Category: Terrorism

Michelle Bachmann May be Right About the Rapture

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I can think of no stronger indicator for the Apocalypse than the fact that, for the 2nd time in as many months, Donald Trump has seized the moral high ground.

Of course, this is an extremely low bar, as the competition is Pamela Geller:

Donald Trump was asked on “Fox & Friends” this morning for his opinion on the shooting outside Pam Geller’s “Draw the Prophet” contest, and he didn’t mince his words.

Brian Kilmeade asked whether he still believed “in freedom of speech, regardless of what they’re talking about — you’ve got to think they could do without being shot, don’t you think?”

Trump replied that it’s “very terrible,” but was heartened that the police acted “very strongly” by killing the two suspects. After blaming the “weak action” of the Baltimore police for the destruction of “over 200 businesses in a single night,” he praised the Garland, Texas police for their handling of these shooters.

However, he quickly switched subjects, saying that “I watched Pam [Geller on Fox News] earlier, and it really looks like she’s just taunting everybody. What is she doing drawing Muhammad? I mean it’s disgusting,” he said in reference to the attempted shootings. “Isn’t there something else they could be doing? Drawing Muhammad?” he went on.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck cut in to say that they’d asked Geller whether there wasn’t some other way they could have exercised their freedom of speech besides this contest, and Geller told her “No, there wasn’t another way, because you have to fight back against this war against the freedom of speech.”

Trump replied by again asking, “They can’t do something else? They have have to be in the middle of Texas doing something on Muhammad and insulting everybody?”

He reiterated his disgust at the attempted shooting, as well as his belief that Geller is taunting Islamic extremists. “What is she doing?” he asked. “Why is she doing it? It’s probably very risky for her — I don’t know, maybe she likes risk?”

“But what the hell is she doing?” he concluded.

So in April, he shamed most of the Republican Presidential candidates over Social Security and Medicare, and now, this.

I do not mean to imply that “The Donald” is meaningful ethics, but rather that the morality of the right wing has descended below his level.

Pamela Geller Wanted a Terrorist Attack, and She Got One

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Well, Pamela Geller has finally gotten her wish, and trigger an attack from deranged Muslim fundamentalists:

Two gunmen were killed after they opened fire Sunday evening outside an event hosted by an anti-Islam group in Garland, Tex., featuring cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, local officials said. According to the authorities, the two assailants shot a security guard and were, in turn, shot and killed by police officers.

Officials did not name the gunmen or assign a motive for the attack. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Dallas said the agency was providing investigative and bomb technician assistance to the Garland police.

The City of Garland confirmed the episode in a Facebook posting.

The shooting began shortly before 7 p.m. outside the Curtis Culwell Center at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islam organization based in New York.

“As today’s Muhammad Art Exhibit event at the Curtis Culwell Center was coming to an end,” the Facebook posting said, “two males drove up to the front of the building in a car. Both males were armed and began shooting at a Garland I.S.D. security officer.”

The “American Freedom Defense Initiative” has, among other things, campaigned against a mosque being built in Manhattan, because ……… Muslims.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified this group, along with most of the other groups she is affiliated with.

Geller is one of the founders of that organization.

Much like issue of the Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, I defend her right to free speech, but like those Nazis, we need to understand that she is a contemptible bigot who should be shunned by all right thinking people.

Instead, I expect to see her on mainstream news media (primarily Fox, but also the others) at least a dozen times over the next few months.

Well, it was Only a Matter of Time Until we Killed a White Guy………

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And now the Obama administration has been forced to admit that they killed two white hostages in drone strikes:

An American aid worker and another man held hostage by Al Qaeda were killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan in January, government officials disclosed on Thursday, underscoring the perils of a largely invisible, long-distance war waged through video screens, joysticks and sometimes incomplete intelligence.

 Intending to wipe out a compound linked to the terrorist group, the Central Intelligence Agency authorized the attack with no idea that the hostages were being held there despite hundreds of hours of surveillance, the officials said. Even afterward, they said, the agency did not realize at first that it had killed an American it had long sought to rescue, with the wrenching news becoming clear over time.

 The violent death of an American at the hands of his own government proved a searing moment in a drone war that has come to define the nation’s battle with Al Qaeda, especially since President Obama took office. Visibly upset, Mr. Obama came to the White House briefing room shortly after his staff issued a written statement announcing the deaths to make a rare personal apology.

But no one gave a sh%$ when a 16 year old American kid, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed by drones “accidentally”, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

His dad was a jihadi, so it was all cool.

One of the important thing to note is that the White House had no idea who was in the al-Qaeda compound:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards ahead of lethal drone and other counter-terrorism strikes. A White House review is under way.

