Occupied Palestinian Territories ?

The complete article is posted here because there are no logical breaks in it. It breaks the "fair use" rule so I have E-mailed the webmaster at IsraPundit that I have posted their article in its' entirety with full credit. If there are any problems, I'll take it down. The article was originaly posted here
---Larry Everett

"By Salomon Benzimra

When we are faced with a protracted stalemate in the resolution of a political conflict, it is probably the time to question the basics. Disinformation on the Middle East conflict has been rampant for the past decades, most notably against Israel. Since the entry of the notion of a “Palestine people” into the political lexicon over thirty years ago, an anti-Israel mindset has grown steadily. It finally produced a legal document at the International Court of Justice which practically denies Israel the right of self-defense against attacks perpetrated by “non-States”, and excoriates the “occupying Power” (Israel) for holding “occupied Palestinian territory”. Let us examine the recent historical record.

When the UN voted Resolution 181 in November 1947 -- 33 for, 13 against (including all Arab and Muslim countries of the time) and 10 abstentions (Britain among them) -- the Jewish Agency in Palestine accepted the Partition Plan, while their Arab counterparts did not. Not only did they reject it, but they vowed to oppose it by force. In the threatening words of Azzam Pasha, the Secretary of the Arab League, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Arab riots erupted immediately thereafter in Palestine and, upon the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 -- a decision fully compatible with Res. 181, Part I/A/3 -- the Arab armies launched a “holy war of extermination to murder the Jews,” fuelled by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, himself a staunch admirer of Hitler. This was the first armed aggression after WWII and the first breach of the UN Charter, because UN Res. 181 invoked Chapter VII of the Charter which authorized the UN, through its Security Council, to use force against any violator of the Resolution. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort was done and Israel was left on its own for its self-defense against the combined Arab armies.

At the end of the war in 1949, there were no longer “Palestinian Jews” but “Israeli Jews”. On the other hand, the Arabs lost the lands allocated to the “Palestinian Arab State” by Res. 181. Those Arabs who remained became “Israeli Arabs” (now, 20% of the population of Israel). The interesting part is that no sane person today questions the validity of this conquest of territory by Israel, following the war of aggression launched by the Arabs in violation of a UN resolution enforced by Chapter VII of the Security Council. No one, that is, except the militant Arabs (who now include the majority of the “Palestinians”) for whom the whole notion of a State of Israel is illegal and the country must be wiped off the map. But, by and large, the State of Israel has been recognized by all the civilized world within its borders of 1949.

Fast forward to 1967. The Six Day War in June 1967 was actually an extension of the war of 1948-49, after a not so peaceful hiatus of 19 years. Even Egyptian President Nasser recognized this when he declared, on the eve of the war (May 28, 1967), that "the war with Israel is in effect since 1948." Comparing the two wars, we find that:
a) The Arabs’ objectives were the same: the eradication of the State of Israel through a war of aggression, as attested by the endless calls for the “annihilation of the ‘Zionist entity’” issued by Nasser and other Arab leaders in May-June 67.
b) Their methods were similar, in that the Arabs violated international law by breaching the armistice agreement of 1949 and by closing the international waterways of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli navigation, a recognized casus belli.
c) And the result of the 1967 war was also the same: loss of predominantly Arab populated territory (the “West Bank”, Eastern Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights).

In that regard, why should the outcomes of these two wars be treated differently? On the one hand, nobody contests the Israeli territory acquired in 1948-49, and on the other hand, most people see the “West Bank”, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as “occupied Palestinian territory.” These territories are as “occupied” as western Galilee, Beersheba and Ashdod, all areas included in the Arab State proposed in the Partition plan of 1947.

So, the United Nations is artificially differentiating two similar situations. In the preamble of UN Resolution 242, we read about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” referring, among others, to the “West Bank” acquired in the 1967 war. Either this “inadmissibility” only applies to wars of aggression and therefore it is irrelevant to Res. 242, or it applies to all wars, regardless of the originator, and, in that case, Israel should revert back to the Partition Plan borders of 1947. But even the UN does not envisage the latter alternative: the ICJ ruling on the “wall” clearly authorized Israel to build any defense system outside the “Green Line”, thus implicitly recognized Israel’s pre-1967 borders. We are then left with the wrongly worded preamble of Resolution 242, which is at the core of the notion of “occupied territory”. Soon thereafter, the fictitious “Palestinian people” was introduced, and the UN, the EU and most of the world now refers to “occupied Palestinian territory” without raising any brows.

Albert Camus was right: “Misnaming things deepens the troubles of the world”.

Read The Original Article

Kerry's Complicated Exfoliation

John F. Kerry was "misled" because he didn't believe the president meant what he said.
The San Francisco Chronicle is a far left newspaper and it's surprising this article appeared in it.
---Larry Everett

"Debra J. Saunders
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle

IT'S AN ODD campaign gimmick, but Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., often tells voters that he was "misled" and that's why he voted for an October 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq.

Kerry says he believed the resolution tied President Bush to promises to build an international coalition, to work with the United Nations and only go to war as a last resort. A disappointed Kerry now says Bush failed in all three venues.

Kerry's story only works if you don't know that the resolution didn't bind Bush as Kerry said.

A month before Kerry's "yes'' vote, Bush went to the United Nations and said the following: "Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice -- 16 times he has defied the U. N. The U.N. has told him after the (Persian) Gulf War what to do, what the world expected, and 16 times he's defied it. And enough is enough. The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that's what we're about to find out.''

When Kerry met with The Chronicle Editorial Board on Friday, I had the chance to ask the senator how he could have expected Bush to behave differently in light of what Bush had said.

Kerry's answer reminds me of the angry customer in the Federal Express ad, who, clad only in a towel and a loofah mitt, calls a company to complain that FedEx delivered his package as scheduled, which he should not have expected, and by the way it inconveniently interrupted a "complicated exfoliation."

Kerry's answer was that Washington insiders believed that Bush didn't mean what he said. "I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn't made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That's what a lot of people thought."

What about what Bush said to the U.N.? That was "rhetorical," Kerry answered. And "a whole bunch of very smart legitimate people" not running for president thought as he did. "So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck." Kerry continued, "The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us."

So Kerry was "misled" because he believed that Bush didn't mean what Bush said.

Talk about your dirty tricks . . . "

[snip]

"There are a few ways to interpret Kerry's statement.

One is to believe the Kerry spin that the Vietnam War vet is a reluctant warrior, who only sends other mens' sons off to war under the most dire circumstances, and Kerry somehow believed that a Senate vote authorizing force would make it harder for Bush to send U.S. troops to Iraq.

Or you can believe Kerry is a reluctant warrior who voted for war, even if he opposed it, because he was running for president, and the war polled well.

Or you can believe that Kerry strongly believed in the war, but now poses as a reluctant warrior because he is running for president as a Democrat.

Or you can believe that you shouldn't believe a politician who complains he was misled because another politician had the cheek to mean what he said."

Read the Whole Thing

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

If a person wants to know about someones military service, who would be better to talk to than the veterans who served with him ? John F. Kerry is as phony as a three dollar bill.
The quote is the whole front page minus the interactive photos of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth There is also a book titled "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,(Amazon.com) from Regnery Publishing, is written by John E. O'Neill. Mr. O'Neill served in Vietnam at the same time as Mr. Kerry and followed him as commander on the swift boat.
---Larry Everett

"Senator John Kerry has made his 4-month combat tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of his bid for the Presidency. His campaign jets a handful of veterans around the country, and trots them out at public appearances to sing his praises. John Kerry wants us to believe that these men represent all those he calls his "band of brothers."

But most combat veterans who served with John Kerry in Vietnam see him in a very different light.

Before and After
Touch the photo to see which Swift officers support John Kerry, or click it to read more

The purpose of this photo is to correct the misleading use of our
images -- against our will -- to further John Kerry's campaign.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been formed to counter the false "war crimes" charges John Kerry repeatedly made against Vietnam veterans who served in our units and elsewhere, and to accurately portray Kerry's brief tour in Vietnam as a junior grade Lieutenant. We speak from personal experience -- our group includes men who served beside Kerry in combat as well as his commanders. Though we come from different backgrounds and hold varying political opinions, we agree on one thing: John Kerry misrepresented his record and ours in Vietnam and therefore exhibits serious flaws in character and lacks the potential to lead.

