Posted on 04/12/2006 8:14:42 PM PDT by callmejoe
Al-Qaida Figure Backs Iraqi Insurgents
Top al-Qaida Figure Ayman Al-Zawahri Urges Support for Iraqi Insurgents in Video
The Associated Press (snipped)
CAIRO, Egypt - No. 2 al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri praised insurgents in Iraq, particularly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and called on all Muslims to support them in a video posted Thursday on the Internet.
The video was dated with an Islamic month corresponding to November 2005 and al-Zawahri mentions an Oct. 23 earthquake that hit Pakistan and Afghanistan. But it appeared to be the first time the 28-minute video has been made public.
It was not clear why the video was not released soon after the date it was allegedly filmed. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
>>>>I seem to remember that the teacher was so amused at my conspiracy theory that she read the paper to the class and at the end was laughing so hard she was nearly in tears.
Those 6th grade incidents sure do stick with you - had one myself at about that age.
I'm glad you put this post together as it's weighing heavy on my mind as well.
A few weeks ago, while checking something on Ramzi Yousef, I ran across the information that Yousef also had a plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the Phillipines. The information was either new to me or I had heard it and forgotten the relevance - so, LOL it was new information to me again.
Yousef wanted the Pope killed on his trip to the Phillipines and prior to Operation Bojinka. Again, there would have been the high profile assassination (Masood in 2001) and then the attack on the US.
I think Agca is correct, Pope Benedict XVI is in danger. It was stunning to see the Pope in the open air Pope-mobile a few days ago. It was almost as though he was double-dog-daring a potential assassin.
Weird that it was a Pope Benedict who was there when the last Caliphate fell:
"19/19/19/23" . . . Treaty of Versailles dissolving the Ottoman Empire (the last Caliphate) was signed in 1919.
http://209.157.64.201/focus/f-news/1614188/posts?page=93#93
And the fairly unique UBL dual release audiotapes began with the teaser the day before the first release (Zarqawi eulogy) with the "Good News Soon" banner advertising the UBL release right as the "Hattin" hostage taking was underway in Gaza and Lebanon.
The "Good News Soon" proclamation was issued on June 28, the day before the UBL audio, and on the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
first UBL tape: *19*/01/06
second UBL tape: *23*/04/06
dual release on Versailles anniversary: *1919*
rumored death report: *23*/08/06
Ramadan begins *23*/09/06
"A few weeks ago, while checking something on Ramzi Yousef, I ran across the information that Yousef also had a plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the Phillipines."
They revisit their targets if unsuccessful the first time.
"Yousef wanted the Pope killed on his trip to the Phillipines and prior to Operation Bojinka. Again, there would have been the high profile assassination (Masood in 2001) and then the attack on the US."
True about Masoud, but I think that was more about laying the groundwork for their retreat to disrupt any retaliation as we then lost our main ally. An even more striking analogy is to compare the actual death of Masoud to the rumored death of UBL. Both may serve a similar purpose - - to cover the final details prior to a strike.
Better to compare the Pope in 1995 to the White House and Congress in 2001. The DC component of 9/11 was a failure. They wanted to decapitate both the executive and legislative branches, and then possibly go after Air Force One with something that never materialized.
Flight 77 was targeting the White House but couldn't get a fix because it is hard to see from the air with all the trees and the morning sun was in their eyes in the east. So they circled back and hit the secondary target (the Pentagon). It is now widely believed that United 93 was designated for the Capitol. And they had the call sign for Air Force One (the threat called in that "angel is next").
9/11 was a decapitation strike, and so will the next one likely be.
They revisit their targets if unsuccessful the first time.
This is a little too bizarre for the "matrix". But maybe provides food for thought nonetheless.
After 9/11, some believed UBL might have been a sci-fi aficionado in his younger days and the name "Qaeda" may have been inspired in part by Asimov's "Foundation" (the Arabic for the title of "Foundation" is "al Qaeda"). Below is an article from 2002 on the eerie similarities. The Israel-Lebanon conflict was called "the Sixth War" (sixth Arab-Israeli conflict). The significance of the "23" in the context of "Zion's" elimination is an interesting coincidence. You never know where they get their inspiration. Also below is a relevant portion of the second "Matrix" film released back in 2003 that also has references to a sixth war and the "23".