“In the aftermath of a situation like this, it raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made to these protocols,” Earnest said.

………

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the accidental killings revealed on Thursday raise “questions about the reliability and the depth of the intelligence that the government is relying on to conduct drone strikes”.

“In neither of these two cases did the government actually know beforehand who it was killing. It does raise questions about how much the government knows – or how little the government knows – before it pulls the trigger,” Jaffer said.

“Perhaps that doesn’t in itself suggest that the strikes were unlawful, but it certainly raises some questions.”

It appears that the CIA thought that something might be wrong when there were two extra bodies found at the strike sites.

Oops!

I will note two things, said by the inimitable Charlie Pierce:

Am I being unpatriotic if I mention that, at this point, I wouldn’t trust the CIA to give me directions to the mall?

There has been a lot of “collateral damage” (Dead innocents) from drone strikes, but it is clear that the CIA is FAR more reckless than the Pentagon over this, though it has improved from the excesses of Petraeus’ disastrous stint as DCIA.

His second point is more important:

I’ve always thought of the drone war in terms of the melon vendor and the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. There’s an al Qaeda operative buying a melon from a vendor. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes up the other side of the road. Suddenly, here comes death from above. The terrorist is dead. So is the melon vendor. So is the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. They’re all blown into equally tiny bits. How do we think the families of the melon vendor and the guy with the goat cart are going to take this? We create a desire for retribution with which our grandchildren may have to cope. And we may never know the names of the melon dealer or the guy with the goat cart, the way we now know the names of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. We may never know the name of the melon dealer until his grandchild blows up an airplane. And none of that should be surprising because that’s also what happens when you make war, any kind of war, in a place.

The drone campaign is clearly excessive, and as a result, we are destabilizing the region, and creating a generation of people who want to make war on America.

Anyone who thinks that our drone campaign makes us safer is insane.

Seriously?

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I have been a bit dubious of the prosecutors’ (and the judge’s) behavior at the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Boston bombing trial.

The case that is a slam dunk, Tsarnaev’s defense team has conceded that he was one of the bombers, so the only issue in dispute is whether the sentence is life without parole or death, and I get the sense that the prosecutors are trying to push the envelope to get a death penalty, and the judge eager to allow them to do so.

This is depressing, because it is more important for the trial to be seen as scrupulously fair than it is to put a needle in has arm.

The latest, and far most concrete, example of this is the prosecutors (and the judge) have have gone a bit far with the showing a video of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev flipping off a security cam while in a holding cell:

The US Department of Justice has released an image of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev giving the finger to a security camera in his jail cell, a day after prosecutors showed it to jurors in the sentencing phase of his trial.

The image, taken three months after the April 2013 bombing in his holding cell at the federal courthouse, is one of the only public images of Tsarnaev since his arrest days after the bombing.

“This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – unconcerned, unrepentant and unchanged,” assistant US attorney Nadine Pellegrini on Tuesday told the jurors who will decide whether the 21-year-old former college student should be executed.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers on Wednesday sought to blunt the impact of a photo, placing it in context of his movements in the cell. They showed the jury video clips of him looking into the camera, apparently fixing his hair in the reflective glass, and then making a slightly angled, two-finger gesture similar to what teenagers often do playfully in selfies. Then he raised his middle finger at the camera.

In an apparent attempt to press the argument that Tsarnaev was a “kid” who was led astray by his big brother, defense attorney Miriam Conrad asked Assistant US Marshal Gary Oliveira if he knew how old Tsarnaev was at that time.

The witness said he didn’t.

“You don’t know that he was 19 years old?” Conrad asked.

I understand that the prosecution is required to show that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a horrible and unrepentant person to get death.

But presenting a 19-year old flipping off a security cam to justify a death penalty?  That seems a bit much.

This serves no purpose but to inflame the jury, and the judge should not have allowed it.

The Middle East is a Truly F%$#ed Up Place

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You may recall that Palestinian terrorists abducted and killed three Israeli Jewish students, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah a while back.

It was a part of the ostensible justification for the latest military operation against Gaza.

A day after they were buried, Israeli terrorists kidnapped and burnt to death Palestinian teen Mohammed Khudair.

Well, it just got more screwed up, because after the Israeli government placed Khudair’s name on a memorial to terrorist attacks, both Israelis and Palestinians flipped out:

Israel has added the name of a Palestinian teen to its “Monument to the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism”, upsetting the youth’s parents and a group representing families of slain Israelis with both demanding his name be removed.

………

The Almagor Terror Victims Organisation, a group founded in 1986 and representing the families of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks, demanded the government remove the plaque honoring Khudair.

