|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
TM designed by: Ian Livingston
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This thread has been locked, it will not receive new replies. |
|
Locked on 06/02/2005 9:39:58 PM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
locked for new thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1415532/posts |
Posted on 04/14/2005 4:02:23 PM PDT by nwctwx
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
TM designed by: Ian Livingston
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NZHERALD.co.nz (REUTERS): Beijing - "CHINA GOES UNDERCOVER TO SWAY OPINION ON INTERNET" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "China has formed a special force of undercover online commentators to try to sway public opinion on controversial issues on the Internet, a newspaper said yesterday. China has struggled to gain control over the Internet as more and more people gain access to obtain information beyond official sources. The country has nearly 100 million Internet users, according to official figures, and the figure is rising. A special force of online commentators had already been operating in Suqian city in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu since April, the Southern Weekend said.") (May 20, 2005) (Read More...)
CNN.com: Washington - "FBI SPY CHIEF ASKS PRIVATE SECTOR FOR HELP" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence David Szady, cited Russia, Iran, Cuba and North Korea among countries he said engage in espionage against the United States, but he focused heavily on activities by Chinese. "There are 150,000 students from China. Some of those are sent here to work their way up into the corporations," Szady said. There are about 300,000 Chinese visitors annually, and 15,000 Chinese delegations touring the United States every year, 3,500 of them in the New York area alone, he said.") (February 10, 2005) (Read More...)
Hey firewalls are a good thing.
Keep them up.
Let me describe that photo to you.
UBL on a horse and he's riding past a building
according to the url is the White House.
Oh, and the graphic shows the building on fire.
Note: The following text is an exact quote:
===
===
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1406737/posts
Jewish Response to Desecration: Grief, Not Violence
CNSNews.com ^ | 5/19/05 | Julie Stahl
Posted on 05/19/2005 5:45:54 PM PDT by abu afak
Jerusalem- Although Palestinians have desecrated Jewish holy books and Jewish holy sites for years, it is not the Jewish way to respond with violence, said Jewish leaders here.
A brief item in the May 9 edition of Newsweek magazine said U.S. troops had flushed a Koran down a toilet in an effort to rattle Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The report- since retracted- sparked deadly riots in Muslim countries, including Afghanistan. But Jewish leaders said such a thing would not happen here -- although there are plenty of provocations.
In October 2000, near the beginning of the Palestinian armed conflict, the Tomb of the Biblical patriarch Joseph in the West Bank city of Nablus came under fierce attack. One soldier died of wounds he suffered there.
Joseph's Tomb was one of several Jewish holy sites in Palestinian areas protected in the Oslo Accords, which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed in 1994. Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Shalom al Yisrael (Peace on Israel) Synagogue in Jericho also were included in that agreement.
The Israeli army agreed to withdraw from Joseph's Tomb, after the P.A. pledged to protect and defend it -- and with the understanding that Jews would return. But within hours, an angry Palestinian mob burned, looted and ransacked the place.
Rabbi Daniel Shilo, spokesman of the Council of Rabbis of Judea, Samaria [West Bank] and Gaza, said since then, the Palestinians have burned Joseph's Tomb a few more times.
The Jewish reaction, Shilo said, was one of grief. "We know the Arabs burn and destroy like it's a regular thing," he said.
In the 19 years (1948-1967) when the Mount of Olives in eastern Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule, Palestinians used tombstones from the ancient Jewish cemetery there for building and paving, Shilo said..."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
I have a note I made, from a book I read a while back, that one of the Al Queda logo's, for internet use, is a white stallion. (For what it's worth)
[It will be most interesting watching how successful the USA will be in Africa? I think the USA may find that Muslim terrorists have many friends and hide-outs in Africa - including South Africa.
We have lots of Muslims here who hate America. Don't be surprised if you find that Africa plays a major role in harbouring terrorists. Many of these Governments are secretly opposed to the USA - including South Africa. Jan]
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2005 – A new program to begin this summer will galvanize an interagency effort to prevent terrorists from establishing a foothold in Africa.
The Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative will officially kick off in June with Exercise Flintlock 2005, according to Theresa Whelan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs.
U.S. special operations forces will train their counterparts in seven Saharan countries, teaching military tactics critical in enhancing regional security and stability. At the same time, they will encourage the participating nations to work collaboratively toward confronting regional issues, Whelan said during an interview today with the American Forces Press Service.
The Trans Saharan initiative builds on the successful Pan Sahel Initiative, launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to prevent terrorists from setting up safe havens in Africa.
Vast, relatively unpopulated areas and a lack of strong government controls make parts of Africa particularly attractive to terrorists, Whelan explained. Traditional caravan routes in this area can provide hideouts and staging areas for international and regional terrorists and criminals who move goods and money to support their operations without detection or interference, she said.
