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Home Front: WoT
'Net Posse Tracked 'Jihad Jane' for Three Years
2010-03-13
While the rest of America was stunned to hear that a suburban Pennsylvania woman allegedly used the Internet identity of Jihad Jane and tried to join militant jihadists, for a group of 'Net vigilantes it was old news.

In fact, at least one of the Web sleuths claims to have alerted the feds to Colleen LaRose's alleged efforts to raise money and recruit fighters for Islamic terrorists and to carry out her own jihad.

Groups like JawaReport, Quoth the Raven and the YouTube Smackdown Corps claim they had been monitoring LaRose's growing militancy for three years, and watched as the Internet -- particularly YouTube -- fed her fervor.

They also said "Jihad Jane" is not the only one on the Internet that the groups are monitoring. "There are certainly many others out there who are more eloquent and appear to be more dangerous from the way they talk," a man calling himself Rusty Shackleford told ABC News.
Hah! That's what he calls himself! Asks him where he gets all those robots!
Shackleford, a pen name, says he is a libertarian college professor who created the blog JawaReport in 2004 after he was enraged that Iraqi Islamists had beheaded an American named Nick Berg. "It was my way of venting. But mostly it was about countering violent Islamist propaganda, specifically the videos that were being produced by al Qaeda in Iraq and other Salaafist jihadists fighting our troops," he said.

Shackleford said his goal from the beginning was combating violent Islamist material and support on the Web. "I'm a blogger, but also an activist against violent Islamism. One of the things we do is try and pressure Webhosts to remove Websites that belong to terrorist organizations. An example of this would be the dozen or so times we've successfully had the Taliban's website removed. The websites sometimes pop back up, sometimes not," Shackleford said.

Shackleford and other contributors to JawaReport and sites like it noticed YouTube had become a hub for videos and comments in support of violent extremism and attacks against the West and its allies, leading to the creation of the YouTube Smackdown.

Shackleford said the groups identify videos in support of violent Islamism and pressure the Web site to take them down, "as they would child pornography or other obscene material."

According to the "Quoth the Raven" blog, since the "smackdown" movement began in 2007, users have had over 31,000 videos removed from YouTube, and 695 users suspended. They say LaRose was one of those suspended.
Link


Olde Tyme Religion
Jihadist Forum Thread Discusses If and When One May Eat the Flesh of U.S. Soldiers
2009-06-27
A recent thread on the Al-Falluja jihadist forum discussed the case of whether a Muslim who has nothing else to eat may kill an infidel in order to eat him. The discussion was prompted by a recently published book by Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential jihadist sheikhs active today.

The following is a summary of the discussion thread. (JTTM subscribers can read the full report; to subscribe to the JTTM.

"Is It Permitted To Eat The Flesh of American Soldiers?"

On June 13, 2009, a member of the Al-Falluja forum who uses the moniker "Al-Maqdisi's Student" wrote a post based on this passage [in full report] titled "Is it permitted to eat the flesh of American soldiers? A quote from the illustrious Sheikh Al-Maqdisi, may Allah preserve him." He began by recounting an exchange between the early Muslim commander Khalid b. Al-Walid and the Byzantine commander at the battle of Yarmuk (in the year 636 C.E.) The Byzantine commander said to Khalid that the Muslims had only gone out from their land due to hunger, and offered to buy them off. Khalid responded: "It was not hunger that drove us out of our land, as you say; we are a people who drink blood, and we know that there is no blood more delicious than Byzantine blood. That is why we came."

"Al-Maqdisi's Student" then cites the aforementioned passage from Al-Maqdisi's Beginner's Guide [in full report], and follows up with the words: "The mujahideen should inform their belligerent [infidel] and apostate enemies of this exceptional law so that they can bring it up and study it at their conferences on human rights, counterterrorism, and so on! Then they in turn can proclaim that our soldiers lick their lips [at the thought of] eating the flesh of their hamburger- and Pepsi-eating soldiers!"

"If We... Eat Americans, Let's Make Them Into A Gunpowder-Flavored Kabsa With Some Hors D'oeuvres Made Of Apostates"

Most of the numerous responses to the post were off-topic. Some responses, however, did take up the flesh-eating issue. "Abu Hajir Al-Muqrin" wrote: "If we are forced to eat Americans, let's make them into a gunpowder-flavored kabsa with some hors d'oeuvres made of apostates."