The "Neo" character in the "Matrix" movies may, in some ways, resemble the "Seldon" character in the "Foundation" series. (Based on what little I understand of both.)
http://www.dictionary-of-matrix.com/index.php/Matrix_Reloaded_transcript
Architect: The Matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the 6th version.
TV Neos: 5 `One's before me? 4 3 2 What are you talking about?
Neo: There are only two possible explanations, either no one told me, or no one knows.
Architect: Precisely. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly is systemic - creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations. . . .
Architect: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses, but rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.
Architect: The function of the One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which, you will be required to select from the Matrix 23 individuals - 16 female, 7 male - to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to the Matrix, which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,779530,00.html
War of the worlds
It has become synonymous with the terrorist attacks of September 11 - but what is the origin of the name al-Qaida? Giles Foden on how Bin Laden may have been inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Giles Foden
Saturday August 24, 2002
(snipped)
In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov's 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title "al-Qaida". And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims.
"This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov's book and the events unfolding now," wrote Dmitri Gusev, the scientist who posted the article. He was referring to apparent similarities between the plot of Foundation and the pursuit of the organisation we have come to know, perhaps erroneously, as al-Qaida.
The Arabic word qaida - ordinarily meaning "base" or "foundation" - is also used for "groundwork" and "basis". It is employed in the sense of a military or naval base, and for chemical formulae and geometry: the base of a pyramid, for example. Lane, the best Arab-English lexicon, gives these senses: foundation, basis of a house; the supporting columns or poles of a structure; the lower parts of clouds extending across a horizon; a universal or general rule or canon. With the coming of the computer age, it has gained the further meaning of "database": qaida ma'lumat (information base).
Qaida itself comes from the root verb q-'-d : to sit down, remain, stay, abide. Many people appear to think al-Qaida's name emerged from some idea of a physical base - a command centre from where Bin Laden and other leaders could direct operations. "We've got to get back to al-Qaida on that one," it's possible to imagine a footsoldier saying. Bin Laden himself has spoken, post-September 11, of being in "a very safe place". There have also been stories that his father had a vernal estate called al-Qaida in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Could there be a sense in which the name of the organisation represents a notion of the eternal home in the consciousness of its fugitive leader?
On the surface, the most improbable explanation of the name is that Bin Laden was somehow inspired by a Russian-born writer who lived most of his life in the US and was once the world's most prolific sci-fi novelist (born in 1920 in Smolensk, Asimov died in New York in 1992). But the deeper you dig, the more plausible it seems that al-Qaida's founders may have borrowed some rhetoric from Foundation and its successors (it became a series) and possibly from other science fiction material.
As Nick Mamatas argued in an article on sci-fi fans in Gadfly magazine, "even the terror of September 11th had science fictional overtones: it was both an attack on New York from a tin-plated overlord with delusions of grandeur and a single cataclysmic event that seemingly changed everything, for ever".
Science fiction has often featured "evil empires" against which are set utopian ideas whose survival must be fought for against the odds by a small but resourceful band of men. Such empires often turn out to be amazingly fragile when faced by intelligent idealists. Intelligent idealists who are also psychopaths might find comfort in a fictional role model - especially one created by a novelist famous for castigating that "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan: the president who prosecuted the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan.
The Empire portrayed in Asimov's novels is in turmoil - he cited Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an influence. Beset by overconsumption, corruption and inefficiency, "it had been falling for centuries before one man really became aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history."
Seldon is a scientist and prophet who predicts the Empire's fall. He sets up his Foundation in a remote corner of the galaxy, hoping to build a new civilisation from the ruins of the old. The Empire attacks the Foundation with all its military arsenal and tries to crush it. Seldon uses a religion (based on scientific illusionism) to further his aims. These are tracked by the novel and its sequels across a vast tract of time. For the most part, his predictions come true.
Seldon, like Bin Laden, transmits videotaped messages for his followers, recorded in advance. There is also some similarity in geopolitical strategy. Seldon's vision seems oddly like the way Bin Laden has conceived his campaign. "Psycho-history" is the statistical treatment of the actions of large populations across epochal periods - the science of mobs as Asimov calls it. "Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilisation."
