Category: Terrorism

Once Again, Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Stun Me Into Sputtering Rage

No Comments

It seems that it happens every month, and when I say, “That’s it there is no way it could get any worse,” and each time I am wrong.

Now, they are using the Cuba embargo and anti-Terror regulations to prevent the Guantánamo Bay defense attorneys from being paid or reimbursed for expenses.

Note that these guys are billing at $250/hour when their normal rate would be north of $500 an hour, but they aren’t even getting that:

When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers “The A Team.”

Now, they’re the No-Pay Team.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.

….

I can do nothing but look at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

Kafka Lives

No Comments

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuit by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation claiming that the US government has wiretapped conversations with their lawyers, because the document that confirms this is classified:

A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a lawsuit that claimed the government illegally wiretapped conversations between lawyers and a client, a now-defunct charity suspected of terrorism.

The lawsuit relied on a classified call log the government turned over by mistake to the client, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker barred the foundation from using the document and dismissed the suit, according to the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He gave the foundation 30 days to file a new lawsuit using publicly available information.

Catch 22.

McCain Money Man Funded Terrorists

No Comments

Not surprisingly, it was an executive at Chiquita, formerly United Fruit, which did so much to destabilize and de-democratize Latin America, who is involved, Carl H. Lindner Jr., whose firm admitted to knowingly supporting a terrorist organization:

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”

Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita’s payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.

According to the Justice Department, the payments “were reviewed and approved by senior executives” of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 “that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization.”

Lindner has hosted a number of fund raisers for McCain, and is on his “Ohio Victory Team”.

Chiquita also did gun running to the AUC, which I suppose is one way to keep the banana plantation workers from organizing.

And, of course, Mr. Straight Talker also did favors for the guy regarding a land deal in Arizona in the 1990s.

Oh, and I almost forgot, his chief political advisor, Charlie Black, lobbied for both Chiquita and Columbia.

What a bloody witches brew we have here….but the press won’t cover it, because McCain is a straight talker and honest.

Hmmmmm….An Interesting Factoid about the Iran – US Conflict

No Comments

According to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius :

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

So, the Iranians know that we are attempting to insert spies, saboteurs, and garden variety terrorists from Iraq, but they have the Iraqis so penetrated that they when we plan something before we do it.

Sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, where about 35% of the intelligence officers there were working for the North.

At some point, they will catch an American, and put him on TV.

Court Cites Carroll in Uighur Gitmo Case. I would have Cited Kafka

No Comments

The unclassified portions of decision by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia regarding Uighur’s imprisoned at Gitmo has now been released. (Background here)

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

……

Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

……

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

(emphasis mine)

When you lose David Sentelle on basic human rights, you are off the track. When David Sentelle signs of on a ruling that quotes Lewis Carroll, you are not only off track, you are off planet.

Ron Arad as Olmert’s Political Tool

No Comments

Well, it looks like the deal to swap swap child murderer Samir Kantar for the remains of two Israeli soldiers has hit a snag, Olmert is insisting that there can be no deal without the return of Ron Arad.

The first thing that I will say is that I think that these deals for hostages are counter productive, even moreso when the hostages are dead. Releasing Samir Kantar, who killed a 4 year old girl, for some bones is indefensibly stupid.

Bring Ron Arad into the question however, creates an entirely new dynamic.

Arad has been Israel’s Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, etc., and his status, and there is some evidence is that he is still alive, has been a focus of public concerns for over two decades now.

If he stands tough and there is no deal, Olmert wins politically, because of the public interest in the Arad manner. If he stands tough and gets back bones, he wins politically for the same reason. If Arad comes back alive, Olmert wins the next election even if he is in prison.

It is a masterful political move.

Lousy statecraft, but very good politics.

Well, Now, Isn’t That Special?

No Comments

More chocolatey goodness in the FISA bill:

The FISA law currently being debated in the Senate redefines weapons of mass destruction in a very broad way. Jason Sigger looks at Under title VII, section 110:

`(1) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas device that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause a mass casualty incident;

`(2) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;

`(3) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as such terms are defined in section 178 of title 18, United States Code) that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons; or

`(4) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to release radiation or radioactivity causing death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons.’

(emphasis mine)

Two things of note:

  1. Significant number of persons is a very vague term, and a pipe bomb at a bus station might qualify under the law, even though the term was defined in the late 1940s to apply only to those things capable of causing A-Bomb levels of destruction.
  2. It defines an incendiary device as a WMD, which means that a WP 155mm howitzer round or an incendiary bomb are now defined as WMDs, a definition that the US military has been fighting against for years.

$2 billion in Unaccounted Aid in Pakistan

No Comments

Typical. Money that was supposed to be spent on counter-terrorism was spent on…lord knows what.

Of course Pakistan has been spending our money down south, to counter the Indians, as opposed to up north, where the Taliban is, anyway.

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.

Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.

Bush Administration to Pull DPRK from Terror Watch List

No Comments

It’s actually quite refreshing that Bush and His Evil Minions™ are acutally doing something to deescalate the diplomatic situation with North Korea.

Not surprisingly, Cheney, et al, are steadfast against this.

The fact is that the North Koreans are not crazy, they are paranoid, and when you have Cheney lobbying for a military attack, that’s just being a realist.

Hopefully, this will be a step towards formal diplomatic relations. The only thing keeping the regime in power is paranoia and distrust of the USA.

About Those Gitmo Detainees “Returning to the Fight”

No Comments

In the most recent Supreme Court decision on Gitmo, Scalia noted that 30 former detainees had, “Returned to the Fight”.

Well, thanks to Sabin Willett, whose firm has represented some of those detainees, writing in the Boston Globe, we now have a definition of what this means:

It is a serious allegation, so the lawyers looked into it. It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.

Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren’t.

So I can’t speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted “returning to the fight.”

The basic institutions of state security in the United States have become very profoundly pathological indeed.

Gaza, Like This is a Surprise

No Comments

I get it. Israel agrees no offensive action against Hamas in Gaza if Hamas stops firing missiles into Israel.

So then Hamas lets Islamic Jihad (and yes, Hamas has a lid on the place, this does not go down without their making the decision to be inactive) fire rockets into Israel because of a in the West Bank, Nablus specifically, against militants who were not members of either Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

I give the truce another 3-4 weeks before a complete collapse.