"Muhammad Al-Baghdadi" wrote: "But the slaughtering needs to be according to the shari'a. He then wrote "perhaps this is the best way" above stills from the Nick Berg decapitation video.

"Al-Maqdisi's Student" weighed in again towards the end of the thread and wrote: "A true story: a group of mujahideen from one of the brigades was in the mountains during the jihad against the Russians. One of them was sent off on a mission; he went and came back, but he couldn't find any of the brothers. He saw a roasted calf leg that the brothers in the brigade left for him for dinner, and he ate of it until he was full. When he went back to the main camp, the brothers saw him and offered him dinner! He said: praise Allah, I already ate! They said: Where did you find dinner? He said: You left me roasted calf leg! They said: No, no, that wasn't calf, that was the leg of a Russian infidel! He answered: No matter, it's all Islamic slaughter! (smile)"
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Home Front: Culture Wars
Good Economic News: Ted Rall Laid Off
2009-04-24
ht to Patterico who notes:
I don't normally gloat when someone loses their job, but for this tool, I'm willing to make an exception. Especially given that his "job" consists of comparing U.S. soldiers to suicide bombers; mocking widows of terror victims; profiting from Pat Tillman's death; assuming the voice of Iraqi soldiers talking about killing American soldiers; making leftist political hay out of the Nick Berg beheading; lying about lefty blogger vitriol; and suing a guy for making him appear to be a "rude, petty, self-absorbed writer/cartoonist" (which is what he is).

F*ck Ted Rall. I'm glad he got laid off.
and I agree wholeheartedly
Link


Home Front: WoT
Torture Documents: What’s The Deal And Who Cares?
2009-04-18
If you look at the long list of links at Memeorandum, you’ll see very few conservative blogs listed. Why? Because, for the most part, we really do not care if stone cold jihadis were made uncomfortable with hot and cold conditions, listening to Christina Aguilera music, sleep deprivation, and being exposed to women (only in the Muslim jihadi world are women considered torture.) Our concern is for the 3,000 men and women who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, a date that barely exists in Liberal World. Our concern is for people like Nick Berg. Our concern is in stopping Islamist attacks. Our concern is stopping the march of radical Islam. Not Gitmo detainees (heck, even France, after all the diaper nashing, is only willing to take one (1) if Obama ever actually closes the site)
Link


Fifth Column
British Muslim computer geek revealed as Al Qaeda's top cyber terrorist
2008-01-16
A computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush, West London, became al Qaeda's top internet agent, it can be revealed today. Younes Tsouli, 23, an IT student at a London college, used his top-floor flat in W12 to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West.

Under the name Irhabi 007 — combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist — he worked with al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web. Videos he posted included messages from Osama bin Laden and images of the kidnapping and murder of hostages in Iraq such as American Nick Berg.

His capture led to the arrest of several Islamic terrorists around the world, including 17 men in Canada and two in the US.
Observing his mug shot, it appears he is prone to accidents!
Fell down the stairs again, did he?
Cut himself shaving.
Associates linked to Tsouli in the UK have also now been detained. His 10-year jail sentence was increased to 16 years last month.

At first intelligence operatives who came across his activities dismissed him as a joke. It was only when anti-terrorist detectives began trawling through files on his computer after his arrest that they realised his true significance.

When he was seized, forensic science officers found that Tsouli had been creating a website called YOUBOMBIT. At his trial at Woolwich crown court a jury heard how the Met trawled through a “hugely gigantic'' amount of material — computers, CDs and memory sticks — to bring Tsouli and two other men to justice. Detectives found literature urging Muslims to take up the fight against other religions. It was the first time anyone in Britain had been prosecuted for inciting terrorist murder purely based on the internet, the court heard.

Tsouli, who set up and ran several sites over the summer of 2005, was described as the most prominent of the three on trial. The other two were also jailed. One intelligence source said: “In a network structure, if you get the right guy the whole thing goes down.”

Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Met's counterterrorism operations, said: “It was the first virtual conspiracy to murder that we have seen.”

