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You are right. You know this subject.
Lefty, if you ever looked at impeached pantless former president Clinton you would throw up.
Armenian quest for lost orphans (Christians becoming Muslims)
bbc.co.uk ^ / Monday, 1 August 2005 Dorian Jones
By Dorian Jones, Producer, BBC World Service
Ninety years ago, hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in mass killings that still resonate through Turkey's social and political life.
Armenians say that up to 1.5m of their people were deported and died at the hands of the then Ottoman rulers of Turkey.
But it is believed that thousands of orphaned Armenian children were saved secretly by Turkish families.
Until now, the very existence of the children has remained largely an untold story, buried along with those who died between 1915 and 1916.
But the stories of those Armenian orphans are slowly being uncovered by their descendants. Turkish documentary maker Berke Bas is one of those people.
Family member Nahide Kaptan was saved in 1915 when she was nine years old. But uncovering the truth still remains a difficult and contentious issue.
What happened in 1915 still remains a hotly disputed subject. Armenia, along with the Armenian Diaspora, accuses the then Ottoman rulers of carrying out a "genocide". But Turkey disputes the charge, saying that a few hundred thousand died and that the deaths occurred in a civil war in which many Turks were also killed.
Kitchen hideout
Selim Deringil, a historian of the late Ottoman period at Istanbul's Bosphorus University, says "what you have is people talking at cross purposes and not really interested in what happened."
Professor Deringil himself fell victim to the controversy, being forced to postpone a conference on the subject earlier this year after intense government pressure.
The ongoing controversy can pose problems for those delving into the past.
Berke Bas, on returning to her birthplace - the Black Sea city of Ordu - admitted she had concerns.
"I am sure there will be people who will approach this with disdain, saying 'Why am I digging up this history?' So many families deny the fact they had Armenian family members."
According to Professor Deringil, such stories are not unusual. He says thousands of Armenian children were saved by Turkish families.
"We do know that it was on such a scale that the then rulers of the Ottoman Empire issued secret orders to punish families who saved Armenian children."
The first memory of Nahide for Berke was being told how she was hidden under the kitchen sink, when she first came to the family.
After speaking with relatives, Berke discovered that at least five Armenian children were taken in by both sides of her family.
But acknowledging Armenian ancestors within Turkish families still remains a taboo for many, according to the editor of the local newspaper.
"These children were brought up in Muslim families. This is the biggest issue, Christians becoming Muslims," he said.
"They don't see themselves as outsiders but they remain silent about their past, afraid. Now, as a Turk, a Muslim you say that your ancestors were Armenian then you are called a 'Gavur', you are without belief, without a soul, and you are an outcast."
'Stunning stories'
But despite the reluctance of many to talk about their Armenian ancestry, Berke discovered that Nahide had a brother who survived 1915 and eventually ended up in Istanbul. Although he has since died, it is believed his daughter is still alive.
Berke returned to Istanbul to try to find her. She visited Agos, a weekly Armenian newspaper.
Printing both in Turkish and Armenian, the paper seeks to be a bridge between the 60,000 Istanbul Armenians living in the city and wider Turkish society.
Agos editor Hrant Dink says he is inundated by requests from both Turkey and abroad to find Armenian relatives.
"The mails I receive, the e-mails, the phone enquiries! The people who knock on my door, they contact me every day," he said.
"There are so many people from here and from abroad. They learn that they have a past. They're looking for information, wanting history and references, looking for relatives. I am involved in it personally everyday. There are stunning examples, so many stories reaching me."
Masterpiece: The Little Girl Who Came In From The Cold can first be heard on BBC World Service at 0805GMT/0905BST on Tuesday 2 August 2005 or online at the Masterpiece website for the following 7 days.
British war cemetery in France desecrated
Yahoo News ^ / August 02, 2005
LILLE, France (AFP) - A cemetery in northern France holding the remains of British soldiers killed in World War I has been desecrated, with 42 headstones broken and one scorched by a Molotov cocktail, French police said.
The vandalism occurred late last week in the Albuera cemetery in Bailleul-Sir-Berthoult, near Lille. The graveyard's visitors' book was also torched, police said Tuesday. No inscriptions were found.
"Two or three broken headstones, that unfortunately happens sometimes. But 42 -- that's never occurred. Everybody is shocked," said a spokesman for Britain's Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Christopher Farrell.
The military cemetery, which contains 252 tombs, is one of 1,500 in France, where more than 400,000 soldiers from Britain and its former colonies are buried.
How many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?
Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:
1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.
2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.
3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.
4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.
6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.
7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.
8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.
9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.
10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.
12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.
15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.
You are ignorant of the subject you jabber about, lefty.
As usual.
Learn how to read, lefty:
Kathryn Jean Lopez: What did the Clinton administration know about Osama bin Laden and when did they know it?
Richard Miniter: One of the big myths about the Clinton years is that no one knew about bin Laden until Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the bin Laden threat was recognized at the highest levels of the Clinton administration as early as 1993. What's more, bin Laden's attacks kept escalating throughout the Clinton administration; all told bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans on Clinton's watch.
President Clinton learned about bin Laden within months of being sworn into office. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake told me that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden in 1993 in relation to the World Trade Center attack. Lake briefed the president about bin Laden that same year.
In addition, starting in 1993, Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) repeatedly wrote to President Clinton and warned him and other administration officials about bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists. McCollum was the founder and chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and had developed a wealth of contacts among the mujihedeen in Afghanistan. Those sources, who regularly visited McCollum, informed him about bin Laden's training camps and evil ambitions.
Indeed, it is possible that Clinton and his national-security team learned of bin Laden even before the 1993 World Trade Center attack. My interviews and investigation revealed that bin Laden made his first attack on Americans was December 1992, a little more than a month after Clinton won the 1992 election. His target was 100 U.S. Marines housed in two towering Yemen hotels. Within hours, the CIA's counterterrorism center learned that the Yemen suspected a man named Osama bin Laden. (One of the arrested bombing suspects later escaped and was detained in a police sweep after al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000.) Lake says he doesn't remember briefing the president-elect about the attempted attack, but that he well might have.
So it is safe to conclude that Clinton knew about the threat posed by bin Laden since 1993, his first year in office.
Lopez: What exactly was U.S. reaction to the attack on the USS Cole?
Miniter: In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked.
Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had ordered his staff to review existing intelligence in relation to the bombing of the USS Cole. After that review, he and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, were convinced it was the work of Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon had on-the-shelf, regularly updated and detailed strike plans for bin Laden's training camps and strongholds in Afghanistan.
At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack "sufficient provocation" for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
Instead of destroying bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke's plan had been implemented, al Qaeda's infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day.
Lopez: When the World Trade Center was first bombed in '93, why was it treated at first as a criminal investigation?
Miniter: The Clinton administration was in the dark about the full extent of the bin Laden menace because the president's decision to treat the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a crime. Once the FBI began a criminal investigation, it could not lawfully share its information with the CIA — without also having to share the same data with the accused terrorists. Woolsey told me about his frustration that he had less access to evidence from the World Trade Center bombing — the then-largest ever foreign terrorist attack on U.S soil — than any junior agent in the FBI's New York office.
Why did Clinton treat the attack as a law-enforcement matter? Several reasons. In the first few days, Clinton refused to believe that the towers had been bombed at all — even though the FBI made that determination within hours. He speculated a electrical transformer had exploded or a bank heist went bad.
More importantly, treating the bombing as a criminal matter was politically advantageous. A criminal matter is a relatively tidy process. It has the political benefit of insulating Clinton from consequences; after all, he was only following the law. He is not to blame if the terrorists were released on a "technicality" or if foreign nations refuse to honor our extradition requests. Oh well, he tried.
By contrast, if Clinton treated the bombing as the act of terrorism that it was, he would be assuming personal responsibility for a series of politically risky moves. Should he deploy the CIA or special forces to hunt down the perpetrators? What happens if the agents or soldiers die? What if they try to capture the terrorists and fail? One misstep and the media, Congress, and even the public might blame the president. So Clinton took the easy, safe way out, and called it a crime.
Lopez: Bill Clinton was actually offered bin Laden? Could you set the scene a little and clue us in on why, for heavens sakes, he would not take advantage of such opportunities?
