Winds of War Briefing: Aug 23/05

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Top Topics

• The Department of Energy is going to release a whoooole lot of energy, blowing up truck bombs in the desert to figure out whether nuclear site security barriers are vulnerable to them.

• Dress-up time for Putin! Is it a pilot...a seaman...it's a tin-pot autocrat playing games with another tin-pot autocracy! The unprecedented 8-day-long joint military exercise, Peace Mission 2005, involving 10,000 Russian and Chinese troops, started on the 18th. The exercises are meant to send the US a message and sell more weapons. Meanwhile, Russia's defense budget will increase by 22% in FY 2006. Russia and China also want the US to quit its bases in their backyard to free them to pursue influence, resources and regional hegemony. The US is watching. According to the Russians, the scenario for the war games is ostensibly Russia and China are "assisting" a third country that has a terrorist insurgency. I'm sure they'll be very helpful.

• The Taliban are reopening the Afghan front with new tactics, flush with cash and weapons. They're taking a few pages out of the Iraq playbook. The CIS's anti-terror chiefs are concerned. The amnesty for Taliban fighters/government jobs program doesn't appear to be too effective either.

• JK: Meanwhile, here's some good news from Afghanistan. No, not Chrenkoff - but worthy. Just one of the good folks we're working with to keep these briefings going after Arthur Chrenkoff retires.

• The Pentagon's latest (and third, so far) 25-year roadmap for the development of unmanned aerial systems (née UAVs). If you're looking for pictures, vital stats and future plans for every unmanned craft in the US arsenal, this is the PDF for you. There are currently well over 1000 unmanned aerial systems in Iraq and Afghanistan. More at DefenseTech, too...

• In the wake of the New Folsom prison terror cell's unraveling plot, questions are being asked more urgently about Islamist recruitment in prison. Over 200 agents are involved in the investigation into the homegrown terrorist cell, a manifestation of Saudi Arabia's insidious war on the United States. According to geostrategy-direct (no link, sorry), the Saudi military is sending 100 officers a month to fight in Iraq. The cell itself may be homegrown, but at least one of the terrorists is not-he's a Pakistani national. Oh, Pakistan.

Other Topics Today Include:
Turkey holding Zarqawi confederate?; AQ chief in Saudi killed (yes, again); Putin flirts with Jordan; US permanent troop presence in Iraq details; US teams up with 4 countries against MS-13; NYPD & its Middle Eastern employees; ACLU whining; Arab Bank fined; two states of emergency along the border with Mexico; US shopping mall security learns from the Israelis; US mediates release of hundreds of POWs in Morocco; Mugabe tottering; how Binnie got da Bomb; 27 terrorist training camps in Pak sez India; JI US embassy truck-bomb plot thwarted; UK wrings hands as terrorists broadcast demoralizing messages inciting the death of its soldiers in Iraq-from their UK facilities!; IRA doings; UK appoints fox to guard hens; secret spilled; Bakri and Little Bakri still in the news and mucho mucho more...

THE MIDDLE EAST & IRAN

• Iran headed for confrontation, Bush not ruling out force, McCain insisting force must be kept as an option, sitzpinkler sitzpinkles.

• Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria: let's not be too harsh on Iran. Or China. Or anyone really.

• A man in Turkish custody claims to be a buddy of Zarqawi's, and US intelligence is taking him seriously.

• Another month, another Al Qaeda chief in Saudi Arabia killed. Tune in next month for the next thrilling episode with a totally unexpected conclusion.

• Noted traitor Sean Penn gives comfort to the enemy again.

• Bombs in Beirut.

• Gaza is Judenrein.

• Putin flirts with Abdullah: "I will lend you money to buy my weapons."

• The second-ranking US diplomat in Baghdad has been named as one of the leakers of classified information to AIPAC lobbyists, although he is not accused of wrongdoing. It seems to me as if what the AIPAC lobbyists did became a crime retroactively.

• The US military has released more details about the suicide bombing in a mess tent last December.

• It looks like 50-60,000 US troops will remain in Iraq near-permanently, in four mega-bases. Currently, US troops are housed in over a hundred bases, which is being reduced to 14, then four.

• Americans, Brits, Jordanians, Egyptians and Israelis agree: in light of the Gaza disengagement and Eilat attack, Zarqawi now poses an imminent threat to Israel.

AMERICAN DOMESTIC SECURITY & THE AMERICAS

• The US is teaming up with four other countries to try to crush the multinational hyperviolent street gang/nascent stateless army MS-13.

• Boffins from some of our top research university shops are spending federal cash to to develop a computer network to make our power grid more robust and secure.

• Policing the internet beat: Middle Eastern NYPD employees stalk jihadis on the internet, ferreting out plots. Much less admirably, some jerk recruit to the police academy has a jihad tattoo. He should be told to remove it or get the hell out, and be put under surveillance for the rest of his hopefully-short life.

