|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Posted on 03/05/2005 5:06:15 PM PST by nwctwx
Edited on 03/29/2005 8:49:43 PM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
He's unhappy --- again and again and again?
Too bad.
http://www.freecongress.org/commentaries/2005/050405.asp
"Latin America: A Vigil of Suspense"
By Paul M. Weyrich
April 5, 2005
PERSECUTION.ORG
http://www.persecution.org
===
===
Note: The following text is an exact quote:
---
http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s05040021.htm
ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 2126, Garden Grove, CA 92842-2126 USA
Visit our web site at: www.assistnews.net -- E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
CONVERT FROM ISLAM TO FACE APOSTASY CHARGES
Christian Sources Fear For His Safety
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
IRAN (ANS) -- Christians in Iran have expressed great fears for the life of pastor Hamid Pourmand, a lay leader in a church and a convert from Islam, who will appear before an Islamic court next week to face charges of apostasy. If found guilty he is likely to face the death penalty.
Christian sources in Iran learned April 4 that pastor Pourmand is scheduled to appear before an Islamic court within the next 10 days. No specific date was given. Pastor Pourmand is a lay leader in the Assemblies of God church in Bandar-i Bushehr and converted to Christianity in 1980. At the time of his arrest he was a Colonel in the Iranian army.
According to Middle East Concern, Pourmand was arrested September 9, 2004, together with 85 other participants of the annual general conference of denomination. The other Christians were released within the next three days, but pastor Pourmand was charged with hiding his conversion from his superiors. According to Iranian law only Muslims can be officers in the army.
Pastor Pourmand was found guilty of this charge on February 16, 2005, even though he presented several papers in court which proved his superiors were aware he was a Christian. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment, discharge from the army, and loss of his entire income, pension and housing for his family. A few days later his wife and two children were forced to vacate their house.
Iranian Christian sources learned yesterday of the new charges of apostasy from Islam and proselytizing other Muslims. Apostasy is a capital offence in Iran.
In the last 16 years three Iranian church leaders have been charged with apostasy and found guilty. All three were sentenced to death. Pastor Hussein Soodman was hanged in 1989. Deacon Maher already had a noose around his neck when he signaled his willingness to recant and was released after signing a paper to that effect in 1992. Pastor Mehdi Dibaj was condemned to death in December 1993. He was released three weeks later after a strong international outcry, only to be found murdered six months later.
MEC is a co-operative effort by concerned Christians in the Middle East focusing on the need for Middle Eastern authorities to ensure the rights of all who choose to call themselves Christian.
A photograph of Hamid Pourmand is available upon request. For further details please contact Middle East Concern:
Phone: +44-1509-239400
Fax: +44-870-134-8312
Email: Office@MEConcern.org
** Michael Ireland is an international British freelance journalist. A former reporter with a London newspaper, Michael is the Chief Correspondent for ASSIST News Service of Garden Grove, CA. Michael immigrated to the United States in 1982 and became a US citizen in Sept., 1995. He is married with two children. Michael has also been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a British Christian radio station.
** You may republish this story with proper attribution.
Note: The following text is an exact quote:
===
===
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/press_release/press_release_0650.xml
Press Releases
Transcript of Press Conference with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on the TOPOFF 3 Exercise
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
April 4, 2005
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Good morning, everybody. Well, welcome to TOPOFF. As you probably know, TOPOFF is the third in a series of preparedness exercises that were mandated by Congress through which we test our ability to prepare for and respond to a pretend or simulated terrorist event -- and I want to underscore “simulated” -- all over the state of New Jersey and the state of Connecticut in the next few days. People are going to be seeing hazmat suits and vehicles and police. And I know an effort has been made to warn the citizens that this is not War of the Worlds, that it is an important and serious exercise, but ultimately something that is not occurring in real life.
This is going to play out over a series of several days through April 8th, and I want to take the opportunity to thank everybody who is participating in the exercise. We have approximately 10,000 participants from 27 federal agencies, and more than 200 government as well as private sector organizations, which makes this the largest exercise of its kind in history dealing with counterterrorism.
And I want to thank everybody who has taken the time and effort over a period of weeks and months to put this together and then to play it out over the next week.
This team that's participating in TOPOFF 3 includes everybody from cabinet secretaries, international partners, governors, mayors, city managers, local fire and police, search and rescue personnel, public health and public communications officials, and the private sector. And the point of the exercise is not only for each of us to test our own preparedness and response, but to work as a whole to coordinate our entire effort and to see how that coordination and collaboration works.