Miniter: On March 3, 1996, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, Director of East African Affairs at the State Department, David Shinn, and a member of the CIA's directorate of operations' Africa division met with Sudan's then-Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa in a Rosslyn, Virginia hotel room. Item number two on the CIA's list of demands was to provide information about Osama bin Laden. Five days later, Erwa met with the CIA officer and offered more than information. He offered to arrest and turn over bin Laden himself. Two years earlier, the Sudan had turned over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal to the French. He now sits in a French prison. Sudan wanted to repeat that scenario with bin Laden in the starring role.
Clinton administration officials have offered various explanations for not taking the Sudanese offer. One argument is that an offer was never made. But the same officials are on the record as saying the offer was "not serious." Even a supposedly non-serious offer is an offer. Another argument is that the Sudanese had not come through on a prior request so this offer could not be trusted. But, as Ambassador Tim Carney had argued at the time, even if you believe that, why not call their bluff and ask for bin Laden?
The Clinton administration simply did not want the responsibility of taking Osama bin Laden into custody. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is on the record as saying: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." Even if that was true — and it wasn't — the U.S. could have turned bin Laden over to Yemen or Libya, both of which had valid warrants for his arrest stemming from terrorist activities in those countries. Given the legal systems of those two countries, Osama would have soon ceased to be a threat to anyone.
After months of debating how to respond to the Sudanese offer, the Clinton administration simply asked Sudan to deport him. Where to? Ambassador Carney told me what he told the Sudanese: "Anywhere but Somalia."
In May 1996 bin Laden was welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban. It could not have been a better haven for Osama bin Laden.
Steven Simon, Clinton's counterterrorism director on the National Security Council thought that kicking bin Laden out of Sudan would benefit U.S. security since "It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time." Buys time? Oh yeah, 1996 was an election year and team Clinton did not want to deal with bin Laden until after it was safely reelected.
Lopez: This amazes me every time I hear it: You write, "When a small plane accidentally crashed into the White House lawn in 1994, West Wing staffers joked that it was [Jim] Woolsey trying to see the president..." How could the CIA director have that bad a relationship with his president? And this, after the first WTC attack. Did no one in the West Wing get it?
Miniter: Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semiprivate meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."
One of the little scoops in the book is the revelation that Clinton froze Woolsey out because the CIA director refused to put a friend of Bill on the agency's payroll. This account was confirmed by both Woolsey and the Clinton's consigliore Bruce Lindsey.
Considering the Justice Department's experience with Webster Hubbell, another Friend of Bill, Woolsey's decision may have done the CIA a great deal of good. But Clinton's pique did not make America any safer from bin Laden.
Another Clinton intelligence failure involved a refusal to help the CIA hire more Arabic language translators. In 1993, Woolsey learned that the agency was able to translate only 10 percent of its Arabic intercepts and badly wanted more translators. But Sen. Dennis DeConcini refused to approve the funds unless Clinton phoned him and said it was a presidential priority. Despite entreaties, Clinton never phoned the Democratic senator and the CIA didn't get those translators for years.
Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?
Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:
1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.
2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.
3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.
4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.
6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.
7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.
8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.
9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.
10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.
12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.
15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.
Lopez: You sorta defend Clinton against "wag the dog" criticisms in regard to that infamous August 1998 (Monica times) bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and some bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan. That wasn't the problem, was it — that we fired then?
Miniter: Certainly the timing is suspicious. The day before the East African-embassy bombings, Monica Lewinsky had recanted her prior affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. The sex scandals kicked into overdrive.
Still, the president wasn't doing too much in combating bin Laden because of his sex scandals — he was doing too little. He should have launched more missile strikes against bin Laden and the hell with the political timing. Besides, after the East African-embassy bombings, any president would have been negligent not to strike back. If he had not, it would be open season on Americans. He would have been as ineffectual as Carter was during the Tehran hostage crisis. Indeed, this was the mistake made following the attack on the USS Cole.
But Clinton was distracted by sex and campaign-finance scandals and his political support was already heavily leveraged to get him through those scandals. If he fought bin Laden more vigorously, the leftwing of the Democratic party might have deserted him — which could have cost him the White House.
Instead Clinton's token, ineffectual missile strikes that only emboldened bin Laden. He believed that America was too intimidated to fight back — and was free to plan one of the most-murderous terrorist attacks in history.
Lopez: How did George Tenet perform during the Clinton years vis-à-vis al Qaeda/bin Laden?
Miniter: Tenet seemed to take a too legalistic view of CIA operations. He was risk-averse, wanting almost absolute certainty before recommending action, focused on safeguards against error and unintended consequences. Tenet seemed more concerned with not getting in trouble rather than relentlessly pursuing results to safeguard Americans against terrorism, the focus of a warrior.
Each time U.S. intelligence pinpointed bin Laden, Tenet was against a missile strike on the grounds that the information was "single threaded" — a pet phrase of the director which means single source. The predator was armed and fitted with video cameras mostly to overcome Tenet's objections to taking out bin Laden.
Lopez: Madeline Albright — frequently called upon expert nowadays — what's her record vis-à-vis al Qaeda?
Miniter: Albright always insisted that diplomatic efforts would best yield results on bin Laden. Even after the Cole bombing, Albright urged continued diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to turn him over, even though that effort had been going on for two years with no progress. Two simple facts should have made Albright aware that the Taliban would never turn over bin Laden: Osama had married off one of his sons to Mullah Omar's daughter. The Taliban weren't about to surrender a member of the family — especially one that commanded thousands of armed fighters who helped maintain Omar's grip on power.
Lopez: What exactly is the Iraq-al Qaeda connection?
Miniter: Osama bin Laden's wealth is overestimated. He had been financially drained during his years in Sudan and financing terrorist operations in dozens of countries, including training camps, bribes, etc., requires a large, constant cash flow. Saddam Hussein was unquestionably a generous financier of terrorism. Baghdad had a long history of funding terrorist campaigns in the bin Laden-allied region that straddles Iran and Pakistan known as Beluchistan. Documents found in Baghdad in April 2003 showed that Saddam funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the 1990s. Saddam openly funded the Iraqi Kurdish Group and its leader, Melan Krekar, admitted that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan. George Tenet testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq had provided training in forging documents and making bombs. Farouk Harazi, a senior officer in the Iraqi Mukhabarat reportedly offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi intelligence operative, was arrested in October 2000 near the Afghan border, apparently returning from a visit to bin Laden. One of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin, reportedly fled to Baghdad in 1994. Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub in Khartoum; Sudanese intelligence officers told me about dozens of meeting between Iraqi Intel and bin Laden. Tellingly, reports that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague several times in 2000 and 2001 have not been disproved. I have far more on this in Appendix A of Losing bin Laden.
Lopez: What most surprised you to learn about the Clinton years and terrorism?
Miniter: Three things:
1) That the Sept. 11 attacks were planned in May 1998 in the Khalden Camp in southeastern Afghanistan, according to American and British intelligence officers I interviewed. In other words, the 9/11 attacks were planned on Clinton's watch.
2) The sheer number of bin Laden's attacks on Americans during the Clinton years.
3) And how much senior Clinton-administration officials knew about bin Laden and how little they did about it.
Lopez: This sounds like this could all be right-wing propaganda. How can you convince readers otherwise?
Miniter: Most of my best sources were senior Clinton officials, including both of his national-security advisers, his first CIA director, Clinton's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright, and others. Plus, I interviewed scores of career federal officials. None of them are card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
And, while I shine the light on Clinton's shortcomings in dealing with bin Laden, I also give credit where it is due. Chapter nine is all about one of the greatest (and least-known) Clinton victories over bin Laden — the successful thwarting of a series of plots to murder thousands of Americans on Millennium night, 1999.
If anyone has any doubts about the credibility of this book, they should read the acknowledgements, which list many of my sources. Or peruse the more than 15,000 words of footnotes, that allow the reader to see exactly where information is coming from. Or examine the intelligence documents reproduced in Appendix B. Or pick a page at random and read it. Any fair-minded reader will see a carefully constructed and balanced account that attempts to lay out the history of Clinton and bin Laden.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: What did the Clinton administration know about Osama bin Laden and when did they know it?
