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« on: March 09, 2007, 07:08:00 PM »

A National Security Primer, Part 1
Understanding "Jihadistan" and Islamic terrorism
By Mark Alexander
The first constitutional responsibility of any U.S. President is to our national security. In the event that our vital national interests are threatened, the President has the authority to commit armed forces to protect those interests.

On 11 September, 2001, after eight years of the Clinton administration's national security malfeasance, and eight months of the newly installed Bush administration's effort to reorder national priorities, most Americans were unaware that a deadly enemy had coalesced in our midst. But before noon on 9/11, it became clear that our vital national interests -- both the security of our homeland and the stability of our energy providers abroad -- were under assault. An enemy had declared war on the United States, and it was an enemy unlike any before.

Sheik Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qa'ida (translated as "The Base"), constitute an asymmetric enemy -- part of an international and increasingly unified Islamic terrorist network supported, in part, by nation states like Iran and Syria, and previously by Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unlike symmetric threats emanating from clearly defined nation states such as Russia and China -- those with unambiguous political, economic and geographical interests -- an asymmetric enemy defies nation-state status, thus presenting new and daunting national-security challenges for the executive branch and U.S. military planners.

Perhaps the most difficult of these challenges is the task of keeping Americans focused on why this asymmetric threat must be engaged (short of periodic catastrophic wake-up calls). It is critical that Americans understand this formidable adversary, particularly since liberal Democrats and their Leftmedia outlets have politicized our efforts to both combat this enemy and support democratic reforms in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, out of deference to cultural sensitivity and diversity, the Bush administration has yet to clearly define or, dare we say, "profile" these Islamists. Consequently, The Patriot refers to this asymmetric enemy collectively as "Jihadistan."

Jihadistan is a borderless nation of Islamic extremists that constitutes al-Qa'ida and other Muslim terrorist groups around the world. A borderless nation? Indeed. The "Islamic World" of the Quran recognizes no political borders. Though orthodox Muslims (those who subscribe to the teachings of the "pre-Medina" Quran) do not support acts of terrorism or mass murder, sects within the Islamic world subscribe to the "post-Mecca" Quran and Hadiths (Mohammed's teachings). It is this latter group of death-worshipping sects that calls for jihad, or "holy war," against all "the enemies of God." (These enemies, or infidels, consist of all non-Muslims).

Jihadists, then, are characterized by the toxic Wahhabism of al-Qa'ida's Osama bin Laden and his heretical ilk -- those who would remake the Muslim world in their own image of twisted hate and deathly obsession. In the words of bin Laden himself: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us." Al-Qa'ida seeks to disable the U.S. economy using any means at their disposal, and thus, undermine our political, military and cultural support for liberty around the world. Bin Laden's plan, "American Hiroshima," outlines an attack on the U.S. with multiple nukes. Ultimately, they seek to contain or kill those who do not subscribe to their Islamofascist ideology.

How many members of the Muslim faith subscribe to the notion that non-adherents are infidels? Perhaps fewer than five percent take such a hard line. But to put this in perspective, if just one percent of Muslims worldwide inhabit the brotherhood of Jihadistan, then there are 10 times more Jihadists than there are uniformed American combat personnel in our combined military service branches.

Jihadistan is thus a formidable, but not insuperable, enemy.

Source: http://PatriotPost.US/papers/primer01.asp

These articles can be found at the link beneath them.

Understanding "Jihadistan" and Islamic terrorism
Responding to the WMD threat -- Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom
The Long War against Jihadistan
The unthinkable -- perhaps the inevitable
The Real Islam
http://patriotpost.us/papers/primer02.asp

 

Mark Alexander along with Michelle Malkin is one of two recent recipients of honors from Accuracy in Media.
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« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2007, 07:09:28 PM »

Left Allows Europe to Fall to Muslims
by Rabbi Aryeh Spero (more by this author)
Posted 02/08/2007 ET
Updated 02/08/2007 ET


In a recent interview, Prof. Bernard Lewis, famed historian and leading expert on Islam, warned that "Muslims seem to be about to take over Europe." The irony is that this takeover -- be it in 10 years or 30 -- is not because Islam has more tanks or better missiles than the Europeans. It is because the minority Islamic populations already living within Europe are making demands to Islamize Europe and no one seems to be willing to say no. No one has the political will to announce to the Islamic communities that daily life and laws in Europe must be in accord with the Western outlook that is Europe's heritage.

Was the fall of Europe inevitable? No, according to Prof. Lewis, who says it is coming about because "Europeans have surrendered on every issue regarding Islamic demands, due to political correctness and multi-culturalism." Europe has become woefully secular and its tepid attachment to a forgotten and dismissed Christianity is no match for the zeal of Muslims who remain fervent believers in their faith. Having been force fed that all cultures are equally valid, Europeans consider it unenlightened to assert the primacy of their culture even in their own countries.

What is even stranger is that secularized and politically correct European elites do insist on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands. In other words, other countries are there to preserve their own way of life while the West is supposed to jello-ize and even deny its historic way of life. The bottom line: "Europeans have no respect for their own culture." Their worship of open-mindedness, no matter the cost, is leading to their demise.

Perhaps for the first time in history, we are witnessing the death of a civilization not due to outside forces stronger militarily but because "instead of fighting the threat, Europeans have simply given up, and do not want to fight." Pacifism in Europe runs so deep that it goes beyond a reluctance to take up military arms and extends to not even battling verbally, be it with laws or assertive opinion, or by fighting for Western culture even in routine social conversations.

As is well known, after World War II, Europe began denigrating the concept of nationalism, and the further left it became politically, the further it extolled transnationalism. Brainwashing citizens against the natural human inclination to be proud and loyal to one's own country over others has boomeranged to the point where Europeans can no longer even make the case for their own culture and history.

The lesson for the United States is clear. So as not to fall and disintegrate as is Europe, we need strong national patriotism, a genuine belief in the West's Judeo-Christian heritage and religion, and a conviction that our inherited culture and civilization is best for us and has been the true source of our blessings, success and freedom. Bereft of these deep and abiding associations, what is there to fight for?

Moreover, it is necessary to assert that our historic ethos is superior to that which Islam is demanding. Europe, as well as history, shows that those unable to assert the primacy of their own culture at home are unwilling to even assert its parity, and mire in "suicidal self-abasement."

This self-abasement has gone so far that "sophisticated" Europeans extend respect and "understanding" to Islamic marital habits that they’d condemn if practiced by their own. They would never accept rampaging and burnings in response to cartoon publications and statements if done by fellow Englishmen. Nor would they countenance censorship of the press if a bishop was offended by some newspaper article.

Yet out of a strange deference and submission to things Islamic, many are accepting that which they would condemn if perpetrated by a native Christian Brit. In other words, Islamic "honor" is more important than British honor, and Islamic habits are given more deference than Western customs and mores continually under self- assault and self-criticism. Criticism is reserved only for our culture, the "bad, discredited, and passé Western culture."

What brought Europe to this pitiful surrender is the left/liberalism that has controlled it since the 1960s. This post-modern liberalism has used political correctness and multi-culturalism to strip Europe of that which had previously made it great, and worthwhile. If it has proven a disastrous recipe for Europe, it certainly is no prescription for us in America. It is a cultural poison, a death potion. We, therefore, must not allow the elitist left to do here what they've already done to Europe. We know, however, that is precisely what the American Left is trying to do, and we see how the elitists in this country always ape Europe, demanding that "we Americans act more European-like."

To be sure, some in Europe accede to the demands of Islam over European life not out of a sense of cultural inferiority but fear, palpable fear. But the question remains: Given that the Islamists living inside Europe are not armed with tanks or other heavy military equipment, why can't the better equipped police forces subdue the Islamic gangs and imams that are intimidating the British and European public? Why can't law enforcement shut down the Islamic hot heads and centers that are creating such fear among Europeans that they’d rather forfeit actual civil liberties (freedom of speech), their culture, and way of life so as to appease the threatening Islamists?