Tsouli arrived in London in 2001 with his father, a Moroccan diplomat. He studied IT at a college in central London and was quickly radicalised by images of the war in Iraq posted on the internet. By 2003 he had already begun posting his own material including a manual on computer hacking and a year later had moved on to publishing extremist images and al Qaeda propaganda on the web.

It is claimed al Qaeda leaders in Iraq spotted Tsouli's work and took the decision to recruit him, using his expertise to post their own extremist videos to a wider audience.

In 2005, Tsouli became administrator for the web forum al-Ansat, used by 4,500 extremists to communicate with each other, sharing such practical information as how to make explosives and how to get to Iraq to become a suicide bomber. But the enterprise had become so huge, it began to attract the attention of cyber-trackers who monitor the internet for extremists, leading to Tsouli's arrest.
Link


Britain
Man guilty of using internet to promote jihad
2007-07-04
A third man with close links to al-Qa'eda in Iraq has admitted using the internet to urge Muslims to wage a violent holy war against all non-believers. Tariq al-Daour, along with accomplices Younes Tsouli and Waseem Mughal, believed there was a "global conspiracy" to wipe out Islam and spent at least a year trying to encourage people to follow the extreme ideology of Osama bin Laden using email and radical websites.

The jury at Woolwich Crown Court heard how the "intelligent" young men used computers to try and recruit people to a global jihad. Films of hostages and beheadings were found in their possession. These included footage of Ken Bigley pleading for his life and Americans Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl being killed.

In one online conversation, when Al-Daour was asked what he would do with £1 million, he replied: "Sponsor terrorist attacks, become the new Osama [Bin Laden]." In another conversation he said suicide bombings were permissible but he did not like them unless they killed many people because "a Muslim life is worth more than that".

Al-Daour had CDs containing instructions for making explosives and poisons including a recipe for creating a rotten meat toxin which, in its pure form, is "the most toxic substance known to man", the court was told.

UAE-born Al-Daour, 21, of Bayswater, west London, admitted inciting another person to commit and act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom which would, if committed in England and Wales, constitute murder. Moroccan-born Tsouli, 23, of Shepherd's Bush, west London, and British-born Mughal, 24, of Chatham, Kent, admitted the same charge on Monday. Their guilty pleas come two months into their trial. The men also admitted conspiring together and with others to defraud banks, credit card companies and charge card companies.

The judge directed the jury to return formal guilty verdicts against Al-Daour, in light of his pleas. The three men will be sentenced tomorrow.
Link


Home Front: WoT
VHD: The Dark Ages Live from the Middle East
2006-10-31
The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?

Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity — and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans — in fear of radical Islamists — would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law — sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe. Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman — much less whether it was any better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us — live almost daily from the Middle East.
Link


Fifth Column
" Zarqawi didn't kill my son, Bush did."
2006-06-08
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son's death. Asked what would give him satisfaction, Berg, an anti-war activist and candidate for U.S. Congress, said, "The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush."

The United States said its aircraft killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader who masterminded the death of hundreds in suicide bombings and was blamed for the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor, and other captives.

"I don't think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq," Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. "I think George Bush is. George Bush is the one that invaded this country, George Bush is the one that destabilized it so that Zarqawi could get in, so that Zarqawi had a need to get in, to defend his region of the country from American invaders."

Berg said Bush was to blame for the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "Yeah, like George Bush didn't OK the torture and death and rape of people in the Abu Ghraib prison for which my son was killed in retaliation?" he told his Fox interviewers. In a telephone interview with Reuters from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the father said: "I have no sense of relief, just sadness that another human being had to die."

Berg, who is running as a Green Party candidate, has repeatedly blamed Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his 26-year-old son's death. Nick Berg's videotaped beheading by hooded captors was posted on the Internet, and the father said he could understand what Zarqawi's family was going through.

"I have learned to forgive a long time ago, and I regret mostly that that will bring about another wave of revenge from his cohorts from al Qaeda," he told Fox.

Zarqawi's organization took responsibility for the execution of Nick Berg in May 2004. The video was published with a caption saying: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughtering an American." When an Islamist Web site showed the video of a man severing Berg's head, the CIA said Zarqawi was probably the one wielding the knife. The father said he was not convinced.