This is another example of the way in which we constantly see that dealing with the issue of terrorism or any other catastrophic -- potentially catastrophic event is a matter of partnership. No one entity, no one level of government, or even government as a whole, does it all by itself. We all have to work together, from the private sector through the public sector, individual citizens, all the way up to people here in Washington.
I also want to take the opportunity to particularly note how pleased I am that both Canada and the United Kingdom are participating in TOPOFF 3. We also have 13 other countries, including Mexico, participating as observers, underscoring how this is really an international effort.
Now again, I want to make it very clear, this is a simulation. It is an exercise. It is realistic, but it is a response to a non-real event. And I also want to make it clear that neither the particular locations nor the particular scenarios were picked based on any specific intelligence. They really reflect kind of a compilation of threats that we've seen over time, plus an ability to kind of project out what something might -- what might occur, if, in fact, there were a terrorist attack. In the particular locations, of course, were volunteers to participate in this program.
Now, of course, what is preparedness? Preparedness is learning from past experiences, testing ourselves, and then building upon the experiences in the tests to build a better product and to prepare ourselves better. It's like any other -- it's like a competition for a sporting event. The more you scope out the lay of the land, you see the course, you work yourself up into a situation of readiness, the better prepared you are when the real event occurs.
In this case, TOPOFF 3 will build on the lessons of the prior TOPOFF exercises, also upon our general experience in putting together a National Response Plan, a National Incident Management System, and a whole comprehensive set of tools for dealing with the issue of hazards.
I want to make it clear that we are going to push our plans and our systems to the very limit. So, in this sense, we're actually going to go beyond what we might really expect to test our operational assumptions and our policy assumptions in the most stressful possible environment. And that's how you really tell if you are prepared. You stress the system to the point at which it comes to failure or actually exceeds failure. When they test passenger airliners, they put them through physical maneuvers that you would never see in real life with a full plane load of passengers, because you really want to see what the tolerance is for the wings and for the fuselage. That's our philosophy here.
So we expect failure because we're actually going to be seeking to push to failure, and that is, in our judgment, the best way to get a “lessons learned” from what we do here over the next week, and what we've, in fact, done over the last few months.
On a personal note, by the way, this is a great learning opportunity for me. I've been on the job for less than two months, and it will give me a bird's-eye view of what we have done and what we have yet to do as part of our review of the Department.
We are always learning from our past experiences and trying to improve ourselves. TOPOFF 3 is a great example of how we and all of our partners in state, local and private activity are working together to make things -- improve our preparedness, and, if necessary, our response.
And I'll take a few questions.
QUESTION: Did you review the results of TOPOFF 2 in preparing yourself? And what do you personally very specifically look for in playing TOPOFF 3?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I did get a general review of what happened in TOPOFF 2. I didn't get into enormous detail. What I'm looking for is to particularly examine the way in which we coordinate in the face of a dynamic stressful situation, to see how it is that we execute from a policy decision or an operational decision, to actually moving the people and things to the field, and then distributing them and taking the necessary steps in the real world. And that's why an important part of this is the participation of hospitals and first responders and police who are actually going to play out the scenarios that are decided by people sitting in offices in Trenton and in Hartford and here in Washington.
Yes.
QUESTION: Can you tell us about the role of intelligence gathering in the last few weeks? Have they been able to see any of this coming?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: As a matter of fact -- I'm glad you raised that -- there was an important part of this exercise was the intelligence exercise. There was a simulated stream of intelligence which was built up over the last few weeks. All the intelligence agencies participated, and again, the effort there is to see how they all work together, how they analyze and exchange information, and pull together the streams of intelligence. And of course, the product will then play a role in our decision making as we go forward and implement the exercise over the next several days.
Yes.
QUESTION: Did the intelligence community succeed in stopping any aspects of the attack?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I think I'm going to wait until the exercise is over, and then we'll do a full report card on how everybody did. We didn't -- I mean, one of the issues about -- I should make this clear -- about stressing to failure is we didn't want to be too good. If we had succeeded in stopping all the threats, there wouldn't be a second part of the exercise. So you will see there are some decisions we will make, we have made and we will make, that will perhaps not be what we would do in real life, because we need to make sure we can play the exercise out along the entire range from the original Intel all the way through to the response.
QUESTION: Is there something you've already learned, perhaps, from the way that the intelligence community responded?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I think, again, I'm going to take the opportunity to go through the entire process. Then we'll examine the results and we'll make a -- draw our conclusions about the important lessons that have been learned.
Yes.
QUESTION: The decision to go to Code Red in TOPOFF 2, as I understand, created a lot of chaos in Seattle. Is there any decision to go to code -- to raise the alert level to red in this exercise, or is there any reluctance, based on what happened two years ago?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, I think what we're going to do in this exercise is, again, based on what is presented in the field, based on what we're getting and reporting back, based on what the simulated intelligence is, we will make real-time judgments about what to do.