Richard Miniter: One of the big myths about the Clinton years is that no one knew about bin Laden until Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the bin Laden threat was recognized at the highest levels of the Clinton administration as early as 1993. What's more, bin Laden's attacks kept escalating throughout the Clinton administration; all told bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans on Clinton's watch.
President Clinton learned about bin Laden within months of being sworn into office. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake told me that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden in 1993 in relation to the World Trade Center attack. Lake briefed the president about bin Laden that same year.
In addition, starting in 1993, Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) repeatedly wrote to President Clinton and warned him and other administration officials about bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists. McCollum was the founder and chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and had developed a wealth of contacts among the mujihedeen in Afghanistan. Those sources, who regularly visited McCollum, informed him about bin Laden's training camps and evil ambitions.
Indeed, it is possible that Clinton and his national-security team learned of bin Laden even before the 1993 World Trade Center attack. My interviews and investigation revealed that bin Laden made his first attack on Americans was December 1992, a little more than a month after Clinton won the 1992 election. His target was 100 U.S. Marines housed in two towering Yemen hotels. Within hours, the CIA's counterterrorism center learned that the Yemen suspected a man named Osama bin Laden. (One of the arrested bombing suspects later escaped and was detained in a police sweep after al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000.) Lake says he doesn't remember briefing the president-elect about the attempted attack, but that he well might have.
So it is safe to conclude that Clinton knew about the threat posed by bin Laden since 1993, his first year in office.
Lopez: What exactly was U.S. reaction to the attack on the USS Cole?
Miniter: In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked.
Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had ordered his staff to review existing intelligence in relation to the bombing of the USS Cole. After that review, he and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, were convinced it was the work of Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon had on-the-shelf, regularly updated and detailed strike plans for bin Laden's training camps and strongholds in Afghanistan.
At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack "sufficient provocation" for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
Instead of destroying bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke's plan had been implemented, al Qaeda's infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day.
Lopez: When the World Trade Center was first bombed in '93, why was it treated at first as a criminal investigation?
Miniter: The Clinton administration was in the dark about the full extent of the bin Laden menace because the president's decision to treat the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a crime. Once the FBI began a criminal investigation, it could not lawfully share its information with the CIA — without also having to share the same data with the accused terrorists. Woolsey told me about his frustration that he had less access to evidence from the World Trade Center bombing — the then-largest ever foreign terrorist attack on U.S soil — than any junior agent in the FBI's New York office.
Why did Clinton treat the attack as a law-enforcement matter? Several reasons. In the first few days, Clinton refused to believe that the towers had been bombed at all — even though the FBI made that determination within hours. He speculated a electrical transformer had exploded or a bank heist went bad.
More importantly, treating the bombing as a criminal matter was politically advantageous. A criminal matter is a relatively tidy process. It has the political benefit of insulating Clinton from consequences; after all, he was only following the law. He is not to blame if the terrorists were released on a "technicality" or if foreign nations refuse to honor our extradition requests. Oh well, he tried.
By contrast, if Clinton treated the bombing as the act of terrorism that it was, he would be assuming personal responsibility for a series of politically risky moves. Should he deploy the CIA or special forces to hunt down the perpetrators? What happens if the agents or soldiers die? What if they try to capture the terrorists and fail? One misstep and the media, Congress, and even the public might blame the president. So Clinton took the easy, safe way out, and called it a crime.
Lopez: Bill Clinton was actually offered bin Laden? Could you set the scene a little and clue us in on why, for heavens sakes, he would not take advantage of such opportunities?
Miniter: On March 3, 1996, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, Director of East African Affairs at the State Department, David Shinn, and a member of the CIA's directorate of operations' Africa division met with Sudan's then-Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa in a Rosslyn, Virginia hotel room. Item number two on the CIA's list of demands was to provide information about Osama bin Laden. Five days later, Erwa met with the CIA officer and offered more than information. He offered to arrest and turn over bin Laden himself. Two years earlier, the Sudan had turned over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal to the French. He now sits in a French prison. Sudan wanted to repeat that scenario with bin Laden in the starring role.
Clinton administration officials have offered various explanations for not taking the Sudanese offer. One argument is that an offer was never made. But the same officials are on the record as saying the offer was "not serious." Even a supposedly non-serious offer is an offer. Another argument is that the Sudanese had not come through on a prior request so this offer could not be trusted. But, as Ambassador Tim Carney had argued at the time, even if you believe that, why not call their bluff and ask for bin Laden?
The Clinton administration simply did not want the responsibility of taking Osama bin Laden into custody. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is on the record as saying: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." Even if that was true — and it wasn't — the U.S. could have turned bin Laden over to Yemen or Libya, both of which had valid warrants for his arrest stemming from terrorist activities in those countries. Given the legal systems of those two countries, Osama would have soon ceased to be a threat to anyone.
After months of debating how to respond to the Sudanese offer, the Clinton administration simply asked Sudan to deport him. Where to? Ambassador Carney told me what he told the Sudanese: "Anywhere but Somalia."
In May 1996 bin Laden was welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban. It could not have been a better haven for Osama bin Laden.
Steven Simon, Clinton's counterterrorism director on the National Security Council thought that kicking bin Laden out of Sudan would benefit U.S. security since "It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time." Buys time? Oh yeah, 1996 was an election year and team Clinton did not want to deal with bin Laden until after it was safely reelected.
Lopez: This amazes me every time I hear it: You write, "When a small plane accidentally crashed into the White House lawn in 1994, West Wing staffers joked that it was [Jim] Woolsey trying to see the president..." How could the CIA director have that bad a relationship with his president? And this, after the first WTC attack. Did no one in the West Wing get it?
Miniter: Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semiprivate meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."
One of the little scoops in the book is the revelation that Clinton froze Woolsey out because the CIA director refused to put a friend of Bill on the agency's payroll. This account was confirmed by both Woolsey and the Clinton's consigliore Bruce Lindsey.
Considering the Justice Department's experience with Webster Hubbell, another Friend of Bill, Woolsey's decision may have done the CIA a great deal of good. But Clinton's pique did not make America any safer from bin Laden.
Another Clinton intelligence failure involved a refusal to help the CIA hire more Arabic language translators. In 1993, Woolsey learned that the agency was able to translate only 10 percent of its Arabic intercepts and badly wanted more translators. But Sen. Dennis DeConcini refused to approve the funds unless Clinton phoned him and said it was a presidential priority. Despite entreaties, Clinton never phoned the Democratic senator and the CIA didn't get those translators for years.
Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?
Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:
1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.
2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.
3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.
4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.
6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.
7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.
8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.
9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.
10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.
12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.
15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.
Lopez: You sorta defend Clinton against "wag the dog" criticisms in regard to that infamous August 1998 (Monica times) bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and some bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan. That wasn't the problem, was it — that we fired then?
Miniter: Certainly the timing is suspicious. The day before the East African-embassy bombings, Monica Lewinsky had recanted her prior affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. The sex scandals kicked into overdrive.
Still, the president wasn't doing too much in combating bin Laden because of his sex scandals — he was doing too little. He should have launched more missile strikes against bin Laden and the hell with the political timing. Besides, after the East African-embassy bombings, any president would have been negligent not to strike back. If he had not, it would be open season on Americans. He would have been as ineffectual as Carter was during the Tehran hostage crisis. Indeed, this was the mistake made following the attack on the USS Cole.
But Clinton was distracted by sex and campaign-finance scandals and his political support was already heavily leveraged to get him through those scandals. If he fought bin Laden more vigorously, the leftwing of the Democratic party might have deserted him — which could have cost him the White House.
Instead Clinton's token, ineffectual missile strikes that only emboldened bin Laden. He believed that America was too intimidated to fight back — and was free to plan one of the most-murderous terrorist attacks in history.
Lopez: How did George Tenet perform during the Clinton years vis-à-vis al Qaeda/bin Laden?
Miniter: Tenet seemed to take a too legalistic view of CIA operations. He was risk-averse, wanting almost absolute certainty before recommending action, focused on safeguards against error and unintended consequences. Tenet seemed more concerned with not getting in trouble rather than relentlessly pursuing results to safeguard Americans against terrorism, the focus of a warrior.
