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It isn't every morning that you wake up and read in the newspaper that one of the worlds most dangerous terrorists has been released on bail but that is exactly what happened today when the New York Times reported on the release of Abu Doha (aka Amar Makhlouf, aka the Doctor, aka Rachid) from custody in the UK. For those that aren't familiar with Abu Doha it is worth re-stating the threat he posed to American and western interests during the late 1990s and period prior to 9/11. He is widely known to have been a senior leader within the...

Should be a no-brainer, but just in case, here’s a recommendation for Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person In The World Award tonight. Husam Taysir Dwayat. He’s the terrorist who killed three people and wounded 66 during his bulldozer rampage in Jerusalem today. Certainly that’s the caliber of person Olbermann’s award is designed to recognize?

On Sunday the Israeli cabinet voted 22-3 in favor of a “prisoner” swap with Hezbollah. Israel, on its side of the bargain, won’t be receiving any prisoners but instead the corpses of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the two soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006, along with partial, inadequate information on Ron Arad, the airman shot down over Lebanon in 1986. Hezbollah, for its part, gets five live terrorists including child-killer Samir Kuntar, dozens of corpses of terrorists, information on four Iranian diplomats who were detained by Christian Phalange forces in Lebanon in 1982, and live Palestinian terrorists whose number...

President Bush will soon decide whether to close Guantanamo Bay as a prison for al-Qaeda suspects, sources tell ABC News. High-level discussions among top advisers have escalated in the past week, with the most senior administration officials in continuous talks about the future of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay--and how it will be dramatically changed and/or closed in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that gave detainees there access to federal courts. Sources have confirmed that President Bush is expected to be briefed on these pressing GTMO issues--and may reach a decision on the future of the naval...

ELECTION 2008 Obama campaign site: Free Islamic terrorist! Posted: June 29, 2008 8:02 pm Eastern By Aaron Klein © 2008 WorldNetDaily "We are all Palestinians" post JAFFA, Israel – A blog posting on Sen. Barack Obama's official campaign site urged Americans to take action to secure the release of imprisoned terrorist fundraiser Sami Al-Arian, comparing the controversial former professor to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The posting, which has been removed since publication of this story, is just a sampling of a large volume of racist, anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian rhetoric published on the user-friendly MyObama community blog pages. The...

As the November presidential election draws near, the issue of Iran’s nuclear program will undoubtedly be thrust to the forefront of the candidates’ debate. Senator Obama has advocated direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without any preconditions whatsoever. Senator McCain has rejected that idea, instead choosing to focus on continued diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions backed by the threat of military force as a last resort. No matter which candidate is elected this fall, the new president will be faced with the same two basic options currently on the table for dealing with Iran: continued diplomatic efforts coupled with economic sanctions,...

Mexico City - An estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants from South America, the Caribbean and Central America pay Mexican gangs to help them transit Mexico and cross into the United States every year, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission said Wednesday. This illegal trade brings 'extraordinary earnings' since each person pays 4,000 to 15,000 dollars. In total, this would mean some 2 to 7.5 billion dollars a year, the commission said. The commission, which also said Mexican officials deport an estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants every year, released the report just two weeks after a high profile illegal transit case made headlines. An...

GAZA CITY — U.S. volunteers with military backgrounds have been recruited to help train the new Hamas army in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources said one of the Americans was former U.S. Army captain Fares Al Ashi. "This information is important for the youth," Al Ashi said during a briefing to visiting journalists in Gaza City. The sources said Al Ashi, a specialist in explosives and weapons, had been trained in South Carolina during his years with the U.S. military. "We give them general information about the explosives, those manufactured locally and the Israeli ones, because those people always reach...

A majority of people in India feel that use of torture on terrorists is justified if it could help save innocent lives, a new survey of 19 nations shows.      India bucks the trend in the poll, which saw most people favouring an unequivocal rule against torture, even in the case of terrorists who have information that could save lives of innocent people.      But four nations, including India, lean toward favouring an exception in the case of terrorists, according to the WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19,063 respondents, released ahead of the International Victims of Torture Day on June 26.     ...

Last week's 5-4 Supreme Court decision creating a new right of access to civilian courts for prisoners of war is being described as a rebuke to the Bush administration. Not exactly. The court essentially is rebuking itself. As Paul Mirengoff explains at powerlineblog.com, the court ordered a collaborative effort by Congress and the White House two years ago to resolve disagreements over the rights of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then voided the result of that compromise. Chief Justice John Roberts called the majority's ruling "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this...