So did Bin Laden use Foundation as a kind of imaginative sounding-board for the creation of al-Qaida? Perhaps reading the book in his pampered youth, and later on seeing his destiny in terms of the ruthless manipulation of historical forces? Did he realise much earlier than anyone else that the march of globalisation would provide opportunities for those who wanted to rouse and exploit the dispossessed?
In the Arab newspaper al-Hayat, the Muslim intellectual Yussuf Samahah put it like this: "Anyone who believes that his [Bin Laden's] 'ideas' and the new phenomenon [globalisation] are contradictory would be mistaken, because while globalisation is gradually uniting the planet, it is causing many introverted and revivalist reactions which use the tools that globalisation provides to give the impression that they are not only fighting it but will ultimately defeat it." Using something like game-theory, Asimov's Hari Seldon worked on exactly such principles, taking into account, across time, the dynamic between intergalactic megatrends and local reactions to them.
If Bin Laden did read Asimov, when was it? It is clear that from an early age he consumed western products and media, until a fundamentalist reversion occurred when he met the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam, who was to be a crucial influence.
As Bin Laden's best biographer, Yossef Bodansky, puts it, he "started the 1970s as did many other sons of the affluent and well-connected - breaking the strict Muslim lifestyle in Saudi Arabia with sojourns in cosmopolitan Beirut. While in high school and college, Osama visited Beirut often, frequenting flashy nightclubs, casinos, and bars. He was a drinker and womaniser, which often got him into bar brawls."
If Bin Laden did read Foundation, it most likely would have been in these wild years, when he was aping western habits. Maybe he read an English version, bought in one of Beirut's English-language bookshops, or during a trip to the US or London (where he bought property in Wembley). . . .
In the wake of September 11, the spectre of another science-fiction novel, Frank Herbert's Dune, was also raised as a possible influence on Bin Laden's self-mythology. It features a mysterious man whose followers, Arabic-speaking sons of the desert, live in caves and tunnels. They engage in a religious jihad against a corrupt imperialist civilisation.
The case that science fiction, and in particular Asimov, could have had an effect on Bin Laden is strengthened by their better documented effects on other psychopathic personalities. Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect - which released 11 packets of deadly sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995 - was also apparently trying to build a community of scientists modelled on the members of Asimov's Foundation. "Aum's bible was, believe it or not, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov," says David Kaplan, author of The Cult at the End of the World, a book on the sect, or "guild" as it styled itself.
This is backed up by others. According to Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, "The ultimate purpose of the guild, said the sect's science minister Hideo Murai, before he was murdered by a Korean gangster, is to rebuild civilisation after a cataclysm and to combat the powerful globalist institutions that are bringing on an apocalypse."
In 1995, after the subway attacks, a coded letter arrived at the magazine Takarajima 30. Believed to have been from Aum sympathisers, it gives a sense of how seriously the sect's members took Asimov and science fiction more generally. The letter, which promised an attack on the Tokaimura nuclear reprocessing plant, embedded its threat in a passage of literary criticism.
Shimatsu explains: "The letter was a rebuttal to an essay by Susan Sontag in which she claims the sci-fi film genre is based on a fascination with catastrophe in the age of the bomb. Instead, this critic asserted, science fiction is really about surviving catastrophe, and is therefore optimistic - and the key to the genre is the longing for a sense of scientific community resembling the craft guilds of the past.
"A professor of American literature at one of Tokyo's top universities, a specialist in science fiction, immediately recognised the passage as the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. It was obviously selected as a defense of the Aum sect's effort to build a community of scientists modelled after Isaac Asimov's Foundation series."
A small, unplanned nuclear reaction took place at the Tokaimura plant in 1999, the same year the Japanese government cracked down on the sect. There had been other, more minor incidents. All are generally attributed to human error, but Shimatsu believes they may be connected to a second, resurgent wing of Aum working in the nuclear industry on Asimovian lines. "Aum enjoys a huge following within Japan's nuclear establishment, which is riddled with believers from millennialist sects. Another clue is contained in Asimov's masterpiece. After the visible First Foundation was crushed by the Galactic Empire, the invisible Second Foundation persisted to eventually win the universal struggle." . . .
