Why we mised 9/11

Want to know why 9/11 took us by surprise? Dhimmi Watch shows a flyer on terrorist groups published in 1999 during the Clinton adminstration. It speaks volumes!

Peace in Iraq

The United States delivered Iraq from the oppression of a brutal tyrant who supported terrorists and kept his people in line using secret police and torture chambers. When that didn’t work, Saddam used WMD to slaughter his own people by the thousands. All told, he may have been responsible for as many as two million deaths.

After ridding Iraq of this tyrant, America then helped Iraq to set up a democracy in which Iraqis can vote for their own elected representatives (for the first time in history). The U.S. is now building roads, schools, utilities and hospitals. What compassionate person could possibly be against this?

On the other hand, those who want to return Iraq to the days of tyranny are Islamic radicals from places outside Iraq like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran—or they are former Baathist allies of Saddam Hussein, who have no problem with mass indiscriminate slaughter of anyone—including innocent Muslim women and children—who stands in the way of their goal of returning Iraq to the days of tyranny.

So when Code Pink and other radical anti-war activists blame all the deaths in Iraq on the United States, and fight to pull the U.S. out of Iraq immediately, just whose side are they on and whose peace are they working to ensure?

Obama and terrorism

Please take time to read Ed Morrissey's short but excellent article on how Obama would handle terrorism. The bottom line is this:

Besides that, though, Obama didn’t understand the question, and even his longer answer shows that. Williams asked him what he would do if we had incontrovertible evidence that AQ had conducted the attack. Obama avoided that by saying we’d have to do an investigation to be really, really, super-sure that AQ was responsible, and only then “take potentially some action” to dismantle the network. Otherwise, he’d mostly just talk — to the American people, to our allies, and anyone else who might feel alienated by any action we took to defend ourselves from further attack.

The RNC really should have clipped the entire answer. Never once in this answer does Obama pledge to take action against terrorists who would have killed thousands of Americans once again in terrorist attacks. It’s far more important for Obama to talk than take action.

Thomas Sowell and the election

Thomas Sowell has a remarkable way of cutting through all the debris and focusing on what really matters in the upcoming election. If you don’t read anything else today, please read his short but outstanding article in Townhall .

(Is it too late to draft Thomas Sowell for President?)

Yousef Yee and Obama

Remember James “Yousef” Yee? He is a Muslim and former Army chaplain who was “charged with espionage while serving at Gitmo.” He was “caught returning to the U.S. with maps of Gitmo prison facilities, among other classified materials, and was arrested at a U.S. airport. Two of his Muslim cronies at Gitmo were convicted of stealing or mishandling classified documents. The case against Yousef Yee was dropped to protect national security.

It turns out that Yousef Yee is now a Barack Obama delegate from Washington State! (And I thought nothing could shock me any more)! Read the story at Jihad Watch.

Sue Myrick's plan to fight terrorism

U.S. Representative Sue Myrick has a ten point plan for fighting against jihad in the U.S.
Among other things, her plan calls for investigating military chaplains who were endorsed by Abdurahman Alamoudi, a Muslim chaplain convicted of funding terrorism. And since a whistleblower reported that some Arabic translators in the FBI cheered the 9/11 attacks, Ms. Myrick thinks the process for selecting Arabic translators should be investigated.

Since some officials of CAIR have been convicted on terror charges, Ms. Myrick thinks the non-profit status of CAIR should be reconsidered. She wants to make it treason to publish materials that call for the death of Americans. She wants to “Restrict religious visas for imams who come from countries that don’t allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy. She wants to “block the sale of sensitive military munitions to Saudi Arabia.”

Sounds like a reasonable, common-sense plan to me. So why is Jibril Hough of the Islamic Center of Charlotte opposing it as a fear campaign and “McCartyhism?” Don’t moderate Muslims want to stop terrorism too? Or could it be that some of these so-called “moderate” Muslim organizations are really just foreign-funded front organizations that are not so moderate after all?

Read Robert Spencer’s excellent article about all this on FrontPage.

Obama terrorist ties?

Imagine a terrorist fundraiser with ties to Hamas having a link on Obama's official web site. Imagine Michelle Obama listed among the "friends" of this terrorist fundraiser. Go to LGF and check it out.

Obama terrorist connection

According to the PowerLine blog (via LGF):

When Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer decided to retire in 1995, she hand-picked local left-winger Barack Obama as her successor. In order to introduce Obama to influential liberals in the district, she held a function at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. This was, really, the beginning of Obama's political career, and it linked him forever with Ayers and Dohrn, with whom, as his campaign has acknowledged, he continues to have a friendly relationship.