We're not going to -- obviously, we want to learn lessons from TOPOFF 2, but the point of this is not to design a simulation that makes us "look good," because we figured out to prepackage everything we want to do. The point is actually to drive at the areas where we think there are potential questions or weaknesses, and really push those areas to learn more lessons.
Yes.
QUESTION: Can you just give us a small sense, as we sit here, in real time what has happened so far (inaudible) two attacks have taken place already?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, I'm -- to get into the spirit of the exercise, I'm going to wait to go get briefed on that when I get back, and that's going to be part of my process of responding in my simulated role as Secretary of Homeland Security.
QUESTION: There's 13 other -- 13 nations that are observers. Are they observing from their own nations, or are they represented here?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, we have -- no, we have representatives here from the observer nations. But there will actually be Canada and the United Kingdom who are participating. There will be participation in their home capitals.
Yes.
QUESTION: You were mentioning, I guess, in (inaudible), that there's actually been a lot of flooding in New Jersey (inaudible) that has affected this exercise.
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: It has had some impact. It's not going to prevent the exercise from going forward. Obviously, real life does intrude on simulation. But there's a lesson there as well, which is in real life, if there were a terrorist attack, we couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be flooding or some natural event. So it will have to be incorporated into the way we play the game out.
QUESTION: Do you know if it's diverting any personnel?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: My understanding is we will be able to -- New Jersey will be able to carry out its commitments and its full participation in the exercise.
Yes.
QUESTION: How are you ensuring that all the different participants are able to share information effectively, given all the different systems that are in place?
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, that's, again, part of the exercise, is to make sure that we do have interoperability to allow the various components that are actually participating in the field to communicate with each other and do what they have to do. That's -- these are exactly the kinds of questions that TOPOFF is designed to answer, by seeing how these things play out in real life.
Yes.
QUESTION: Just out of curiosity, I'm wondering how close to your home the New Jersey site is, is it (inaudible) and whether or not it's affecting your friends and family.
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: It's not -- well, there were big ads over the paper over the weekend that I think -- I think the government actually made some public statements making it very clear this is not a replay of War of the Worlds, and I think that the expectation is people will understand and not be alarmed by what they see.
All right, thanks a lot. We'll see what happens.
###
Related Information
March 17, 2005 - Department of Homeland Security Announces Partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada for TOPOFF 3
March 17, 2005 - Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at a Joint Press Conference with Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan
TOPOFF 3 Media Site
Semi-automatic Shotgun Taken From Vehicle
UPDATED: 9:48 am CDT April 5, 2005
SAN ANTONIO -- The Bexar County Sheriff's Department is searching for a thief who stole about $4,000 worth of SWAT team equipment -- including a semi-automatic shotgun -- from a deputy's vehicle Friday...
AThe thief got away with body armor, a whisper microphone, three magazines for a glock pistol, a weapons of mass destruction kit and a Banelli entry semi-automatic shotgun.
Illegal Immigration Costs Texans $4.7 Billion a Year (TX - 4/5/05)
Finds New Study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
Mass illegal immigration is costing Texas more than $4.65 billion a year finds a new report released today by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Texans, examines the fiscal costs being borne by the state to provide education, health care and incarceration for an illegal alien population now estimated to exceed 1.5 million....
Van Load of Illegal Immigrants Flee Authorities on Foot (Iowa - 4/5/05)
WILTON, Iowa Authorities caught 15 suspected illegal immigrants who fled on foot today after the van they were in was stopped for speeding on Interstate 80 in eastern Iowa near Wilton.
NY Islamic Finance Conference (NY - 4/19/05)
Bahrain: Tuesday, April 05 - 2005 at 06:14 A conference on Islamic finance will take place in New York on April 19, organised by the Arab Bankers Association of North America. The half-day forum will look at trends and products for retail, real estate, private and public funds and sukuks. Representatives from the Dow Jones, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bahrain Monetary Authority are among the speakers.
Muslim Cleric Urged Jihad (VA - 4/5/05)
Soon after 9/11, he called the victims of the attacks legitimate war casualties
BY PAUL BRADLEY TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Apr 5, 2005
ALEXANDRIA - Five days after the Sept. 11 attacks, a noted Islamic cleric called the victims legitimate casualties of war and implored the Muslim faithful to prepare for violent jihad on a global scale, a former follower said.
During the first day of the trial of Ali al-Timimi of Fairfax County, Muhammad Attique said al-Timimi made his case to about a dozen men taking part in a secretive meeting inside a Fairfax County apartment on Sept. 16, 2001.