"I have been lied to by my own government," he told Reuters on Thursday.
Link


Iraq
Obituary: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
2006-06-08
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was believed to be behind many of the most headline-grabbing attacks of the conflict in Iraq. The Jordanian-born fighter rose to prominence as leader of the Islamist Tawhid and Jihad group in 2003.
Tawhid was founded to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. It was active in Europe at least as early as 2000.
In 2004, al-Zarqawi announced that he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and changed the organisation's name to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The group carried out some of the most deadly attacks in Iraq since the US-led invasion, including the January 2005 bombing of a crowd of police and Iraqi National Guard recruits in the southern city of Hilla that killed 125 people. Al-Zarqawi is alleged to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages during 2004 - Nick Berg and Eugene Armstrong. During 2005, al-Qaeda in Iraq began to move their campaign beyond Iraq's borders - carrying out a suicide attack on a Jordanian hotel that killed 60 people and claiming responsibility for a rocket attack against Israel.
That was a mere extension of the al-Qaeda operation to al-Tawhid.
The US put a $25 million on his head, the same as for Osama bin Laden, and al-Zarqawi was sentenced to death three times in his native Jordan.
Guess they can close the books on that one now...
The group was also at the centre of the Iraqi sectarian conflict that has threatened to develop into all-out civil war.
Zark and his organization are takfiri. Anybody who doesn't agree with them 100 percent is an infidel. That puts Shiites into the same category as Lutherans.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the bombing of Shia mosques and al-Zarqawi described Shia muslims as "enemies of Islam" in an audiotape posted on the internet in June. But analysts believe that despite being a prominent figure in the Iraqi uprising, his influence was often exaggerated by the media.
Which just goes to show you don't have to be a genius, or even moderately smart, to be an analyst.
His organisation was believed to be only 3,000 strong at most and US army officials admitted raising al-Zarqawi's profile by blaming attacks on his group, the Washington Post reported in April. After reports that he had been dislodged as political leader of the Iraqi uprising, al-Zarqawi released a video in May in an attempt to maintain his profile - a move that may have provided the US with information on his whereabouts.

Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayla in 1966, al-Zarqawi was known in the Jordanian industrial town of al-Zarqa as a small-time criminal. He adopted his Islamist radical ideology while in a Jordanian prison in the late 1990s. After being released in an amnesty, al-Zarqawi went in 1999 to Afghanistan, where he formed links with bin Laden. He fled during the US-led war that toppled the Taliban government in late 2001, passing through Iran to Iraq, according to US officials.
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India-Pakistan
Targeting Islam and Muslim polities
2006-02-15
By Shireen M Mazari
Starts from shaky premise, soon changes subject, then loons out. Islamic thought at its finest.
It is a sad time for Muslims. Europeans have declared open season on Islam with blasphemy and abuse deliberately going unpunished by states.
What a pity they don't have blaspehmy laws in Europe like they do in Pakland...
The unprecedented scale of protest from Muslim civil societies is also being misread as something happening at the behest of extremists and/or Syria and Iran.
It's just coincidence that in places where the Islamists aren't strong enough to throw their weight around nobody gives a rat's patou...
Some recognised European experts on Islam, like Olivier Roy, have declared that the protests go beyond the issue of the cartoons. Some have even tried to link the protest to the lack of freedoms in some Muslim polities! Well all this may comfort those who refuse to accept the extent of hurt and anger caused to all Muslims by the unpunished acts of blasphemy against Islam and its Prophet (PTUI peace be upon him), but it is absolutely incorrect.
"Yup. Wrong as wrain. Couldn't be wronger. Here's why..."
The fact of the matter is that all shades of Muslims are angry and want to see the guilty brought to book and the issue is very much of the cartoons themselves. No one has to push the protest forward. We are all protesting because we are angry and hurt by the injustice of the countries allowing their own laws to be broken because the targets are Islam and Muslims.
Denmark as a free press and it doesn't have blasphemy laws. So piss off.
Contrast this with the action taken against historian David Irving who denied the Holocaust and has been in prison in Austria, since 2005, under a warrant issued in 1989, for this denial.
Austria's part of the scene of the crime. Their peculiar laws have a similarly peculiar genesis.
Denmark, too, has seen the same Jyllands-Posten editor, who was supposedly taking a stand for "freedom of expression" when he commissioned and printed the blasphemous cartoons suddenly being sent on holiday when he felt he must also print anti-holocaust cartoons!
When the Jews were being carted away for slaughter the Danes stuck up for them. The king of Denmark was the first to sew the yellow star on his coat.No Muslims have been carted away in Denmark, and if someone were to suggest it the royals would probably take the Muslim side. But since such suggestions are actually originating with Muslims, I guess that won't happen.
So, it becomes increasingly clear that Islam and Muslims are now acceptable targets for abuse in Europe and other parts of the Christian world.
Muslims fare pretty well in Europe, especially compared to the condition of Christians and — even worse — Jews in Muslim countries. Blasphemy laws are only one of the mechanisms of oppression...
So much so that we are now seeing revelations of yet more physical and mental abuse being heaped on Muslims in Iraq by the occupying forces -- this time the victims being mere teenagers.
He's probably referring to the video of the Brit troops beating the crap out of the rock-throwing kiddies...
As if Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharaib were not enough of abuse against Muslim prisoners, British forces seem to have developed a perverse joy in the physical abuse of Iraqi teenagers.
No one's had his head chopped off at Guantanamo. Can you say the same for Lahore? Abu Ghraib was a stench and a pestilence long before we got there, and it's not a patch on the way things were under Sammy. We don't flog people, we don't toss them off buildings, we don't cut their tongues out — but we did keep the videos of Sammy's people doing the same things. You should watch them sometime.
A few sentiments of regret by Blair and a news item stating that one of the guilty soldiers has been arrested is all that one has gotten in response from the British Government.
Sentiments of regret and the arrest of the perps is appropriate. Groveling isn't.
Even here, the name of the offending soldier has been kept out. Why? After all, the teenagers were abused in public with one clearly deranged soldier giving vent to his thrill in witnessing this abuse. Once again, even guilty Europeans must be protected while Muslims remain fair game.
Two words, bub: Nick Berg. I agree that Euros and Americans are expected to adhere to higher standards, but it'd be nice to see Muslims do the same. But their savagery is always excused by one thing or another, even if it's the loss of Andalusia...
And now we are hearing of yet another invasion of a Muslim state in the offing -- this time Iran.
We can only hope...
And the pretext? Its nuclear programme. Consider the following: North Korea opts out of the NPT, declares it has nuclear weapons and intends to continue down this path. So what does the US do? Get involved in the Six Party talks while keeping the North Korean issue at the UNSC on ice. Then we have Iran, reiterating its intent of staying in the NPT, stating it simply wants to pursue its right to enrich uranium as allowed for under the NPT, makes a clean confession of its past omissions, allows inspections, disavows any intent to produce nuclear weapons, so what do we get? The US threatening the possibility of military action against Iran.
At the same time we've had the president of Iran demonstating that he's a psychoceramic, calls for the destruction of Israel, threats against Europe and the usual scimitar-rattling. Wehn we do finally take out North Korea, you'll bitch about that, too.