Each time U.S. intelligence pinpointed bin Laden, Tenet was against a missile strike on the grounds that the information was "single threaded" — a pet phrase of the director which means single source. The predator was armed and fitted with video cameras mostly to overcome Tenet's objections to taking out bin Laden.
Lopez: Madeline Albright — frequently called upon expert nowadays — what's her record vis-à-vis al Qaeda?
Miniter: Albright always insisted that diplomatic efforts would best yield results on bin Laden. Even after the Cole bombing, Albright urged continued diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to turn him over, even though that effort had been going on for two years with no progress. Two simple facts should have made Albright aware that the Taliban would never turn over bin Laden: Osama had married off one of his sons to Mullah Omar's daughter. The Taliban weren't about to surrender a member of the family — especially one that commanded thousands of armed fighters who helped maintain Omar's grip on power.
Lopez: What exactly is the Iraq-al Qaeda connection?
Miniter: Osama bin Laden's wealth is overestimated. He had been financially drained during his years in Sudan and financing terrorist operations in dozens of countries, including training camps, bribes, etc., requires a large, constant cash flow. Saddam Hussein was unquestionably a generous financier of terrorism. Baghdad had a long history of funding terrorist campaigns in the bin Laden-allied region that straddles Iran and Pakistan known as Beluchistan. Documents found in Baghdad in April 2003 showed that Saddam funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the 1990s. Saddam openly funded the Iraqi Kurdish Group and its leader, Melan Krekar, admitted that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan. George Tenet testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq had provided training in forging documents and making bombs. Farouk Harazi, a senior officer in the Iraqi Mukhabarat reportedly offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi intelligence operative, was arrested in October 2000 near the Afghan border, apparently returning from a visit to bin Laden. One of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin, reportedly fled to Baghdad in 1994. Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub in Khartoum; Sudanese intelligence officers told me about dozens of meeting between Iraqi Intel and bin Laden. Tellingly, reports that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague several times in 2000 and 2001 have not been disproved. I have far more on this in Appendix A of Losing bin Laden.
Lopez: What most surprised you to learn about the Clinton years and terrorism?
Miniter: Three things:
1) That the Sept. 11 attacks were planned in May 1998 in the Khalden Camp in southeastern Afghanistan, according to American and British intelligence officers I interviewed. In other words, the 9/11 attacks were planned on Clinton's watch.
2) The sheer number of bin Laden's attacks on Americans during the Clinton years.
3) And how much senior Clinton-administration officials knew about bin Laden and how little they did about it.
Lopez: This sounds like this could all be right-wing propaganda. How can you convince readers otherwise?
Miniter: Most of my best sources were senior Clinton officials, including both of his national-security advisers, his first CIA director, Clinton's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright, and others. Plus, I interviewed scores of career federal officials. None of them are card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
And, while I shine the light on Clinton's shortcomings in dealing with bin Laden, I also give credit where it is due. Chapter nine is all about one of the greatest (and least-known) Clinton victories over bin Laden — the successful thwarting of a series of plots to murder thousands of Americans on Millennium night, 1999.
If anyone has any doubts about the credibility of this book, they should read the acknowledgements, which list many of my sources. Or peruse the more than 15,000 words of footnotes, that allow the reader to see exactly where information is coming from. Or examine the intelligence documents reproduced in Appendix B. Or pick a page at random and read it. Any fair-minded reader will see a carefully constructed and balanced account that attempts to lay out the history of Clinton and bin Laden.
And yet, there is no getting around the fact that Israel is about to become the first modern, Western nation in more than 60 years to forcibly uproot a whole population -- men, women, children, babies -- solely because they are Jews. There is no getting around the fact that the forthcoming expulsions are rooted in the belief that any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein -- emptied of its Jews. And while it goes without saying that Sharon and every member of his government abominate the Nazis and all they stood for, there is no getting around the fact that disengagement is meant to appease an enemy that has always regarded the genocidal hatred of Jews in a very different light.
Long before there were "occupied territories", Haj Amin El-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of Palestine's Arabs, urged Hitler to "solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries... by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries." When five Arab armies invaded the newborn Israel in 1948, the secretary-general of the Arab League vowed to wage "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
More than half a century later, how much has changed? The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is the author of a book denying the Holocaust and claiming that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Palestinian Authority TV broadcasts poisonous diatribes, like one Friday sermon by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris. "The Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers," he preached. "The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature and have been throughout history."
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza changes nothing, the senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahard said recently. He told an Italian newspaper that Israel's existence would be unacceptable even if it were to retreat to the armistice lines of 1949. "In the end, Palestine... must become Muslim," he insisted. "And in the long term, Israel will disappear from the face of the Earth."
The abandonment of Gaza and northern Samaria plays directly into the hands of the haters. The sight of Jewish troops expelling Jewish families from their homes and schools will do nothing to promote Arab-Israeli peace. It will reinforce instead the notion that any Jewish presence is intolerable on land the Arabs claim for themselves. And if that is an argument against Jewish life in Gaza, it is also an argument against Jewish life in Israel.
Nazi Echoes in the Gaza 'Disengagement'?
Boston Globe Sunday, July 31, 2005^ Jeff Jacoby
The record states that lefties gave Jew-Killer Arafart their Nobel PEACE prize.
Earth to lefties, you are knocking (with millions from Soros) but you can't win elections. LOL.
I believe you will admit that the new law shielding gun manufacturers from the insanity of trial lawyers coming after them is is a direct result of sanity.
The trial lawyers are very unhappy and have go after corporations serving coffee now. Boo hoo for them.
They did better under Clinton.
The owner of the Baltimore Orioles got THREE BILLION as his lawyers fee in the tobacco settlement.
After all, the Justice Department under Clinton had more important things to go after than terrorists.
They had the tobacco companies and Bill Gates to go after.
The first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombing of the USS Cole, were of no importance to Butch Reno and Bill in comparison.
Ask the Kurds who gassed them, retard.
Last week Smith and Wesson went way up because of news that that stupidity was squelched.
They have stopped hundreds of them, you halfwit.
"The Israelis have had very little success stopping suicide bombers over many years. "
It's all our fault [PC Will Kill Us All]
Townhall ^ / August 1, 2005 / John Leo
In the wake of the London bombings, New York City is now searching the bags of subway riders. As you might expect, this is provoking the usual cluster of perverse reactions. Someone on Air America, the liberal talk radio network, suggested that riders carry many bags to confuse and irritate the cops. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, normally a sane fellow, has ordered that the searches be entirely random, to avoid singling out any one ethnic or religious group.
So if someone fits the suicide bomber profile—young Muslim male, short hair, recently shaved beard or mustache, smelling of flower water (a preparation for entering paradise)—the police must look away and search the nun or the Boy Scout behind him.
What’s the point of stopping a terrorist if you have to trample political correctness to do it?
Besides, the New York Civil Liberties Union opposes all bag searches. No surprise there. The national American Civil Liberties Union still opposes passenger screening at airports. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, historian Fred Siegel said that the Democrats, pegged as the party of criminals’ rights, are in danger of becoming the party of terrorists’ rights.
From the first moments after the attacks of 9/11, we had indicators that the left would not be able to take terrorism seriously. Instead of resolve, we got concern about emotional closure and “root causes,” warnings about the allegedly great danger of a backlash against Muslim Americans, arguments that violence directed at America is our own fault, and suggestions that we must not use force, because violence never solves anything. “We can’t bomb our way to justice,” said Ralph Nader.
The denial of the peril facing America remains a staple of the left. We still hear that the terrorism is a scattered and minor threat that should be dealt with as a criminal justice matter. In Britain last October, the BBC, a perennial leader in foolish leftism, delivered a three-part tv series arguing that terrorism is vastly exaggerated. Al Qaeda barely exists at all, the series argued, except as an idea that uses religious violence to achieve its ends. Besides, the series said, a dirty bomb would not kill many people and may not even kill anyone. This ho-hum approach isn’t rare. Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do.
The “our fault” argument seems permanently entrenched. After the London bombings, Norman Geras of the University of Manchester wrote in the Guardian that the root causes and blame-Blair outbursts were “spreading like an infestation across the pages of this newspaper . . . there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do.” That has been the case on both sides of the Atlantic. After 9/11, Michael Walzer, one of the most powerful voices on the left, warned about “the politics of ideological apology” for terrorism.