“(Khudair’s) name on the memorial debases the memory of all the other fallen people,” Yossi Tzur, an Almagor member whose 17-year-old son was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in 2003, told Israel Radio.

“He is not part of the Israeli ethos. He is not part of the sacrifice our children made at the altar for the sake of Israel’s establishment and existence,” Tzur said.

Khudair’s parents told Reuters they had not been consulted by Israel about adding their son’s name to the memorial, which lists more than 4,000 people.

“We can’t accept that his name be included among soldiers who killed his relatives in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank,” said Khudair’s father, Hussein.

His mother, Suha, said her son was “a Palestinian martyr, and not Israeli”, and their family felt shamed.

This is incredibly depressing.

This kid is a victim of terrorism, and neither side can move themselves to move past a tribal inability to feel any smidgen empathy for the other.

It’s all degenerated into a contest over whose suffering is more righteous.

Remember the Brief Kidnapping of Richard Engel by Assad’s Forces in Syria? Not so Much.

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It turns out that he was kidnapped by the Syrian opposition, and then freed by the same militias as a part of a false flag operation: (See also here and here.)

NBC News on Wednesday revised its account of the 2012 kidnapping of its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, saying it was likely that Mr. Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by a Sunni militant group, not forces affiliated with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

In a statement posted on the NBC News website Wednesday evening, Mr. Engel said that a review of the episode — prompted by reporting from The New York Times — had led him to conclude that “the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia.” He also wrote that the abductors had “put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite shabiha militiamen.”

Mr. Engel and his team were kidnapped in December 2012 while reporting in Syria. They were held for five days. Just hours after emerging, they appeared on the “Today” show.

“This was a group known as the shabiha, this was the government militia, these are people who are loyal to President Bashar al-Assad,” Mr. Engel said on “Today,” citing information he had gathered from the group. In that and other appearances on NBC, and in a Vanity Fair magazine article, he said that he had been rescued by Sunni rebels. At least two people died during the course of the captivity, he said in some versions of the account.

Interviews by The Times with several dozen people — including many of those involved in the search for NBC’s team, rebel fighters and activists in Syria and current and former NBC News employees — suggested that Mr. Engel’s team was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr. Assad.

The group, known as the North Idlib Falcons Brigade, was led by two men, Azzo Qassab and Shukri Ajouj, who had a history of smuggling and other crimes. The kidnapping ended, the people involved in the search said, when the team was freed by another rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, which had a relationship with Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj.

Mr. Engel and his team underwent a harrowing ordeal, and it is a common tactic for kidnappers in war zones to intentionally mislead hostages as to their identity.

NBC executives were informed of Mr. Ajouj and Mr. Qassab’s possible involvement during and after Mr. Engels’s captivity, according to current and former NBC employees and others who helped search for Mr. Engel, including political activists and security professionals. Still, the network moved quickly to put Mr. Engel on the air with an account blaming Shiite captors and did not present the other possible version of events.

Of course they, “Did not present the other possible version of events,” they couldn’t present other possible versions, because Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia..

This is Significant

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Donald Trump spoke at CPAC, and he was booed when he called for ground troops in Iraq to fight ISIS:

In the same question and answer period with Sean Hannity, he [Trump] embarrassed himself yet again when he outlined his strategy to fight ISIS, which was nothing more than “he’d hit them really hard.” With what? We don’t know, but when he supported sending ground troops against ISIS, the crowd turned on him.

Hannity: A, to stop Iran’s nuclear program and B, to defeat ISIS, cause I don’t hear say degrade them, I hear you say defeat them.

Trump: Defeat. Well, with ISIS, I’d just hit them really hard and that would probably and a year ago you wouldn’t have said it and nobody wouldn’t have likes it, you may have to have some boots on the ground for a period of time until you’re rid of the cancer. (boos) That’s number one, you may have to have it Look, they’re cutting off the heads of people, they’re burning at the stake, It’s like we’re living in medieval times.

(emphasis original)

Unfortunately, the video has been deleted by the user, but the fact that the crowd at CPAC, who have pretty much defined themselves as the wingnuts of wingnuts, have come to the conclusion that the John McCain school of foreign policy is without merit is significant.

If the war forever has lost the CPAC crowd, they have lost the nation.

Today’s Must Read

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Ted Rall’s essay Obama Destroyed Libya. (alternate link here, the first link is twitchy)

He makes a number of points, that Libya under Gaddafi was generally prosperous, at least by the standards of Africa and the Arab world, albeit with a pretty horrific human rights record, and now it is a basket case with a growing lawlessness and it has become a locus for terrorist activity.

