These archive pages are being left here so past links to us don't break. We're now at www.windsofchange.net - come see us at our new home, and our new MT-powered blog!

(N.B. all pathcom.com URLs will break at the end of 2003... to fix, just substitute our domain before the HTML filename)

 
Thursday Daily Winds: Moving Day!

We're back, following some brief technical troubles. Our Movable Type launch is almost ready, and in fact you can see the sneak preview. By the end of the day we expect to have the bare-bones MT blog up and running here at the main address. Refining the platform as we go to add and leverage some cool new features is next on the technical agenda. On the content agenda? All the same good stuff you've come to expect from us - and more.

Thanks for tuning in!
posted by Joe Katzman on 1/30/2003 12:44:40 AM | [link to this post!]

 
Hi hoping 4 better security every where
I hacked this weblog meaning no harm
just for security test
im not gonna change anythings :)

Yahoo ID:Failure_of_god
E-mail:webmaster@x-hackers.com
posted by Mohammad x-hacker on 1/30/2003 06:36:56 AM | [link to this post!]

 
The State of the Union

We don’t have TV in Casa de Armed Liberal, so I didn’t get to read the State of the Union speech and the Democratic responses until this morning, when I read them on the New Laptop…which is important, because I was so damn frustrated with the weak-ass Democratic response that I was tempted to chew on the screen, but restrained myself because the machine was so expensive.

Middle Guy, my 16 year old son, noted my frustration, and in the warm, supportive style we share as a family suggested “Geez, dad. If they’re so weak, why don’t you write a better one.”

So here were the comments Rep. Joe Democrat should have made last night:

Thank you for taking the time tonight to listen to this critical dialog about our nation’s future.

We know how many of you have been turned off by the ugly politics of the last decade, and how easy is to be distracted from what goes on here in Washington. But right now is the time when, more than ever, we need an informed and engaged citizenry as we confront critical issues of war and peace, the economy, and national security.

Let me talk first about national security.

We in the Democratic Party have been and are the strongest defenders of individual expression and the 1st Amendment. We believe that there is a wide gap between political speech and political action on one side, and terror and violence on the other. We have a judicial system to stand between them, and most important, to act as a check on the power of the Federal Administration, as the Founders intended.

And we cannot accept the notion that U.S. citizens or resident aliens arrested on U.S. soil can be treated outside that system.

Our troops faced enemy combatants in Afghanistan; including, sadly, a U.S. citizen. We are not asking for our legal procedures to apply on the battlefield. But the cities of the U.S. are not a battlefield, and while there may well be terrorists in our cities today, we will not accept the notion that we must deal with them extrajudicially when they are on U.S. soil.

I take this position first because the Federal Government cannot fight and defeat terrorism alone. It will take the combined efforts of local police and public safety officials, an active, informed, and alert citizenry along with the Federal security forces to win this fight. It will also be critical that we win this fight and survive ourselves as a nation founded on the public and just application of law and the notion that we have no sovereign who stands beyond the gaze of citizens and the laws that bind us all.

We will move to require that all U.S. Citizens and resident aliens suspected of terrorist activity or conspiracy be dealt with through the legal system, and to ensure that political speech and actions – as opposed to terrorist conspiracy are fully protected.

We face many threats from outside, and we believe that it is important to first combat the ones that are obvious and easy, as opposed to unlikely and hard. The interests that would injure us do not have ballistic missiles that can reach our cities. The threats we face will arrive by commercial airliner, container ship, and delivery truck.

We cannot afford to spend the billions of dollars it will cost to develop a relatively ineffective missile shield against a threat that does not today exist. Not when we are still too open and vulnerable to terrorist threats which remain all too easy to carry out.

To that end, we propose reallocating the bulk of the funds proposed for ballistic missile defense implementation, as opposed to research, to strengthening the technology and personnel who can secure our ports, airports and highways against terrorist attacks.

Our country has already been attacked with biological weapons…the anthrax-laced mail that was sent two years ago, and we have discovered how fragile our public-health system has become through decades of neglect. We are seeing increases in communicable diseases in almost all our major cities, and our ability to predict, track, and respond to those is a major defense against the most frightening type of terrorism.

We propose substantially increasing the budget for public health to create mechanisms to defend us against the possibility of both natural and man-made diseases.

The health of our economy is also our best defense, and touches all of us within the US and also people outside as it directly affects their economies and as it affects our ability and resources to act both militarily and charitably.