In the June 2005 issue of the American Prospect, he returned to the theme. “Is anybody still excusing terrorism?” he asked. “The answer is yes: Secret sympathy, even fascination with violence among men and women who think of themselves as ‘militants,’ is a disease, and recovery is slow.” Though the argument has shifted somewhat, he wrote, the problem is “how to make people feel that the liberal left is interested in their security and capable of acting effectively. We won’t win an election until we address this.”
Walzer’s analysis is a strong one. The Bush administration has botched many things, but large numbers of Americans go along with the president because he displays what the left apparently cannot: moral clarity and seriousness about what must be done.
When the ideas of the left come into view, the themes often include the closing of Guantánamo, attacks on the Patriot Act, opposition to military recruitment on campuses, casual mockery of patriotism (a whole art exhibit in Baltimore was devoted to the theme), and a failure to admit that defeating terrorism will require some trade-offs between security and civil liberties. Is this a serious program?
Real security, Walzer says, will depend on hunting down terrorist cells, cutting off the flow of money, and improving surveillance at key sites. He writes: “The burden is on us—nobody else—to make the case that these things can be done effectively by liberals and leftists who will also, in contrast to today’s Republicans, defend the civil liberties of American citizens.” Good argument. How will the left respond?
Jew-Hater ergo sum lives in a dream world--as do all lefties.
Fundamentally, we're useful idiots As the rest of Europe acts, extreme Islamists take advantage of British naivety
Timesonline ^ / 08/01/05 / Anthony Browne
ELEMENTS WITHIN the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists for the Soviet Union — useful idiots.
Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same.
The two fascisms, one racial and one religious, one beaten and the other resurgent, are evil in both their ideology and their methodology, in their supremacism, intolerance, belief in violence and threat to democracy.
The London bombings revealed only to those in denial the extent to which Islamic fascism has taken root. But we have a long way to go until we reach the level of understanding in mainland Europe. With one of the smallest Muslim populations in Western Europe, just 3 per cent of the total, Britain has been able to afford a joyful multicultural optimism. Other countries, with far bigger Islamic populations, from France to Germany to the Netherlands, have had to become far more hard-headed.
The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain’s Left. The wacko Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the Muslim Association of Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting group, to form the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George Galloway created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won a seat in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.
When I revealed on these pages last year both the fascist views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the fact that he was being welcomed to Britain by Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, it caused a storm that has still to abate. Mr Livingtone claims that Sheikh al-Qaradawi is a moderate — which he is, in the same way that Mussolini was.
The BBC and The Guardian regularly give space to MAB to promote sanitised versions of its Islamist views. John Ware, one of the BBC’s most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive. Last month it emerged that The Guardian employed a journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, who is a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that wants a global theocracy, and is described by the Home Office as “anti-Semitic, anti-Western and homophobic”. The Guardian used Dilpazier Aslam to report not just on the London bombings, but on Shabina Begum, the Luton schoolgirl who, advised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, won a court case allowing her to wear head-to-toe fundamentalist Islamic clothes.
The tale illustrates Britain’s naivety in many ways. Hizb ut-Tahrir is still legal, despite being banned in many European and Muslim countries, and despite President Musharraf of Pakistan pleading with Britain to ban it after it plotted to assassinate him. The useful idiots of the Left insisted that Ms Begum’s victory was a victory over Islamophobia, but even the Muslim Parliament of Britain gave warning that it was a “victory for fundamentalism”, bringing Shariah law one step closer.
In France, by contrast, the government ban on wearing the hijab, or Islamic veil, in schools was widely supported by the Left. It is impossible in France for radical Islamists to dupe useful idiots into supporting a pro-hijab campaign presenting it as pro-choice, as they did in Britain — because in France, the Left knows that the Islamists believe Muslim women should be compelled to wear the hijab.
Here the Government talks about deporting extremist imams, but does nothing. In contrast, France has deported ten radical imams in the past two years, with another one deported to Algeria last week, and ten more are under police surveillance. In France, no mosque is off limits to the police. While Britain welcomes Sheikh al-Qaradawi, Germany last week deported an imam who simply supported the Muslim Brotherhood. In Bavaria alone, 14 “hate preachers” have been deported since November 2004, and a further 20 have received notifications of deportation.
The Netherlands and Denmark, worried about the growth of ghettoised Muslim communities, have promoted integration, with the Netherlands insisting that those wanting to become immigrants take a test of Dutch language and the nation’s values before they are even given a visa. Both countries have clamped down on inter-continental arranged marriages — which are thought to comprise 70 per cent of Muslim marriages there, as in Britain — on the ground that they promote the creation of separatist communities. Such measures are barely on the radar in Britain.
Even post-bombing, Britain has a long way to go in its understanding of Islamic fascism. The tragedy is that we start daring to understand it only when innocent lives are lost.
Anthony Browne is Europe Correspondent of The Times
Ergo sum the Jew-Hater and hate-America lefty doesn't like it when the light is shone on his sickness.
Why don't you explain to us all about the experiment in Auschwitz first? Then you can tell us all about where your family served in the war.
Why don't you explain to us all about the experiment in Pearl Harbor first? Then you can tell us all about where your family served in the war.
Newly Discoverd Mary Jo Kopechne Photo
fatboy.cc ^ / Aug 1 2004 / Howie Carr
http://fatboy.cc/
Sicko lefty callsandputput gets hysterical when he is described as what he is---
A sick Hate-America leftwinger.
How many bombs must hit New York before the U.S. media differentiates terrorists from normal people?
RIA Novosti ^ / 29/ 07/ 2005 / Pyotr Romanov
MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Pyotr Romanov.) I am surprised that it sometimes takes my colleagues a long time to realize that they now live in a different world, a world suffering from international terrorism.
Moreover, in this world there is no difference between a "good" terrorist and a "bad" terrorist: All terrorists are bad and alien. Their hands are smeared with the blood of innocent victims. As a matter of fact, I have written about this repeatedly.
ABC, which apparently preaches freedom of speech, has given airtime to the most notorious Chechen terrorist, Shamil Basayev, who has even been blacklisted by the UN. Basayev admits complicity in bloody terrorist acts on Russian territory, including the murder of children.
The Russian Foreign Ministry will, of course, make a corresponding statement to its US colleagues. I myself want to ask my US counterparts whether they smelled drops of blood and dead human flesh while broadcasting Basayev's statements. It seems that Thomas Jefferson, one of U.S. democracy's founding fathers, had every reason to complain in old age that the vessel of freedom of the press could be filled with anything, even dirt.
Do ABC journalists dislike Russians and the Russian government? That is their problem. But do they like their fellow Americans who were killed in the horrendous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? Do they like the British citizens who died as a result of the bombing of the London Underground? And what about those killed in Spain and Egypt? Or do my colleagues still naively think that Chechens alone are fighting in Chechnya? I would like to tell them that foreign mercenaries have already outnumbered Chechen terrorists in the Caucasus.
Terrorists seized a school in Beslan last year. Many children were killed then.. There were two British subjects in the group. The terrorists were subsequently killed by the Russian special forces. It seems that London would have been rocked by additional bomb blasts if they managed to escape. Or they might have staged a terrorist attack in the United States.
I find it hard to imagine that my U.S. colleagues planned to achieve some goals other than to raise their channel's ratings when they gave airtime to Basayev.
They became famous, if that was their intention. But any other terrorist act on the part of Basayev will make them his accomplices.
Finally, the anti-terrorist coalition has once again displayed its inefficiency and a commitment to double standards. However, it is impossible to win the war against terrorism in such a way.
Church Bombings Outrage Iraqis of All Faiths
Neighbors Express a Sense of Collective Injury
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
BAGHDAD, Aug. 2 -- Two teenage sisters picked disconsolately through the wreckage of their bedroom Monday: Barbie dolls, movie magazines and a jumble of lingerie half-buried in the dust and debris from a car bomb that had exploded in the street below their window Sunday evening.
"What am I going to wear now?" wailed Rana, 16, lifting a ruined blouse from her bed and letting it drop.