• Canada's cops to get more snooping and eavesdropping powers.

• Pentagon: no, actually, we didn't identify Atta prior to 9/11 after all.

• The ACLU is getting the vapors because Orange County, Florida police have enlisted the help of businesses in a regional "eyes and ears" crime watch program, calling it "spying". Shut up, ACLU, nobody cares what you think any more.

• The Arab Bank was fined 24 million smackeroos for financing Palestinian terrorism, and may ultimately face up to $5 billion in claims.

• Rummy snarled a little at Chavez and Castro while visiting fragile Bolivia.

• The States and the Federal government are increasingly out of step with each other on border security as two border states declare states of emergency while Federal agencies dither and make excuses. Other states may follow New Mexico and Arizona's lead, such as California, where governor Schwarzenegger praised the two states' moves.

• Nevada is studying how terrorists might strike Las Vegas tourists.

• Northcom has selected three (out of a hundred tested) communications and coordination technologies for homeland defense and emergency management teams.

• A peek at bioterrorism response exercises, which are mandatory annually for hospitals if they want to receive certain kinds of funding.

• US shopping mall security outfits are proving far more receptive to Israeli-style "software" attack prevention (focusing on the behavior of potential attackers and human judgment) than they were in 2003 to American-style "hardware" security (big fancy detectors of various sorts).

• A federal appeals court tossed out the convictions of five admitted Cuban spies on the specious grounds that the trial was in Miami and Cubans really hate Castro.

AFRICA

• Joburg's Muslims are upset with South African, US and British police treatment of their community.

• US gets hundreds, some POWs for 20 years, freed in Morocco mediation.

• Operation Drive Out The Rubbish may actually drive out, well, the rubbish! I'm crossing my fingers.

• The peace is threatened in the Ivory Coast.

• Algerian terrorists killed six.

ASIA

• How noted bastard AQ Khan gave bin Laden the bomb. We're still not allowed to interrogate the scoundrel. But did you know that Pakistan is a vital ally in the war on terror? That's what they say.

• India: there are 2-2,500 terrorists in 27 training camps in Pakistan.

• It's not just madrassas, even mainstream schools in Musharraf's Pakistan are teaching jihad.

• Bombs over Bangladesh: namely, 300 of them! Security forces detained about a hundred nobodies in the investigation, one of whom (a madrassa student, 18) had in his possession military training videos and bin Laden porn.

• A JI plot to truck-bomb the US embassy in Manila was thwarted earlier this year.

• The Turkish government is in disarray over how to fight terrorism, and how to frame its fight against Kurdish rebels to the EU.

• The Ukraine is freezing Russian companies out of its markets after the Orange Revolution.

• A "serious geopolitical project": several democratic former Soviet Republics are forming an axis to reduce Russia's leverage and minimize their dependence on it.

• In the face of rioting and increasing domestic unrest, China unveils a new police force armed with choppers and armored vehicles. It will be deployed in 36 large cities. The end is near, comrades.

EUROPE

• A jihad station is broadcasting inciting terrorist messages to Iraq and Saudi Arabia from the UK, calling for attacks on UK troops, yet nothing is being done about it in the UK as regulators wring their hands and claim inability to act.

• The Dutch are getting less tolerant of Islamists. A recent poll notes that "63% of the respondents were in favour of a legal ban on civil servants wearing Muslim dress, while 80% agreed that government workers shouldn't wear such attire because it signals their unwillingness to adapt to life in the Netherlands."

• 9/11 conspirator Mounir Moutasaddeq gets 7 years in Germany. Boy, German justice is rough!

• Three IRA terrorists, on the lam from Columbia where they are wanted for training rebels to build bombs, surrendered to Irish police. In other IRA terrorism news, an IRA bomber is being held in Spain who bombed a British barracks in Germany in 1996. Got all that?

• More security resources to the Colosseum.

• A Bosnian Serb businessman was arrested for financing the fugitivities of various Serb war criminals.

• Terror alert level secretly lowered. Oops, guess I spilled the beans.

• Al Qaeda nerve gas attack on the House of Commons foiled.

• The UK has appointed a fox to guard the henhouse, in a heartwarming temporary triumph of hope over experience.

THE GLOBAL WAR

• Famous terrorist inciting bastard Bakri: now planning to set up shop and carry on business as usual in Lebanon, the UAE or Pakistan. My money's on Pak. Bakri's Mini-Me, still in the UK, isn't sitting still, recommending the bombing of that notorious oppressor of Muslim lands, Ireland. Oy.

• Surprising no one, Al Qaeda claimed the rocket attack in Eilat. The only casualty was a Jordanian soldier.

• Pope denounces terrorism: now the terrorists will see the error of their ways.

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