Other factors -- war, poverty, disease, corruption and lack of education, among them - create an atmosphere of hopelessness where extremists' messages resonate, particularly with the younger generation, she said.
"The very conditions that cause these humanitarian tragedies are also the very conditions that lead to breeding grounds for the kinds of threats that we're most concerned about in this region," Whelan said.
The Pan Sahel Initiative, which began in 2003, helped address this problem by training and equipping six light infantry companies in Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger in skills needed to help secure the region's vast border areas.
One of the program's biggest successes was the capture of Abderrazak al-Para, a key figure in the extremist Salafist Group for Call and Combat, who was turned over to the Algerian government last year.
But despite its successes, Whelan said, the Pan Sahel Initiative was constrained from its inception by limited funding and a limited focus. The $6.25 million in funding it received during its first year as part of the State Department's budget represented "just a drop in the bucket" in light of the need, she said.
"It was a little bit of a Band-Aid approach" to the security crisis in the region, she said, but at least represented a positive step forward.
"We were under no illusions that a single company could, say, patrol and control the whole Mauritanian border," she said. "But we felt that if they had a military unit that was capable of responding more effectively to information on threats in the region, that that would at least we a step in the right direction."
The Pan Sahel Initiative and the inroads it made laid important groundwork for the new Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative, she said.
The new program will be better funded - it will receive about $100 million a year for five years - and have a wider scope, adding Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal and Nigeria to the original four countries included in the Pan Sahel Initiative, Whelan said.
And unlike the program it replaces, Whelan said the Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative will introduce a more comprehensive approach to regional security.
The Defense Department will continue to focus on military operations, expanding its scope from the company to the battalion level.
But other U.S. government agencies also will become active players in the program, Whelan said. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, will address educational initiatives; the State Department, airport security; and the Department of Treasury, efforts to tighten up money-handling controls in the region.
"It becomes a broader package approach," Whelan said. "You're not just developing one muscle in the body, you're developing the whole body."
While providing an interagency approach to the region, the United States will continue efforts to get participating nations to think regionally about their mutual security concerns. "If we revert to bilateral, stovepipe programs, we simply won't be as effective as if we can maintain a multilateral effort," Whelan said.
Whalen said the new initiative represents an important step in the United States' effort to address and fight global terror, with an emphasis on prevention rather than reaction.
By building African nation's ability to counter terrorism within their borders, the United States can help prevent the region from becoming a safe haven where terrorists can train, organize and plan their operations, she said.
"This is an excellent example of getting ahead of the power curve and not being behind it and having to try to catch up," she said. "And we are getting ahead of the power curve by building the capacity of our friends."
The notion that the United States is capable of confronting the threat of global terrorism alone is "just a physical impossibility," Whelan said.
"So you have to build the capacity of like-minded states to be able to help you confront the threat. And that's what the Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative represents."
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
http://www.africancrisis.org/NewsView.asp?Rec=4984&Action=V&Sort=D&Page=0&
KABUL (Pajhwok Afghan News): Engineer Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, president of the Hezb-i-Iqtedar-i-Islami (Islamic Supremacy Party) and a leader of the grand opposition alliance, fears long-term foreign military presence may undermine Afghanistan’s vital interests.
Excerpted (rest of article at link)
_____________________________________
Seven Afghan aid workers killed
KABUL (Pajhwok Afghan News): Six Afghan aid workers were shot dead by suspected Taliban militants Thursday on the Kabul- Kandahar highway in the southern province of Zabul, when they were transporting a body of a man who was killed in neighbouring Helmand a day before
Excerpted (rest of article at link)
________________
UK national held for Al Qaeda links
PESHAWAR, May 18: The authorities have arrested a British national suspected of holding links with the Al Qaeda terror network, officials said on Wednesday. The man, who identified himself as Shehzad, was arrested four days ago from the small town of Shabqadar, some 25 kilometres north of Peshawar, a security official told AFP requesting anonymity.
The secret service agents arrested him with the help of the anti-terrorism police force during a raid on a house and recovered computer and compact discs from the room, he said. “We think he is an Al Qaeda man,” the official said but declined to give further information about the investigation.
“We are gathering other information about him and his Pakistani national identity card gave us an address in Hyderabad,” the official said. Shehzad, 25, told interrogators that he was from London and arrived in Pakistan last year in March. The authorities this month arrested a number of Al Qaeda suspects, including Abu Faraj Al Libbi, allegedly a key aide of Osama bin Laden.
Afghan clerics defer jihad call against U.S.
by Qurban Ali Hamzi
Source: Reuters
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan - A group of Afghan Islamic clerics have deferred a call for holy war against the United States over a magazine report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran after the report was retracted.