We regret the need to do this. Most Swift boat veterans would like nothing better than to support one of our own for America's highest office, regardless of whether he was running as a Democrat or a Republican. However, Kerry's phony war crimes charges, his exaggerated claims about his own service in Vietnam, and his deliberate misrepresentation of the nature and effectiveness of Swift boat operations compels us to step forward.

For more than thirty years, most Vietnam veterans kept silent as we were maligned as misfits, addicts, and baby killers. Now that a key creator of that poisonous image is seeking the Presidency we have resolved to end our silence.

The time has come to set the record straight."
Read the Whole Thing

If the Dead Could Talk

Victor Davis Hanson has a new post up at National Review Online Click on the title or "Read the Whole Thing" at the end for the full article.

"Victor Davis Hanson
NRO Contributor
July 30, 2004, 12:25 a.m

If the Dead Could Talk
They’d teach us a thing or two about war.

The last two weeks I have been following the route of the American Army's drive from Normandy into Germany in 1944-5. It is quite something to visit Aachen, Mainz, the Hürtzen forest, Bastogne, Omaha Beach, and Pointe du Hoc, and then juxtapose such visits with the daily pabulum in the International Herald Tribune, CNN, and the European dailies. And after two weeks, I think most would prefer the wisdom of the noble dead to the ignorance of the shameful living.

There are over 10,400 Americans resting in the World War II cemetery at St. Avold in the Lorraine — more dead here than at the Normandy grounds. No sitting American president, I am told, has ever visited the graveyard. One should.

The necropolis of thousands of uniform white crosses and Stars of David leaves the visitor mute — sadly, unlike the experience of visiting many of the World War II museums in Holland and Germany. The inscriptions at American graveyards admonish the visitor to remember sacrifice, courage, and freedom; they assume somebody bad once started a war to hurt the weak, only to fail when somebody better stopped them.

In contrast, the "folly" of war — to paraphrase Barbara Tuchman — is what one gleans at most World War II museums in Europe. The displays, tapes, and guides suggest that a sudden madness once descended equally upon normal-thinking Europeans and Americans at places like Nijmegen and Remagen. "Stupidity," a European visitor at Arnhem lectured me, best explains why thousands of young men killed each other for no good reason over "meaningless" bridges. Perhaps — but I suppose the answer to that also depends on whether in September 1944 you ended up on the German or on the Allied side of Arnhem.

At places like Nejmegen one now reads less about the Holocaust, the invasion of Poland, and the Nazi hijacking of German culture, and much more about the need for eternal peace, along with notes about the necessity to stop racism and oppression.

Europe now really does believe that such evil disappeared spontaneously, without Willies and Joes driving to their flaming deaths in thin-skinned Sherman tanks to stop SS murderers in 70-ton Tigers. But then in a world where George Bush last year was said to be a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein, why should one be surprised that affluent Westerners perhaps feel SS killers led by Sepp Dietrich were as much victims of war as the defenseless Belgian civilians they butchered? It was not always so: The message of Verdun is not just the wastage of a million men, but also the courage of the outmanned and outgunned French turning back and stopping a different — and far worse — vision of Europe's future.

July has been a bad month for our civilization. Islamic terrorists right out of Gibbon's pages on Attila are caught with heads of their victims in their refrigerators in Saudi Arabia — while Britain and the United States squabble over the extradition of an Islamic fascist whose career was dedicated to convincing Muslims in the West to destroy the United States while whining that infidels were occupying the ancient caliphate. In fact, the opposite is true: Detroit is the largest community of expatriate Arabs in the world outside the Middle East. Emigrants flock to gracious hosts in Michigan to live under tolerance and freedom impossible in their own Arab countries.

In response, crazy al Qaeda videos keep airing on their official mouthpiece, al Jazeera, depicting Western interlopers squatting on "Arab lands." Can someone please tell the Arab world that its millions are stampeding to the Christian infidel West, while very few Americans want to go to the "Holy Lands." Saying that Mr. Johnson had no business in Saudi Arabia is like saying that a million Arabs have no business in the American Midwest."

[snip]

"Once, the Belgians in places like Wiltz and St. Vieth were not complaining about Americans "exporting democracy" — when Panzers were stopped in their countryside from renewing their murderous work. They did not believe that America needed quickly to join the League of Nations instead, or that the next election in Germany would bring them a better reprieve.

And the tens of thousands sleeping under their white marble crosses in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg from the Meuse-Argonne to Hamm would not agree that had we only been more reasonable and less bellicose we would have been more popular and liked. You see, they would not concede that millions followed Hitler because it was America's fault in not offering the German people an alternative to barbarism. In fact, they didn't much care why Germany hated America, only how to defeat it and then — but only then — to guide it on a new path away from its savage past.

Indeed, if our dead could rise out of their graves they would surely rebuke us for our present blasphemy — shaking their fingers and remonstrating that bin Laden and his followers, both active and passive, are no different from Hitler and the other evil killers of their own age, who deserve to be defeated, not reasoned with or apologized to, and not understood. The voices of our dead abroad murmur to us, the deaf, that a nation is liked not by being good and weak or bad and strong, but only by proving both principled and resolute.

Sleep in peace, you ten thousand of St. Avold, and let us pray that we, the smug beneficiaries of your ultimate sacrifice, may still wake up from our own slumber."Read the Whole Thing

Sandy Bergers Stuffed Pants

Sandy Berger, President Clintons National Security Advisor and a John Kerry campaign advisor slated for a top State Department post, was recently discovered to have removed top secret documents from The National Archives. The list of security breaches, their consequences, and the legal ramifications, has been exhaustively covered over at Winds of Change.Follow the link and see for yourself what is posted all over the blogosphere yet not covered honestly or in depth by the Main Stream Media(MSM).
The opening paragraph of the link rich offering :

"The Blogosphere has heavily covered Sandy Berger's security breach of the National Archives, and the many angles that the mainstream media and particularly the Washington Post and New York Times have avoided. Yet for all that there are no real evaluations of:

1. How badly the National Archives screwed up the security of code letter secret documents;
2. How badly the system of notification of security breaches was abused; and
3. How badly Sandy Berger screwed over American national security. Cell phones are not secure, and Berger's security breach using a cell phone from a secure document vault is the kind of thing that could result in tens of thousands of preventable American civilian deaths if my worst fears bear out.

None of these issues are trivial - and unfortunately, the scenario for #3 isn't a big stretch."
Blogosphere Reactions...

[Read the Whole Thing
---Larry Everett

Slide Show of 9\11

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, and, who has a link on the left of this page, has just posted a photo slide show featuring the World Trade Center on 9\11.
WARNING : There are some disturbing and graphic photos presented.
Charles Johnsons Slide Show of 9\11
---Larry Everett

Boldness of the President

An interesting editorial in The New York Sun states the case that a president under domestic siege while under attack by foreign forces cannot prosecute his duties to the fullest extent of his abilities. President Clinton was under domestic fire for most of his presidency, much of it his own fault. But, laying aside the blame, Clinton needed help with foreign issues while distracted by home brewed ones. Enter Samuel(Sandy) Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor who recently was caught stuffing "Top Secret Codeword" documents in his clothes "inadvertently" on at least five different occasions. Berger took the documents from The National Archives then "inadvertently" lost some of them.
I wasn't going to post anything about this because I thought it would get screaming headlines. What it got was... [crickets]. Imagine the headlines if this was a Republican National Advisor. I'll post more on the Berger story later. Someone needs to talk about it.
---Larry Everett

"Publication:The New York Sun
Date:Jul 23, 2004
Section:Editorial & Opinion; Page:10

The Boldness of the President

Reading the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, we couldn’t help thinking of Justice Scalia’s great dissent in Morrison v. Olson. It’s the case in which the Supreme Court upheld the idea of an independent prosecutor. Justice Scalia warned of the danger that unleashing an uncontrollable prosecutor against a president could shake his courage. “Perhaps the boldness of the President himself will not be affected - though I am not so sure,” he warned.