Ironically, no one is allowed to cast any aspersions at all or seek any limits on Israel's nuclear programme and weapons' stockpiles.
As far as I know, they haven't even admitted they have nuclear weapons. Maybe they don't. But nobody's called their bluff, have they?
This threat of military action comes alongside the British Foreign Secretary's statement to a parliamentary committee, on 8 February, that there was no proof that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. But then the US has never waited for proof when it seeks military action against a Muslim state.
There's no proof they aren't, either. It'd be fairly easy to demonstrate that they aren't, but they refuse to do that.
This is not to say that Iran has not been guilty of violations of the NPT, but if it really wanted to go the nuclear weapon route it would have left the NPT and not held its nuclear programme up for inspections and negotiations. As for producing fissile material, no non-nuclear party to the NPT has a larger and more threatening programme than Japan. Japan has a massive fast breeder programme and is in the process of building the Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant. Already, in Japan's pilot Tokai reprocessing plant, 206 kg of plutonium have gone unaccounted for. But we have not heard anyone refer to this, even at the IAEA.
Japan's been inoculated against a desire for nuclear weapons.
Of course, sending the Iran issue to the UNSC will only up the ante and politicise the issue even further, leaving little flexibility for negotiations -– that is, if the US is prepared to have negotiations.
Iran's been "negotiating" for three years, with no results. One would almost suspect they don't intend for the negotiations to go anywhere. One would almost suspect that they're playing for time.
After all, the US still suffers from an Iran trauma since the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis that followed.
There is that, isn't there? We do owe them. And we haven't forgotten. I hope we never do.
But for other members of the UN, some pertinent questions need to be answered if one is to assess the value of moving the issue out of the IAEA, which has a technical rather than a political focus, to the UNSC.
* First, what will be the next step, once Iran has been reported to the UNSC? Is there a cohesive strategy that exists on this?
I think the strategy to date has been for Iran to line up support from the Russers and the Chinee, in hope of forestalling any action. Apparently they're also lined up support in some quarters of Pakland, too...
* Second, now that Iran has decided to voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol and has also taken some transparency measures, that go beyond the IAEA safeguards and Additional Protocol, is the international community better off? The suspension on the enrichment was voluntary and non-legally binding so how can this be made legally-binding now just to try and find some rationalisation for taking Iran to the UNSC. After all, Iran continues to observe the regular NPT safeguards.
... since they're playing for time. If they cease at this point, that shortens the timetable for tromping them, without shortening their timetable for achieving nuclear weapons.
* If Iran refuses to cooperate with an UNSC resolution, what will be the response of the international community?
My guess is dithering, until the U.S. takes the lead in one direction or the other...
In the case of Iraq, non-cooperation impeded verification. As for sanctions -– will they be enforceable effectively?
Iraq's were, though only somewhat. We'll have to listen to Medea Benjamin bitching and moaning about the starving Iranian children, but we've put up with that before. This time maybe we'll keep an eye on Kofi and his family and friends and prevent that little bit of rakeoff.
Will there be military action a la Iraq-invasion style by the US and a coalition of the willing with a post-event UNSC resolution to give it legal cover?
I'd guess an air war like nothing you've ever seen.
Will that help stabilise the region or enable an effective response to the situation in terms of non-proliferation, which the US itself seems to have reneged upon in the wake of its nuclear deal with India?
"Stabilizing the region" at this point involves another hack at the Gordian knot. Ridding Iran of its mad mullahs will go far to introducing actual stability, rather than stagnation. That will leave only Soddy Arabia and Pakland with significant pockets of Islamist nutbaggery. That's why both parties will be against the idea of Iran going down.
Clearly, the US approach has only put the international community, including Iran, on a lose-lose path and any military action against Iran will end what is left of stability in this region.
Exporting Islamic revolution doesn't make for stability.
It seems the US will target the oil installations of Iran, which are clustered together, with cruise missiles and then try to take physical control of them. The oil resource factor in play again!
No blood for oil, baby! But why would we target the oil installations, when we could target the nuclear installations? Maybe that should be "no blood for neutrons"?
For Pakistan, the danger lies not simply in the fallout
... so to speak...
on the domestic polity of any military action against Iran. With the US delinking India's nuclear status from that of Pakistan, a far greater danger lies in the possibility of a similar threat being given to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan's nuclear programme -- which still sits uncomfortably with the US. Otherwise why should the US deny Pakistan the same nuclear recognition it is offering to India?
Because India's a somewhat freer country than Pakland? Because the lunatics are several steps removed from leadership positions in India, while in Pakland they sit in the senate and scheme for the big turban?
The writer is director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad.
In that case, I don't think we have much to fear from Islamabad's attempts at strategizing.
Link