A healthy world economy is the ultimate cure for terrorism. Jobs, security, and a better standard of living will reduce the pool of unemployed, hopeless young men that feeds the terrorist stream.

A healthy U.S. economy is the answer to a number of our problems as well. We respect the President’s commitment to reducing the tax burden on individuals and businesses in the U.S., and want to work with him to help nurture the economy.

But we think he’s going about it wrong.

The biggest impacts on consumption will come from reducing the tax burned on the middle class. They pay Federal and State Income taxes, as well as sales, property, and a host of other taxes.

We want to retarget his changes in the personal tax rates downward.

The repeal of the estate tax was an expensive mistake. We want to undo it.

We support a reduction in corporate taxes as well, and would support his effort to eliminate taxes on dividends, as long as it was combined with a tax on ‘mailbox’ corporations that do business and are truly headquartered in the U.S., but maintain fictitious addresses in foreign tax havens.

We also want to examine the subsidies built into the tax codes for the largest corporations, and retarget those at the true engines of prosperity and job growth, the small and regional businesses that are the backbone of American wealth and well-being.

For too long, we have tolerated fiscal mismanagement at the state and local level, and compounded it with unfunded mandates. We need to sit down in an open dialog with state and local governments and look hard at the fiscal crisis that they are facing today. These are the services and jobs that directly face most of us, and we need to find ways to put them on a firmer financial footing.

We propose a national task force on local government finance, with a deadline of next year and the honest charter to find a way to keep the states and local cities from going bankrupt.

This Administration is missing the boat on issues affecting the environment. The American people have shown, over and over again that they expect us to be better stewards of the natural riches we have been blessed with.

To that end, we want to move to do several things.

We need to improve the efficiency with which we use energy. Our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil is limits our freedom to react to the threats and politics there.

The President’s proposal to experiment with hydrogen is a good one, but we believe that there are two things we can do to move our cars and trucks in the direction of greater efficiency.

Natural Gas is clean-burning, widely available, and can be blended with hydrogen as a first step toward a hydrogen-based energy economy. We propose to incentivize the automobile manufacturers, gas and oil companies, and consumers to build, fuel, and buy cars and trucks powered by natural gas. We in government need to lead the way. To that end, we will propose the entire Federal civilian vehicle fleet be transitioned to natural gas over the next five years, and that a series of tax and regulatory incentives be put in place to encourage the use of natural-gas powered vehicles.

We propose to end the subsidies to fuel-inefficient small trucks and SUV’s. Look, we believe in free choice. But the reality is that Chevy Suburbans and other similar vehicles are subsidized by regulatory loopholes which need to be closed. We use them like cars, let’s treat them like cars.

We believe that we have to continue the exploration and exploitation of domestic energy resources. We will look carefully at drilling in the ANWR. But let there be no mistake about it. Twenty years ago, this Congress approves the trans-Alaska pipeline, premised on the promise by the Administration and the oil companies that the oil that flowed through it would feed the energy needs of the U.S. It was less than ten years later that we were shipping that oil to Japan.

We won’t make the same mistake again. If we are going to drill in the ANWR, the energy extracted must be for our domestic use. Period.

And now, the threat of war....

(break for commercial)

...to be concluded tomorrow.
posted by Armed Liberal on 1/29/2003 04:20:05 PM | [link to this post!]

 
Tuesday Daily Winds

Tick, tock goes the clock. The Bush State of the Union speech arrives tonight.

If you missed Monday night's Hannity & Colmes on Fox News Channel, you missed a corker of an interview with a former U.N. weapons inspector named Bill Tierney. It is blogged below.

Today's Blogs:
  * Hunter of the Apocalypse: An Interview with a U.N. Weapons Inspector

posted by Trent Telenko on 1/28/2003 06:58:02 AM | [link to this post!]

 
Hunter of the Apocalypse: An Interview with a U.N. Weapons Inspector

A friend of mine called me up and directed me to a thread over on the FreeRepublic.com on a Fox News Channel interview with a former U.N. weapons inspector named Bill Tierney. Tierney was a former US Army Military Intelligence Chief Warrent Officer who was recruited in 1996 as a weapons inspector. He made two highly charged accusation. First, the French were spying on the U.N. weapons inspection teams by providing the Iraqis lists of sites to be inspected. Second, he is convinced the Iraqis have operational nuclear weapons.

In the interview, Tierney detailed how the French had a spy at UN HQ in NY who was caught rifling thru a desk that held the inspection site list and how a French inspector was caught passing info to the Iraq. Tierney's inspection team went as far as feeding the French spy phony sites they planned on searching. (Now you know why the Iraqis accused Tierney of being a spy!)