Well, look now to what the 9/11 report has to say about the man to whom President Clinton, under attack by an independent counsel,delegated so much in respect of national security, Samuel “Sandy” Berger. The report cites a 1998 meeting between Mr. Berger and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, at which Mr. Tenet presented a plan to capture Osama bin Laden.

“In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.

In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”

On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”

In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden.This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”

In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times - Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today."

[snip]

"Other aspects of the report, including the absence of serious recommendations for dealing with the terrorist threats from Syria or Iran, are harder to understand. The report is being taken seriously for its political ramifications for the Bush administration and for its policy recommendations. But perhaps its greatest value is as a history - more, a sad epitaph - of the Clinton-Berger administration.

Why was it Mr. Berger rather than President Clinton himself making all these judgment calls? As the report puts it, these decisions “were made by the Clinton administration under extremely difficult domestic political circumstances.Opponents were seeking the president’s impeachment.”

One can blame the special prosecutor law or Mr. Clinton for agreeing to name a special prosecutor, or one can blame the underlying reckless behavior by Mr. Clinton that got him into the “difficult domestic political circumstances.” Or one can blame the Republican Congress. No matter what one’s view of the underlying merits, it is hard to deny that one of the costs to the country was a preoccupied president.There’s no guarantee that, in the absence of the scandal and the prosecutor, Mr. Clinton would have acted against Mr. bin Laden. But the chances would have been at least somewhat increased, and it would have been Mr. Clinton rather than Mr. Berger making the call.

The boldness of the president, in Justice Scalia’s phrase,had been lost,and the man left in charge, Mr. Berger, was not up to it. When we think of the repairs that need to be made in the coming months, it is of this: The need to carry on our national politics with an eye to protecting the boldness of our leaders and particularly in a time of war. It is something to think about amid one of the bitterest, most adhominem political seasons in the history of the Republic."[Read the Whole Thing]

A Failure of Academia

This is a draft I wasn't going to post but it seemed to fit in well with the post "Thailand Identifies the Enemy".
Walid Phares is a Professor of Middle East Studies and a Terrorism Analyst. His analysis are posted on Walid Phares . This is his first article for Front Page Magazine
---Larry Everett

"9/11: A Failure of Academia
By Dr. Walid Phares
Front Page Magazine| July 28, 2004

A few months ago, when the 9/11 Commission released footage of the communications between several command centers and the transportation network during the dramatic minutes of September 11, one phrase chilled me to the bones. It summarized how unprepared America was to face to the Jihadist onslaught. A pilot of an F-16 rushing to the scene over the Pentagon screamed on his radio: "God, the Russians had us...they had us."

Since the end of the 1990s, Americans, were subjected to a campaign of intellectual subversion. The Jihadist factor, although identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as the driving force behind terrorism throughout the past decade, didn't make it into the national psyche. Hence, this American jet pilot automatically blamed "Russians," even 11 years after the end of the Cold War.

The 9/11 Commission had a historic opportunity to confront this reality last week. After nearly two years, the U.S.-mandated entity assessed the threat and attempted to reveal how we failed to prevent this catastrophe..."

[snip]

"The commissioners blamed 9/11 on a failure of "management" and a failure of "policy.” Indeed, not responding to the terrorist threat during the Clinton years proved perilous. It logically led to mismanagement of crisis. If you don't act in response to the enemy, you will encourage him. That was what happened in the 1990s. Not responding to the 1993 attacks led to a series of additional attacks around the world, culminating in the 1998 embassy bombings. Responding inappropriately that summer (bombing a factory in Sudan and bombing an empty tent in Afghanistan) emboldened the Jihad warriors. The strike against the USS Cole was their next move. The silence that followed the naval attack hastened Mohammed Atta's plans..."

[snip]

"When an FBI agent rushed to her supervisors to inform them that "Saudi men" were learning to fly but not land airplanes, no one lifted a finger. Agents were told that CIA analysts were receiving cable after cable indicating that Jihadist elements were mounting operations against the mainland, and possibly planning to use planes. But the agency's political bosses had not produced guidelines to help the analysts properly recognize the terrorist threat. In 1998, bin Laden himself declared war against infidel America. The White House did not hear and Congress did not see. Back in 1994, a former CNN journalist, now an MSNBC Terrorism analyst, Steven Emerson, filmed Jihad preachers in New York calling for violence and showed it to the nation. Not only was there no response, but Wahhabi political factions began systematically lobbying against a crackdown. Worse, all experts who attempted to warn America were suppressed by Arabist-Islamist factions. The Wahhabi Lobby claimed that, "warning from the Jihad threat was a cover for pro-Zionist propaganda to advance Israel's interests!" ...

[snip]

"Americans have a great imagination. What the U.S. lacked was a basic education about Jihadist terror, the worse enemy we have met, the enemy who visited destruction upon New York and Washington in 2001. The pilot that morning embodied the state of America’s education about radical Islam and terrorism, not the state of our imagination. Some academic elites had insisted that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the West had no real enemies. Hence, the last foe the pilot knew was Russia. Don't blame him for what he said when he saw the smoke over the capital and Manhattan. He, along with millions of Americans, was told for a whole decade that Islamic Fundamentalism isn't a threat. Al-Qaeda was attacking us from one side, and our educators were failing us from the other."
[Read the Whole Thing]

The money quote : "Our leaders didn't understand the gravity of the threat."

The Proliferation Security Initiative

The Mass Media and Democrats who insist on portraying the Bush administration as "unilateral," have probably never heard of the "Proliferation Security Initiative". Bryan Preston, a writer and television producer, has a blog titled The Junkyard Blog.. Preston writes this article, "Mr Multilateral", for Tech Central Station.
The article is short so read the whole thing. It is an eye opener.
Why haven't the Main Stream Media(MSM) picked it up or at least mentioned it somewhere ?
That question was meant as rhetorical but can be answered with two more... Media bias ? What media bias?
---Larry Everett

"Mr. Multilateral
It is playing a key role in curbing and caging North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. It played a key role in disarming Libya, discovering and rolling up the Pakistani A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network, and has become a framework for international military and police exercises organized by the United States. Its membership includes most of the world's largest economic powers, most of the world's largest military powers, and most of the most influential states on earth. The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Netherlands, France, Australia and Germany are among its 15 member states, and it is one of the pillars of the Bush administration's strategy to both win the war on terrorism and halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As an organization set up to perform a mission that the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency have jointly failed, halting the spread of nuclear weapons, it has the potential of becoming an alternative to the UN itself in coming decades. Notably, all of its members to date are democracies.

But thanks to the media and Democrats who insist on portraying the Bush administration as "unilateral," you have probably never heard of it.

Called the Proliferation Security Initiative, this results-oriented alliance is now just over a year old. The work of the much maligned Under Secretary of State for Arms Proliferation and International Security John Bolton, PSI is already a great success in bringing nations that disagreed bitterly over the Iraq war together under one flag to deal with larger weapons proliferation issues, especially those relating to the Korean Peninsula.

How It Works

The PSI is a bit of a strange bird, neither pure military alliance nor economic consortium nor intelligence agency, though it bears some of the features of all three. There is no guarantee among PSI members to come to the defense of any other member attacked by another party, for instance, such as exists in the NATO charter. It has no operating budget or swank headquarters building, and no jet-setting General Secretary or Supreme Commander. But most of the world's great navies -- America's, the UK's, Japan's, Australia's, and Russia's all play key roles. Many of the world's best intelligence assets, from spy satellites to human intelligence sources to financial investigators, are devoted to working with the PSI at some level."

[snip]

"A Sister Organization: The Caspian Guard

The "unilateralist" Bush administration is also setting up a sister organization to the PSI called Caspian Guard. Caspian Guard is ostensibly a three-way alliance between the United States, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan for the integration of several interlocking program elements, namely airspace and maritime surveillance and control systems, reaction and response forces, and border control.