Sarah Shammari, a Muslim whose family rented rooms to a Christian family, looks out her shattered window at the ruins of Lady of Salvation Church. (Pamela Constable -- The Washington Post)
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In the parlor downstairs, the girls' father, Majid Shammari, shook his head in anger. It was not the damage to his stately home that outraged him, said the graying Muslim engineer. It was the terrorists' cynical targeting of the Assyrian church next door, a community he said he had always been proud to know as a neighbor and friend.
"From the time of my birth, there has never been a question of whether you are Christian or Muslim," Shammari said, sweeping up shards of glass from a shattered fish tank. "We rent our upstairs to a Christian family, we share food with each other. The bonds between all of us are very strong. What cowards are these terrorists to hurt the innocent, to try and break those bonds? If that is their aim, I swear they will never, never succeed."
Shammari's determination was echoed by other residents who live near Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad's Karrada district. It was one of four Baghdad churches attacked in coordinated car bombings Sunday, including an Armenian church a few blocks away. A fifth church was bombed in the northern city of Mosul. U.S. military officials said at least 11 people were killed and 47 wounded.
The neighborhood is home to a diverse mix of Christian Arabs and Muslim Kurds, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Many have lived for years near the sand-colored stone church, built in 1961, that rises to a soaring double arch around an abstract cross. Above the wooden doors, an Arabic inscription reads, "Glory to God in heaven, and on Earth, peace."
A day after the bombing, neighbors of all faiths came out to inspect the tableau of charred vehicles, dangling power cables and sprays of broken glass surrounding a deep crater in the road between the church and Shammari's house. Many people peered through the locked church gates, and some paused to say a prayer.
Although the bomb was clearly aimed at the church and its congregation, a dozen houses and apartments nearby were damaged in the blast, and Muslims at home or in the street were wounded by the same shrapnel and flying glass that bloodied the fleeing worshipers, adding to a sense of collective victimization.
"We helped protect this church from looters during the war. It is a house of God, just like a mosque," said Khadima Wadi, 54, a Shiite woman who lives with nine relatives in a one-room house behind the church. The blast broke all the windows in her house and blew off part of the roof.
"We slaughtered a sheep to the Virgin Mary and prayed for our sons to be safe during the war," Wadi said. "Now we ask her to take revenge on these criminals."
Christians in the neighborhood emphasized that they had never felt any threat from Iraqi Muslims, and that the atmosphere in the community had been peaceful until Sunday's attacks. Some made a point of visiting their Muslim neighbors whose houses had been damaged, and the Rev. Rafael Kotaimi, the priest at Lady of Salvation, paid a personal call on the Shammari house.
Maryam and Sarah, two sisters who live across the street from Lady of Salvation and did not want to give their surname, were attending evening Mass when the bomb exploded outside. Within seconds, they said, the crowded sanctuary became a black, smoke-filled pit, filled with panicked screams and showered with deadly window glass.
"We've been going to that church for 17 years and nothing ever happened. After all, our religion is from ancient times in Babylon," said Sarah, sitting with her parents in an immaculate parlor with a small crucifix by the front door. "But now we are living in fear. We just want to live in peace with our neighbors, but now the terror has touched everything, even churches."
Despite most residents' insistence that the bombings would not drive a wedge between Muslims and Christians, there was an edgy, bitter tone to some of their comments. Several also cast blame on the U.S.-led forces who have occupied the country for months, saying they had permitted chaos and lawlessness to flourish.
Outside the church, Fadi, 26, a young engineer, stood staring at a wrecked car that had melted into the pavement. Then he looked up angrily.
"Before the Americans came, everything was fine," he said. "We all celebrated Easter and Christmas and Eid," a Muslim holiday. "We were out in the streets until midnight. Now there is no army, no police, no security on the borders. They say they brought us freedom, but look what this freedom has brought us."
A block away, at the Shammari home, a stream of sober-faced well-wishers picked their way among bloodstained rubble strewn across the front yard. A few feet beyond the collapsed wall, American soldiers impassively guarded the bomb site.
The engineer greeted each visitor gratefully, repeating the story of how he had heard the first bomb explode at the Armenian church and was rushing down the street to help when the second bomb went off next to his home.
His wife hung back in the shadows, her eyes red and her shirt still bloodstained from carrying a wounded child out of the church. The couple's two daughters came downstairs, dazed and dirt-streaked. They were lugging a plastic sack full of stuffed animals and singed clothing salvaged from their room.
"I guess we'll have to tear down the house and build another one," the father said matter-of-factly, gesturing at the devastation around him. The teenagers glanced at each other and burst into tears.
SCOBA/SCOOCH Statement On Iraq Church Bombings
PRESS RELEASE
August 5, 2004
SCOBA/SCOOCH Statement On Iraq Church Bombings
The hierarchs of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA) and the hierarchs of the Standing Conference of Oriental Orthodox Churches in America (SCOOCH) learned with great sadness the news that religious edifices were targeted by certain extremist elements in Iraq.
SCOBA and SCOOCH have been and are deeply committed to interfaith dialogue. In Iraq, citizens of different faith backgrounds have lived together peacefully and harmoniously for centuries. "We deplore the violent and destructive acts of persons seeking to create disharmony and division among people whose faiths derive from one common Abrahamic source," stated Archbishop Demetrios, chairman of SCOBA and Metropolitan Philip Saliba, vice-chairman of SCOBA.
Archbishop Barsamian, chairman of SCOOCH, added, "We pray for the victims of these divisive forces. We pray for the enlightenment of those who sow division. And we express our love for and solidarity with all persons of good will in Iraq."
NCCC General Secretary on Iraq church bombings
The National Council of Churches USA laments the attacks on the Christian communities in Baghdad. These communities trace their heritage in Iraq two thousand years, and during much of that time both they and their Muslim neighbors have lived peacefully side-by-side. This destructive action taken against the churches by extremists betrays that history of coexistence. We join our Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters of goodwill in Iraq and around the world in condemning this violence.
Dr. Bob Edgar
General Secretary
National Council of Churches
Religious leaders condemn Iraq church bombings
United Methodist News Service by Linda Bloom
United Methodists and other religious leaders have condemned the targeted attacks on Iraq's Christian minority.
In what appeared to be coordinated car bombings, explosions occurred at five churches during the customary period of Sunday evening mass on Aug. 1, killing at least 10 people and wounding about 47 others.
The Rev. R. Randy Day, chief executive of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, expressed deep grief for the innocent children and adults killed and noted that both Christians and Muslims were among the victims of the bombings. "All of the people of Iraq are God's children and we at the General Board of Global Ministries mourn the loss of each and every life," he said.
"We continue to condemn, in the strongest terms, all acts of violence, by individuals and institutions both domestic and foreign, in Iraq, a country that has suffered far too much to date," Day added.
According to various news sources, the targeted churches included the Armenian Catholic Church in the Karrada District of central Baghdad; the Syrian Catholic Church at Saydat Al Najat, about a half mile away; the Korkis Chaldean Church in Doura, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad; an Assyrian church in the New Baghdad District and the Mar Boulos Chaldean Church in Mosul.
The Rev. Larry Pickens, chief executive of the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, also condemned the bombings. "The direct attack upon people of faith in the holy sites does not in any way further any agenda other than the fostering of hatred and disunity," he said.
"It is our hope that an environment of greater tolerance will prevail and that those who are responsible for this targeted violence would cease these senseless acts," Pickens added.
The Rev. Robert Edgar, a United Methodist pastor and chief executive of the National Council of Churches, has visited churches and met with church leaders in Iraq. "These communities trace their heritage in Iraq two thousand years and during much of that time both they and their Muslim neighbors have lived peacefully side-by-side," he said. "This destructive action against the churches by extremists betrays that history of coexistence."
James Winkler, chief executive of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, also pointed to the long history of Christian communities in Iraq. "I pray that we United Methodists will be generous in our assistance to them in this time of need and loss," he said. "Let us also work to bring this war to an end as soon as possible."
Edgar said the NCC has worked with the World Conference of Religions for Peace, whose moderator has met with Iraqi religious leaders forming an interreligious council.
In an Aug. 2 statement, The Religions for Peace moderator, His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal, called the church attacks "a new escalation in the extremists' effort to incite a religious war" and "a particularly obscene blasphemy against the spirit of Islam and the character of Iraq."