Friday, June 20, 2008 http://boortz.com/nuze/200806/06202008.html - truth THE TRUTH ABOUT THE OBAMA RALLY MUSLIMS We've come to learn a little more information about these poor, victimized Muslim girls that were not allowed to sit behind Barack Obama at a rally because his staff didn't want him to be pictured with Muslims. Oh and by the way, this was all the Republicans fault. Debbie Schlussel has done some great research to reveal who these two girls are ... Once the CAIR crowd got involved the Obama campaign started to quake. Now these girls have been invited invited to a future Obama...

Suspected Al Qaeda leader Abu Qatada is celebrating his release from prison with the release of a book in which he urges Muslims to commit terrorist attacks in the West. In the 71-page tract, published in English translation on the internet, he repeatedly claims that fighting jihad, holy war, is obligatory for all Muslims and urges them to 'terrorise' non-believers. Security sources say his clear incitement to violence makes a mockery of the decision to set him free. The preacher of hate, who has been described as Osama Bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe, was released on bail from Long...

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2008 – Terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq employ improvised explosive devices as a weapon of choice to sap the willpower of the American people, a senior U.S. officer said here today. Terrorists use IEDs “as a strategic weapon to wear our will down, because our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines can whip this thing, tactically,” Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, told attendees at the 2008 Joint Warfighting Conference. Metz compared the enemy’s strategy today in Afghanistan and Iraq to what occurred more than 30 years ago in...

CAIRO, Egypt — Israel and the radical Islamic group Hamas have agreed on a truce to begin Thursday, Egypt's state-owned news agency said Tuesday. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said the group is committed to the truce deal. Israeli officials declined to confirm a deal, but said Israel's negotiator in the truce talks was rushing to Cairo and that they were "cautiously optimistic."...(more at link)

The Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that the writ of habeas corpus should apply to non-American terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The Taliban delivered its own commentary on the ruling the very next day, when it busted into a prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and freed 1,150 prisoners, of whom 400 are Taliban members and the other 750 easy potential conscripts. Call it habeas corpus, Taliban-style. The connection between these events is not merely their timing. The point of keeping enemy combatants at a remote location like Guantanamo is that it offers some assurance that they...

(IsraelNN.com) A Gaza-based organization has expressed "deep concern" at the recurrence of "internal explosions" caused by the manufacture and storing of weapons in civilian areas. The PCHR (Palestinian Center for Human Rights) released its statement after Thursday's tremendous explosion in a large house in northern Gaza, which killed an infant, a 16-year-old and six terrorists. Forty people were wounded in the blast. PCHR announced it is "deeply concerned about the recurrence of internal explosions as a result of weapons being manufactured, and stored, in areas populated by civilians. These actions are threatening the lives and property of Palestinian civilians." PCHR...

"Justice Scalia is right that today’s opinion will result in the death of Americans. His words remind me of the beleaguered FBI agent, Harry Sammit, who pleaded with his superiors at FBI headquarters to be allowed to launch a nationwide manhunt for Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers on my brother’s plane, 3 weeks before 9/11. He was turned down by the lawyers in the National Security Law Unit of the FBI, who cited the FISA law that prevented this intelligence information from being used by the criminal division. The point of that law — known as...

Five members of the US Supreme Court just sided with known terrorists currently detained at Gitmo in Cuba. In doing so, they not only provided “aid and comfort” to enemies of our state, but offered Constitutional Rights written solely to protect the rights of innocent legal US citizens to known terrorists, and placed every American life in mortal danger in that process. You can read the USA Today column on the subject here. Our silence is our consent. We have been far too tolerant for far too long. We can no longer afford to be silent in our dissent my...

June 13, 2008 HP-1023 Washington - The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated the Kuwait-based Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) for providing financial and material support to al Qaida and al Qaida affiliates, including Lashkar e-Tayyiba, Jemaah Islamiyah, and Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya. RIHS has also provided financial support for acts of terrorism. "Designating and freezing the assets of an organization engaged in charitable work is a decision not taken lightly because the last thing we want to do is cut off needed humanitarian assistance," said Stuart Levey, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. "However, the reality is that...