Because political correctness has tied the hands of those entrusted to protect the home-grown citizenry. The courts and the ruling elites in charge of European legal institutions have made it almost impossible to enforce the laws and protect the people. New operational terms, such as racial profiling, cultural understanding, mosque sanctuary, community deference, etc., have been sanctified so that Moslems are exempt from the very tough investigatory and law enforcement procedures normally used when trying to apprehend other criminals and violators of the law. Sociology is replacing strength and common sense.

Worse, the blood-curdling threats by imams against the public go unpunished while candid and forthright apprehensions over what the Islamic community is doing to society is punishable as a hate crime.

Out of fear, Europe is appeasing. It has become a supplicant. Out of guilt, Europe is acquiescing. Out of years of self-criticism, it no longer feels worthy. Cynicism has lead to defeatism. Pacifisim has replaced religion. They believed in the parity of everything, so they now believe in nothing -- not even themselves. They, not the enemy, are orchestrating their own national demise.

To those elites in Europe, and America, who feel a greater kinship with the exotic peoples of other cultures than with the dull citizens of their own country, there is nothing to fear. For what will have been lost is something, a set of cultural beliefs, they discarded long ago; nationalisms that were objects of scorn and had, for them, become boring. An Islamized Europe is nothing to fret and worry over. Wrong!

Prof. Lewis warns: "The growing sway in Europe is of particular concern given the ever-rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements." But these self-righteous, self-centered elitists born of the 60s Left still need not worry. They probably will not be the victims of the annihilation they have wrought. It will be their children and grandchildren.

Rabbi Spero is a radio talk show host, a pulpit rabbi, and president of Caucus for America. He can be reached at www.caucusforamerica.com.

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« Reply #2 on: March 09, 2007, 07:12:31 PM »

January 08, 2007
The War Against Global Jihadism
By Peter Wehner

President Bush has said that the war against global jihadism is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. We are still in the early years of the struggle. The civilized world will either rise to the challenge and prevail against this latest form of barbarism, or grief and death will visit us and other innocents on a massive scale.

Given the stakes involved in this war and how little is known, even now, about what is at the core of this conflict, it is worth reviewing in some detail the nature of our enemy - including disaggregating who they are (Shia and Sunni extremists), what they believe and why they believe it, and the implications of that for America and the West.

Islam in the World Today

The enemy we face is not Islam per se; rather, we face a global network of extremists who are driven by a twisted vision of Islam. These jihadists are certainly a minority within Islam -- but they exist, they are dangerous and resolute, in some places they are ascendant, and they need to be confronted and defeated.

It's worth looking at Islam more broadly.[1] It is the second-largest religion in the world, with around 1.3 billion adherents. Islam is the dominant religion throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which alone claims more than 170 million adherents. There are also more than 100 million Muslims living in India.

Less than a quarter of the world's Muslims are Arabs.

The Muslim world is "vast and varied and runs the gamut from the Iran of the ayatollahs to secular and largely westernized Turkey."[2]

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are Sunnites, or "traditionalists"; they comprise 83 percent of the Muslim world, or 934 million people. It is the dominant faith in countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

Sunni Islam recognizes several major schools of thought, including Wahhabism, which is based on the teachings of the 18th century Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab. His movement was a reaction to European modernism and what he believed was the corruption of Muslim theology and an insufficient fidelity to Islamic law. He gave jihad, or "holy war," a prominent place in his teachings.

Wahhabism -- a xenophobic, puritanical version of Sunni Islam -- became the reigning theology in modern Saudi Arabia and is the strand of Sunni faith in which Osama bin Laden was raised and with which he associates himself.

Shiites, or "partisans" of Ali, represent around 16 percent of the Muslim world, or 180 million people. The Shiite faith is dominant in Iraq and Iran and is the single largest community in Lebanon. The largest sect within the Shia faith is known as "twelvers," referring to those who believe that the twelfth imam, who is now hidden, will appear to establish peace, justice, and Islamic rule on earth.

"Across the Middle East Shias and Sunnis have often rallied around the same political causes and even fought together in the same trenches," Professor Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, has written. But he also points out that "followers of each sect are divided by language, ethnicity, geography, and class. There are also disagreements within each group over politics, theology, and religious law..."[3] Professor Nasr points out that "[a]nti-Shiism is embedded in the ideology of Sunni militancy that has risen to prominence across the region in the last decade."[4]

It is worth noting as well that for most of its history, the Shia have been largely powerless, marginalized, and oppressed -- often by Sunnis. "Shia history," the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has written, "is about lamentations."[5]

Shia and Sunni: Different Histories

The split between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam is rooted in the question of rightful succession after the death of Muhammad in 632.[6]

The Shia believe that Muhammad designated Ali, his son-in-law and cousin, as his successor. To the Shia, it was impossible that God could have left open the question of leadership of the community. Only those who knew the prophet intimately would have the thorough knowledge of the true meaning of the Koran and the prophetic tradition. Further, for the new community to choose its own leader held the possibility that the wrong person would be chosen.

The majority view prevailing at an assembly following Muhammad's death, however, was that Muhammad had deliberately left succession an open question. These became the Sunnis, followers of the Sunnah, or Tradition of the Prophet. This is the root of the Sunni tradition. Sunnis have a belief in "the sanctity of the consensus of the community... 'My community will never agree in error': the Prophet is thus claimed by the Sunnis to have conferred on his community the very infallibility that the Shi`is ascribe to their Imams."[7]

The assembly elected as Muhammad's successor Abu Baker, a close companion of Muhammad, and gave Abu Baker the title Caliph, or successor, of God's messenger. Ali was the third successor to Abu Baker and, for the Shia, the first divinely sanctioned "imam," or male descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

The seminal event in Shia history is the martyrdom in 680 of Ali's son Hussein, who led an uprising against the "illegitimate" caliph (72 of Hussein's followers were killed as well). "For the Shia, Hussein came to symbolize resistance to tyranny," according to Masood Farivar. "His martyrdom is commemorated to this day as the central act of Shia piety."[8]

The end of Muhammad's line came with Muhammad al-Mahdi, the "Twelfth Imam" -- or Mahdi ("the one who guides") -- who disappeared as a child at the funeral of his father Hassan al-Askari, the eleventh imam.[9]

Shia and Sunni: Different Eschatologies

Shiites believe that the Twelfth Imam, al-Mahdi, is merely hidden from view and will one day return from his "occultation" to rid the world of evil. Legitimate Islamic rule can only be re-established with the Mahdi's return because, in the Shiite view, the imams possessed secret knowledge, passed by each to his successor, vital to guiding the community.

History is moving toward the inevitable return of the Twelfth Imam, according to Shia. Professor Hamid Enayat has written:

"The Shi`is agree with the Sunnis that Muslim history since the era of the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs ... has been for the most part a tale of woe. But whereas for the Sunnis the course of history since then has been a movement away from the ideal state, for the Shi`is it is a movement towards it."[10]

It's worth noting that Shia have historically been politically quiescent, with "[the return of the Mahdi] remaining in practice merely a sanctifying tenet for the submissive acceptance of the status quo."[11]

In more recent times, however -- and in particular in Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala in 680 has been used to catalyze political action. Ayatollah Khomeini embraced a view that Hussein was compelled to resist an unpopular, unjust and impious government and that his martyrdom serves as a call to rebellion for all Muslims in building an Islamic state.

The end-time views of Ayatollah Khomeini have been explained this way:

"[Khomeini] vested the myth [of the return of the Twelfth Imam] with an entirely new sense: The Twelfth Imam will only emerge when the believers have vanquished evil. To speed up the Mahdi's return, Muslims had to shake off their torpor and fight."[12]

As Professor Matthias Kuntzel points out, Khomeini's activism is a break with Shia tradition and, in fact, tracks more closely with the militancy of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to reunite religion and politics, implement sharia (the body of Islamic laws derived from the Koran), and views the struggle for an Islamic state as a Muslim duty.