Europe
Sullivan: Islamo-bullies get a free ride from the West
2006-02-12
To see or not to see: that is now our question. For the past week and a half, the biggest global story has been the rioting, violence and murder that has exploded over a dozen cartoons in a Danish newspaper.

Former president Bill Clinton has called the cartoons “totally outrageous”. Many mainstream Muslims have claimed that they are indeed offended by them. The Archbishop of Canterbury has opined that they have hurt many feelings and cast a shadow over Christian-Muslim relations.

Others have claimed, in contrast, that the cartoons are tame and cannot even faintly be described as offensive — certainly no more offensive than any number of other cartoons that are published all the time.

That’s my position, by the way. I think that much of the “offence” is contrived, that it has been manipulated by Islamists and the Syrian and Egyptian governments to advance their own agendas, and that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published them, deserves high praise for facing down Islamist bullies.

But enough about me. What are you to think? You’d think, wouldn’t you, it might be helpful to view the actual cartoons so you can see what on earth this entire fuss is about. But the British and American media have decided that it is not their job to help you understand this story. In fact it is their job to prevent you from fully understanding this story. As of this writing no major newspaper in Britain has published the cartoons; the BBC has shown them only fleetingly and other networks have shied away. All have decided not to give you this critical information, without which no intelligent person can construct an informed and intelligent position on the matter. You’re on your own.

The reasons given are conventional enough: the press doesn’t want to inflame matters further; the cartoons are indeed offensive, and no editor has to publish images that would appal readers; reprinting would merely play into the hands of extremists, and so on.

The one argument you haven’t heard is the one you hear off-camera. Many editors simply don’t want to put their staffs at risk of physical danger. They have “offended” Muslims in the past and learnt to regret it. In New York the editors of a free alternative paper, the New York Press, decided they wanted to run the cartoons so their readers could have a grasp of what this huge story is about. The owner refused. The staff quit en masse. The editor claims the owner gave him a simple explanation: “I’m not putting lives in danger. We’re not getting things blown up.”

None of these arguments is risible. An editor has no responsibility to publish anything he doesn’t want to. A publisher has every right to protect his own staff from physical danger. But what all the arguments amount to is simple: the press is refusing to do its job.

The fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you. And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano’s famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

The withholding of truth has, of course, been one of the recurring themes of this war. We were not allowed to see the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the US. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the legal case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see . . . cartoons. Cartoons! The very things newspapers are designed in part to publish.

But then, of course, there is what makes this war different. This war is the first to take place in the online era. The web has made it possible to see almost all of it, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pictures are seriously out of view for most people.

And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward for what is fit to print, to become an arbiter of sensitivity, good taste and political correctness. And we have web pages like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, data, images and opinions that readers can judge with the benefit of all the facts, not just some of them.

If you want to see why newspapers are struggling, surely this is part of the reason. They have forgotten their fundamental task: to provide information.

Yes, the internet has its own censorship problems. Google just caved in to China. Yahoo! may even have helped identify a dissident to the Communist authorities. Many oppressive governments have found ways to shut down websites, police access to the online world and censor what readers can find. Your privacy may be at risk.

On the web there are no editors filtering fact from fiction. But in a case like this it’s an easy decision. If you want the full story, including indispensable information to make sense of it, you have to go online. The good news, of course, is that the truth is still out there. Maybe we have the perfect solution: newspapers can sustain public propriety, while readers can find out the raw facts for themselves on the web. But the bad news is that the Islamists have just scored a huge victory.

Their hope has always been what can only be called creeping sharia. Bit by bit, free societies abandon small freedoms to accommodate the sensitivities of Muslims or Christian fundamentalists or the PC police or other touchy fanatics. Bit by bit, we cede our freedoms to fear and phoney civility — all in the name of getting along.

Yes, in this new war of freedom versus fundamentalism I always anticipated appeasement. I just didn’t expect the press to be among the first to wave the white flag.
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Terror Networks & Islam
Ex-Clinton official on Brisard's book on Zarqawi
2005-09-18
THERE is no substitute for war as a way of separating out talented field commanders from the rest. In Iraq, America's terrorist enemies have benefited from these winnowing effects as much as any conventional force. Now the jihadists have a hardened cadre of leaders, and none is more brutally distinguished than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

With a $25 million price on his head and the United States military desperately trying to corner him, Zarqawi has become the face of the insurgency, if not exactly "the new face of Al Qaeda," as the subtitle of Jean-Charles Brisard's disjointed biography, "Zarqawi," asserts. His organization may be committing only a fraction of the attacks in Iraq, but, as Brisard and his collaborator, Damien Martinez, rightly observe, "His are the ones that are commented on throughout the world." These attacks have included the destruction of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and large-scale bombings of Shiite targets in Najaf and Karbala, which have helped speed the way toward wider sectarian violence and the current undeclared civil war.