CLEVELAND (AP) -- Three Ohio men were convicted Friday of plotting to recruit and train terrorists to kill American soldiers in Iraq, a case put together with help from a former soldier who posed as a radical bent on violence.

A jury on Friday convicted three men of Middle Eastern descent of plotting to recruit and train terrorists to kill American soldiers in Iraq. The men — Mohammad Amawi, 28, Marwan El-Hindi, 45, and Wassim Mazloum, 27 — face a maximum sentence of life in prison. Prosecutors said the men were learning to shoot guns and make explosives while raising money to fund their plans to wage a holy war against U.S. troops. Defense attorneys charged that the three defendants, who all lived in the Toledo area, were manipulated by a government informant. The jury returned its verdict after three...

Thursday's 5-4 decision awarding "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo --terrorists-- the "privilege of the writ of habeas corpus" has left millions of Americans stunned. What in the world is the majority of the Supreme Court thinking? Justice Scalia, writing in dissent, was blunt: America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United...

I have been invited by Aljazeera English to debate today's ruling by the USSC granting rights to terrorist suspects at Gitmo. You may view the live webcast at 9pm EST tonight.

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court had done today," Justice Antonin Scalia writes at the end of his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, extended rights under the U.S. constitution to enemy combatants who have never set foot on U.S. soil. It's worth noting that the nation has lived to regret things the court has done in earlier wars. In Schenck v. U.S. (1919), the court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party leader for distributing an anticonscription flier during World War...

A Supreme Court decision granting terrorism suspects the right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts has touched off a scramble at the federal courthouse in Washington. Nearly 200 lawsuits by Guantanamo Bay detainees have been on hold for months as federal judges waited for word on whether they had the authority to move forward. The lawsuits claim that the Bush administration is holding the detainees illegally. The right to file such lawsuits has been around since the Magna Carta and was written into the Constitution, but the Bush administration argued that Guantanamo Bay detainees aren't covered by it. Congress...

BUSH'S AMERICA: 100 PERCENT AL-QAIDA FREE SINCE 2001June 11, 2008 In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised. I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents. Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and...

Officials have been trying to keep it quiet, but 24 UC Berkeley researchers and seven staffers have been harassed by animal rights activists in recent months, in some cases having their homes or cars vandalized."What they all have in common is that they all work in animal research," UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders said of the targeted employees. In several instances, the activists have shown up outside researchers' homes in the middle of the night with bullhorns and chanting, "Animal killers." Sometimes they have scrawled slogans on the sidewalk in chalk.On more than one occasion, rocks have been thrown through...

The three protesters who scaled the Golden Gate Bridge and unfurled "Free Tibet" banners while suspended 150 feet over traffic a couple of days before the big Olympic torch run in April will have all the charges against them dismissed once they complete 25 hours of community service.Thanks to a decision by San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office, the three were eligible for pretrial diversion and community service - and the court officials in charge of picking the community service sent them to Students for a Free Tibet. Shouldn't be too onerous, since the three were already affiliated with...

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher on Wednesday dismissed the idea that taunting terrorism suspects with women's panties is a form of torture. In a debate about detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the California Republican cited panties eight times, arguing that making suspected terrorists wear women's underwear on their heads isn't demeaning and degrading enough to be called torture. "You're suggesting that the behavior of, what, panties on his head ... is unacceptable interrogation technique for a man who was involved in a conspiracy to kill tens of thousands of Americans?" Rohrabacher asked during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Rohrabacher was...

Ever since World War II, we have been driven by a passionate desire to understand how mass genocide, terror states and global war came about – and how we can prevent them in the future. Above all, we have sought answers to several basic questions: Why did the West fail to see the coming of the catastrophe? Why were there so few efforts to thwart the fascist tide, and why did virtually all Western leaders, and so many Western intellectuals, treat the fascists as if they were normal political leaders, instead of the virulent revolutionaries they really were? Why did...

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2008 – U.S. Central Command is part of an Interagency Task Force for Irregular Warfare, a CentCom operations section initiative that recently stood up to track and target “violent and extreme actors” in the command’s area of operations, the Air Force general who’s spearheading the effort said yesterday. “Regionally, we look at influences of extreme actors that are malign that would provide, from within their borders, exporting either violence or activities that would be disruptive to their neighbors,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, CentCom’s deputy director of operations, said to online journalists and bloggers during...