Professor Noah Feldman of New York University points out, "Recently, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contributed to renewed focus on the mahdi, by saying publicly that the mission of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to pave the way for the mahdi's return..."[13]

Sunni radicals hold a very different eschatological view. "For all his talk of the war between civilizations," Professor Noah Feldman has written:

"bin Laden has never spoken of the end of days. For him, the battle between the Muslims and the infidels is part of earthly human life, and has indeed been with us since the days of the Prophet himself. The war intensifies and lessens with time, but it is not something that occurs out of time or with the expectation that time itself will stop. Bin Laden and his sympathizers want to re-establish the caliphate and rule the Muslim world, but unlike some earlier revivalist movements within Sunni Islam, they do not declare their leader as the mahdi, or guided one, whose appearance will usher in a golden age of justice and peace to be followed by the Day of Judgment. From this perspective, the utter destruction of civilization would be a mistake, not the fulfillment of a divine plan."[14]

Many Sunnis, then, look toward the rise of a new caliphate; Shia, on the other hand, are looking for the rule of the returned imam -- with the extremist strain within Shia believing they can hasten the return of the twelfth imam by cleansing the world of what they believe to be evil in their midst.

Other prominent Shia, like Iraq's Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, "take a more fatalist stance, and prefer to believe that the mahdi's coming cannot be hastened by human activity...."[15] Indeed, Ayatollah Sistani was a disciple of Ayatollah Abul-Qassim Khoei in Najaf, who was from the "quietist school" in Shiite Islam and attempted to keep Khomeini from claiming the mantle of Shiite leadership.[16]

Contemporary Sunni Radicalism

Since the attacks of September 11, we have learned important things about al Qaeda and its allies. Their movement is fueled by hatred and deep resentments against the West, America, and the course of history.

In Islam's first few centuries of existence, it was a dominant and expanding force in the world, sweeping across lands in the modern-day Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere. During its Golden Age -- which spanned from the eighth to the 13th century -- Islam was the philosophical, educational, and scientific center of the world. The Ottoman Empire[17] reached the peak of its power in the 16th century. Islam then began to recede as a political force. In the 17th century, for example, advancing Muslims were defeated at the gates of Vienna, the last time an Islamic army threatened the heart of Europe. And for radicals like bin Laden, a milestone event and historic humiliation came when the Ottoman Empire crumbled at the end of World War I.

This is significant because for many Muslims, the proper order of life in this world is for them to rule and for the "infidels" to be ruled over. The end of the Ottoman Empire was deeply disorienting. Then, in 1923-24 came the establishment of modern, secular Turkey under Kemal Ataturk -- and the abolishment of the caliphate.[18]

Osama bin Laden and his militant Sunni followers seek to reverse all that. Bin Laden sees himself as the new caliph; he has referred to himself as the "commander of the faithful." He is seeking to unify all of Islam -- and resume a jihad against the unbelievers.

According to Mary Habeck of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University:

"Jihadis thus neither recognize national boundaries within the Islamic lands nor do they believe that the coming Islamic state, when it is created, should have permanent borders with the unbelievers. The recognition of such boundaries would end the expansion of Islam and stop offensive jihad, both of which are transgressions against the laws of God that command jihad to last until Judgment Day or until the entire earth is under the rule of Islamic law."[19]

Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies are waging their war on several continents. They have killed innocent people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Far East, and the United States. They will try to overthrow governments and seize power where they can -- and where they cannot, they will attempt to inflict fear and destruction by disrupting settled ways of life. They will employ every weapon they can: assassinations, car bombs, airplanes, and, if they can secure them, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

The theocratic and totalitarian ideology that characterizes al Qaeda makes typical negotiations impossible. "Anyone who stands in the way of our struggle is our enemy and target of the swords," said Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Osama bin Laden put it this way: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

This struggle has an enormous ideological dimension. For example, both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two leader of al Qaeda and its ideological leader, were deeply influenced by Sayyid Qutb, whose writings (especially his manifesto Milestones) gave rise and profoundly shaped the radical Islamist movement. Qutb, an Egyptian who was killed by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser in 1966, had a fierce hatred for America, the West, modernity, and Muslims who did not share his extremist views.

According to the author Lawrence Wright:

"Qutb divides the world into two camps, Islam and jahiliyya, the period of ignorance and barbarity that existed before the divine message of the Prophet Mohammed. Qutb uses the term to encompass all of modern life: manners, morals, art, literature, law, even much of what passed as Islamic culture. He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation. Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam. This was the choice: pure, primitive Islam or the doom of mankind."[20]

Sunni jihadists, then, are committed to establishing a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example, has spoken about a "jihad for the liberation of Palestine, all Palestine, as well as every land that was a home for Islam, from Andalusia to Iraq. The whole world is an open field for us."

Their version of political utopia is Afghanistan under the Taliban, a land of almost unfathomable cruelty. The Taliban sought to control every sphere of human life and crush individuality and human creativity. And Afghanistan became a safe haven and launching pad for terrorists.

The Islamic radicals we are fighting know they are far less wealthy and far less advanced in technology and weaponry than the United States. But they believe they will prevail in this war, as they did against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, by wearing us down and breaking our will. They believe America and the West are "the weak horse" -- soft, irresolute, and decadent. "[Americans are] the most cowardly of God's creatures," al-Zarqawi once said.

Contemporary Shia Radicalism

President Bush has said the Shia strain of Islamic radicalism is "just as dangerous, and just as hostile to America, and just as determined to establish its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East." And Shia extremists have achieved something al Qaeda has not: in 1979, they took control of a major power, Iran.

The importance of the Iranian revolution is hard to overstate. In the words of the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis:

"Political Islam first became a major international factor with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The word 'revolution' has been much misused in the Middle East and has served to designate and justify almost any violent transfer of power at the top. But what happened in Iran was a genuine revolution, a major change with a very significant ideological challenge, a shift in the basis of society that had an immense impact on the whole Islamic world, intellectually, morally, and politically. The process that began in Iran in 1979 was a revolution in the same sense as the French and the Russian revolutions were."[21] (emphasis added)

The taking of American hostages in 1979 made it clear that "Islamism represented for the West an opponent of an entirely different nature than the Soviet Union: an opponent that not only did not accept the system of international relations founded after 1945 but combated it as a 'Christian-Jewish conspiracy.'"[22]

Ayatollah Khomeini said in a radio address in November 1979 that the storming of the American embassy represented a "war between Muslims and pagans." He went on to say this:

"The Muslims must rise up in this struggle, which is more a struggle between unbelievers and Islam than one between Iran and America: between all unbelievers and Muslims. The Muslims must rise up and triumph in this struggle."

A year later, in a speech in Qom, Khomeini indicated the type of mindset we are facing:

"We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."[23]

"Whether or not they share Teheran's Shiite orientation," Joshua Muravchik and Jeffrey Gedmin wrote in 1997, "the various Islamist movements take inspiration (and in many cases material assistance) from the Islamic Republic of Iran."[24]

Indeed. As Lawrence Wright points out:

"The fact that Khomeini came from the Shiite branch of Islam, rather than the Sunni, which predominates in the Muslim world outside of Iraq and Iran, made him a complicated figure among Sunni radicals. Nonetheless, Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad, supported the Iranian revolution with leaflets and cassette tapes urging all Islamic groups in Egypt to follow the Iranian example."[25]

Today Iran is the most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world. For example, it funds and arms Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist organization which has killed more Americans than any terrorist organization except al Qaeda. Hezbollah was behind the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans and marked the advent of suicide bombing as a weapon of choice among Islamic radicals.

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has said this: "Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute... Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America."