As a genre, science fiction can't claim exclusive villainous effect. Other figures of extreme public animus have been influenced by different types of novels. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who held science in contempt, told his family that he'd read Conrad's The Secret Agent "about a dozen times" in his Montana hut, and is thought to have modelled himself on Conrad's anarchist. He also registered under the name "Conrad" in the Sacramento hotel from which he's believed to have sent his bombs.
Earth First!, the militant US environmental gang, claim inspiration from Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey-Wrench Gang, in which eco-guerrillas sabotage dams and bridges. Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was a fan of neo-Nazi William Pierce's The Turner Diaries, which tells of a group that blows up the FBI headquarters in Washington.
As, in that very same biscuit-brown building in Federal Plaza, more "Most Wanted" pictures of Bin Laden were being pinned up in the wake of September 11, the Asimov/al-Qaida story was spreading. There was a piece in the Ottawa Citizen. On Ansible, one of the most popular science-fiction websites, hip sci-fi novelist China Miéville was quoted: "An expert on the Middle East told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term al-Qaida seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts... Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
The expert Miéville was referring to is Fred Halliday, who teaches international relations at the LSE. Trying to define al-Qaida, Halliday included the Asimov connection as a glancing aside in the "keywords" section of Two Hours that Shook the World, a book about September 11: "The term has no apparent antecedents in Islamic or Arabic political history: explanations range from a protected region during the communist era in Afghanistan, to it being an allusion to the Bin Laden family's construction company, to the title of a 1951 Isaac Asimov novel which was translated into Arabic as al-Qaida." . . .
Rohan Gunaratna, research fellow at the centre for the study of terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews, takes a different view. In an important recent book on al-Qaida, he argues that the name came from political theory, citing the concept of al-Qaida al-Sulbah (the solid base) formulated in an essay by Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden's intellectual mentor. The solid base provided a platform, Gunaratna writes, for the "sole purpose of creating societies founded on the strictest Islamic principles".
Al-Qaida al-Sulbah mixes a type of revolutionary vanguardism, borrowed from European political philosophy, with Islamic martyrdom: it's the pioneering vanguard that must, in Azzam's phrase, after "a long period of training and hatching", be prepared to "jump into the fire". And there may be another borrowing: the essay reads like nothing so much as Hari Seldon's plans for his foundation. Perhaps it was Azzam, after all, who read Asimov.
That's interesting.
Thank you callmejoe for the ping.
You're welcome. I'm not much of a sci-fi fan myself. But I found it interesting.
I seem to remember that the Columbine killers had a thing for the Matrix as well as Lee Malvo, the DC sniper. I guess little psychopaths as well as huge psychopaths can have their obsessions. And if that lady who claimed she was with UBL is to be believed, (the one who says he likes Whitney Houston) he retains an attachment to some Western things. So if he does, other planners in the food chain below him may as well.
Alienated social deviants in previous decades were inspired by books. With bootleg DVDs floating around the third world, I suspect the cultural influences that haunt the unbalanced minds of all races, colors and creeds tend to find their way into their collective consciousness through movies rather than books these days.
As a postscript, it would be even more interesting to know whether Asimov's "Foundation" was ever translated in to Farsi. I could easily see a young engineering student/math genius/terror savant in 1979 Tehran dabbling in sci-fi. In the end, UBL has been guided by Zawahiri, and Zawahiri has been guided by others. The food chain likely goes in unexpected directions.
In any case, that young Iranian engineering genius, who some say ultimately became the shadowy mastermind of 9/11 two decades later, wouldn't need a Farsi version. According to his translator last week, he knows English.
My goodness - this is quite a bit to digest.
You're right, much of it matches up and it can't all be coincidence.
ex: "Foundation"
the lower parts of clouds extending across a horizon
Immediately thought of "Clouds Enterprise" which I always thought sounded quite science fictiony (my new word, LOL)
the lower parts of clouds extending across a horizon
Immediately thought of "Clouds Enterprise"
Thanks. I didn't catch that one. It is easy to let the language and cultural chasms obscure some common traits of socially alienated young middle class and upper class males in their teens and twenties - - no matter language or culture, many seek refuge in the realm of science fiction.
All you have to do is go to the nearest major university and look for the guys walking around campus in their bathrobe at noon. Nothing wrong with sci-fi. Many of those guys are going to be the great scientific minds of the next generation. And even I have to confess that I have a weakness for the new "Battlestar Gallactica" (my one and only current sci-fi vice).