Abu Hamza's Muslim lawyer earns £1m a year in legal aid from representing terror suspects   By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 12:47 PM on 06th June 2008  Muddassar Arani, the solicitor who represented Abu Hamza, leaves the Old Bailey in London, during his trial in 2007. A solicitor who specialises in representing terror suspects and tells them not to cooperate with police was paid almost £1 million in legal aid last year.   Muddassar Arani's firm represented Abu Hamza, dirty bomb plotter Dhirin Barot and three of the 21/7 bombers in recent years. She has raked in...

Norquist's Muslim Protégés By Paul Sperry FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/3/2008 If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That appears to be the strategy of GOP powerbroker Grover Norquist in his wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government. While he's managed to get some of his Muslim proteges jobs in the Bush administration, getting them elected to public office has been another story. Voters aren't buying their makeover. Last November, his crony Faisal M. Gill lost a bid for a seat in the Virginia state legislature. Now another protege, Kamal M. Nawash,...

If you are a wannabe terrorist with hate in your heart, do not despair. The doctor will see you now. Over a cup of tea and a few Rorschach inkblot tests, he will sort out this silly jihad nonsense once and for all. Custard cream? Now let's concentrate on the cards. The Home Office has just announced an extra £12.5 million in funding to support counselling initiatives in an attempt to stop extremism spreading. How very kind. This is the same Government that would not help a 64-year-old, tax-paying, law-abiding woman dying of cancer - because she had the temerity...

The NYT ran an op-ed that for me answers a question that’s surfaced from time to time. Knowing what I do about the culture in the Middle East and the need to speak to militant Muslims in terms they understand, the word “terrorist�, while useful for Western audiences, suffers from a translation problem when the message is focused at the Arabic-speaking world. Now, along comes this: IMAGINE if Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken to calling Adolf Hitler the “leader of the National Socialist Aryan patriots� or dubbed Japanese soldiers fighting in World War II as the “defenders of Greater East...

BOSTON (AP) -- A federal judge has reversed some of the convictions of three former Islamic charity leaders in Massachusetts who were accused of duping the government to hide pro-jihad activities. The three men had been convicted in January. However, a federal judge in Worcester, Mass., overturned their conspiracy convictions Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor IV also overturned tax charges against two of the men — Samir Al-Monla and Emadeddin Muntasser. The judge says prosecutors did not prove the men tried to hide information from the Internal Revenue Service.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That appears to be the strategy of GOP powerbroker Grover Norquist in his wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government. While he's managed to get some of his Muslim proteges jobs in the Bush administration, getting them elected to public office has been another story. Voters aren't buying their makeover. Last November, his crony Faisal M. Gill lost a bid for a seat in the Virginia state legislature. Now another protege, Kamal M. Nawash, has lost his third political race in seven years....

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That appears to be the strategy of GOP powerbroker Grover Norquist in his wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government. While he’s managed to get some of his Muslim proteges jobs in the Bush administration, getting them elected to public office has been another story. Voters aren’t buying their makeover.

TORTURE OR REASONABLE FORCE? Okay, torture sucks. So, too, does the idea of people being detained without right to counsel, without the freedom to protest their status, etc. Now let’s move on to a hypothetical. Picture yourself in a situation in which you have excellent reason to believe that your family has been targeted by some fanatical, religious nutcase and the nutcase’s buddies. You have irrefutable information that their plan is to execute you, your wife, kids, grandkids, friends, neighbors, everyone you know, and they’ve already shown their expertise at such executions by killing thousands of others. Their Nutcase Army...

W vs. Terror By John Hinderaker IT'S an article of faith on the left that the Bush administration has done nothing that has enhanced our security - rather, its alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us. Empirically, however, something clearly has made us safer since 2001. Successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have not increased, as had been widely predicted, but instead dwindled to virtually nothing. A steady stream of terrorist attacks on America and US interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward. A partial history: 1988:...

A year into Hamas' rule in the Gaza Strip, courts are meting out justice, police are arresting thieves, motorists are paying for licenses and authorities are blocking Internet porn sites. At the same time, Gazans are stocking up on vegetable oil - not for cooking, but to run their cars during a severe fuel shortage. An Israeli-led blockade has forced 80 percent of the people to rely on United Nations food handouts. With sanitation services collapsing, millions of gallons of raw sewage are flowing into the sea. Enemies of the regime have been silenced. "We've only become stronger. We will...