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has also declared his absolute hostility to America.[26] Last October, he said, "whether a world without the United States and Zionism can be achieved... I say that this... goal is achievable." In 2006 he declared to America and other Western powers: "open your eyes and see the fate of pharaoh... if you do not abandon the path of falsehood... your doomed destiny will be annihilation." Later he warned, "The anger of Muslims may reach an explosion point soon. If such a day comes [America and the West] should know that the waves of the blast will not remain within the boundaries of our region."

He also said this: "If you would like to have good relations with the Iranian nation in the future... bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender. If you don't accept [to do this], the Iranian nation will... force you to surrender and bow down."

In Tehran in December, President Ahmadinejad hosted a conference of Holocaust deniers, and he has repeatedly threatened to wipe Israel off the map. "More than any leading Iranian figure since Ayatollah Khomeini himself," Vali Nasr has written, "Ahmadinejad appears to take seriously the old revolutionary goal of positioning Iran as the leading country of the entire Muslim world -- an ambition that requires focusing on themes (such as hostility to Israel and the West) that tend to bring together Arabs and Iranians, Sunni and Shia, rather than divide them..."[27]

Concluding Thoughts

It is the fate of the West, and in particular the United States, to have to deal with the combined threat of Shia and Sunni extremists. And for all the differences that exist between them -- and they are significant -- they share some common features.

Their brand of radicalism is theocratic, totalitarian, illiberal, expansionist, violent, and deeply anti-Semitic and anti-American. As President Bush has said, both Shia and Sunni militants want to impose their dark vision on the Middle East. And as we have seen with Shia-dominated Iran's support of the Sunni terrorist group Hamas, they can find common ground when they confront what they believe is a common enemy.

The war against global jihadism will be long, and we will experience success and setbacks along the way. The temptation of the West will be to grow impatient and, in the face of this long struggle, to grow weary. Some will demand a quick victory and, absent that, they will want to withdraw from the battle. But this is a war from which we cannot withdraw. As we saw on September 11th, there are no safe harbors in which to hide. Our enemies have declared war on us, and their hatreds cannot be sated. We will either defeat them, or they will come after us with the unsheathed sword.

All of us would prefer years of repose to years of conflict. But history will not allow it. And so it once again rests with this remarkable republic to do what we have done in the past: our duty.


**********

[1] Sources for this section include The New York Times Almanac: 2007 and "Islam is faith with many faces," by David R. Sands, The Washington Times, October 21, 2001.

[2] Why We Fight, by William J. Bennett (2002).

[3] The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (2006).

[4] "Iraq's Real Holy War," The New York Times, March 6, 2004.

[5] The Foreigner's Gift (2006).

[6] The precepts of Islam were revealed through Muhammad, who Muslims believe was the last of a line of prophets including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muhammad was born around 570 at Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, and died in 632 in Medina. Muslims believe the Koran, which means "recitation" and consists of 114 chapters (or surahs), is the infallible word of God as revealed to Muhammad.

[7] Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Second edition, 2005).

[8] "A Faith Divided," The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2006.

[9] The February 22, 2006 attack in Iraq on Samarra's Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, was significant because, as the Washington Post reported at the time, "the mosque holds the tombs of two revered 9th-century imams of the Shiite branch of Islam, including Hassan al-Askari, father of the 'hidden imam,' al-Mahdi. Many Shiites believe that Mahdi is still alive and that his reemergence one day will signal the beginning of the end of the world. Shiites consider the mosque in Samarra to be a tangible link with the hidden imam." It should also be noted that the name of the militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, is the Mahdi Army. "Moqtada is absolutely hooked on the concept of the reappearance of the Mahdi," according to Amatzia Baram, the director of the Ezri Center at Haifa University.

[10] Modern Islamic Political Thought (Second edition, 2005).

[11] Ibid.

[12] Matthias Kuntzel, "A Child of the Revolution Takes Over," The New Republic, April 24, 2006

[13] "Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age," The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2006. It should be noted that Professor Feldman also argues, "Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering collective suicide."

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Anthony Shadid, "Call of History Draws Iraqi Cleric to the Political Fore," The Washington Post, February 1, 2004.

[17] The Ottoman Empire was established in the 13th century by the Osmanli (Ottoman) Turks. At the height of its power, this Turkish empire spanned three continents.

[18] The establishment of a secular Islamic state in Turkey was unprecedented for an Islamic nation. The reason is rooted in the history of Islam. According to Efraim Karsh, author of Islamic Imperialism: A History, "Islam has never distinguished between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad." The Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis puts it this way: "The notion of church and state as distinct institutions, each with its own laws, hierarchy, and jurisdiction, is characteristically Christian, with its origins in Christian scripture and history. It is alien to Islam... From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience. For Muslims, Muhammad's career as a soldier and statesman was not additional to his mission as a prophet. It was an essential part of it."

[19] Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (2006).

[20] The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006).

[21] "Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005.

[22] Matthias Kuntzel, "From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad," Policy Review, December 2006 & January 2007.

[23] The quotes by Ayatollah Khomeini appear in Matthias Kuntzel's "From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad," Policy Review, December 2006 & January 2007.

[24] "Why Iran Is (Still) a Menace," Commentary, July 1997.

[25] The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006).

[26] President Ahmadinejad is certainly a key figure in Iran and the world. It is worth noting, however, that the Iranian government has several different power centers, including the presidency, the parliament, the Revolutionary Guard, and the office of the Supreme Leader - currently filled by Ayatollah Khamenei, who ultimately oversees the armed forces and exerts great influence.

[27] "The New Hegemon," The New Republic, December 18, 2006. It should be noted that in his book The Shia Revival, Professor Nasr argues that the Islamic revolution is "today a spent force in Iran, and the Islamic Republic is a tired dictatorship facing pressures to change." He adds, "If the Shias are emerging from their dark years of ideological posturing, revolution, and extremism, the Sunnis seem to be entering theirs, or at least passing into a darker phase."

Peter Wehner is deputy assistant to the President and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/01/the_nature_of_our_enemy.html
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« Reply #3 on: March 09, 2007, 07:20:44 PM »

Oh, and one doesn't have to take President Bush's word for it, either.  There are other sources readily available if one is intersted in the truth and not just spewing socialist propaganda in order to garner a few votes for leftist politicians.

Article:

 
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Financial Times FT.comhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/9222452a-bb66-11db-afe4-0000779e2340.html  EU report on Iran: details and full text
By Daniel Dombey

Published: February 13 2007 13:48 | Last updated: February 13 2007 13:48

The full text of an internal European Union document on Iran reveals that officials from the bloc are pessimistic about the chances of stopping Iran from getting enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb.

The reflection paper, written by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief, circulated to the EU’s 27 governments last week, concedes that Iran will probably acquire sufficient capacity to enrich uranium for a weapons programme “at some stageâ€, adding that the programme has been held back by Tehran’s own technical shortcomings, rather than international pressure.

The document, obtained by the Financial Times and reproduced below, mirrors EU officials’ private comments that, although negotiations with Iran will probably fail, they have to be attempted.

EU member states believe that their chances of success would be bolstered if the US offered Tehran comprehensive security guarantees; sceptics of negotiations will point to the paper’s findings to bolster their arguments for a military attack on the country’s nuclear facilities. The paper itself does not recommend any such course, commending instead the EU’s current “twin track†policy of mixing incentives and disincentives.

Iran insists its purposes are purely peaceful.

The paper says that Iran’s economy is vulnerable because of economic mismanagement, with foreign investment all but drying up and a real inflation rate of about 20 per cent per annum. But it concludes that “the problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions aloneâ€, as Iran has shown great resilience to outside pressure in the past.

In an indication of debates deep inside the EU, the paper posits the questions of how best to bring Iran to the negotiating table, whether the EU should press for additional sanctions and how to maintain international unity.

In other observations, it concludes that the EU’s attempts to encourage Iran to respect human rights have had little effect and that Iran considers itself strengthened because of recent developments in the Middle East – partly because of “its connections in the weak Shi’a dominated administration†in Iraq.

