as well as the role of Islam in the state.

Appears that someone else isn't happy......Al Qaeda threatens to kill pro-charter Iraq imams: website.

DUBAI - The group of Al Qaeda frontman in Iraq Abu Musab Al Zarqawi has threatened to kill any Muslim imam who speaks out in favour of IraqÂ’s constitution, according to an Internet statement published on Saturday

Companion OpiniPundit

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August 12, 2005

Seattle Muslim Threatens Jawa Readers

One of the tiny minority of extremists sends the following message to Jawa readers. Abbas is from Seattle, Washington, and writes [warning: nasty language follows]: more...

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No, Iraq Had Nothing to do with 9/11 (Updated)

Scroll to end of post for update.

Is the 9/11 Report flawed? Yes. But that does not mean there was a conspiracy to keep information out of the report. It is the inherent nature of government reports, all government reports, to be flawed. If you don't want a flawed government report then you should not ask the government to report on anything.

Do the Able Danger revelations impeach the entire 9/11 Report so that nothing in the report should be believed? No. Of course not. It would be silly to have ever imagined that the report represented reality unbiased and unfiltered.

The 9/11 Report represents a consensus view on intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attrocities. Consensus views, by their very nature, are never complete and are never 100% accurate. They can't be. But the alternative to producing a consensus view is producing competing reports, each with their own set of biases, each with a different set of assumptions, and each with a different focus and emphasis.

So, when Captain Ed began speculating that there may actually have been operational ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, I was a bit taken aback. If I read him correctly, his reasoning is: more...

Posted by: Rusty at 03:34 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment
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Cowed by the bully ACLU lawyers, US lowers transit terrorism level

Thismakes me furious.

How can they officially let their guard down so soon after the London bombings?

Not that what they were doing before was helping anyway. I was in NYC 3 weeks after the first set of bombings, and one of my friends had her bag searched. I'd like to state for the record now that I watched the policemen search bags for 15 minutes.

They searched the bags about 8 women for every man.

UPDATE: Can you or your church group do something about the ACLU? Yes.

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Jawa Report: Over 2 Million Served (LINK THIS POST, BIYATCHES!)

Celebrate with us for a moment. You can help us celebrate our ginormous flow of traffic by linking to this post and sending a trackback, thus increasing our traffic even more! In return, we'll issue a fatwa against your infidel butt, you'll get a link in return, and maybe you'll get a hit or two of your own. But make sure it's a good post. Okay, who are we kidding, there are no good posts out there...... more...

Posted by: Rusty at 01:29 PM | Comments (31) | Add Comment
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How "Able Danger" Will Be Played

This is the money quote from the New York Times Thursday article about the 9/11 Commission/"Able Danger" scandal [emphasis added]:

Mr. Felzenberg said the commission's staff remained convinced that the information provided by the military officer in the July 2004 briefing was inaccurate in a significant way.

"He wasn't brushed off," Mr. Felzenberg said of the officer. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing" from the commission's investigation.

Felzenberg has, in effect, called the unidentified officer a liar or the dupe of a liar. In order for the information to be "inaccurate" it would have to have been faked in some way. The possibility of faked information being fed to the Commission should have, in and of itself, immediately raised alarm bells that a coverup or setup was taking place. Why would the commissioners simply dismiss, without investigation, an attempt to give them false information? more...

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Biggest Gigolo: David Lee Roth or Yoda?

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Click photo. Louis Prima + Yoda = Pimptastick Good Time. Eat your heart our David Lee Roth. Via Flea.

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Muslim Funny

Via Interested Participant. Muslim comic Shazia Mirza:

I'm terrified I'll die a virgin. Not because I'm obsessed with sex. I'm not, I don't think it's that big a deal. But I don't want to get to Paradise and have to sleep with one of the suicide bombers.
It's funny because it's true.

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About Those Approval Polls

Rob on Say Anything makes some valid points about the AP poll that the anti-war movement always cites when they want to make the case that they're now the majority. (h/t: Wizbang) The party affiliation numbers suggest it's not very representative of either the total or the voting population. He might be going a little too far, however, when he states:

The bottom line is, I’m not sure I’m going to be trusting any more of these polls touted by the media. It just doesn’t seem like any of them are really all that representative of the true opinions and feelings of the people.
Well, it's going to be tough knowing the public attitude and values if we stop conducting polls. And you could tell pretty easily that this AP poll wasn't representative... which suggests that one needn't necessarily be skeptical of all polls. Let's try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I've helped design a number of academic surveys using reputable firms (like Angus Reid Group) and don't think it's wise to paint with such a broad brush. The cell phone problem is real, but there are countermeasures. And refusals that might bias the results have been around for a long time, so the same corrective measures would work with "don't call" lists. (Legitimate political surveys aren't included in the national "don't call" list anyway.)

By the way, to point out a problem that Rob didn't discuss: one thing that I rarely see mentioned in MSM coverage concerning polls that identify approval or disapproval of Bush's handling of the war is any attempt to distinguish between those who feel we're not sufficiently invested and those who feel we're too invested. Believe it or not there are quite a few folks who think Bush is "too liberal," and that we ought to be not only pressing the war against Syria and Iran, but that we also ought to engage against perfidious Arab media. MSM and the anti-war Left always assume that disapproval signifies "too conservative" (warmongering), which is simply not the case.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia, Anticipatory Retaliation and The Jawa Report)

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Bakri Freed

Omar Bakri Muhammed is out of a Lebanese jail. Free, once again, to spout his message of jihad against the West and tolerance for Islamic terrorists. But at least he won't be going back to London to abuse the British socialist-state any time soon. more...

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