He pointed out that Iraqis had never attacked a church before. "The international Muslim community has always justly taken pride in our protection of religious minorities who lived and took shelter among us," he said.
Leaders from nearly every major Muslim group in Iraq spoke out forcefully against the bombings, according to an Aug. 3 article in The New York Times.
In an Aug. 2 statement, the Middle East Council of Churches called upon Iraq's authorities "to cooperate intensively in order to prevent intercommunal discord and to frustrate the machinations of the evil ones who want to drive a wedge between Christians and Muslims who have long lived together as one people."
Middle Eastern Christian leaders attending a World Council of Churches meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, also condemned the attacks.
Day said his agency would continue to support "the vital work" of the Middle East Council of Churches - whose own offices near the Armenian Catholic Church were damaged - as well as work with others on humanitarian relief efforts and Christian-Muslim dialogue in Iraq.
Some humanitarian workers are beginning to return to Baghdad despite the ongoing violence, according to Rick Augsburger, director of emergency programs for Church World Service (CWS).
CWS and the "All My Children Campaign" have supplied aid to children there by working with local Iraqis to deliver supplies and services. Since the campaign started 14 months ago, its projects have directly benefited more than 200,000 children through assistance to clinics, hospitals, a children's theater project and safe water supply projects. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has been a participant in the campaign.
CAIR Condemns Iraq Church Bombings
Sunday, August 01, 2004
A prominent national Islamic civil rights and
advocacy group today condemned bombings at five churches in Iraq that left at least 11 people dead and many more wounded. The attacks were carried out during Sunday evening services.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said:
"We condemn these vicious attacks in the strongest terms possible. The
identity of the perpetrators is not known, but their motive of creating
religious divisions is obvious. Harming those engaged in worship violates
the principles of all faiths. Religiously and historically, Islam mandated
the protection of churches and synagogues. The Prophet Muhammad and his
successors sought to protect houses of worship and the communities they
serve. We offer condolences to the families of those killed and injured,
and call for increased security measures at all religious sites in Iraq."
CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil liberties group, is headquartered in
Washington, D.C., and has 28 regional offices nationwide and in Canada.
Iraq church bombings leave empty pews
Oct. 17, 2004 The Associated Press -
By Scheherezade Faramarzi
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - For the first time in their lives, Widad Mikho and her sister Neshwan will not attend Mass on Sunday, too frightened after a series of
church bombings across Baghdad.
But fear will not keep Dana George away. ``It would be better to die in church than anywhere else,'' she said.
Iraq's Christians, increasingly targeted by insurgents, are fleeing Baghdad for the safety of the Kurdish north or neighboring Syria and Jordan. After Saturday's
bombings of five churches - which damaged buildings but caused no casualties - Christian leaders fear more will leave.
But the exodus is temporary, insist many, because they are not selling their homes and property. They will wait it out and return when the situation improves.
Pascale Isho Warda, a Christian who is interim government's minister for displacement and migration, estimated as many as 15,000 out of Iraq's nearly
1 million Christians have left the country since August, when four churches in
Baghdad and one in Mosul were blown up in a coordinated series of car bombings.
The attacks killed 12 people and injured 61 others. Another church was bombed
in Baghdad in September. Saturday's ``explosions will no doubt push people to immigrate,'' said Father Raphael Qutaimi, acting bishop of the Syrian Catholic Church. ``But this country has been ours for thousands of years. Our ancestors shed blood defending it. We mustn't leave it.''
He and all the dozen Christians interviewed Saturday said the attacks were not the work of Muslim Iraqis, but foreigners.
``The foreigner is trying to create division and enmity between Christians and Muslims. We must stand hand in hand and heart to heart and not give the
outsider cause to divide us,'' Qutaimi said.
``They want us to leave Iraq,'' said Surah Samaan, a 25-year-old lab technician,
referring to the attackers, who she believes are Arabs linked to al-Qaida.
But Yonadem Kana, secretary general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, said the general security situation of the country - car bombings, kidnappings and murders, which affect all of Iraq's religious groups - had chased away many
Christians.
``They figure instead of staying and paying $50,000 to kidnappers for ransom,
they can spend $5,000 in Latakia or Damascus,'' he said, referring to two cities
in neighboring Syria.
He said more than 100 Christians had been murdered after the U.S.-led war, including 35 liquor vendors and others who worked for coalition forces. About 200 more have died in the general violence that has gripped Iraq. Insurgents have been targeting many Iraqis who are seen as helping the U.S.-led forces, and extremist militiamen have often targeted people in occupations seen as breaking Islamic rules.
Never in Iraq, Kana said, had a church been attacked, not since the days of the
Mongols, who massacred 800,000 of Baghdad's residents and destroyed the
city in the 13th century.
Neshwan Mikho, 46, has been cleaning the Saint John's Church in the working class neighborhood of Bataween every Saturday for the past seven years undeterred by rain, sandstorms or even shellings. ``But today, I was afraid to go when I heard the news,'' she said.
She said she and her sister, Widad, 60, who lives with her, will not catch the 6:30 a.m. bus that takes them to church every Sunday.
``I am sad in my heart because tomorrow I will not be attending mass,'' said
Widad, a Chaldean Christian. ``They are denying us what is most important thing in our lives.''
She has been living in a state of near paranoia since the August church attacks.
At night, she said, she wakes up four or five times to look out the window to
make sure no one's standing outside.
``We are targets from both sides - for being Iraqis like everyone else and for being Christians in particular,'' said Widad, a retired nurse.
She and her sister would like to leave for good for Australia, where their two
other sisters live. But they cannot afford it.
``What can we do? They are shelling our church, they might break into our homes tomorrow and the next day force us to wear the veil,'' said Widad.
Bassem Samir Khouri, a legal adviser in the interim Education Ministry, will also skip Sunday mass but is staying put in Iraq.
He said throughout the years, Iraq's Christians had kept to themselves trying to
keep out of trouble. With the country in turmoil now, Muslims are asking why the Christians aren't taking sides on the question of Fallujah or other trouble
spots where anti-American insurgency is strong.
Dana George, 60, would like to leave the country if only for the sake of her three grown children. But her husband won't hear of it. So for now, she will continue
going to her St. Matthew's Church despite the attacks.
She feels indebted to God for protecting her and her family all those difficult
years under Saddam. ``Now I feel it's my duty to pay him back,'' she said. Samaan said Christians are vulnerable in predominantly
Muslim Iraq.
``There's nobody to help us. Muslims have the support of their tribe. The
Pope is our only power, but doesn't help us,'' she said. She said she would like to leave Iraq for good. Where would she like to go?
``Anywhere - out of the Arab world - where they all think we are infidels,'' she
said.
Terrorists bomb church in Pakistan
latest news / India Defence ^ / Daily Times
QUETTA: A bomb exploded outside a church in Kohlu (Balochistan) on Saturday, shattering windows and damaging a wall but causing no injuries, police said.
“It was a homemade bomb that had been planted by unidentified terrorists near the church in Kolhu,” a town about 350 kilometres east of Quetta, said area police official Mohammad Khan.
He said two more small bombs exploded in the same town, causing no casualties.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blasts, and police were still investigating, Khan said. Bomb disposal squad personnel said the bombs were Russian. Separately, Quetta Police on Saturday found and defused a 10-kg bomb at Aalmo Chowk (roundabout) on Airport Road.
The bomb, rigged to a bicycle, was meant to target a security agency convoy, which passed the site within minutes of the bomb being defused. agencies
Your insane bin-Laden-Hussein muslims in Iraq blow up the Christian churches already there in Iraq.
Have you missed the news, halfwit?
Or does your leftwing "news" black out such things, huh, lefty?
Your lovely bin-Laden-Hussein muslims also blow up lots of fellow muslims at their mosques in Iraq.
Of course your "news" feed never let you know that either. LOL.
Osama and his muslims got their asses kicked by the Armenians in Georgia when they tried to stick their nose in there. Osama and his muslims left beaten, with their tails between their legs.
The Armenians (orthdox Christians) weren't about to let muslims get away with anything after their experience with the Turks in the Armenian genocide by the (muslim) Turks which killed more than half of the population of Armenia.