The clerics in Badakhshan province said on Sunday the United States should hand anyone guilty of desecrating the holy book to a Muslim country for prosecution in three days or they would declare jihad, or holy war, against the United States.
But Newsweek magazine, which first ran a story in its May 9 issue saying U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down a toilet, on Monday retracted the report.
"We will consult and discuss our next move with other Ulemas," said the head of Badakhshan's council of clerics, Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman, when asked about the jihad call.
Ulema are Islamic scholars. Representatives will be sent out for talks with other clerics, he said.
"We are keen to take a unanimous decision about this," he said.
Aman said he suspected Newsweek had retracted the story because of U.S. government pressure following their call for holy war.
"The regret and retraction by the magazine clearly came after the issue of our deadline," he said.
Muslim clerics have traditionally been teachers and leaders in Afghan society and throughout its history they have rallied public opinion and sometimes led uprisings against unpopular rulers and foreign occupiers.
Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.
The Newsweek report sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, as well as in Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza last week. The reported desecration was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.
Excerpted
http://www.sabawoon.com/news/miniheadlines.asp?dismode=article&artid=22903
The notion that the United States is capable of confronting the threat of global terrorism alone is "just a physical impossibility," Whelan said.
Map and statistics Muslims in Africa
Lost ship found
19 May 2005
ABU DHABI — A cargo ship which vanished last month after leaving Dubai Port heading for Iran was found by the UAE and Kuwait Interpol authorities in Kuwait.
According to Lt-Col Abdulla Eissa Al Filasi, Director of Interpol at the Ministry of Interior, the ship, leased by a local businessman, was carrying electronic and electrical goods worth $2.5 million. It sailed off from Dubai Port for Iran on April 2 and was supposed to reach its destination but it vanished without any news about it till last week. The worried businessman reported the incident to the UAE Interpol.
Lt-Gen. Shaikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Interior, issued instructions for immediate action to solve the mystery of the ship. A team had been especially formed for the task. In a record time of 48 hours, the team managed to track the ship in Kuwait.
According to investigation, the ship owner continued to manoeuvre during this period while talking to the businessman over the phone claiming that the vessel broke down, Lt-Col Filasi said. He said the ship owner in the meantime managed to make some changes in the ship. He headed for a port in Kuwait where he started to unload the vessel. But he could not unload some of the goods as that brand has an agent in Kuwait. Therefore he decided to store the goods thinking that he managed to get away with his crime. The UAE Interpol sent the businessman to the Kuwaiti port where he identified his goods. The culprit was then identified and arrested in cooperation with Kuwait Interpol authorities.
That article about the Chinese military spending is a must read, IMO. I sent that article on to a few people.
With one sentence, Newsweek triggered a series of violent intifadas in countries as remote as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. That's at least how mainstream media, government officials, and most of the public see it. The truth is more complicated: Islamists had been planning these riots long before this story ever made it into print.
True, the short piece by Michael Isikoff and John Barry, which attempted to unveil a new scandal, became the trigger for mass violence led by Islamists across the world. But the jihadists had mobilized for a counteroffensive against the "infidels" long ago. Ironically, these two developments have something in common: both undermine the credibility of the U.S-supported democracy movements in the Arab world.
The violent marches in Pakistan and Afghanistan were not an abrupt and sudden reaction to the weekly magazine's sentence accusing U.S. personnel of desecrating a copy of the Muslim holy book. Since the fall of Tora Bora in December of 2001, al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants were waiting for this moment: they call it "al awda," meaning the "return." Patiently, the leaders of the jihadists, including Thawahiri, Mullah Umar, and the various Islamists of Jamiet Islami and Hizbu Tahrir, were working on mounting the major counteroffensive against the democratically elected government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Day after day, from Kabul to Kandahar, the Afghan society was moving away from the mental and political grip of the Taliban. And year after year, more and more al-Qaeda leaders were being eliminated and arrested, two over the past few weeks alone.
The more lethal danger facing the jihadi ideology is the success of democracy in the region. Afghani women voted by the millions; Iraq's 8.5 million voters braved Zarqawi's killers; a million marchers challenged Syria's military in Beirut, and just this week, Kuwaiti women forced parliament to give them the right to vote. By jihadi standards, the war of ideas is being lost. The Newsweek story gave them the ability to counterattack and try to gain ground in their terror war.
Preparing their "come back," the Salafists understood that demonstrations are their best weapons for the time being. Suicide bombings and beheadings made them look as evil as they are, even in the eyes of most Arabs and Muslims. They saw how popular expressions from Kabul to Beirut, from Tehran to Baghdad, captured the imagination of younger and younger Muslims, but also the attention of public opinion in the West. Back in the early winter, Ayman al Thawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two, called on his followers to "take back the country and reduce Karzai to his palace." That was the mission order: to find a way to re-conquer the street and, from there, the entire Arab world. On Al Ansar websites, on al Jazeera and on Hezbollah's al Manar TV, a global propaganda campaign has been waged since 2002, increasing sharply since the fall of Saddam. In the chat rooms I visit, the dominant motif is: America has made war on Islam as a whole, as a religion.