But as in any batch of apples, there are always a few bad ones. And when the apples are marinating in a totally dysfunctional community (say the isolated Islamic communities in London and the rest of Western Europe which have not assimilated to the same degree as those in the US - - hence more potential threats per capita for them) or a completely dysfunctional society (as are almost all those in the Mideast), they become easy prey for jihadi recruitment. It is the same phenomenon you see in our inner cities as young alienated males without adult direction become targets for gang recruitment. For inner city young males, the fictionalized violent rap culture is their version of escapist "sci fi".
Most of the jihadi cannon-fodder is just gang bangers who chant Koranic verses instead of rap lyrics. And they sustain themselves by continually recruiting psychologically vulnerable and socially alienated young men and initiating them by street fighting. You see where I am going with this . . .
The home grown problem here will only intensify after the next attack because the retaliation against the Islamic community will alienate the non-jihadi (and fully American) majority and transform the Muslim population here into the more radicalized types in Europe.
Just as the insurgency in Iraq was predictable (I still have my emails) due to our own colossal misjudgments, I fear that we will import the problems of the Europeans here by public reactions and the inability to control them. It will not drive most of them to become terrorists, but it will drive them to isolate themselves and cease the cooperation with authorities that thousands have done since 9/11.
If your local police raid a drug-infested housing project based on tips and cooperation from the residents, then they better protect those people from retaliation, or they will never cooperate again in order to protect their families. If we do not protect the people who are helping us, then when they become targets, they will go silent and the radicals will come to dominate their communities.
And just as the Iraqi insurgency is largely a product of our own mistakes, the escalating violence/domestic insurgency here is predictable.
Worse yet, there are many of our own "holy warriors" who will manage to create new jihadi problems where there were none in the first place.
Just last week I saw posts on FR saying that anyone that "looked" Mideastern needed to be targeted after the next attack . . . after the poster had been talking about hispanics (not just illegals). And i know that this proto-fascist sentiment is not unique. I daresay thousands of lurking Freepers (a minority of lurkers/posters, but still many)are infected with these pre-jihadi symptoms as well. The most radical of these "pre-jihadis"/proto-fascists intend to express and display their own jihadi mentality by going after entire communities, deliberately "terrorizing", and even killing hundreds or even thousands of innocents across America since they are "all guilty", and they intend to be judge, jury and executioner . . . much in the same way that to a Mideastern jihadi, all infidels are guilty, even women and children.
So after the next major attack, there will be hundreds if not thousands of revenge attacks, almost all of the victims innocent. And many will not even be Muslim. If those who "look foreign" become targets many hispanics and south asians will get killed. And if some of the attackers are black muslims, you can bet that the hundreds of Stormfront sympathizers who lurk here will be loading ammo and cruising to find a black kid on the corner with the bow tie selling moon pies.
Fear and social/political alienation can drive many people, no matter their background, to seek out violent solutions.
And this applies not just to Muslim extremists. Some jihadis are truck driving, flag waving, gun toting, "patriotic" Americans, who, when they perceive that they and their families are being attacked, will lash out at anything and anyone they deem a threat - - even if they are tragically wrong.
The only difference between the ignorant rednecks who will be gunning down Pakistani convenience store owners after the next attack and the young al Qaeda punks in Baghdad busy drilling holes in the skulls of their Shia neighbors, is the zip code.
Otherwise they are blood brothers.
My husband and I were discussing that very thing the other evening. I have Greek relatives on one side of the family - most of whom look like clean-shaven terrorists.
I dread what is to come with the next attack and thereafter.
from the first "callmejoe" post in the summer of 2004:
" . . . If they Interject further violence into the post-election chaos through staged provocations or assassinations, you then have a recipe for national disaster/fratricide. If you want to see us fall into "three parts", try using minority gang members. Or give Mideast AQ operatives false Latino identities and East African AQ sleepers Black identities.
You cannot target and round up 10-15 million American Muslims.
You certainly cannot target and round up 75 million American Blacks and Hispanics.
They turn what is good and familiar into their weapons.
They understand what we don't - - that WE could be "turned" to become our own worst enemies.