…


RESTRICTED


7 February 2007


Iran- reflection paper


EU and Iran: the two track approach


From the 1990s the EU has sought to persuade Iran to change its policies on the Middle East, support for terrorism, missiles and WMD, and human rights. Iranian policies have varied, making some progress vis-Ã -vis the worst times of the 1990s; but all these issues remain serious concerns today.

Engagement remains both the basis for solutions in these areas and the best way to develop common interests, for example in energy, drugs and trade and regional issues. A possible forum for this is the Comprehensive Dialogue, established in recognition of the opportunity represented by Khatami and never formerly [sic] abolished, though Iran has shown little interest in reviving this format. But experience suggests that in all of the cases, engagement alone is not enough: the EU must be prepared to mix incentives with disincentives; i.e. a two track approach.


Human rights, Civil Society and Public Diplomacy


The human rights situation in Iran and the condition of civil society continue to deteriorate. Freedom of expression is widely suppressed, sometimes with violence, e.g. police broke up two peaceful women’s rights demonstrations in Tehran in 2006. Shirin Ebadi’s Centre of Human Rights Defenders has been declared illegal. In September, the Iranian Supervisory Board of the Press shut down four newspapers. Restrictions on the internet have increased. Iran executed more people, including minors, in 2006 than any other country except China. The government has ignored demarches from the EU, e.g. in the case of ten Ahwazi Arabs sentenced to death without access to lawyers or an open trial. Seven of them have since been executed.

The EU has attempted to engage via the Human Rights dialogue but the Iranians have cancelled meetings since 2004. There is no evidence that these meetings have made much impact; nor has public criticism, though the Iranians dislike it. An alternative approach is to engage with the people rather than the government. As well as direct support to human rights activists (where this does not endanger them or damage their cause) assistance in other less sensitive areas, e.g. drugs, environment, health, rescue services, can help build a real civil society. Iran’s inclusion in the ERASMUS MUNDUS programme offers an opportunity to strengthen academic exchanges. The EU could also explain its policies better to a wider Iranian public. Exposure of European political figures in Persian-speaking and Iranian media- TV radio and internet – would help. Some Member States are taking initiatives in this area. The EU also has successful media training programmes in other regions whioch could be replicated in Iran.

+How can the EU improve its impact on human rights in Iran?

+How can engagement with civil society best be put into practice? Can Community instruments play a bigger role?


Iran’s regional role


Recent political change in the Middle East has boosted Iran’s self-perception as a historical great power and the natural hegemon in the region. Iran feels strengthened by its energy resources, its nuclear programme and developments in the region. But it also feels vulnerable especially to the US, fears which build on a century of Western intervention in different form.

-Saddam Hussein’s overthrow removed Iran’s most powerful regional enemy. Iran has been able to exert influence though [sic] its connections in the weak Shi’a dominated administration in Baghdad. Tehran attaches great importance to the unity of (a weakened) Iraq. The large-scale presence of US forces in Iraq is uncomfortable for Iran but they perceive the US as bogged down. One of Iran’s policy aims is to see US forces leave. Hence its support for groups opposing them.

{{Note from Anna:  That would be the socialist DNC in this country.  If you have any doubt that we have politicians bought and paid for by our sworn enemies, just listen to them talk about the "slow bleeding" they want to do to our military in Iraq!  It is very frightening to have members of Congress and Terrorists in Iran saying the same things and stating them as their short-term goals.  This cannot be a good thing for our national security and the very survival of this country.!}}

-In Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban also brought an end to a regime that Iran had opposed. Iran has since spent considerable sums on projects in infrastructure, agriculture, education and energy. Repatriation of the remaining almost one million Afghan refugees in Iran, and dealing with drug trafficking from Afghanistan remain important objectives. Iran is, at least, in contact with anti-Western groups.

-Iran is the primary political and financial supporter of Hizballah in Lebanon and sees Hizballah as a vital foreign and security policy tool .During the Lebanon conflict last summer, Iran maintained regular supplies of weapons to Hizballah. Many of the most lethal and sophisticated weapons that Hizballah used during the conflict were of Iranian manufacture or procured from Iran, such as the Fajr-3 missiles fired at Haifa.

-In Palestine- Iran plays a spoiling role as the only country in the region to reject the two-state solution. It is a major funder and supplier off arms for Palestinian militant groups; it has probably put its weight against a government of national unity. (An Iranian General was recently captured by Fatah during a clash with Hamas.)

All this has led to considerable unease about Iran among Arab countries (and Israel). The fact that Ahmadinejad is popular at street level does not help.

Iran feels strengthened by developments in the region but still feels it lacks recognition. Steps towards regional stabilisation, especially in the MEPP and Lebanon might help create a more productive climate for negotiation:

+What are the possibilities for the EU to reach out in areas of common interest, e.g. Afghanistan (drugs/border security), Iraq?

+Can the EU engage with Iran on regional issues, without legitimising disruptive policies and actions? And can it do so while the nuclear issue remains unresolved?


Security Issues


In the absence of guarantees of its exclusively peaceful nature, the Iranian nuclear programme- together with its missile programme- represents a security threat in the region as well as to the international non-proliferation system. Israel considers the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability as an existential threat.

Iran’s size and its comparatively well-equipped armed forces mean that today it does not face any serious military threat from the region. Its principal security concern is an attack by the US. The Iranians will have noted a change in US language concerning Iran, including in the State of the Union message, and the more aggressive US approach to Iranian interference in Iraq.

Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have so far not succeeded. The EU3/EU+3 ideas put to Iran in summer 2006 were remarkable in many respects- not least the US offer to begin dismantling their sanctions. Iran’s rejection makes it difficult to believe that, at least in the short run, they would be ready to establish the conditions for the resumption of negotiations. In practice, despite the suspension of sensitive nuclear activities following the Paris Agreement, the Iranians have pursued their programme at their own pace, the limiting factor being technical difficulties rather than resolutions by the UN or the IAEA. At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons programme.

UNSCR 1737- and the fact that it was adopted unanimously – has had an impact in Iran, which is not fully measurable at this stage. The sanctions contained in the Resolution have limited direct effect but they come at a moment when the economy is performing poorly, partly because of Iranian mismanagement. Ahmadinejad is under criticism because of rising inflation – officially at 12 per cent, in reality closer to 20 per cent; economic growth around 5 per cent per annum is not keeping up with the need for job creation. Foreign investment has all but dried up, partly because of the nuclear issue and associated action (e.g. restriction on Iranian banks, greater caution of export credit agencies). Without new investment, Iran risks being unable to maintain medium-term oil production, currently 50 per cent of government income.

The problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone. Iran has shown great resilience to outside pressure in the past, for example during the Iran/Iraq war. The government may also exploit the sanctions to benefit nationalism or to explain economic failure. Nevertheless, Iran must understand that the pursuit of policies which the international community rejects is not cost-free.

The EU has agreed to pursue sanctions through the United Nations if the Iranians continues [sic] to reject the decisions of the IAEA Board and the UN Security Council. But it has also agreed to keep the door open to negotiations if Iran decides to meet the requirements in the UN Resolutions.

+How can Iran be persuaded to take the steps needed to start negotiations? How can we attract Iran to the negotiating table?

+Should we press for further UN sanctions if Iran fails to comply with resolution 1737? If so, in which areas?

+If we believe that the unity of the international community is important in handling Iran, how is this best maintained?


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2007.
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« Reply #4 on: March 09, 2007, 07:21:29 PM »

Could Cicero, in 42 B.C., have had today's Democrats in mind when he wrote this piece on Treason?