This article from Newsmax excerpts the part of the Hannety and Colmes interview relating to Tierney's nuclear accusation:

Tierney told Hannity that a 1997 inspection he attempted to conduct at Saddam's Jabal Makhul presidential palace lead him to suspect that the Iraqi dictator already had the bomb.

"Certain things convinced me that they had proscribed items at this presidential site. That led to the inspection in September 1997 where we were locked out. There was something about that. The just came up and said, 'There will be no inspection. Good Day.' And they walked off."

Tierney said the rebuff was "completely different" from other inspections of sensitive sites, where some sort of compromise was always worked out.

Another sign of sinister activity: As Tierney and his team were being turned away, a U.N. helicopter attempting to overfly Jabal Makhul nearly crashed when an Iraqi official on board lunged at the controls.

"That was a distraction to keep that helicopter from going over to the other side of the mountain to see what they were doing" at the facility, said Tierney.

He described Jabal Makhul as a "gigantic" complex of warehouses and underground tunnels, before noting that last year the London Times reported Saddam was storing nuclear weapons in bunkers in and around the Hamrin Mountains.

"There is only one heavily guarded place in the Hamrin Mountains," Tierney told Hannity. "And that's where we were, Jabal Makhul."

Still, despite efforts by Iraqi officials to keep inspectors away from Jabal Makhul, U.N. officials continued to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt, he complained.

"If you had ambiguous reporting; it could mean he has the nukes, it could mean that he doesn't." he said. "Normally the call would be, 'Oh well, that doesn't confirm so therefore he's still developing. He doesn't have it,'" Tierney said he was told.

While, as mentioned previously, Bill Tierney was accused by the Iraqis of being a spy. That wasn't what got him in trouble with the Clinton Administration. No, he was removed from the inspection teamsfor the "crime of proselytizing." The following is from the Tampa Tribune Online:

At the time, Richard Butler was executive chairman of the U.N. Special Commission which provides and oversees U.N. weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter was the team's chief inspector.

``The position which Mr. Tierney would fill would be in direct support of [Ritter], and is a critical position on the lead access team for any inspection, especially one which may be categorized as sensitive by Iraq,'' Butler wrote in 1998 as he sought to extend Tierney's tour with the inspectors.

Tierney says his career began unraveling after he was called on to help interrogate an Iraqi defector who was a Christian. The defector was nervous, Tierney says, so Tierney prayed with him.

Tierney drew fire for that. Critics accused him of violating a Central Command directive prohibiting religious proselytizing. Before long, Tierney says, doors always before open to him began closed, and his career fell into limbo.

He resigned, he says, mistakenly believing it would be easier that way to clear his name. He learned that wasn't so and unsuccessfully tried to win reinstatement.

The Pentagon said in rejecting him that his behavior with the defector was inappropriate and could have cost the United States a valuable intelligence source.

Tierney scoffs at that. The man already professed Christianity, he says, so he couldn't have been proselytized.

``The fact is, I established excellent rapport with the source,'' Tierney adds. ``If anything, a U.S. government official expressing compassion for his situation enhanced his willingness to cooperate.''

Given the flat out hate many senior Democrats have for Christian "bible thumpers" (and lets face it, the deference to the Saudis that Republicans pursue) it is not surprising that the senior officers in Central Command took advantage of Tierney's naivete to get rid of him. He was to dangerous to Clinton Administration Iraq policy to be "allowed to live" anywhere near the Iraqi WMD intelligence.
posted by Trent Telenko on 1/28/2003 07:40:27 AM | [link to this post!]

 
Monday Daily Winds

Tick, tock goes the clock. 1 DUPBBSNIT (Day Until President Bush's Big Speech, Not Including Today). The speech is coming on Tuesday evening.

Saw "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" yesterday - you know, the movie about Gong Show host Chuck Barris and his claim that he was a CIA assassin. Let's just say I'm skeptical, but the movie was well done: alternately sharp, sad and funny when called for. Recommended, as is "Catch Me If You Can."

Today's Blogs:
  * Three Degrees of Separation: Envy, Genocide, Anti-Semitism and the Trans-Atlantic Rift
posted by Joe Katzman on 1/27/2003 12:20:47 AM | [link to this post!]