The clever clerics played with the doctrinal genes of their followers. Day in and day out, from Saudi Arabia to Virginia, the jihadis patiently prepared for the moment of the explosion. In a sum, Newsweek's article didn't create the "Big Bang"; it triggered it. The explosion was coming, but the apparent motive had to be supplied. It could have been a rape, a killing, or another Western desecration. Newsweek's "investigative journalists" provided this fuse.
Messrs. Isikoff and Barry, probably on a domestic political crusade, wrote hastily: "sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet." As simple as that and in a style more appropriate to Arab popular media than to the Western press, the "story" hit the presses. Basing their accusations on a source they weren't able to identify, they provided a graphic description of the act. Since at least one of the authors, Michael Isikoff, describes himself as an "expert on terrorism," he should have known that describing flushing a Koran down a toilet was the equivalent of shooting napalm into a warehouse packed with dynamite.
More disturbing is the pattern behind the short article. Isikoff has shown a deliberate trend of activist-writing rather than objective journalism. Back in October, Isikoff targeted a coalition of American Middle Eastern groups supporting Washington's campaign for democracy. After a series of interviews with the members of that coalition, he accuses them in an article (October 29) of "Lobbying for Libya." He didn't inform his readers though, that among the coalition members, were dissident Libyans who were calling for a regime change in Tripoli. As for this week's scandal, Isikoff initially wanted to undermine the policies of the Bush administration. He ended up lying, denying any error to his readers, and provoking chaos. The ludicrous "Libyan" accusation may have caused some minor tensions among Middle Eastern Americans, but his "Koran" accusation cost lives and human suffering, 16 dead and 100+ injured.
One element lost in all the coverage of the jihadist-inspired riots is the rioters' utter hypocrisy. Their concerns for the Muslim holy book did not manifest when they burned mosques to the ground in Pakistan over the past few months. Nor did they launch demonstrations after they destroyed mosques in Iraq throughout the year. There were certainly hundreds of Korans burned into ashes. (It didn't hurt that the owners of these mosques were Shi'ites.) A couple of decades earlier, Hafez Assad's brutal brigades leveled off the mosques of the city of Hama. Thousands of Korans were destroyed (along with 20,000 Sunnis). Yet, the Arab and Islamic world didn't raise a ruckus. The selective outrage over the destroyed Korans is not theological but political. It is only when the Islamists want to wage a jihad for their holy book that infractions begin to make any difference to them. When Arab militias raids black Muslim villages in Darfur, and destroy them, along with their holy books, that is acceptable, but one sentence in an article published in a U.S. magazine deserves a whole holy war? Who are we kidding here?
What the jihadists want is to mobilize their followers on "religious" grounds. They see the march of democratic principles, secularism, and modernity, and they want to stop it. They are using their last weapons: dogmatic extremism. They want to fight back against the force that is diminishing the grip they've had over their followers since the Dark Ages. Around the region, Salafist scholars are stating, (joined recently by Hassan Fadlallah of Hezbollah), "This is not about a particular incident, it is about America waging a war against Islam as a religion." This is the grand scheme. Civil societies in the Arab world are not duped; they understood the threat Islamist demonstrations posed. Unfortunately, while the true democrats of the region stave off the onslaught of their own troglodytes, Newsweek extended a special invitation for global jihad and gave the Islamists the spark they needed for their malicious counteroffensive.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18121
Maine airport plays key role in no-fly diverted flights
Vermont Homeland Security - how secure?
County officials plan for disaster
Las Vegas terrorism drill concludes
The relative silence of Muslim clerics in condemning terrorist acts
Zarqawi urged to get active in attacks inside USA
Iraq calls on Syria to stop flow of foreign terrorists
Government officials urged to avoid alarmist advice about school terrorism
You're sure welcome Oorang. Glad I could help. The article you posted about the missing ship that was recently found was (as you said) just plain weird. It doesn't add up at all. Maritime threats are huge and missing ships fit the bill potentially for that kind of thing.
" NYT PLANS 6,000-WORD STORY ON TORMENT AND DEATH OF 2 AFGHANS AT AMERICAN GI HANDS; AFGHAN PRISON ABUSE DETAILED... MORE..."
I am praying that this is not true.
What the heck is going on? Clearly, there are some dark and sinister forces at work against us lately.
Yikes! I forget, is the Sun a American tabloid or British?
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.