What might be Caspian Guard's deeper mission? Take a look at a couple of maps, one of Azerbaijan's neighborhood and one of Kazakhstan's. What do they have in common? Both are central Asian states with coasts on the Caspian Sea, and both either share a border with or are across the water from Iran. Caspian Guard is to Iran what the PSI is to North Korea -- a cage in the making, constructed by the Bush administration's State Department. Look for several other US-leaning states in the area, such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and possibly even Turkey, to either join the Caspian Guard or cooperate with it in significant ways. The US will begin to encircle Iran, the world's most dangerous remaining Islamic state, the way it is attempting to encircle North Korea, all to strangle their nuclear proliferation programs and over time halt their nuclear programs altogether. Additionally, Caspian Guard gives member states access to US training and tactical knowledge and the assurance of friendly relations with the world's sole superpower in exchange for assistance in dealing with some of the axis of evil's charter members".

[snip]

"For all the abuse that the Bush administration receives for its conduct of the war on terrorism, the Proliferation Security Initiative and Caspian Guard stand as examples of the other side of the war as conducted by a serious administration that knows we are all in for a long twilight struggle. Only by removing or intimidating terror-sponsoring states into renouncing terrorism, and only by stopping the spread of nuclear and other mass killing technology in its tracks, can the free world hope to win this war without incredible loss of life. Bush administration critics and the media -- often one and the same -- consistently fail to take the existence of the PSI and its start-up sister Caspian Guard into account when assessing how we are doing in the war."

Read the Whole Thing

Thailand Identifies the Enemy

Thailand is beginning to catch on to who the enemy is and identify them. The United States doesn't seem to have come to terms with that yet. War, by definition means someone has enemies and a war can't be fought without identifying them.

On Aug. 7, 1998, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed by terrorists, leaving 258 people dead and more than 5,000 injured

On June 25, 1996, a terrorist truck bomb exploded outside the northern perimeter of the U.S. portion of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed nineteen servicemen and wounded hundreds of others, including civilians of several nationalities.

On Thursday, October 12, 2000, 17 young lives were taken in a terrorist attack on the USS Cole, docked in the port of Yemen to take on fuel

On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was planted by the Islamist terrorists in the underground garage below Tower One.The bomb exploded in the underground garage at 12:17 P.M., opening a 30 meter wide hole through 4 sub levels of concrete. The bomb generated a pressure of more than 70,000 kilograms per square inch. The detonation velocity of this bomb was about 15,000 feet per second. The cyanide gas that Ramzi Yousef put in the bomb burnt up in the explosion. Yousef entered the United States with a false Iraqi passport in 1992.

However, only six people were killed and at least 1,040 were injured. The towers were not destroyed like how Yousef envisioned it to be. Yousef had escaped to Pakistan several hours later.

A granite memorial to the six victims of the bombing was erected between the Twin Towers, directly above the site of the explosion

This granite memorial erected in memory of the first attack was obliterated during the destruction of the towers in 2001.
[World Trade Center Bombing 1991]

What's next ? A poisoned water system of a major city ? Knocking out a power grid or a dam ? More airliners full of innocent passengers being flown into building full of even more innocent people ?

All of these things have been intercepted by intelligence services while in the planning stage. The probability of an event of the magnitude of the above , or worse, is very high unless we do something about it. We can't do anything about it until we identify who the enemy is.

There are people being killed all over the world in the name of "jihad". The common thread is Islamists. Islamists are not to be confused with Islam. I don't advocate outlawing a whole religion, just identifying those radical groups within it and dealing with them. If martyrdom is their goal we should give them all of the help they need to achieve that end.

---Larry Everett

"Thais threaten to close 21 Islamic schools
Owners and teachers are told to stop 'fostering militancy' or face jail and fines

By Nirmal Ghosh

BANGKOK - The Thai authorities have threatened to shut down 21 Islamic schools in the country's deep south and jail their owners if they do not stop 'fostering militancy' and indoctrinating students with anti-government sentiments.
The schools in southern Thailand have often been blamed for encouraging militancy. -- REUTERS

Owners and teachers at two schools in particular had been identified as having indirect but clear links with some of the violent incidents which have torn the region since January, Deputy Education Minister Sutham Saengprathoom was quoted as saying in a report in The Nation daily newspaper.

'Within a couple of days, the ministry will summon owners and teachers of the two schools first, and the other 19 will be called later when we find clear information,' he said.

A ministry spokesman told The Straits Times that one of the schools was a private Islamic school and the other a ponoh, one of the religious schools which generally provide free schooling to local children and teenagers.

Five of the schools are in Yala, eight in Pattani and eight in Narathiwat.

Mr Sutham said the Education Ministry would demand that the schools' owners and teachers cooperate in the detection of militant movements among their students.

If they did not, they would be imprisoned for six months or fined 50,000 baht (S$2,110), or both, he said.

The threat came after an extensive government exercise in evaluating and registering more than 200 Islamic schools and ponohs.

The Interior Ministry has acknowledged that the fact the schools did not need to be registered earlier had rendered the government unable to monitor what was being taught in them.

While some taught a mix of Islamic religious teachings and the government's official curriculum, some ignored the curriculum and concentrated on religion, officials said.

The schools have often been blamed by government officials and ministers for allegedly inciting anti-government sentiments and encouraging militancy

[snip]

On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, a powerful politician from the south, told journalists: 'The government is now seeing a clearer picture of the situation in the deep south, and its root causes, and is moving in the right direction to solve the problems.

'So I expect tension in the southern border region will ease soon.'

[Read the Whole Thing]

"Victims" Answer Andy Rooney

A column by Andy Rooney questions the character and morale of servicemen in Iraq. Rooney offered five questions that he wanted reporters to ask the soldiers, a group he dubbed "victims" rather than "heroes." Rooney gained a reputation as a reporter during the second World War. Sixty years hence he has not only lost his edge, I believe he has also lost his ability to think rationally. Perhaps he should just go back to whining about paper clips or something similar as has been his forte for the last thirty or so years. Move him out of the field of the banal he will be outside his field of competence. His column is followed by another by Robert Alt that fields those questions posed by Rooney.
A quote from Rooneys article, "There's no Ernie Pyle to tell us and, if there were, the military would make it difficult or impossible for him to let us know."
Well Andy. The questions have been asked, answered, and posted in the main stream media and on the internet so, your sideways claim of censorship went out the window. Robert Alts article is below this excerpt of Rooneys column.
---Larry Everett

FROM: The Montana Standard

"Heroes don't come wholesale
By Andy Rooney Tribune Media Services - 04/08/2004

Most of the reporting from Iraq is about death and destruction. We don't learn much about what our soldiers in Iraq are thinking or doing. There's no Ernie Pyle to tell us and, if there were, the military would make it difficult or impossible for him to let us know.

It would be interesting to have a reporter ask a group of our soldiers in Iraq to answer five questions and see the results:

1. Do you think your country did the right thing sending you into Iraq?

2. Are you doing what America set out to do to make Iraq a democracy, or have we failed so badly that we should pack up and get out before more of you are killed?

3. Do the orders you get handed down from one headquarters to another, all far removed from the fighting, seem sensible, or do you think our highest command is out of touch with the reality of your situation?

4. If you could have a medal or a trip home, which would you take?

5. Are you encouraged by all the talk back home about how brave you are and how everyone supports you?

Treating soldiers fighting their war as brave heroes is an old civilian trick designed to keep the soldiers at it. But you can be sure our soldiers in Iraq are not all brave heroes gladly risking their lives for us sitting comfortably back here at home".

[snip]

"About 40 percent of our soldiers in Iraq enlisted in the National Guard or the Army Reserve to pick up some extra money and never thought they'd be called on to fight. They want to come home.

One indication that not all soldiers in Iraq are happy warriors is the report recently released by the Army showing that 23 of them committed suicide there last year. This is a dismaying figure. If 22 young men and one woman killed themselves because they couldn't take it, think how many more are desperately unhappy but unwilling to die. We must support our soldiers in Iraq because it's our fault they're risking their lives there. However, we should not bestow the mantle of heroism on all of them for simply being where we sent them. Most are victims, not heroes."