Ayers and Dohrn were famous radicals, and fugitives from the law, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dohrn, actually, was the more famous of the two; she was the head, as I recall, of Students for a Democratic Society or one of its factions. Dohrn was crazy. She is the only public figure, to my knowledge, to approve publicly and enthusiastically of the Charles Manson murders.

Please read the entire article and listen to the audio at PowerLine.

Bombing Israelis

On that tiny radical Muslim minority:

"Palestinians who support bombing attacks against Israeli civilians rose from 44.8% in June 2006 to 48% in September 2006 and to 50.7% now."

"Again, more Gazans support these operations (65.1%), compared with 42.3% of Palestinians in the West Bank" (LGF).

Terrorism and poverty

According to UPI:

Alberto Abadie of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government said there is no significant relationship between a country's wealth and level of terrorism once other factors, like the country's level of political freedom, are taken into account.

The researchers reviewed the World Market Research Centre's Global Terrorism Index and found no clear correlation between terrorism and poverty.

Hmmm, I wonder if there is a correlation between terrorism and being raised in a Middle Eastern Muslim country.

Saddam and terrorism

The following are excerpts are from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal”

…a new Pentagon report suggests that Iraq's links to world-wide terror networks,
including al Qaeda, were far more extensive than previously understood.

The redacted version of "Saddam and Terrorism" is the most definitive public
assessment to date from the Harmony program, the trove of "exploitable" documents, audio and video records, and computer files captured in Iraq. On the
basis of about 600,000 items, the report lays out Saddam's willingness to use terrorism against American and other international targets, as well as his larger state sponsorship of terror, which included harboring, training and equipping jihadis throughout the Middle East.

According to a 1993 memo, Saddam decided to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia," where al Qaeda was then working with warlords against U.S. humanitarian forces.

The Harmony documents "reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term version."

For 20 years, such "support" included using Fedayeen Saddam training camps to school terrorists, especially Palestinians but also non-Iraqis "directly associated" with al Qaeda, continuing up to the fall of Baghdad.

In July 2001, the regime began patronizing a terror cartel in Bahrain calling itself the Army of Muhammad, which, according to an Iraqi memo, "is under the wings of bin Laden."

The main Iraq intelligence failure was over WMD, but the report indicates that the CIA also underestimated Saddam's ties to global terror cartels. (Wall Street Journal, see insightful analysis on HotAir).

It is so easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but try to put yourself back before the war in Iraq. Iraq was in violation of UN directives. We had been negotiating with Iraq for 10 years. Sanctions were not working. In fact, they were starving the Iraqi people while making Saddam even more filthy rich than he already was.

Not only our own intelligence services, including the CIA, but virtually all our allies’ intelligence services were saying that Iraq still had WMD. That Iraq once had WMD and used them on their own people is not in dispute, so when Saddam refused to allow inspectors to visit certain sites, or regularly blocked the inspectors’ way long enough to remove the evidence, there was no reason to doubt that Saddam still had WMD. Although, this turned out to be a deliberate deception by Saddam Hussein himself, that fact that Saddam was an active, global sponsor of terror, as seen above, was right on the money.

If I had been President, I think I would have done some “shock and awe” on the imagined WMD sites as well as Saddam’s military. I think President Bush was wrong to launch an all-out invasion. But I think it could have been even have even more disastrous to have had a President like Barack Obama who would have sat on his hands while the Iraqi people suffered through years and years of more negotiations and sanctions.

What if the next country that supports terrorist networks really does have WMD? Do you really want a President who will wait until one or more of our major cities has been decimated before we do anything? What would you do?

Power, Faith and Fantasy

After 600 pages of detailed discussion of the history of U.S. Middle-East relations from 1776 to the present, Michael Oren, the author of the outstanding book, Power, Faith and Fantasy provides this assessment:

“The history of U.S.-Middle East relations…was not one of unqualified kindness and altruism. American oil companies pumped billions of barrels of Arabian oil not for the betterment of the indigenous populations but for their own enrichment [This hardly seems fair. The oil companies not only made themselves rich, they made these countries wealthy beyond their wildest dreams]. Successive administrations had backed the oppressive regimes that advanced America’s interests and conspired to overthrow popular leaders. Yet for all its demerits, the record of American interaction with the Middle East is rife with acts of decency and graced with good intentions. The United States was unrivaled in introducing modern education and health care to the area, in extending emergency relief, and building infrastructure, in obtaining the freedom of colonized nations and in attempting to achieve security and peace. On balance, Americans historically brought far more beneficence than avarice to the Middle East and cause significantly less harm than good (Oren, Michael B. Power, Faith and Fantasy; America in the Middle East; 1776 to the Present. New York : Norton, 2007, 603. The words in brackets above are mine).