 
Three Degrees of Separation: Envy, Genocide, Anti-Semitism and the Trans-Atlantic Rift

There were several articles this week end on the subject of the growing US-European rift. One appeared in the Washington Post and it referenced two more (one each in the N.Y. Times Review of Book and the other in the TIMES Literary Suppliment) that are worth looking at. The gist of the three articles is that the Europeans envy American military power, but won't pay for their own. While Americans of the Left and Right are disgusted with the Europeans over their moral failings.

The Washington post article was written by Gianni Riotta and is titled Transatlantic Chill? Blame Europe's Power Failure. It says the primary reason for America and Europe parting ways is Europe's structural disarmament after the Cold War.

It is not America's unilateralism that relegates Europe to the kids' table. It is Europe's budget priorities. Europe spends $2.50 a day on every cow that grazes happily on the grass of the EU. Yet defense spending lags. Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of government at Harvard University, estimates that "the United States spends five times more on military R&D than all of Europe." Europe's soldiers cannot fight beside their U.S. comrades-in-arms because they lack technology such as the AN/PVS-7 night vision goggles; the U.S. Army has 215,000 of them. European forces have 11 heavy military transport planes; U.S. forces have 250.

The United States will accept Europe as a real equal when it sees muscle behind diplomacy.

The book review/article by Henri Astier, Why the French Hate America, referred to by Riotta in the Washington Post column, requires a subscription to access. An on-line excerpt can be found here. This last bit from the excerpt is telling and parallel's Riotta explanation on the moral level:

The purpose of European anti-Americanism is to find a reassuring explanation for the Continent's catastrophic loss of status. Europe virtually tried to commit suicide in the twentieth century, and American preponderance is a direct consequence of its self-inflicted wounds. In the space of thirty years, the Europeans triggered two World Wars from which the Americans had to come and rescue them. But rather than face up to this sorry history, Europeans prefer to pose as victims of America's drive for world domination. American 'unilateralism', Revel explains, 'is the consequence, not the cause, of power failures in the rest of the world'. . . ."

The New York Review of Books article was by Timothy Garton Ash and is titled Anti-Europeanism in America. The heart of this article is the following passage:

The current stereotype of Europeans is easily summarized. Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: "Euroweenies."[2] Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge. They spend their euros on wine, holidays, and bloated welfare states instead of on defense. Then they jeer from the sidelines while the United States does the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, standing tall in the patriotic service of the world's last truly sovereign nation-state.

A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see "the Americans" as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see "the Europeans" as limp-wristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can't get it up. (After all, they have fewer than twenty "heavy lift" transport planes, compared with the United States' more than two hundred.) Following a lecture I gave in Boston an aged American tottered to the microphone to inquire why Europe "lacks animal vigor." The word "eunuchs" is, I discovered, used in the form "EU-nuchs." The sexual imagery even creeps into a more sophisticated account of American–European differences, in an already influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace entitled "Power and Weakness."[3] "Americans are from Mars," writes Kagan approvingly, "and Europeans are from Venus"—echoing that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

Not all Europeans are equally bad. The British tend to be regarded as somewhat different and sometimes better. American conservatives often spare the British the opprobrium of being "Europeans" at all—a view with which most British conservatives, still mentally led by Margaret Thatcher, would heartily agree. And Tony Blair, like Thatcher before him, and Churchill before her, is cited in Washington as a shining exception to the European rule.

The worst abuse is reserved for the French—who, of course, give at least as good as they get. I had not realized how widespread in American popular culture is the old English pastime of French-bashing. "You know, France, we've saved their butt twice and they never do anything for us," Verlin "Bud" Atkinson, a World War II veteran, informed me at the Ameristar casino in Kansas City. Talking to high school and college students in Missouri and Kansas, I encountered a strange folk prejudice: the French, it seems, don't wash. "I felt very dirty a lot," said one college student, recalling her trip to France. "But you were still cleaner than French guys," added another.

There were two further passages I found of particular interest. The first was this one on European culpability in Serb Genocide:

"Atlanticist Europeans should not take too much comfort here, for even among lifelong liberal State Department Europeanists there is an acerbic edge of disillusionment with the Europeans. A key episode in their disillusionment was Europe's appalling failure to prevent the genocide of a quarter of a million Bosnian Muslims in Europe's own backyard"

In other words, one of the wages of Srebrenica was the American Left losing its identification with Europe as a moral and civilizational model. The second passage that struck me was this:

When and where did European and American sentiment start diverging again? In early 2002, with the escalation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. The Middle East is both a source and a catalyst of what threatens to become a downward spiral of burgeoning European anti-Americanism and nascent American anti-Europeanism, each reinforcing the other. Anti-Semitism in Europe, and its alleged connection to European criticism of the Sharon government, has been the subject of the most acid anti-European commentaries from conservative American columnists and politicians. Some of these critics are themselves not just strongly pro-Israel but also "natural Likudites," one liberal Jewish commentator explained to me. In a recent article Stanley Hoffmann writes that they seem to believe in an "identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States."[20] Pro-Palestinian Europeans, infuriated by the way criticism of Sharon is labeled anti-Semitism, talk about the power of a "Jewish lobby" in the US, which then confirms American Likudites' worst suspicions of European anti-Semitism, and so it goes on, and on.

This one is the more important one. Not for what it said, but for what it didn't. The author completely missed the moral impact on Americans of Palestinian suicide attacks on Israelis. Particularly those attacks that use children as homicide bombers. Using children as weapons of war strikes a very deep Jacksonian cord about dishonorable enemies. The impact of children homicide bombers is much stronger on religious Americans, and most especially married religious women. Who are disproportionately Republican these days. This is something America's overwhelmingly secular mainstream media is stone deaf on and would not report even if they bothered to listen.

Sharon is very much a "Jacksonian archetype" in American eyes. If Israel were to start ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from large swaths of the West Bank and the Gaza. Many "Jacksonian Americans" would cheer Israeli on while muttering "About damned time" under their breath. Remember, Americans have committed genocide on a number of American Indian tribes for less than what the Palestinians have done to the Israelis. And Americans now identify with Israelis much more strongly than with Europe after the suicide attacks of 9/11/2001.

As the war goes on, Americans will be more and more bloody minded and impatient. It is a much repeated trend in American history. Meanwhile the Europeans will grow more and more envious and preening with their "moral superiority" over Americans. This will cause the rift between America and Continental Europe to grow ever wider...at least until Continental Europe suffers a mass casualty attack by Al-Qaeda.

posted by Trent Telenko on 1/27/2003 07:59:01 AM | [link to this post!]

 
January 26: Good morning. To quote Joe: "Tick, tock goes the clock. 2 DUPBBSNIT (Days Until President Bush's Big Speech, Not Including Today; acronym appropriately pronounced: "dub-snit")." Since Joe seems to be sleeping in, I'll kick off today's Blogs with a clip from Ralph Peters I found on the Free Republic web site and a plug for the works of Yossef Bodansky, the Repulican Majority director of the House Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, and how they play into Bush's "Axis of Evil" strategies.

Today's Blogs:

  * A Ralph Peters Exerpt
  * The Works of Yossef Bodansky and the War on Terrorism
  * London Bio-chemical Attack Averted? What Next?
posted by Trent Telenko on 1/26/2003 12:23:15 PM | [link to this post!]

 
A Ralph Peters Exerpt

I found this at the FreeRepublic.com site. These are excerpts from Ralph Peters' interview in American Heritage:

I personally feel that we’ve made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world’s Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that’s absolutely true is that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi money, spent to support their grotesquely repressive version of one of the world’s great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world.

And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in the one path to the truth, you can’t have science. In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulugh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying. There are myriad factors in the Islamic decline, but the decline itself has been irreversible. Muslims never turn it around; they never have their reformation that breaks down the one true path.

Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy. Ten years ago, when I tried to talk about the role of religious belief and the power of religion, it was not considered a serious strategic factor. People talked about economics and demographics, about political structures and development theory. Since September 11, people are perfectly happy to talk about religion. In the future we’ll get around to recognizing the neuroses, if not psychoses, that are far too prevalent within the Arabian heartland of the Islamic world. I believe that a primeval terror of female sexuality is a significant strategic factor, one we’ve failed to examine. Males in these traditional cultures see the pictures of Pamela Anderson or replay Sharon Stone movies, and they want a piece of the action. But they don’t want their daughters and wives to turn into Pamela Anderson, or Britney Spears, or, for that matter, Emmylou Harris. They’re mesmerized by the sexual component in our culture, which our media grossly exaggerate and which they misread.

The truth of the exerpt above cannot be contested. Our Islamist foes are insane with hate for Western women. It is one of the reasons we must kill them and force wider Islam to accept women as people and not property. And if that is cultural imperialism, so be it. If the choice is the West or Islam. I choose the West, whatever it takes.

T.T. Update:

The full Ralph Peters interview can be found here. It is titled “The Shah Always Falls.”