[read it all... it's short]

Andy gets his wish.The troops in Iraq were asked these questions and the results were sent to Robert Alt, a regular contributer to The National Review Online

"July 22, 2004, 8:34 a.m.
Troop Talk
Soldiers on Iraq.

TUZ, IRAQ — As I walked into the barracks, Sgt. Kevin Porter, a 23-year-old trooper in the Ohio National Guard serving south of Kirkuk, Iraq, called me over. He had just received a package from his family in Bellaire, Ohio, which included a then-weeks-old copy of his local newspaper. The op-ed page featured a column by Andy Rooney opining about the character and morale of servicemen in Iraq. Rooney offered five questions that he wished a reporter would ask the soldiers, a group he dubbed "victims" rather than "heroes." Although Sgt. Porter is not someone who frequently talked politics or current events, Rooney's article struck a nerve with him and his fellow troopers. He asked if I would assist him and the others in responding to Rooney's questions."

[Read The Whole Thing]

European Union Funds Separation Fence

I found this article at Israeli National News and nowhere else. It should have made headlines as a demonstration of international hypocracy. The article is short so I posted it all. Yes I know it's goes against the "fair use" rule but it's an old article and I don't know how much longer it will be available. No RTWT for this one.
---Larry Everett

European Union Funds Separation Fence
Former Mossad agent Gad Shimron reports that while the European Union attacks Israel mercilessly for the partition fence it's building to protect Jewish lives, the EU itself funds and operates a similar fence designed only to protect itself from illegal immigrants.

The fence is located in a Spanish enclave in northwestern Africa, the coastal city of Ceuta just across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain. Unknown to most of the world, when Spain handed over most of northern Morocco to the newly independent kingdom in 1956, Spain retained Ceuta and Melilla (about 250 kilometers further east) - thus that the European Union is present in Africa as well. Poverty-stricken Moroccans attempting to cross into Ceuta, from where they will then be able to work anywhere in Europe because of the EU's no-checkpoints policy, are stopped in their tracks by the eight-meter-high, double layer fence. Funding for the fence, some 60 million Euros, came from European Union coffers.

Frequent Spanish patrols, together with policemen who do not hesitate to beat potential infiltrators, render crossing the partition a nearly impossible mission - but the needy say they will continue to try. One of the many who are determined to immigrate to Europe said, "Whoever came all this difficult way and reaches the mountains of northern Morocco, opposite the fence of Ceuta, will not give up. You see the lights of Ceuta? As far as we're concerned, that's the Promised Land. The people here are in despair and will do anything to pass over that fence, enter Spain, and from there continue northward and blend in with the other millions of immigrants in Europe."

The EU continues to oppose Israel's fence, constructed to protect against murderous terrorists and suicide bombs - even as it plans to build another fence of its own around Spain's second enclave in northern Africa, the Moroccan town of Melilla. "It appears," concludes Gad Shimron in Maariv today, "that from a European point of view, the ethical aspects of a separation fence are sometimes a matter of geography."

V.D. Hanson Compares Wars

Victor Davis Hanson wrote this piece for NRO, National Review Online. He's comparing the screwups involving the Iraqi conflict with the second World War. He is basicaly saying that war is hell and shit happens.
He's one of the best writers out there. Agree or disagree, he will make you think.
---Larry Everett

"July 16, 2004, 8:27 a.m.
History’s Verdict
The summers of 1944 and 2004

About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success - and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences - resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.

Pre-invasion intelligence - despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings - had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like. How can you spend months spying out everything from beach sand to tidal currents and not invest a second into investigating the nature of the tank terrain a few miles from the beach? The horrific result was that the Allies were utterly unprepared for the disaster to come - and died by the thousands in the bocage of June and July."

[snip]

"We should probably have shot the looters who wrecked Iraq and smashed thugs like those in Fallujah last spring, when they were still in their vulnerable chrysalis stages. Iraqis should have been far more prominent in governance and on television almost immediately. Aid was tied up and delayed - as postwar goodwill ebbed away in the heat. All this and more we now know from hindsight, even as we suspect that had we sent 400,000 troops, shot looters, blasted the killers in Fallujah, properly patrolled the borders, and kept the Baathist army intact, the New York Times would now be railing even more vehemently against U.S. overkill, brutality, puppet governments, and security at the expense of social justice."

[snip]

"In the short period between June and August 1944, military historians can adduce hundreds of examples of American amateurism, failed intelligence, incompetent logistics, and strategic blundering - but not enough of such errors to nullify the central truth of the Normandy invasion. A free people and its amazing citizen army liberated France and went on in less than a year to destroy veteran Nazi forces in the West, and to occupy Germany to end the war. Good historians, then, keep such larger issues in mind, even as they second-guess and quibble with the tactical and strategic pulse of the battlefield.

We should do the same. Errors were committed in the Iraqi campaign as they always are in war and its aftermath. Saddam didn't use WMDs as we had expected - neither did Hitler, and as a result thousands of GIs carried bothersome and superfluous gas masks across France and Germany for nearly a year."

[snip]

"Given that there were many valid reasons to remove Saddam in a post 9/11 climate, we can lament that the administration privileged the casus belli of worries over WMDs, which proved to be based on flawed intelligence - a shortcoming that the United States in wartime has often experienced. As far as the war itself, we removed Saddam from power in three weeks under impossible conditions of driving nearly 400 miles from a single small front without tactical surprise. We have paid a steep price for the reconstruction - perhaps 900 combat dead, tragically. Yet due to our soldiers' courage and sacrifice, after little more than a year there is the beginning of the first consensual government in the Arab Middle East, and elections are slated on a schedule far ahead of our efforts after World War II. Just as the liberation of France and the final defeat in Germany overshadowed the horror and stupidity of the war on the ground in 1944, so too, when all is said and done, the fact of a free Iraq - not the hysteria about Abu Ghraib, Joe Wilson, or Richard Clarke - will remain."

[snip]

"For all their triangulation, deep down inside both he and John Kerry are not foolish. They don't want a post-9/11 world with Saddam's petro-tyranny intact, more wounded al Qaedists seeking refuge in Baghdad, an unimpressed Qaddafi back to his terrorist machinations, Dr. Kahn franchising his nuke-mart, or the Saudi royal family fueling fundamentalist killers even as 10,000 Americans are on its soil."

[snip]

"With extremists like Michael Moore and ANSWER breathing down their necks, Kerry and Edwards cannot accept history's tragic verdict that there are terrible costs to pay in any necessary war. Yet they also don't know what else could or should have been done to get us where we are now.

[Read The Whole Thing]

Communist Party USA Supports Kerry

The online edition of the St. Augustine Record posted an opinion piece by D.P. Heimbold about the Communist Party USA(CPUSA) supporting the John Kerry campaign. I thought this interesting not because of the politics but because of the references to the mood of the nation. Where are we going as a nation, and, do we really want to go there ?
---Larry Everett

"The southern Democrats must be thrilled by the news that the Communist Party of The United States of America, CPUSA, is publicly supporting the election of John Kerry.

The CPUSA has made available on its Web site, cpusa.org, an advertisement entitled Top Ten Reasons To Defeat Bush. This advertisement can be downloaded. The communist party urges readers to place this ad in local newspapers throughout the country to defeat President Bush.

Remarkably, the "Top Ten Reasons" of the Communist party are identical to those of the Democratic party; out-sourcing, homosexual rights, abortion and the like.

At first, I thought "this is only a coincidence." The Democratic party of the United States couldn't be in lock step with the Marxists! So, I wrote to a spokesman of the CPUSA in Georgia and here is part of his letter:

" The CPUSA supports the John Kerry campaign with donations and volunteer effort. We believe that defeating George Bush is the single most important issue this November ..."

Next, I discovered that one of Kerry's campaign themes is " Let America be America Again." This slogan was borrowed from a Communist poet, Langston Hughes. This is not common knowledge to the average American.

"Let America be America Again" sounds good but is a rambling, gloomy poem. Interestingly, another poem by Langston goes as follows;

"Goodbye, Christ Jesus, Lord, God, Jehova, Beat it on away from here now.

Make way for a new guy with no religion at all -- A real guy named Marx, communist, Lenin, Peasant, Stalin, Worker, ME -- I said, ME!"