The assessment that overall, America’s policies brought much more good than bad to the Middle East flies in the face of many on the Left who argue that it is America’s Middle East policies that have brought on the wrath of Islamic extremists. The fact is that we did not deserve to have 6 killed and over 1,000 wounded in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centers, or to have 19 killed and 372 wounded in the attack on the Khobar Towers in 1996, or to have 244 killed and over 4,000 wounded in the attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, or to have 17 killed and 34 wounded in the attack on the USS Cole, or to have 3,000 dead in the attack on the twin towers in 2001.

Those like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and many others on the Left, who blame America for these atrocities, place themselves on the side of the very terrorists who seek to kill us.

Cutting off fingers

Today, LGF passed on the story of how Jihadists cut the fingers off of their innocent hostages.

What is even more disturbing than Jihadist degenerates cutting off the fingers of innocent hostages, however, is the total silence of all those America-hating Leftists who so self-righteously, and endlessly condemned America's waterboarding of three terrorists! Apparently, in the minds of the Left, it is a horror beyond belief to waterboard terrorists, but no big deal when our enemies cut fingers off innocent people!

Bomb explodes in New York City

At about 3:45 AM this morning, someone in Times Square in New York City threw an improvised explosive device at a military recruiting station. Read the story at ABC News.

Saber rattling in Venezuela

Marxist FARC rebels have been firing across the border from Ecuador into Columbia so yesterday, Columbian troops responded by attacking a FARC jungle camp in Ecuador. In the process they "killed Raul Reyes, a leader of Marxist FARC rebels."

According to the Intelligence Encyclopedia, "FARC is responsible for bombings, murder, kidnapping, extortion, hijacking, as well as guerrilla and conventional military action against Colombian political, military, and economic targets." They are also involved in illegal drug trafficing and have kidnapped Americans.

Today, siding with FARC, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez withdrew his diplomats from Columbia, sent 10 tank battalions to the Columbian border and mobilized his air force (Washington Post).

This is the same Hugo Chavez, by the way, that has been supported by numerous Democrats and Hollywood Leftists.

Obama funding terrorists?

According to an article published yesterday in WND Barack Obama did fundraising for a Palestinian camp with ties to terrorism:

Obama's 1999 fundraising for the Palestinian Deheisha camp raised the
eyebrows of one senior Israeli security official who was contacted yesterday for
comment on the issue. The official, who was not aware of Obama's fundraising,
noted Deheisha, which is located near the city of Bethlehem, had a "very active"
Palestinian terror apparatus in 1999, carrying out scores of deadly shootings
against Israeli civilians that year.

Two of the most deadly suicide bombings in 2002 also were planned from Deheisha, where the suicide bombers originated, said the security official. On one such bombing, in March of that year, 11 people were killed and over 50 injured, four critically when a Deheisha bomber detonated his explosives next to a group of Jewish women waiting with their baby carriages for their husbands to leave a nearby synagogue.

Read the entire article at WND.

The terrorist threat

While American Leftists charge Republicans with "fear mongering" "US Military Commanders Bemoan Lack of Concern About Terror Threat." Read the story at CNSNews.

Imad Mughniyeh killed

Yesterday (February 13), Imad Fayez Mughniyeh was assassinated.

Mughniyeh “served as special operations chief for Hizballah's international operations and as the group's primary liaison to Iran's security and intelligence services.” He “oversaw the group's terror network and established operational cells around the world.” Mughniyeh was involved in “the 1983 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed sixty-three people,” the “twin truck bombings in Beirut...killing fifty-eight, and a U.S. army barracks, killing 241 marines.” He was implicated in “the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, which resulted in the execution of U.S. navy diver Robert Stetham.” In 1992 Mughniyeh was involved in “the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed twenty-nine people” and in 1994 “he directed the bombing of the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in the same city, killing eight-five” (Policy Watch).

As a result of his death, tens of thousands of members of "the Religion of Peace" turned out today to show their support for this monster and to condemn his death…and Hezbollah declared “open war” on Israel.

Boy kidnapped by Al Qaeda

Fox News is showing video this morning of American troops rescuing a little Iraqi boy who had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda threatened to deliver the boy's head to his parents if they did not pay a huge ransom.

And the Democrats want to pull out immediately and leave Iraqis at the mercy of these satanic Jihadist monsters! I agree that we can't stay in Iraq forever. Eventually the Iraqi government must stand on it's own two feet. But to pull out immediately, regardless of the consequences to innocent Iraqis, is just wrong.

Retarded suicide bombers

Just when we thought that Muslim terrorists couldn't possibly get more disgustingly depraved and evil--dare we say, "satanic"--CBS News is now reporting that Jihadists are using mentally retarded women as suicide bombers!