A Jordanian with a background as humble as Osama bin Laden's is grand, Ahmad Fadil Nazzal al-Khalayleh (Zarqawi's nom de guerre is taken from his hometown near Amman) traveled a route sharply different from that of Al Qaeda's first generation of leaders. Unlike the patrician surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's second-in-command and chief ideologist, or bin Laden himself, a member of the Saudi elite who studied engineering and economics, Zarqawi was a high school dropout, an abuser of alcohol, a drug dealer and possibly a participant in an attempted rape.

According to Brisard, this rebel from a criminal background went to fight in the Afghan jihad in 1989 after a quarrel with his father, a minor city official. He missed the glorious struggle against the Soviets but saw action in later battles among the various Afghan factions. He was arrested in his native country in 1994 for trying to bring the jihad home. In prison, Zarqawi came under the tutelage of a prominent radical imam, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, and matured into a hard-edged takfiri, a believer in the excommunication - and slaughter - of Muslims deemed guilty of apostasy. He became the leader of a jailhouse Islamist cell, acquiring a reputation for being relentlessly aggressive against those he opposed and extravagantly devoted to those who supported him.

These qualities have served him well in Iraq. While bin Laden, who is fastidious about the details of his violence, has been off making video addresses from the caves of Waziristan and casting himself as a world leader, Zarqawi is claiming credit for a dozen bombings a week. His videos show him personally beheading captives, like the young American Nick Berg. His passionate hatred of Shiites, whom he has compared unfavorably to Americans, has made him perfectly suited to be the catalyst for an Iraqi civil war - a role that probably could not have been filled as well by bin Laden, since Al Qaeda has historically sought to avoid provoking Shiite Iran.

Zarqawi could be an excellent window into understanding radical Islam's appeal to the Arab world's swelling underclass, the various currents running through the movement (including its powerful anti-Shiite sentiment) and the way the jihadist struggle has been changed by the war in Iraq. But this biography has little to say about any of this. Nor is it helpful in explaining Zarqawi's volatile relationship with Al Qaeda. In the period preceding the war, while the Bush administration was portraying Zarqawi as the key intermediary between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, many Western intelligence services saw him less as a lieutenant of bin Laden than a rival - a view now widely accepted. (The charge that Zarqawi was collaborating with Hussein's regime has long since crumbled.) The merger of his Tawhid and Jihad group with Al Qaeda in 2004 was a case of mutual exploitation. Zarqawi was able to show that he had the blessing of the greatest jihadist and bin Laden could create the illusion that he was a real presence in today's central field of battle.

Brisard describes a chaotic series of conspiracies, mostly failed, and he provides the names of legions of insignificant co-conspirators, but he scarcely explores Zarqawi's differences with the Al Qaeda leaders over doctrine (it may be hard to believe there are people more radical than bin Laden, but takfiris, with their "slaughter them all approach," are just that). There is also little discussion of the disagreements over strategy, in which Zarqawi pushed for bringing the jihad to the Middle East to topple Jordan's rulers and attack Israel, while bin Laden favored a global focus on the United States.

What's more, numerous errors of fact and a shabby use of sources makes this a self-undermining book. For example, Brisard refers to a mid-90's plot "to crash several airplanes simultaneously over the United States"; the goal of that plot was actually to blow up 12 wide-bodies over the Pacific. Brisard appears not to know that Pakistan's ruler in the late 90's was Nawaz Sharif, and he identifies Benazir Bhutto as the victim of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's 1999 coup, when in fact she was in exile at the time. Most bizarre is Brisard's claim that the United States has been trying to incite a "direct clash" between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq "so as to justify its presence in Iraq."

Charges like this only reinforce the reputation for reckless conspiracy theorizing that Brisard acquired with his last book, "Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden." (There he alleged that the 9/11 attacks were a response to American pressure on the Taliban to permit oil and gas pipelines to be built in Afghanistan.) In a letter early this year, Osama bin Laden asked Zarqawi to start work on an operation against the United States. The world's foremost jihadist evidently thinks the Jordanian upstart has the resources to carry out such an attack, and surely this is reason enough for us to know more about him. But "Zarqawi" is a squandered opportunity.
I've got my own copy of the book and tend to think that Benjamin's selling it quite a bit short. While I agree with him on the factual errors (substituting Bhutto for Sharif), I think that this more than a hatchet job intended to sell Benjamin's own views on Zarqawi rather than to actually critique Brisard's.
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