Then, if this was not enough to convince me that the Democratic party has lost it, a third discovery!

A Vietnam vet group took a trip to Communist Hanoi to investigate a report that John Kerry was in the "Hanoi Hall of Fame." Yes, there is a museum in Hanoi with a section dedicated to foreign activists who help defeat the United States Military in Vietnam. Of course, you would expect Jane Fonda's picture to be there. But, alas, there is John Kerry's picture shaking the hand of a communist official."

[snip]...

"While the bulk of our National Guard are over seas fighting terrorist, every leftist weirdo is coming out of the closet to hi-jack the November presidential election.

The question is: What are the "real" southern Democrats going to do?

Will they join the CPUSA, NEA, ACLU and a host of other radical leftist groups or help save the country from this mob."

Read The Whole Thing

Democracy in Arab countries..

AYS at Iraq at a Glance has posted an article that doesn't need any comment. The title says it all.
---Larry Everett

"Democracy in Arab Countries..

Which one of those Arabs know the meaning of Democracy, Elections, Human rights and other terms which considered as weird words when heard in the ‘Arab Nation’?
It’s funny to listen to those Arab ‘analysts’ when they talk against the new Iraqi Interim government and that’s not an elected government, and does not have the legal rights to act or legislate the rules and laws and apply them on the Iraqi people!
Isn’t it strange to hear them talking like that, most of those are Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and many others from the rest of our ‘lovely’ Arab nation, in addition to those Islamists and clerics who have been occupying our channels recently, those who play the biggest rule in the ‘anti-everything’ opinions..

‘How could those Americans act as they like in Iraq?’
‘This Iraqi government is a group of CIA agents they are not elected by Iraqis’
‘Where are the human rights.. Look at abu-Ghraib’
........etc.
Being a friend of USA means an ‘agent’ in Arabic dictionary?!
Talking about human rights and no one can see what’s going on in your prisons?
‘Americans act as they like’?... Handing over sovereignty and the step by step withdrawal of the forces, fighting the terrorists, future plans to help Iraqis build their country.....you call all of those things ‘Americans act as they like?’.. Why don’t you say : helping Iraq to develop and progress after the 35 year of destructions and massacres..?

AND WHICH ONE OF YOUR LEADERS WAS ELECTED??

Let’s stop by some facts regarding the meaning of Democracy and Elections in Arab countries:...

[Read The Whole Thing]

Attack Imminent. Target Italy ?

Aaron, (no last name for obvious reason), has a weblog named Internet Haganah. (Haganah means defense). He has been "Confronting the Global Jihad:" and seems to be successful at it. He has been under attack by the jihadis and had his web site taken down by hackers. That rankled the blogosphere, even the folks that didn't agree with him. As a result, he was offered more storage space and bandwidth than he can use. He now has mirror sites all over the world. Aaron is constantly under death threats but keeps on blogging. He has been instrumental in closing down over one hundred jihadi websites. He's good at what he's doing.
Aaron seems to have a finger on the pulse of the jihadis and today he posted an article of an imminent threat to Italy. Italy should be paying attention.
---Larry Everett

"ATTACK IMMINENT. TARGET ITALY?

We're detecting discussion/postings in the Qaida-linked forums suggesting that a signal has just been given for an attack, and that the target *may be* Italy. Interested parties should contact me directly for more info.

This is not a drill.

UPDATE 09:23 CDT (GMT -5):

For some time now Internet Haganah, in cooperation with another counter-terrorism organization that specializes in monitoring discussions on Arabic-language forums known to be popular with Al Qaida operatives, has been actively involved in examining such forums for signs of 'command and control', i.e. that the forums may from time to time be used to pass along orders to field operatives.

One active participant in these forums is widely recognized as a source of credible information that originates with people in the leadership circles of various Al Qaida franchises and affiliates. This individual is not known to post information that is off-topic or old. This individual is suspected of ties to acts of Islamic terrorism going back over a decade. This individual is suspected of having previously given "the signal" for terrorist attacks to occur.

Early this morning this individual posted an old speech from bin Laden on a Jihadist forum. This is not normal behavior for this person. He added the comment: "a day we shall never forget"

This is also not normal behavior, nor was it apropos to what he had posted, and in light of the suspicions regarding the man's role in "triggering" previous attacks, we take these comments and behaviors as a bad sign."

[Read The Whole Thing]

UNSCAM - Partie Deux

UNSCAM Update :
The United Nations Oil For Palaces Food program is beginning to get some traction. Claudia Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here, (the Opinion Journal,and in the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal Europe, on alternate Wednesdays.
Ms. Rosett has the most complete coverage that I can find. This is the largest financial scam\scandal in history and the mainstream media seem to be ignoring it.
ENRON and Martha Stewart grab headlines for months, or years, and almost anyone who doesn't live in a cave has heard of them.
The United Nations ripping off ten billion dollars from the very people they say they are helping ?...
... [crickets chirping]...
---Larry Everett

"Drip, Drip, Drip
More Oil for Food details leak out. When will the U.N. come clean?

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Kofigate continues. Another stack of secret United Nations Oil for Food documents has now reached the press, this batch procured by congressional sources and providing--at long last--a better view of Saddam Hussein's entire U.N.-approved shopping list. This huge roster of Oil for Food relief contracts fills in a few more of the vital details about Saddam's "humanitarian" partnership with the U.N., spelling out the names of all his U.N.-approved relief suppliers and the price of every deal."

.Read the Whole Thing

Mooning the Senate

Update :The article quoted here was from a headline news service and they don't archive. It's gone but not forgotten. Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times covered it well at The International Herald Tribune titled "The talk of Washington: Reverend Moon's Senate 'coronation'"

John Gorenfeld, a blogger at Where in Washington, D.C. is Sun Myung Moon has a good write-up including, but not limited to, audio, video, and transcripts.
If you need more, this page will take you to Google Search Results

Mooning the Senate

Members of Congress are recognizing a human being as a diety in a government office building. Rev. Sun Myung Moon was coronated as "King of Peace" or "Messiah" in a Senate office building. What happened to the separation of church and state that was written into our Constitution ?

The Ten Commandments are being removed from public buildings yet we can have a public religious coronation in the Senate building.

Prayers have been taken out of public schools while of the owner of the Washington Times, who has the audacity to claim to be the Messiah, is coronated in the Senate building.

Recently, I read a report about a choir on tour of Washington, D.C. being corrected by the Park Police for singing "God Bless America" at the Lincoln Memorial after being inspired by its' grandeur(choirs do that), while Senators and Congressmen sing the praises of a cult figure inside the Dirksen Senate Office Building with other members of Congress looking on.

Just to clarify where I stand on this, I am not a Christian supporter. I am a supporter of equal protection under the law and this "coronation" appears to be a double standard.

The money quote :
"Use of a Senate office building requires a senator's approval. But organizers said they did not know which senator reserved the space for the ceremony..."
---Larry Everett
From : CyberNewsCast
[edited for length]

"Religious Leaders Defend Moon's Capitol Hill Coronation As 'King of Peace'
By Sarah Junk
CNSNews.com Correspondent
July 01, 2004
(CNSNews.com) - When the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife were crowned the "King and Queen of Peace" on March 23rd -- inside the Dirksen Senate Office Building with Members of Congress looking on -- few news outlets took notice.
But in the months since Moon's March 23rd "coronation" as Messiah, a growing number of people are questioning the appropriateness of allowing a "coronation" to take place inside a government building.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives from the organization that sponsored Moon's coronation unapologetically defended the ceremony, its location, and Moon's Messiah declaration.
"It was the spirit world that said he was the Messiah," said Archbishop George A. Stallings, Jr., pastor of an independent African-American Catholic congregation. Moon, founder of the Unification Church, was merely repeating the message, said Stallings.
[snip]
According to a recent Washington Post description of the event, more than a dozen lawmakers were there, and one of them - Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) -- "wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon's head."
[snip]
Members of Congress who attended Moon's "coronation" are now trying to distance themselves from Moon - whose organization also owns the Washington Times newspaper."