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor—he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."
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« Reply #5 on: March 09, 2007, 07:32:17 PM »

Another Example of the Distortion of Truth by the Mainstream Liberal Press.  But this was the beginning of the end of the Murtha attampt to undermine national security as he is on YouTube stating is his goal.  This large and well-documented survey put the brakes on the runaway Congress for the moment.  They tabled their treasonous attempt and are just now sneakily taking them back up.


 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  CONTACT: 423 / 290-1470

AMERICANS WANT TO WIN IN IRAQ
NATIONAL SURVEY SAYS PUSH TO RENOUNCE WAR IN WASHINGTON ON DIFFERENT PAGE THAN MAJORITY OF AMERICAN PEOPLE ON IRAQ WAR


FEBRUARY 20, 2007

(Alexandria, VA) February 20 -- In the wake of the U.S. House of Representatives passing a resolution that amounts to a vote of no confidence in the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, a new national survey by Alexandria, VA-based Public Opinion Strategies (POS) shows the American people may have some different ideas from their elected leaders on this issue.

The survey was conducted nationwide February 5-7 among a bi-partisan, cross-section of 800 registered voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. The survey was commissioned by The Moriah Group, a Chattanooga-based strategic communications and public affairs firm.

"The survey shows Americans want to win in Iraq, and that they understand Iraq is the central point in the war against terrorism and they can support a U.S. strategy aimed at achieving victory," said Neil Newhouse, a partner in POS. "The idea of pulling back from Iraq is not where the majority of Americans are."

By a 53 percent - 46 percent margin, respondents surveyed said that "Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw troops from Iraq."
By identical 57 percent - 41 percent margins, voters agreed with these statements: "I support finishing the job in Iraq, that is, keeping the troops there until the Iraqi government can maintain control and provide security" and "the Iraqi war is a key part of the global war on terrorism."
Also, by a 56 percent - 43 percent margin, voters agreed that "even if they have concerns about his war policies, Americans should stand behind the President in Iraq because we are at war."
While the survey shows voters believe (60 percent- 34 percent) that Iraq will never become a stable democracy, they still disagree that victory in Iraq ("creating a young, but stable democracy and reducing the threat of terrorism at home") is no longer possible. Fifty-three percent say it's still possible, while 43 percent disagree.
By a wide 74 percent - 25 percent margin, voters disagree with the notion that "I don't really care what happens in Iraq after the U.S. leaves, I just want the troops brought home."
"How Americans view the war does not line up with the partisan messages or actions coming out of Washington," said Davis Lundy, president of The Moriah Group. "There are still a majority of Americans out there who want to support the President and a focused effort to define and achieve victory."

While the Bush administration may find some comfort and support in these poll results, their efforts to increasingly tie the war to Iran do not seem to be working. By a 63 percent-32 percent margin, poll respondents say the US should hold direct talks with Iran about the situation in Iraq and they narrowly reject (49 percent-47 percent) the statement "a stable Iraq is the best way to protect America from the nuclear threat of Iran." Voters also say they are more concerned about the War in Iraq (53 percent) than the growing influence of Iran (35 percent).

Finally, when asked which statement best describes their position on the Iraq War, voters are evenly divided (50 percent - 49 percent) between positions of "doing whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country," and positions that call for immediate withdrawal or a strict timetable.

27 percent said "the Iraq war is the front line in the battle against terrorism and our troops should stay there and do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country."
23 percent said "while I don't agree that the U.S. should be in the war, our troops should stay there and do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country."
32 percent said "whether Iraq is stable or not, the U.S. should set and hold to a strict timetable for withdrawing troops."
17 percent said "the U.S. should immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq."
The survey also found that voters thought it would hurt American prestige more to pull out of Iraq immediately (59 percent) than it would to stay there for the long term (35 percent).

"The key group driving public opinion here are what we call the "nose-holders", said Newhouse. "They don't believe we should have gone to war or should still be there, but they believe we should stay and do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security for their own country."

To view a PDF of the national poll data on Iraq, visit www.moriahgroup.com/iraqpoll
 

Last Updated: 02/21/2007
 
http://www.pos.org/inthenews/20070220.cfm
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« Reply #6 on: March 09, 2007, 07:42:49 PM »

As for congressmen on the take, note that we now have heading Homeland Security a man who took a $100,000 bribe according the law enforcement and had $90,000 in cash found in his freezer.

If you truly doubt John Murtha would take a bribe from Arabs, here is the original tape of his thinking it over, haggleing for a higher amount previously.  All that saved him in the Abscam scandal was he seemed to be holding out for a higher amount!

So someone once seriously thinking over taking a bribe from Arabs is now allowe to try to undermine our national secuirty.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10427

This is the most ethical congress in hisotry Nancy Pelosi promised us in order to win the last election and gain a majority.
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« Reply #7 on: March 09, 2007, 07:48:50 PM »

NYTimes needs to be consistent!  When supporting the socialist left in thsi country, they claim Saddam had no nuclear program.  Then they turn around having a fit because of the information posted from his documents seized since the invasion.  

It can't be both ways.  

 
 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 3, 2006
U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Correction Appended

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte about the Web site.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release.

In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte’s spokesman, Chad Kolton, said, “While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site becomes available again.”

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon D. Johndroe, said, “We’re confident the D.N.I. is taking the appropriate steps to maintain the balance between public information and national security.”

The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that the deletions were “consistent with the principle that proliferation-sensitive information should not be released.”

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. “It’s a cookbook,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.”

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms scientist now at the war studies department of King’s College, London, called the posted material “very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data.”

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said “some things in these documents would be helpful” to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy decisions, said the impetus for the Web site’s creation came from an array of sources — private conservative groups, Congressional Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration — who clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would show that Mr. Hussein’s government had clandestinely reconstituted an unconventional arms programs.

“There were hundreds of people who said, ‘There’s got to be gold in them thar hills,’ ” Mr. Blanton said.

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.

On March 16, after the documents’ release was approved, Mr. Negroponte’s office issued a terse public announcement including a disclaimer that remained on the Web site: “The U.S. government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available.”

On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public, Mr. Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging “minimal risks,” but saying the site “will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam’s links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi people.” He added: “It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites.”

Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr. Hoekstra, said the government had “developed a sound process to review the documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is not posted.” Later, he said the complaints about the site “didn’t sound like a big deal,” adding, “We were a little surprised when they pulled the plug.”

The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before Congress last spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte’s office, Daniel Butler, described a “triage” system used to sort out material that should remain classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to “be biased towards release if at all possible.” Government officials say all the documents in Arabic have received at least a quick review by Arabic linguists.

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq’s program to make germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms at the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the nuclear ones.

In April, diplomats said, the commission’s acting chief weapons inspector, Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United States mission to the United Nations over the document that dealt with the nerve agents tabun and sarin.

Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats said, Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms information had shown up on a public Web site and how his agency appreciated the American cooperation in resolving the matter.

In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and some soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called “Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995.” That description is potentially misleading since the research occurred years earlier.

The Iraqi document is marked “Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),” meaning it was preparatory for the “Full, Final, Complete Disclosure” that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March 1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, “Summary of technical achievements of Iraq’s former nuclear program.” It runs to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq’s bomb design. Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, United Nations arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to Mr. Schulte, diplomats said.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

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« Reply #8 on: March 09, 2007, 08:08:24 PM »

In an attempt to garner votes and divide the American populace, there are those on the left who have been busy rewriting history in order to discredit the current administration for solely political gain.  

ABC News has a tremendous leftist slant and fully and openly gives support to the Liberal causes and is far from supportive of the President and the GWOT, especially our efforts in Iraq.

But this was not always the case.  It was only after it became politically expedient to discredit the effort to oppose the Global Jihad that ABC began to slant the news to oppose our efforts in Iraq inorder to give support to the Disloyal Opposition.  There was a time when they reported accurately on the situation.  