Iran Opens Garrison to Recruit Suicide Bombers Against West
Iran Focus News ^ / July 22, 2005 / Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 22 – A military garrison has been opened in Iran to recruit and train volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations”, according to the garrison’s commander, Mohammad-Reza Jaafari.
Jaafari, a senior officer in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), told a hard-line weekly close to Iran’s ultra-conservative President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the new “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison” (Gharargahe Asheghane Shahadat, in Persian) would recruit individuals willing to carry out suicide operations against Western targets.
The full text of the original interview in Persian can be seen on the weekly’s website at www.partosokhan.ir/283/page08.pdf .
“The Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison has been activated and we will form a Martyrdom-seeking Division for each province in the country, organised in brigades, battalions and companies to defend Islam”, Jaafari told the weekly Parto-Sokhan.
The weekly is published in the Shiite holy city of Qom by the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute. The institute’s chairman, hard-line cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, is regarded as the ideological mentor of President-elect Ahmadinejad.
The weekly carried a report in its July 13 issue on a meeting between Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi and the commander of Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison. Jaafari was quoted by the weekly as saying that the organisation of "martyrdom-seeking popular forces" was being implemented on the basis of instructions from the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
In the earlier interview, the garrison commander spoke in glowing terms of the newly-elected president.
“I have personally met Dr. Ahmadinejad, the distinguished mayor of Tehran”, Jaafari said. “He is a Bassiji [member of the Revolutionary Guards’ paramilitary forces] and I recommend other officials to make him a role model”.
The commander said that “in Tehran alone, there will be four martyrdom-seeking divisions”, adding that “we are currently in the process of recruitment and organisation and soon volunteers will receive training in accordance to their assigned missions”.
The weekly’s interview with Jaafari appeared under the title, “Commander of Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison: Let America and Israel know, each of our suicide volunteers equals a nuclear bomb”.
Jaafari told the weekly that his organisation had set up branches all over Iran and was in particular aiming to convince young persons to enlist for “martyrdom-seeking operations”.
“One of our garrison’s aims is to spot martyrdom-seeking individuals in society and then recruit and organise them, so that, God willing, at the right moment when the Commander-in-Chief of the country’s armed forces [Ayatollah Khamenei] gives the order, they would be able to enter the scene and carry out their missions”, Jaafari said.
“The Imam [Khomeini] said years ago that Israel must be wiped off the face of the Earth, but so far practical steps have not been taken to achieve this”, the garrison commander said. “Our garrison must spot, recruit, organise and train martyrdom-seeking persons to be able to materialise this objective. Any delay in fulfilling the strategy of the Imam and the Supreme Leader in this regard will not be to the advantage of Islam or the revolution”.
“The United States should know that we have nuclear weapons, but they are in the hearts of our suicide bombers”, Jaafari added.
Jaafari is a senior commander who has met with Khamenei on several occasions, according to the interview. He was chairman of the First Conference in Honour of Unknown Martyrs in Tehran earlier this month. The event was widely reported by Iran’s state-run media, which cited Jaafari’s remarks.
LEE, If that is true, it's time to call the missing person's bureau and report yourself.
What does retard Jimmy say about 9-11?
What does retard Jimmy say about bombing subways?
What does retard Jimmy say about chopping off heads?
Interview With A Former ACLU Lawyer
Ezine Articles ^ / 17 July 05 / By John Stephenson
http://ezinearticles.com/?Interview-With-A-Former-ACLU-Office&id=51844
I had the benefit of getting an interview with Mr. Reese Lloyd, a former ACLU lawyer affiliated with the largest Veterans Organization in America, the American Legions. When I called the media relations department there and inquired about their support for Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 , this is the man they referred me to. I soon found out why. This was a very passionate, wise, and well spoken man.
I first inquired of his history with the ACLU, how he became employed with them, and why he eventually disassociated himself with them. He informed me that he had worked two janitor jobs while attending law school. One day the ACLU did some kind of fellowship interview, and he was given an internship with them. He eventually went on to be on their staff. He focused in the area of worker’s rights with special attention to the deprivation of speech in the workplace…such as whistleblowers.
So why did he leave them? He said, “it was in part because around that time they established a separation of Church and State Staff Position.” He informed me that, “This was funded by Norman Lear and several other Hollywood millionaires.” It seems even back then that Hollywood sided with the secular left. He went on to say that, “the very purpose of this staff position was to push “establishment clause” lawsuits against the government.”
At this point he got pretty fired up, and dominated the conversation for a while. I didn’t mind…what he had to say was passionate and cut right to the truth of things.
“I think it is important that we shouldn’t forget that we had a civil rights movement that was needed in our history at the time. I was around to see segregated bathrooms. There were black and white water fountains. You could sit at a lunch counter next to someone like Charles Manson because he was white, but not someone like Martin Luther King Jr. because he was black. The ACLU played a helpful role in the civil rights movement defending these people, and I can’t turn my back on that. I have to give credit where credit is due.”
“But….that being said, what they have done in the past is completely eviscerated by what they do in the present. The ACLU has become a fanatical anti-faith Taliban of American religious secularism.”
I don’t think I could have come up with a better more colorful description myself. I think I will be sending him a Stop The ACLU T-Shirt. But wait…he was just getting warmed up! He went on to say….
“I have done more cases for minorities and civil rights violations myself than the whole bunch of them put together. I was in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement. They can’t tell me anything about civil rights. We did that 40 years ago, and we accomplished that goal. There are now laws protecting people from those things we fought against. The Civil Rights movement has now taken some crazed “Jesse Jackson” turn to the point that often it is now the white people that are being discriminated against.”
I must say that in this world of political correctness this guy was bold, blunt, and to the point. Keep in mind this is coming from a guy who fought the battle of Civil Rights, a soldier who fought for them, and an esteemed former Commander of an American Legions post in Banning, California. He continued…
The ACLU is an elitist organization bent on the social engineering of our Country in defiance of both the legislative and executive branches. What they are involved in is secular cleansing of American History.”
He asked if I were familiar with how Stalin airbrushed people like Trotsky out of photos in order to rewrite history. He went on to compare that to how what the ACLU is trying to do with Christianity in American history. He pointed out many similarities.
Then he got to the good stuff! He repeated….
“The ACLU is involved in the secular cleansing of our history. This is not just a fight about free exercise, but about the protection of our American history. The ACLU want to deny America the knowledge of their Christian heritage.”
“For example, the Ten Commandments in Court Houses. I don’t think this is an “endorsement” of religion. It is an acknowledgment of our history. I don’t care if it causes discomfort to Islamic terrorists, Islamic terrorist sympathizers, or Hindus and their holy cows.”
At this point I felt like saying, ….Bwhahahahah! However I restrained myself like the nice guy that I am. I’m glad I did, cause this is when he got the really good stuff.
“This is a Christian Nation! And we ought to be damn proud it is! Because it is only in Christian Nations where you will find freedom of religion. We are a Christian Nation, and the U.S. Supreme Court said so. The Supreme Court in HOLY TRINITY CHURCH v. U.S. that this is a Christian Nation. That is our history. The history the ACLU wants to erase.”
“Secular Humanism is a religion. Again, the Supreme Court ruled this in Torcaso vs. Watkins. If this is true, then it is being given precedence over other religions in our nation today.”
I finally asked the question that I primarily called for. Knowing that the American Legion is supporting The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 would it affect the ability of a poor person to defend their religious liberty by having to pay attorney fees out of pocket? To this question he answered….
“Absolutely not! This legislation would only apply to “Establishment Clause” cases. This would help to keep organizations from being paid attorney’s fees in cases such as the ones where the ACLU is fighting to take down our Veterans’ Memorials. It would only affect these kinds of suits. The “Free Exercise” is not affected at all. So someone defending their right to express religion could still collect attorney’s fees.”
“The ACLU crossed the damn line when they denied the Boyscouts charter on U.S. Military Bases. People need to stand up on this. The American Legion has a creed we say now…“For God and Country Forever! Surrender To The ACLU, Never!” We have 2.7 million members and we are stepping up. And when we step, we march, we don’t mince.”
Stop The ACLU.Com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
The religion of hate.