[Read The Whole Thing]

John Kerry - Missing in Action

This op\ed article from The Washington Times is a fair summary of John Kerrys' voting record. I guess he supports the troops. After all, he did vote for them before he voted against them.

Washington Times
...

"Regarding the present, it is a shame Mr. Kerry apparently doesn't care about the troops in the field as much as he claims to care about them once they become veterans. Mr. Kerry successfully ran for the Senate in 1984 promising to cancel the Apache helicopter, which has played an indispensable role on the front lines of the war against terrorism in Iraq. And, unlike his late June photo-op gambit on veterans' health care, he refused to adjust his campaign schedule in early June to return to the Senate in order to vote for the $25 billion in emergency funding bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Kerry's no-show for the $25 billion spending measure contrasts sharply with the role he played on the previous Iraq-Afghanistan emergency spending measure last October. On Sept. 14, five weeks before the Senate vote, Mr. Kerry was asked about the $87 billion supplemental appropriation that would have funded military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and, incidentally, increased spending for veterans' health care by $1.3 billion. "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible," Mr. Kerry asserted, adding, "I don't think anyone in Congress is going to not give our troops ammunition, not give our troops the ability to defend themselves."
But that is precisely what Mr. Kerry did several weeks later. By the time the vote was held Oct. 17, Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign was on life-support; the front-running Howard Dean was relentlessly pounding him for his 2002 vote to authorize the war against Iraq. Indeed, two Zogby polls conducted within a week of the Oct. 17 vote showed Mr. Kerry trailing Mr. Dean 21-9 in Iowa and 40-17 in New Hampshire. After asserting in September that a "nay" vote would be "irresponsible" and tantamount to "cutting and running," Mr. Kerry interrupted his presidential campaign and returned to the Senate with great fanfare in order to vote against the $87 billion military-funding and reconstruction bill, which won bipartisan approval in a 87-12 vote.
That was one of the final votes Mr. Kerry cast last year; but it was typical of the votes that helped to establish him, according to an authoritative analysis by the National Journal, as the most liberal member of the Senate for the entire year. Far more disturbing than the reality that Democrats will be nominating the most liberal member of their Senate caucus as their presidential candidate (McGovern redux?) is the fact that Mr. Kerry was willing to sacrifice the well-being of the troops in harm's way in order to once again jump-start his political career."

...
[Read The Whole Thing]

Another Summer of '68 ?

A story about a wounded veteran marching with his family at a Fourth of July Parade being called, "murderer" and "baby killer". I wanted to write a long rant about this but the lovely Michelle Malkin, whom I linked to at the bottom of this article, does a much better job.
---Larry Everett
Veteran gets rude welcome on Bainbridge
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Think about the Seattle area -- Bainbridge Island to be exact -- and you think scenic views and liberal-minded tolerance.

At least the killer views are still there.

The bucolic island's deep reputation for civility got a gut check this week during the annual Grand Old Fourth of July celebration.

That's when Jason Gilson, a 23-year-old military veteran who served in Iraq, marched in the local event. He wore his medals with pride and carried a sign that said "Veterans for Bush."

Walking the parade route with his mom, younger siblings and politically conservative friends, Jason heard words from the crowd that felt like a thousand daggers to the heart.

"Baby killer!"

"Murderer!"

"Boooo!"

To understand why the reaction of strangers hurt so much, you must read what the young man had written in a letter from Iraq before he was disabled in an ambush:

"I really miss being in the states. Some of the American public have no idea how much freedom costs and who the people are that pay that awful price. I think sometimes people just see us as nameless and faceless and not really as humans. ... A good portion of us are actually scared that when we come home, for those of us who make it back, that there will be protesters waiting for us and that is scary."

On the Fourth, Jason faced his worst fear.

It was such a public humiliation -- home front insult after battlefield injury.

[Read The Whole Thing]

Chez Malkin fires back...
Michelle Malkin
SEATTLE HATES AMERICA
By Michelle Malkin · July 10, 2004 09:32 AM

My old hometown of Seattle--the Berkeley of the Pacific Northwest--just can't stop showing its contempt for America.
Take a look at this disgraceful incident on Bainbridge Island, a few miles west of Seattle proper (and the future home of Hollywood liberals Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston). One of the participants in Bainbridge Island's annual Independence Day parade was Jason Gilson, a 23-year-old military veteran who was injured in the line of duty in Iraq. He wore his war medals and carried a sign indicating his support for President Bush--heresy on liberal Bainbridge Island. Upon seeing Gilson and his sign, the crowd booed and called him names including "murderer" and, yes, "baby killer."

[Read The Whole Thing]

L. Paul Bremers Missing Speech

Update:
From : Iraq The Model

After the authority handover at June 28, Ali wrote a post about that event and included a description about Paul Bremer’s farewell speech to the Iraqis. We were surprised that it wasn’t covered by the major media and moreover the Los Angeles times even went as far as saying that Mr. Bremer “ left without even giving a final speech to the country — almost as if he were afraid to look in the eye the people he had ruled for more than a year”.

A day after that Mohammed wrote another post in which he included some of what Bremer said in that speech. Still there was no mention in the media to that speech and some readers started to question- and they have every right to-whether we were not telling the exact truth, as how could it be possible that such a story is not only ignored by all the major media but also some of them reported the opposite in the front page and refused to change their statement!?

[snip]

One of our American readers sent a mail to his local newspaper telling the editor about our story but she said she couldn’t get to our website and she can’t print anything without our permission. I sent a mail giving her the address and the exact link to the posts in question and asked her to publish it, but she didn’t respond!

[snip]

It seems that some people in the major media still think they’re the only ones who have eyes and ears and cameras and that ordinary people cannot have access to the information except from the major media outlets. They underestimated the prevalence and the effect of the internet in connecting people to each other and making the readers in direct contact with real eyewitnesses at the scene of events. I hope this will serve to make them more careful in the future on what to report, or make sure that they report from a place in which there are no bloggers. Here is the L. A. Times correction.
Thanks to all the bloggers who helped to reveal the truth this time, and thank God for the Internet.

L. Paul Bremers Missing Speech
The L.A. Times is one of those newspapers that's so far left that it's wrong. case in point : The Times reports, Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer slinked out of Iraq without even saying goodbye. Others report things a little differently.

LATimes(sorry, registration required)
July 4, 2004
Premier Gets Off to Strong Start
By Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writer

"BAGHDAD — Waving a hurried farewell from the steps of a military transport plane, the man whose starched white shirt, cufflinks and desert boots embodied Western authority in Iraq brought the United States' experiment in occupation to an abrupt end last week.
L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq, left without even giving a final speech to the country — almost as if he were afraid to look in the eye the people he had ruled for more than a year."

[Read the Whole Thing]

Another entry from The Washington Post. They flatout deny there was a farewill speech.

WaPo(sorry, another pesky registration)

"When he left Iraq on Monday after surrendering authority to an interim government, it was with a somber air of exhaustion. There was no farewell address to the Iraqi people, no celebratory airport sendoff."

Then there's this from an Iraqi blogger :Iraq the Model
[Edited For Length]

Small party and great hopes
"I was on duty-call in the hospital all yesterday and I was in the ward when I heard the news that Mr. Bremer had already transferred the power to the new government two days ahead of the expected date. I was so happy about this news and I couldn’t wait until I finish my tour to celebrate the occasion."

[snip]

"... The hall was busy and everyone was chatting and laughing loud. They had Al-Jazeera on (something I never managed to convince them to stop doing). Then suddenly Mr. Bremer appeared on TV reading his last speech before he left Iraq. I approached the TV to listen carefully to the speech, as I expected it to be difficult in the midst of all that noise. To my surprise everyone stopped what they were doing and started watching as attentively as I was.

The speech was impressive and you could hear the sound of a needle if one had dropped it at that time. The most sensational moment was the end of the speech when Mr. Bremer used a famous Arab emotional poem. The poem was for a famous Arab poet who said it while leaving Baghdad. Al-Jazeera had put an interpreter who tried to translate even the Arabic poem which Mr. Bremer was telling in a fair Arabic! “Let this damned interpreter shut up. We want to hear what the man is saying” One of my colloquies shouted. The scene was very touching that the guy sitting next to me (who used to sympathize with Muqtada) said “He’s going to make me cry!”

