Archive for the ‘War on Terror’ Category
What Media Bias? Nothing to See Hear, Just Rioting Youths…
Here is a famous example of confusing an immigration policy with a suicide pact.
The BBC title is quaint enough, “Swedish city hit by youth riots.” A bit down the article we learn that “the trouble was linked to the closure of an Islamic centre” and that this is an “immigrant neighbourhood.”
Of course the city is Malmo and the riots are occuring specifically in Rosengard. Mark Steyn of National Review points out that this is the most Muslim city in Sweeden. Ah ha! Now we are getting somewhere.
This part of town is so dangerous that emergency services do not respond to calls without a police escort.
Samir Kuntar Is a Monster
As the world knows Israel struck a deal with Hezbollah to swap Samir Kuntar, four other terrorists and 199 bodies of Arab terrorists in return for two dead Israili soldiers.
So who is Samir Kuntar?
Samir Kantar gets a hero's welcome
The following is a quote from woman whose four year daughter was brutally murdered by Samir:
Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family….
I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought….
Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar….
To read her entire article that was published in the Washington Post in 2003 click here.
Oh, and are you wondering what would drive a man to do this to a four year old girl? Well, thankfully, Abu Abbas was willing to tell the world that the attack was “to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty” at Camp David the previous year.
How do we negotiate with that?
UPDATE:
The NY Times wrote on the notorious swap and mentioned Samir Kuntar only as he, “who had been held for nearly three decades after being convicted in connection with a deadly and notorious attack that also took place in Nahariya.” I guess that was all the news on Samir Kuntar worth mentioning.
RegimeOfTerror.com – Documenting Saddam Hussien’s Support of Terrorism
If you have been interested in the posts on Remembering the Causes of the Iraq War, I have added a new blog to my blogroll – Regime of Terror.
Mark Eichenlaub has done an excellent job bringing together reports and news stories to document the links between Saddam Hussien’s Iraq and global terrorists.
Please be sure to check it out if you are a skeptic or cheerleader.
Iraq War – Remembering the Causes: Part III
Welcome to the series for Part I click here, for Part II click here.
Terrorist & al-Qaeda Connections to Iraq
Given all of this, WMDs is not the only reason we went to war in Iraq. Often the President’s critics object to the war in Iraq being labeled as a part of the War on Terrorism. The London Telegraph has been the greatest source of journalism that has found links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but there have been other sources as well.
- Documents have been found that have correspondence between an Iraqi Intelligence Chief and Saddam Hussein that place Mohamed Atta in Baghdad in 2001 for “training.” A member of Iraq’s Presidential Committee has verified the validity of this correspondence.
- Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague in December 1994 and June 2000. There is a CIA memo and Czech intelligence that supports this.
- Ahmed Shakir, an Iraqi national:
- Hosted a 9/11 hijacker in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000
- Traveled and met with terrorists worldwide
- Was detained in September 2001 with contact information for ’93 World Trade Center terrorists, ’98 embassy bombers, ’00 USS Cole plotters, and 9/11 hijackers (This dude had the hook-ups!). There are memos that this from our Defense Intelligence Agency and our National Security Agency.
- The CIA has phone records of Shakir receiving telephone calls from the house where the ’93 WTC bombing was planned.
- Other CIA memos list at least 50 instances of contact between al-Qaeda and Iraq from 1990 to March 2003.
- The London Telegraph links Mohamed Atta to Iraq-based Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Ziad, another 9/11 pilot, also seems to have had connections to Nidal.
- During the 1999 “What do we do with Osama?” debacle hosted by the Sudan, Saddam offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. He ended up in Afghanistan.
- Salmon Pak – It’s hard to know where to start on this one.
Salmon Pak is a terrorist training camp south of Baghdad. Defectors say that men came from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco to train there. Here is the kicker. The unique item to Salmon Pak is an empty Boeing 707. There are aerial photos of this. Funny enough, the camp doesn’t have a runway; the plane just sits there. Charles Duelfer testified that he saw the plane from a helicopter and that the Iraqis told it was for (get this) counter- terrorist training.
Salmon Pak opened in 1995. This is the same year that al-Qaeda members started plotting in the Philippines on how to hijack airliners and slam them into U.S. landmarks. Their drawn up plans show they wanted to get up to 15 airliners. November 2001, the NY Times quotes Saban Khodada (Do you know what these names are doing to my spell check?), an Iraqi defector, saying that there was a six month curriculum at Salmon Pak teaching terrorists how to hijack airplanes with small knives and their bare hands. The London Observer also has work on this. They quote a man in Iraqi Intelligence by the name of Mukhabarat.
- It’s clear that Saddam paid between $15,000 and $25,000 to families of Palestinian suicide bombers for their services of ridding the world of Zionist devils, known commonly as Jewish women and children.
All of this information pushes Iraq from a perceived threat into an actual threat and certainly confirms that Iraq is a valid target in the War on Terror.
Iraq War – Remembering the Causes: Part II
If you need to catch up, Iraq War- Remebering the Causes: Part I can be found here.