(Hat Tip: Occam's Toothbrush, and "he who wishes to remain unnamed.")
posted by Trent Telenko on 1/26/2003 12:32:24 PM | [link to this post!]

 
The Works of Yossef Bodansky and the War on Terrorism

If you want to know the thinking behind the actions of the "Neo-con" faction in the Bush Administration. The man to read is Dr. Yossef Bodansky, Director of Research for the International Strategic Studies Association and Director of the United States Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

I mentioned Dr. Bodansky in my first post on Winds of Change, North Korea: Clinton Knew...and 'Kicked the Can' Anyway, and I knew he was reliable from his book Crisis in: Korea. Bodansky's 1993 predictions in that book on North Korean ICBM development were forsightful and were undoubtedly included in the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission report on 3rd World missile development. That commission's report, and the 1998 North Korean ICBM test over Japan, collapsed Clinton Administration resistance to National Missile Defense.

I had one other book of Dr. Bodansky's Target America & the West: Terrorism Today, a 1992 book which lays out the Iranian terror network and the emerging Sunni Islamist terrorist movement. It even mentions that Islamist terrorists had been practicing flying jets into buildings since the late 1980s!

The one thing "Target America" lacked was a background on Al-Qaeda and Ossama Bin Laden. Bodansky addressed this in his 1999 and 2001 updated version of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. Among other things, this book lays out Bin Laden's role in the Somali fighting that became "BLACKHAWK DOWN," his $3 million quest for a Soviet suitcase nuke in ex-Soviet Central Asia and the collaboration between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein through his son Qusay Hussein.

The final book of Bodansky's that should be considered, and virtually the third book of a "terror trilogy," is The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism. It slams the American role in the Arab-Israeli peace process as a myopic sham and documents Arafat's strategy, lies, broken promises and terrors ties during the Oslo Accords. Upon reading this, you can see why the George W. Bush Administration abandoned Arafat as someone they could negotiate with.

The question you have to ask, with this background of accurate prediction and analysis over the years, is why isn't Dr. Bodansky in every major media Outlook contact file, quoted in every story on the war and on every pundit talking head show there is? I have only seen him in the WASHINGTON TIMES and INSIGHT magazine and no where else. The only answers I can come to are that:
1) The major media is lazy and incompetent.
2) the major media, being 80% Democrat, doesn't want to expose the disaster that was Clinton era national security policy.
3) The major media outlets don't want to destroy their sources in the State Dept., CIA, DoD, and other three or four letter national security agencies, because Bodansky's body of work shows a bigger intelligence disaster than Pearl Harbor. A disaster that the national security establishment really, Really, REALLY does not want there to be an in depth, outside investigation of.
posted by Trent Telenko on 1/26/2003 02:18:18 PM | [link to this post!]

 
London Bio-chemical Attack Averted? What Next?

I was doing a news pass through the WorldNetDaily and found this article, "Bio-chem suits found in London mosque" and got the chills. From the three opening paragraphs:

Police investigating an Islamic terror plot have discovered "chemical warfare protection suits" in a north London mosque, according to a report in tomorrow's edition of Australia's Herald Sun newspaper.

The discovery at the Finsbury Park mosque seems to confirm investigators' worst fears – that supporters of terror kingpin Osama bin Laden have been plotting a massive biological or chemical attack on British civilians.

According to the report, both Scotland Yard and British intelligence agency MI5 had tried to conceal the discovery of the nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) suits, fearing public disclosure would spark panic in that country. Law enforcement had revealed early on the seizure of assorted weapons – including a stun gun and a gas canister – but not the existence of the protective suits. But today detectives confirmed they were having the NBC suits found in the mosque tested for traces of ricin or other toxic agents.

The British have an official secrets act they can invoke on the British press in situations like this. So the story surfacing in an Aussie paper and getting picked up by WorldNetDaily tracks as far as credibility is concerned. If I add to that the fact the implications of a recent U.N. inspection in Iraq that I saw on Fox News Channel, namely they looked at a Chicken hatchery, my blood runs cold. The only reason for U.N. inspectors to look at a hatchery is that they think it was supporting the production of small pox.

Face the facts folks. Weapons of Mass Destruction have just been put on the table by the Terror Masters. This is why you are hearing about the American military planning to use nuclear weapons. It is not just a blood thursty threat. It is a promise.

T.T. Update:

The Blogfather has picked up the story with the original Aussie URL.
posted by Trent Telenko on 1/26/2003 04:16:29 PM | [link to this post!]