Don't let it happen. They seek to destroy "America".
They seek to destroy what we are. . ."
Quite prescient.
Time sure flies - has it been more than 2 years already?
"co-incidence" = "simultaneous incidents" = Iran/AQ + DPRK
"from the archives"
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/15/1058035006906.html?oneclick=true
US warned of 'imminent' nuclear peril
The Age (Australia) ^ | 7/16/2003 | Shane Green & Louise Dodson
US WARNED OF "IMMINENT" NUCLEAR PERIL
July 16 2003 By Shane Green (Tokyo) & Louise Dodson (Canberra)
Former United States Defence Secretary William Perry has warned that the US and North Korea are drifting towards war, with an "imminent danger" of nuclear explosions in American cities.
His chilling assessment of the communist state's nuclear program came as an increasingly worried China intervened, revealing a push for talks and sending a special envoy to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
Mr Perry, in an interview with the Washington Post, warned that time was running out in the nuclear crisis. "I think we are losing control of the situation," said the Clinton-era defence chief.
He warned that North Korea could soon begin exporting nuclear weapons to terrorists and other adversaries of the US, posing "an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities".
Referring to reports that North Korea had begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods to make weapons-grade plutonium, Mr Perry said: "I have thought for some months that if the North Koreans moved toward processing, then we are on a path toward war."
North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility has about 8000 spent fuel rods capable of producing enough plutonium to make between six and 12 nuclear weapons. South Korean intelligence reported last week that reprocessing had begun.
Mr Perry oversaw former US president Bill Clinton's plan for a military strike against the Yongbyon nuclear facility a decade ago. The strike was never carried out after a deal was reached with Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions in return for energy aid.
The current crisis was triggered by North Korea's admission last October that it had a nuclear arms program.
Mr Perry said the US policy on North Korea was in disarray, with President George Bush to blame for an absence of negotiations. "I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong-il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him," Mr Perry said.
With the crisis deteriorating, it was revealed yesterday that China - a mentor of North Korea - had intervened with a compromise plan for talks.
Washington has insisted on multilateral talks, while North Korea wants only direct talks with the US. Under the Chinese plan, there would be multilateral talks first, with direct talks on the sidelines.
News of the proposal followed a rare visit by Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. China's state Xinhua news agency said the two men had "in-depth discussions on issues of mutual concern" in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
In Manila, meanwhile, Prime Minister John Mr Howard yesterday dismissed claims that North Korea would target Australia with nuclear weapons.
Mr Howard said North Korea posed no nuclear threat to Australia, and the Government would not be deterred from involvement in an anti-proliferation initiative agreed to in Brisbane last week.
President Bush plans to exert pressure on Pyongyang by intercepting North Korean vessels suspected of carrying components for nuclear weapons or missiles technologies.
Kim Myong-Chol, of the Centre for Korean-American Peace, said on Monday night that if North Korean ships were stopped at sea, its nuclear arsenal could be turned on Australia. "If Australia becomes part of American manipulation against North Korea, North Korea reserve the right to strike back on Australia," Mr Myong-Chol told ABC TV's Lateline.
The Government and Labor both dismissed the claims yesterday, saying North Korea did not have the ability to launch a nuclear strike on Australia even if it wanted to.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Mr Myong-Chol was a self-appointed spokesman with no international standing.
The North Korean embassy in Canberra also said its country had no reason to bomb Australia.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/03/world/main2057290.shtml
N. Korea Vows To Conduct Nuke Test
SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 3, 2006
http://english.yna.co.kr/Engnews/20061003/430100000020061003222439E0.html
2006/10/03 22:24
S. Korean military on alert over Pyongyang's nuclear announcement
SEOUL, Oct. 3 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's military was kept on alert Tuesday following North Korea's announcement that it will conduct a nuclear test, military officials said.
Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung held an emergency meeting with senior military officers and instructed them to be on a high-level of alert for any fresh developments, they said.
"co-incidence" = "simultaneous incidents" = Iran/AQ + DPRK
+ Russia + Venezuela + Cuba + perhaps even Pakistan = They're all lining up
My hubby is Armenian- I've thought about the same thing for him. (sigh)
BTW- thanks for pinging me over to this thread Joe. I deeply appreciate it.
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