Then he finished his speech by saying in Arabic,”A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq”! (Long live Iraq, Long live Iraq, long live Iraq)."

Who are you going to believe ?

SS men hold anniversary celebration in Estonia

Has the whole damned world gone nuts ???
The full article has an interesting historical and political perspective.


Outrage as SS men hold anniversary celebration in Estonia
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
07 July 2004

The EU newcomer Estonia was accused of amorality and gross historical insensitivity yesterday after it allowed veterans of the Nazi Waffen-SS to parade through its capital Tallinn.

The event saw veterans of the 20th Estonian SS division attend a church service, lay flowers at a war memorial and attend a celebratory concert.

The planned unveiling of a memorial to Estonian SS troops was cancelled at the last minute, however, and is not now expected to take place until the autumn.

Jewish groups pointed out that Estonian volunteers in the SS were responsible for the almost complete annihilation of the country's Jewish population during the Second World War.

Tallinn City Council gave yesterday's event its blessing. It said that it was a "political matter" but, despite promises to the contrary, failed to provide an explanation of why it had agreed to the commemoration.

When asked to comment, Estonia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the matter was not within its competence...

[Read the Whole Thing]

Independence Day and Old Glory

I can't think of a more appropriate subject for the Fourth of July than the national anthem.

During the war of 1812, not the Revolutionary War as many believe, Mary Young Pickersgill and her 13 year old daughter Caroline cut and stitched a flag measuring 30 feet by 42 feet. Major George Armistead, the commander of Fort McHenry, wanted a flag that would identify his position, and one whose size would be visible to the enemy from a distance. The flag was so large they had to assemble and stitch it on the floor of Claggett's brewery. In August 1813, it was presented to Major Armistead but it would be over a year before the British threatened Baltimore.

A lawyer named Francis Scott Key had visited the enemy's fleet to secure the release of a Maryland doctor, who had been abducted by the British after they left Washington. Key had been successful in his mission, but he couldn't escort the doctor home until the attack ended. So he waited on a flag-of-truce sloop anchored eight miles downstream from Fort McHenry.

At dawn, the British bombardment tapered off. Wondering if the fort had been captured, he placed a telescope to his eye and trained it on the fort's flagpole. He saw the large garrison flag catch the morning breeze. It had been raised as a gesture of defiance, replacing the wet storm flag that had flown through the night.

Thrilled by the sight of the flag and the knowledge that the fort had not fallen, Key took a letter from his pocket, and began to write some verses on the back of it. Later, after the British fleet had withdrawn, Key checked into a Baltimore hotel, and completed his poem on the defense of Fort McHenry. He then sent it to a printer for duplication on handbills, and within a few days the poem was put to the music of an old English song. Both the new song and the flag became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner."

For his leadership in defending the fort, Armistead was promoted to brevet Lieutenant Colonel and acquired the garrison flag sometime before his death in 1818. A few weeks after the battle, he had granted the wishes of a soldier's widow for a piece of the flag to bury with her husband. In succeeding years, he cut off additional pieces to gratify the similar wishes of others; the flag itself was seen only on rare occasions.

When Commodore George H. Preble, U.S. Navy, was preparing a history of the American flag, he borrowed the Star-Spangled Banner from a descendant of Colonel Armistead, and, in 1873, photographed it for the first time. In preparation for that event, a canvas backing was attached to it; soon thereafter, it was put in storage until the Smithsonian borrowed it and placed it on exhibit in 1907.

The flag had become a popular attraction; in 1912, the owner, Eben Appleton, of New York, believing that the flag should be kept in the National Museum, donated it to the Smithsonian on the condition that it would remain there forever. Once in its possession, the Smithsonian hired an expert flag restorer to remove the old backing and sew on a new one to prevent damage during display.

The Star-Spangled Banner remained in the Arts and Industries Building (the old National Museum) as the new National Museum was constructed across the Mall. In 1964, when the Museum of American History opened, the flag was moved to a prominent place inside the museum's Mall entrance, an awe-inspiring testament to our nation's independence.

Most Americans are familiar with the words of the first verse but few know of the other three verses.

The Star-Spangled Banner

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

United Nations Oil for Palaces Ripoff

U.N.'S TELLTALE TIPOFF
The United Nations Oil For Food program is the biggest financial scam in history yet gets little attention. In spite of the U.N. sanctions against him, Saddam skimmed billions, (that's a "b"), to build palaces all over Iraq while the common folk whom the program was designed to help got nothing. The guardians of the program in the U.N. skimmed as much as ten billion dollars(US)
The first post on the OFF program is short but it's just to prime the pump. There will be more later.
The article is here:Link
Comments on this article are welcomed. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the article.

When the head of the U.N.'s Oil-for- Food program got a copy of a letter in October 2002 suggesting that a bribe had been paid to Saddam Hussein's cronies as part of the program, what do you think was the first thing he did?

If you guessed "informed the authorities, particularly his employers at the Security Council" --guess again.

According to a report Monday on Fox News Channel (a Post sister company), the program's director, Benon Sevan, took the letter and went directly to . . . Saddam.

[snip]

Of course, U.N. inaction here is not terribly surprising: Officials and companies from many of the Security Council countries were themselves benefiting handsomely from the program --whether through legal participation or the alleged illegal kickbacks.

Which also explains why Secretary-General Kofi Annan appears to be frantically trying to cover up the whole sordid affair. Annan's insisting that only his hand-picked probers be allowed to investigate the case.

"I don't think it's a great idea to have parallel investigations of U.N. contracts," Annan's chief prober (and former Federal Reserve chairman), Paul Volcker --whose spotless reputation is meant to sanitize Annan's probe --said.

Meanwhile, as New York Times columnist William Safire notes, Volcker still has no budget or staff --many months after Annan pledged a thorough probe.

But that's OK.

Because a number of credible probes seem to be moving ahead, including two in Congress and one by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The Fox report could provide more grist --at least, that is, for those who really want to get to the bottom of this.

[Read the whole thing]

Eye of the Storm

Haim Harari, an Israeli, gave an instructive and thought provoking talk on what is happening in the region from Pakistan to Morocco. He's telling us the 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict isn't the central issue. It's a long read but well worth the time.

Update :
Prof. Haim Harari is President of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
A short Bio of him is here :
Haim Harari

From: A talk delivered by Israeli, Haim Harari
Date: 20 Jun 2004
Time: 19:30:39

"As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological "entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come.

I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region.

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.

· The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.

· The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.

· The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.

· Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.

· Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60’s because of Israel.

· Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

· The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.

· The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel,

· and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

· The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion.

· They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe.

· These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

· Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

· The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago.

· Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission.

· According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates.

· The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis.

· Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline.

· And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves..."

[Read the Whole Thing]

Iraqi Bloggers

Here's an excerpt from an Iraqi blogger living in Iraq. If you're not reading what the Iraqis are writing, you're missing most of the story. I'll be listing their weblogs here soon.
This is from The Mesopotamian
LINK

"Hail our true friends, the Great People of the United States of America; The Freedom giving Republic, the nation of Liberators. Never has the world known such a nation, willing to spill the blood of her children and spend the treasure of her land even for the sake of the freedom and well being of erstwhile enemies. The tree of friendship is going to grow and grow and bear fruit as sure as day follows night. And the people deep down at the bottom of their hearts, they appreciate. Make no mistake about that. The people have voted today, the pulse of the street is clear, without any hesitation I would give 90% of all Iraqis are hopeful and supportive of the new government, and this is a tacit indirect yes to the U.S. which has been the prime mover of all these events. This is what the foolish fail to understand. Why is this a different situation from that for example of a Vietnam? The answer is very simple: Because, the U.S. has achieved something very popular around here; which is the removal of the Saddam regime. Those who are really against the U.S. from amongst the Iraqis have been and remain a small minority; all other forms of resentment are simply disappointment and disgruntlement resulting from the discomfiture of the present situation and will simply disappear with progress and gradual improvement."
[Read the whole thing]