David Kay rightly admits that somehow we made some decisions based on bad intelligence. But it was Saddam Hussein who put forth a great effort to make our bad intelligence on WMDs look good. UNSCOM was blocked from inspecting sites that they wanted access to in Iraq. Iraqi escorts forbid UNSCOM from taking any photographs during inspections. Various Iraqi personnel were not allowed to answer UNSCOM’s questions. And worst yet, UNSCOM inspectors would be forced to wait outside of building, sometimes for up to twenty-four hours, while trucks would leave filled with who-knows-what. When they would finally be allowed in the buildings would be empty; no furniture or documents. Obviously weapons inspectors were never intended to find any evidence of WMDs. Most of this information is from the testimony of Charles Duelfer, the former vice-chair of UNSCOM. David Kay filled in this odd gap of “We can’t find weapons” – “Saddam doesn’t seem to have any, yet he acted like he did.” God Bless him, Saddam thought he had WMDs. He was paying big money for materials and scientists and he was getting robbed blind. This means he had every intention of developing these weapons but only through his own dumb fault it didn’t work out. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard happen to a tyrant since the seventy straight years of “bad weather” that prevented the Soviet Union from growing any food and being the workers’ paradise it should have been. Meanwhile, during his testimony Kay made an observation that should have caught everyone’s attention. Kay believes, “this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought. [When] we have the complete record, you’re going to discover that after 1998 it became a regime that was totally corrupt. Individuals were out for their own protection. And in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood… of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated… We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq. And we now know that there was little control over Iraq’s weapons capabilities. … Iraq was a very dangerous place.”
It will be tempting for political enemies of George W. Bush to say that he lied and manipulated the American people to get us into a war with Iraq. But follow that through to its logical conclusion. To have lied, he would have had to know that the intelligence of the United States, Great Britain, Israel, France, Germany, Australia and the United Nations was false. George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the best decision they could with the information they had. Countless other people examined the same intelligence and came to the same conclusion. Bush and Blair had two choices, put their trust in their own and their allies’ intelligence or in promises from Saddam Hussein, a warmongering madman, who has pursued nuclear weapons more than once and used chemical weapons on his own people. In the end, there was intelligence that was perfectly accurate – Hussein was hiding that he was actively pursuing WMDs.
Iraq War – Remembering the Causes: Part I
I know, I know… why am I rehashing this now? But with reports of the successful surge and pending troop withdrawls, it is important to remember what got us there in the first place. The Iraq War will define a portion of the history of the United States and nearly the entire history of George W. Bush’s two term presidency. Enjoy…
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Here is what the free world knows about Iraq’s weapons. In 1981, under the cover of night, Israeli forces destroyed a nuclear facility in Iraq. At the time Israel was the scourge of the world. In hindsight we know how valuable that attack was. Ask this question, “Given that Saddam was trying to build nukes in 1981, do you think he simply gave up and never recommitted himself to that goal because a bunch of Jews interfered with his plans?” Next, we discovered all kinds of WMDs in Iraq after Desert Storm. Under the surrender treaty Saddam was to openly and completely dispose of all of his banned weapons. There is no record to be found that he destroyed these weapons. This is why we sent in the UNSCOM inspectors in the first place. Where are all the weapons we knew he had few years prior? Further, as recently as 1998 he launched biological and chemical weapons against Kurds in the North. Saddam and his buddy Ali, fondly known as Chemical Ali, went so far as to video the effectiveness of their weapons after their attack on the Kurds. Sometime in between then and now Saddam must have gotten rid of his weapons to avoid being in material breach of his surrender resolution and numerous following resolutions. But he also had to get rid of the weapons openly. Obviously that never happened. David Kay offered the most likely solution to this problem to the London Daily Telegraph. Kay believes that Iraq moved some weapons to Syria before the war began. He sited interrogations of former Iraqi officials. Kay’s story fits with reports during the war that convoys of trucks were moving along the highway connecting Baghdad to Baathist controlled Damascus, Syria. Jed Babbin reports that some of our Special Forces heaviest fighting occurred on this highway around Al Qaim, on the border into Syria.
In his speech to the nation on December 16, 1998 President Clinton made these points.
- His mission was to destroy “Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.”
- His decision to use force against Iraq due to their material breach was backed by the unanimous recommendation of his national security team.
- Saddam has used WMDs against Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the Kurds.
- “The international community has little doubt then that left unchecked Saddam Hussein will use these weapons again.”
On September 26, 2002 Wesley Clark testified before a House Committee. “[Saddam Hussein] retains chemical and biological warfare capabilities and is actively pursuing nuclear capabilities… Saddam has been actively pursuing nuclear weapons for over twenty years.”
Quoting President Clinton and General Clark is not point the finger and say, “Them too!” But more, to show that it is not reasonable to believe that it was the Bush White House that sat around and cooked this all up from scratch.
More later…
President Reagan on Military
There are some who’ve forgotten why we have a military. Its not to promote war; it’s to be prepared for peace.
This Modern Age 