This video of news coverage documenting the connections between bin Laden and Saddam Heussein has been removed from ABC's archives but fortunately it has been preserved by the bloggers at Powerline.  It is brief and to the point and does in fact confirm that the jihadists and even a secular like Saddam will cooperate in their efforts to defeat the US.


http://powerlineblog.com:80/archives/016745.php

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« Reply #9 on: March 10, 2007, 11:26:45 AM »

Anna,

Thank you for all your work and effort to bring this to the forum, quite an interesting read and my concern is that those who accuse the current administration of an absence of cause for the war, also aren't ever going to examine the motives of those like Murtha screaming from the roof-tops. What kind of voter are you if you do not apply equal scrutiny to both sides of this equation? Not a very responsible one IMO.

I've pondered sharing a personal experience for some time now, realizing I am no longer under NDA to this company, I've decided to share it. I was working as an external consultant for a major financial services provider headquartered in the southeast for four years. This company has been in existence for over 90 years but their business literally exploded with the opening of the internet channel within banking. It grew so fast that their IT architecture could hardly keep up, so instead of having a state of the art platform, instead they pieced it together as they went and it was as disparate from mainframe to PC as a jigsaw puzzle. Only two people in the entire company could navigate that architecture and/or maintain it operationally - a female who had been in data architecture in a lower role for almost 20 years and a new Senior Director who migrated to the US from Iran in his college years.

He was touted as quite brilliant, my Rick even had occasion to work with him for eventually post the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement emerging, suddenly this company had to establish more internet policy surrounding both internal and external architecture. There was no security policy whatsoever as late as 2004, even despite the fact that whenever any of us clicks a button to order a certain financial product while online in our banking channels, you then step through a gateway into this company's IT channel. That's right, at that juncture as you order a product ALL of us use, you have absolutely no security. Any and all information you input within that ordering process, including your banking account numbers, routing numbers, etc - are at total risk of compromise. Of course the banks (their clients) aren't told this, therefore consumers aren't told this either.

Rick's job was to build a security policy, he made headway in all areas with the exception of this Senior Director, even though Rick reported direct to the CIO - this director defied him and stymied him. but one example is that those who use palm handhelds in the company often accessed the data channels with those devices. Rumor came to Rick that this director was accessing the CEO's transmissions for he had requested all of the executives passwords during a recent upgrade to the system? When Rick called out to the CIO that this channel must be locked up immediately, this Director was queried and upon leaving the CIO's office, he headed into HR to make threat after threat regarding discrimination.

I had the same experience with him in that when I had worked with him previously, he didn't report me, he simply antagonized and made sexist after sexist remark to me. One day at the end of a lunch meeting he leaned over and with a sneering smile and said  "do you realize that I have to report to the INS any planned trip out of the US and return to the US? I don't know how they ever found me or decided I was not a patriot to the US, but I suspect it could have been some dealings I had in college. I should scream persecution but I do not." So I had learned to fear this man, I knew what he was implying and I also shared the conversation with the CIO and CEO.

This Director took his fight with HR and this company to the level of legal threat, they then paid him two year's salary to be rid of him as a result. Also as a result of his knowledge of their platform, they have spent the last year building a new custom platform to replace it, but even as I write this that platform is still not fully launched. You see, matching front end architecture to the varied back-end systems in every major bank is quite a task. Part of me is unsure it can be done, but I am not an expert, but I hope it can be done?

This Director also went on to a new position, yes with a major bank here in the US, but alas now he's a VP? Smarts pay in IT, truly they can get you places and he is brilliant within IT seemingly.

So, the moral of this story is to know that this one single human with such a nasty nature and direct ties to Iran, can reach into every major bank in this country. As Rick put it, it's likely there are more "back doors" within the architecture he builds than one can imagine.

Yet we are not to fear Iran? We are not to fear they can touch all of our lives if they chose to in an instant? Widget fears China? I fear this man, he can hobble perhaps every major bank in our country within a day with the right amount of assistance with a data and architecture core OFF SHORE.

The one thing all of us can do as consumers is really very simple, to demand our banks require a double log-in process into our online accounts and to request that they not allow any product provider to have access to our banking information or our banking channel.

To date my bank, one of the largest in the country does not have a double log-in, despite many requests by me.  Rolling Eyes
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« Reply #10 on: March 10, 2007, 11:55:03 AM »

Anna, what great work you have done putting this together.  I only hope others will read it.  We really do need to be enlightened, and None, I have no doubt your experience, as I have known others with similar experiences to yours.
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« Reply #11 on: March 14, 2007, 05:04:55 PM »

Quote from: "nonesuche"

This Director took his fight with HR and this company to the level of legal threat, they then paid him two year's salary to be rid of him as a result. Also as a result of his knowledge of their platform, they have spent the last year building a new custom platform to replace it, but even as I write this that platform is still not fully launched. You see, matching front end architecture to the varied back-end systems in every major bank is quite a task. Part of me is unsure it can be done, but I am not an expert, but I hope it can be done?

This Director also went on to a new position, yes with a major bank here in the US, but alas now he's a VP? Smarts pay in IT, truly they can get you places and he is brilliant within IT seemingly.

Rolling Eyes


Very interesting story Nones!  I have to respond to part of it, as I work for a major financial instituion/credit card company, in the IT dept.   I am VERY familiar with the Sarbanes/Oxley act.  I am not an expert either, but have been with the company over 20 yrs. and grew with IT from the old mainframe to our newest infrastructure.  I have seen the architecture change and grow very quickly in the past 7 to 8 yrs. and can say, that it CAN be done.  SOX has made a huge impact on security (thanks to Enron), I don't know if everybody understands how thorough the Act is and how much money large corporations have had to spend to become compliant.   We are well on our way and have made huge strides.  

I certainly hope your Director didn't come here!  Shocked
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« Reply #12 on: March 14, 2007, 05:06:32 PM »

Anna, I have spent way too many hours at work reading your posts.  But only because they are so interesting and informative!  I appreciate all the work you do and wonder how I can help spread the word myself and get the truth out to everybody!
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« Reply #13 on: March 14, 2007, 06:21:39 PM »

Dihannah1-

Good to see you posting again I have missed you. We need to email, I want to switch to your bank now  Very Happy
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« Reply #14 on: March 16, 2007, 01:31:04 AM »

While there are many unanswered questions pertaining to the War in Iraq and what happened to Saddam's WMD, this remains the biggest question of all to me.  Why did the Bush Administration hush up this uranium?  Sounds as though the French were involved but I don't think we would have done this to protect them, of all people.  I have started to read Jack Cashill faithfully.  He does have information others just won't touch.  One of his areas of investigation is TWA Flight 800 and the fact that something like 270 people say they saw a missile shoot that plane down.   Shocked

 
   
     
   Joseph Wilson's Original Sin
And how the Administration Washed it Away


 © Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
March 8, 2007

Anyone who has followed the Scooter Libby trial closely knows that Patrick Fitzgerald tried the wrong man. Among other things, Wilson has lied conspicuously about who sent him to Niger, who did not send him, what he found, what he did not find, and how he reported his findings.

Wilson did all of this during wartime in an effort to undermine the commander in chief. If there is not a law about this sort of mischief, there should be.

For all the reporting on the Wilson affair, however, the media have been preposterously silent about two critical and related understandings: the first is why Joseph Wilson originally insisted we not go into Iraq; and the second is why the Bush administration chose not to “find” what Wilson assured us we would find.

Both of these stories have been hiding in plain sight.

At the suggestion of his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, Wilson made his critical trip to the African hellhole of Niger in February 2002. He had been there before. In the preface to the paperback version of his comically titled book, The Politics of Truth, Wilson claims he went to Niger in 1999 “at the request of the CIA to look into other uranium-related matters.”

The Joseph Wilson that mainstream America knows is a man of conscience who began to oppose the impending war with Iraq because his trip to Niger had proved to him the emptiness of Saddam’s WMD boasts. This is the story line that the major media continue to run with. Unfortunately, however, it is simply and demonstrably not true.