<p>A human rights group alleges the U.S. has operated detention facilities for terror suspects aboard Naval vessels, according to a published report in a European newspaper Monday.</p> <p>A study compiled by Reprieve says the U.S. may have used as many as 17 vessels as 'prison ships' where terror detainees were subjected to interrogation as part of the acknowledged rendition program operated since 2001, The Guardian reported.</p>

The U.S. is beginning its withdrawal from Iraq. U.S. troops strength is expected to decline from 170,000 to 140,000 by the end of the Summer. The reduction is made possible by the growing number of Iraqi army and police units that can do the job. U.S. military advisors have seen this coming for years, as they tracked dozens of different metrics (statistics on various aspects of Iraqi performance). The Iraqi armed forces and police had to be completely rebuilt. That's because the Saddam era army and police existed mainly to keep Saddam in power. Most of the leadership in that...

While pompous professional politicians like Obama and Clinton want us to surrender to the terrorists even though we are winning the War on Terrorism, today the rest of America remembers those who have fought and died in all of our wars defending our freedom. So today stop and remember those who died so you can sleep easy at night and gripe and complain about gas prices and mowing the lawn. And remember that Obama wants to sit down and talk to terrorists and Clinton hates the military. National defense is the most important election issue, because without a strong defense,...

Here are some things we can look forward to learning about Barack Obama: • That he was mentored in high school by a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. • That he launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home of a terrorist and a killer. • That while serving as a state senator, he was a member of a socialist front group. • That his affiliations are so dodgy that he would have trouble getting a government security clearance. • That there is reason to doubt his "loyalty to the United States."

The heart, if not the soul, of Spain’s capital, Madrid, is its bustling financial district. Thousands crowd daily into the skyscrapers that overlook the district’s main square. Thousands more shop at a branch of El Corte Inglés (Spain’s Macy’s), attend soccer games at Bernabéu Stadium, or ride the subways, trains, and buses whose lines converge here. Terrorists had hoped to strike this densely packed urban space in early 2008. But unlike the devastating coordinated suicide bombings of March 11, 2004, which killed 191 train commuters and wounded 1,600, this plot did not originate with al-Qaida or any of its loosely...

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2008 – The commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo believes two very different Guantanamos exist today. “There is the Guantanamo that exists in what I would call pop culture and the media and most people’s minds, and then there is the Guantanamo that exists here, the one that I see every day,” Navy Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby said in a teleconference from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with online journalists and bloggers. People who visit the detention facility for enemy combatants and see the conditions there come away with a much different impression from that formed by people...

HAWIJAH, Iraq, May 21, 2008 – Sheiks, villagers and coalition troops attended a May 18 reconciliation meeting at Forward Operating Base McHenry. The sixth meeting under Operation Restore Peace afforded a pathway toward reconciliation to combatants who have been linked to attacks against Iraqi and coalition forces. The program, which citizens call “Musalaha,” has been credited -- along with the Sons of Iraq program, in which local people aid security efforts -- with more than a 90 percent decrease in violent attacks against both forces and civilians in the Hawijah district, about 60 miles southwest of Kirkuk in Iraq’s Tamim...

YouTube Videos Are Produced by Al Qaeda and Other Terror Organizations; Videos Show Attacks on U.S. Soldiers, Civilians WASHINGTON – Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Monday called on Google to remove Internet video content produced by terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. The videos – readily available on YouTube –show assassinations, deaths of U.S. soldiers and civilians, weapons training, incendiary speeches by al-Qaeda leadership, and other material intended to encourage violence against the West. The videos are branded with Al-Qaeda logos – a practice detailed in a recent bipartisan Committee staff report entitled “Violent Islamist Extremism,...

BAGHDAD – Iraqi Special Operations Forces detained four suspected terrorists, for attacks against Iraqi Security and Coalition forces, during separate operations in Baghdad and Mosul May 14. In Baghdad, ISOF detained two individuals including a cell leader for Islamic State of Iraq, a front organization for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The men are suspected of conducting indirect fire attacks against Victory Base Complex and improvised explosive device attacks against Baghdad International Airport and Sons of Iraq. In Mosul, ISOF conducted operations that led to the detaining of two suspected IED cell members who are reportedly responsible for IED attacks against the...