"He said these attacks are legitimate," Attique testified yesterday. "He encouraged us to go participate in the coming fight. He said it is right because these people are combatants."
The 41-year-old al-Timimi, an American citizen who has lectured on Islamic issues around the world, faces a six-count federal indictment accusing him of exhorting his followers to wage war against Americans on the side of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan. If convicted, al-Timimi could be sentenced to life in prison.
Muslim-Americans Seek Answers For Border Detention (4/5/05)
AMHERST, N.Y. Muslim-Americans who were detained at the border after a religious conference in Canada got few answers when they met with a Homeland Security civil rights official.
More than three dozen people were held without explanation for as long as six hours in December while trying to re-enter the United States in western New York. They were fingerprinted, photographed, searched, and questioned...
Prayer REQUEST:
The creator of ItsHappening.com, John Messner, has passed on. Please include him in your thoughts and prayers. He has done so much more for our country and the war on terror than acknowledged.. he took down al-qassam.net, al-neda.net, and HUNDREADS of other terrorist websites at his own expense. He probably foiled many of AQ's plans in doing so.
God bless this great man.
[Reprint from Jimmy DeYoung's Prophetic Prospective on the News, Vol 9, Issue 7, Page 6]
"...A partnership between the two state sponsors of terrorism, Syria and Iran, and a major weapons deal between Syria and Russia, has the world's leaders not only talking, but also very concerned about recent events.
There are two ancient Jewish prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel, who combine to bring in focus how these three nations will be major players in the End times, Just prior to the second coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Daniel 11:40 reveals that "the King of the North", modern-day Syria, will be the first Middle Eastern state to move against Israel. Ezekiel 38:2 and 5 mention Russia, "Magog" in verse 2, and Iran (known in Biblical times as "Persia") in verse 5.
These two, Russia and Iran, will also be part of an alignment of nations who endeavor to take out the Jewish State of Israel in the End Times.
The recent events involving Russia, Iran, and Syria are all setting the stage for the final drama to be played out, with Bible prophecy being fulfilled."
Associated Press ^ | April 5, 2005 | Associated Press
Posted on 04/06/2005 10:25:43 AM EDT by seastay
MONTERREY, Mexico – Four Iraqis were detained at an airport in the border city of Mexicali for allegedly carrying false passports, and two more were caught at a highway checkpoint, authorities said Tuesday.
April 6, 2005 - Helicopter Crashes in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, April 6, 2005 - A CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed today near Ghazni, Afghanistan, roughly 100 miles southwest of the Afghan capital of Kabul. No official report on the personnel aboard was immediately available, but a news release from U.S. military officials in Kabul said initial reports indicate there are casualties.
American Forces Press Service will update the story as details become available. Visit http://www.dod.mil/ or http://www.dod.mil/news/articles.html.
_______________________________________________________
NOTE: View the original version of this web page on DefenseLINK, the official website of the U.S. Department of Defense, at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2005/20050406_499.html.
Hi all, just checking in. I've been really busy the past 2 weeks... my final semester as an undergrad is wrapping up. I'm going to be starting work on the next thread soon, and will answer my old PM's beginning later this evening. :) Hope all is well with everyone!
p.s. I found out I am going to get a full ride + Teaching Assistant job to Binghamton University in the fall as a Graduate Student. I'm excited, they have an Arabic program, and I will be able to continue studying for a few more yrs at least!!
Controlling US borders is not optional
Whoo Hoo!!!
Congratulations, Ian.
Fantastic Job Ian!! Congratulations...it is easy to tell that you are a hard worker, and it is nice to see great things happen to people like you. It is also great that you won't have a gigantic student loan to pay back once you graduate.
U.S. Military Raises Death Toll In Chopper Crash To 16
Crash Is Deadliest Since U.S.-Led Offensive Began In 2001
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military now says 16 people have died in the crash of a U.S. helicopter Wednesday in Afghanistan, in the deadliest military crash since the U.S.-led offensive began in 2001....
Congrats!
Armed Student Arrested In Campus Library (Ohio Univ.)
Roommate Claims He Kidnapped Him At Gunpoint
http://www.channelcincinnati.com/news/4352438/detail.html
ATHENS, Ohio -- An Ohio University student accused of abducting his roommate at gunpoint was arrested carrying two loaded guns at the school's main library, police said.
Ryan Salim, 25, of Wintersville, is charged with abduction and two counts of carrying a concealed weapon, Athens County Prosecutor David Warren said Wednesday.(snip)
Amen!
Way to go Ian!!!! Yay!!!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