Conveniently overlooked by the media is an op-ed piece that unravels this lie in a stroke. Wilson wrote it for the San Jose Mercury News on October 13, 2002. Although anti-war in its thrust, its message runs fully counter to the one that would make Wilson famous.

In it, Wilson argues that threatening to oust Saddam “will ensure that Saddam will use every weapon in his arsenal to defend himself.”By every weapon, of course, he means the soon-to-be mocked WMDs. “As the just-released CIA report suggests,” Wilson continues, “when cornered, Saddam is very likely to fight dirty.”

Two weeks before the op-ed, in fact, the CIA had published a National Intelligence Estimate titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Wilson’s trip eight months earlier had obviously failed to persuade him or Plame that Iraq was not planning to fight dirty.



“ Iraq [has been] vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake,” reads the CIA report. “Acquiring either would shorten the time to produce nuclear weapons.” Plame was a WMD specialist by the way.

In his Mercury News op-ed, Wilson proceeds to make an elaborate and unconvincing argument that Saddam will desist from using his WMDs only if he is assured of keeping his job.

“One of the strongest arguments for a militarily supported inspection plan,” continues Wilson, “is that it doesn't threaten Saddam with extinction, a threat that could push him to fight back with the very weapons we're seeking to destroy.”

Unlike the U.S. Senate under Clinton, which had voted unanimously to make “regime change” official U.S. policy, Wilson wanted Saddam to remain in power. To understand why Wilson was working overtime to keep Saddam on the job is to understand that Saddam did indeed have something to hide. Although the evidence strongly suggests that Saddam was able to move most of his WMDs out of country with Russian help, he did not move them all.

A few weeks back I received an email from a scientist affiliated with a major university’s nuclear program. In the email, he casually referred to the “ 1.77 tons of enriched uranium” the U.S. found in Iraq.

More than a little skeptical, I emailed the scientist back, “Tell me how we know about the 1.77 tons.” He referred me to a fascinating article from BBC News online dated 7 July, 2004.

Titled “US reveals Iraq nuclear operation,” the article details how 20 experts from the US Energy Department's secret laboratories packaged and removed 1.77 tons of enriched uranium and then flew the material out of Iraq aboard a military plane.

The article quotes a smiling Spencer Abraham, Secretary of the DOE, saying, "This operation was a major achievement.” And just as suddenly as the story appeared, it disappeared. Not a word was heard of it from the major networks. The only American media to follow up on it was WorldNetDaily.

This is exactly the kind of story that the major media do not want to disseminate. They much prefer the Wilson story line, however absurd on the face of it, that Bush lied us into war with manufactured stories of WMDs that never existed.

The question remains, though, why did the administration cooperate in spiking the story. “ My feeling is that Abraham didn't get the memo,” writes my scientist contact. “He opened his mouth and then everybody scrambled to have him never do it again. “

The scientist speculates that Abraham may not have understood what the American forces had discovered. “He made enriched-u look like dirty bomb material, and that's that,” adds the scientist. “But that isn't that.”

“Enriched uranium = nuclear weapons,” the scientist continues. He argues that the administration prefers that the American people remain ignorant on the subject, possibly to avoid panic.

“’Enriched uranium’ means nothing to them. But it's everything. A machinist, a physicist, and plastic explosive are all you need to make a Hiroshima sized bang.”

There is a second reason for discretion, namely that this material was not manufactured by Saddam. “I think that the French gave Saddam the enriched-u,” observes the scientist, and once Saddam decided to quit fighting Iran and start supporting Abu Nidal in earnest, we decided ‘enough of that’.”

“Knowing the French,” he adds, “they'd demand their hooch back after starting all the trouble with it.”

The French connection almost assuredly got Joseph Wilson involved in this story in the first place. In 2002, he worked as an international consultant and had a long and deep involvement with French interests, mining interests in particular. Plame herself boasted of her husband’s numerous “French contacts.”

To be sure, the French government and hundreds of its key industries wanted to keep Saddam in power. Saddam had long been among the very best customers of its defense industry.

Along with the Russians, the French were also the primary beneficiaries of the shamefully corrupt United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

Even if Wilson had no involvement with the ill-concealed scandal, he had to know how Saddam’s continued reign benefited his clients and potential clients. Why else would a Washington-based consultant write an op-ed for a San Jose newspaper?

One of the major media’s grubby little secrets is that many of their op-eds are written for hire by individuals whose primary goal is to advance their client’s interests. Given Wilson’s humble stature in October 2002, San Jose was likely the best placement he could get. That would change. Within a year, the newly famous Wilson would be writing op-eds for the New York Times.

Indeed, Wilson’s public relations work on behalf of his clients and allies deserves its own Harvard case study. Consider what is known beyond doubt:

Wilson finessed at least two all-expense paid trips to Niger from the CIA.


He used his new-found authority as a weapons inspector to argue publicly against a war that would harm his clients’ interest.


Initially, he waged the argument that Saddam had to remain in power lest he use his arsenal of WMDs against American troops.


When the forged documents were exposed, he insinuated to at least three different publications that he was the first one to debunk the forgeries.


He used his CIA operative wife to enhance his credibility with the first of those reporters, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, despite the risk to her career in so doing.


Once his wife was exposed, and his own fame heightened as a consequence, he used his visibility to argue that the French ought to be cut in on Iraq reconstruction contracts.


He used his celebrity to repeat the canard that there never had been any WMDs and that the Bush administration lied about them to seduce the nation into war. This too had the effect of making his “French contacts” seems less immoral and more worthy of the spoils and his Democratic clients more likely to regain the Congress and the presidency.

As to the 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, my scientist contact believes it would have been shipped to Oak Ridge or Lawrence Livermore to run the forensics on it.

Once completed, we would know where it came from. And for whatever reason, our government has decided that taking a hit on WMDs is more constructive than sharing that information.



 
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« Reply #15 on: March 16, 2007, 02:03:35 AM »

Quote from: "Dihannah1"
Anna, I have spent way too many hours at work reading your posts.  But only because they are so interesting and informative!  I appreciate all the work you do and wonder how I can help spread the word myself and get the truth out to everybody!


I'm just grateful somebody actually reads them, Dihannah, I don't think many do and fewer still even want to know anything other than what they are told by our unreliable liberal mainstream press.

But something does bother me about why we are not told more about the WMD that have been discovered.  For example, it was determined that much of what Libya turned over did in fact technically belong to Saddam.  No wonder Qaddafi just handed them all over!  He for sure didn't want to get into trouble over Saddam's stash!

But does the press refuse to cover this or does the current administration not give any details?  If we can find it, THEY, MSM can find it as well.

There are many things like this that just do not add up and I have to wonder what gives with lack of information readily available.  Perhaps it is to track financing or other parties involved?  I just don't know and have pondered this at great length.  Just don't know what to make of it.

Any thoughts?

.
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« Reply #16 on: March 16, 2007, 10:20:31 AM »

Anna, as I've posted before, Saddam was "spraying" chemicals at night on our troops during Desert Storm so this isn't something new. Clinton just didn't want to deal with the fall-out post the war of this and the gulf war syndrome, so it was yet one more event under the radar. I think one reason Blair has been so forceful in Britain's involvement is they were one of the allies in DS to actually document all of these effects, as did Australia, both leaders have been adamant regarding the need to invade Iraq and stop the WMD production.

I have no answers regarding the media, it boggles the mind how they pick and choose but then I think if we chase their money trail we'd find some answers?
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« Reply #17 on: March 17, 2007, 12:05:07 AM »

I would think that being the first to break a story like that would be a media outlets dream.  So I tend to believe they either have only part of the info. and are not willing to expose it yet, until they have it all the facts, or they just don't know.  I tend to believe if any one of them (or at least some) had any info. they would be thrilled to break the news, just for the ratings and recognition of being the one who found the info.

However, I am just as puzzled and that is the only thing I can think of.
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