I think that the most important part of his essay though, is his conclusion that Barack Obama did not learn the lesson that he should have from this fiasco:

To Obama’s credit, he admits that he screwed up in Libya. Unfortunately, he drew the wrong lesson. In 2014, he told an interviewer that a large ground invasion force might have helped Libya’s post-Gaddafi government succeed. Because that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if he really believes that, why doesn’t he order in the troops?

 Obama’s real mistake was to depose a secular socialist autocrat and allow him to be replaced by a bunch of crazy religious fundamentalist militias whose factionalism ensured they’d never be able to govern.

 Bush committed this error in Iraq. Obama made it in Libya. And now he’s doing it again in Syria.

Obama’s already destroyed one country with a “stupid war”, and now he’s trying for a sequel in Syria.

The foreign policy consensus as regards the Arab world is a toxic mixture of hubris, which, when juxtaposed with the incomprehensible need to appease the various Gulf monarchs (UAE in Libya, Saudi Arabia with Syria) has produced nothing but failure and insecurity.

This all looks so much like Athens’ disastrous Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It Appears that the Only People Surprised with the House of Saud’s Ties to Terrorists is US Anti-Terrorism Agencies

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It appears that members of the US state security apparatus has literally described as “inconceivable” allegations that the Saudis gave support to terrorists:

Former top-level US intelligence officials have lined up to discredit explosive allegations by a convicted al-Qaida operative that senior members of the Saudi royal family supported the extremist network, and that a Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down the US presidential plane Air Force One.

 Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, made the accusations in testimony filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday by lawyers for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks who accuse Saudi Arabia of providing material support to al-Qaida.

 Robert Grenier, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief, said Mousaoui’s allegations were “inconceivable”. A former top navy terrorism investigator, Robert McFadden, likened claims of official Saudi backing for the devastating attack to “a unicorn”.

 But the allegations – which came just a week after the US government made an ostentatious reaffirmation of US friendship following the death of Saudi King Abdullah – have once again focussed attention on the wisdom of Washington’s oil-fueled alliance with a leading exporter of Islamic extremism.

 Moussaoui, whose trial for his involvement in the 9/11 plot exposed a history of mental illness, echoed longstanding allegations that members of the Saudi royal family helped bankroll al-Qaida ahead of the attack.

 But he also made a dramatic new claim, alleging that he discussed a missile attack on Air Force One with a diplomat from the Saudi embassy in Washington.

It is telling that Mr. Grenier uses the term, “Inconceivable.”

He didn’t use the term, “fanciful,”, or “ludicrous,” or “ridiculous,”he used the term “Inconceivable.”

This choice of words is telling.

The House of Saud has a very long history of supporting Islamic extremism, both financially and through its policy of aggressively exporting local religious extremists in order to get them out of the country, but this “expert” cannot even conceive that they might have been providing aid to various flavors of Salafi (Wahhabi) fundamentalists who are tied to terrorism.

These are the words of a person who is fully immersed in denial, like the elements of FBI who arranged for charter flights out of the US for prominent Saudis immediately following the 911 attacks.

Saudi support for extremism is the elephant in the room among the US state security apparatus, and ignoring this fact is both required for career advancement, and cripples the anti-terrorism activities of those who do this.

It is clear that the House of Saud has bankrolled violent extremist groups, including ISIS, and it is even clearer that they use their money to promote religious schools and mosques that are the underlying infrastructure of Islamic terrorist groups.

I don’t care how much oil they pump, we need to stop looking the other way when they do this.

They are not our ally in this matter.

Scholars in Pakistan Say What I’ve Been Saying for Years

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That the prevalence of terrorism in the Muslim world is largely funded by the House of Saud:

Federal Minister for Inter-provincial Coordination (IPC) Riaz Hussain Pirzada has accused the Saudi government of creating instability across the Muslim world, including Pakistan, through distribution of money for promoting its ideology.

Addressing a two-day ‘Ideas Conclave’ organised by the “Jinnah Institute” think tank in Islamabad, the federal minister said ‘the time has come to stop the influx of Saudi money into Pakistan’.

Now if only someone like a US Senator were to issue a similar condemnation.

It is patently clear that the font from which international Jihad springs is the pocketbook of the House of Saud.

They fund the schools where Jihadis are created, the social welfare organizations which they fund are Islamist, and they make a concerted effort to export their home grown nut-jobs to other Arab and Muslim nations, where they are some else’s problem.

H/t Emptywheel

Republican Family Values in Action

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The Teabagger is the one on the Left

Teabagger heroine, and terrorist wannabe, Holly Fisher has been exposed exposed cheating on her military veteran husband:

In July, liberals were delighted by the moronic antics of a woman who quickly became known as “Holly Hobby Lobby.” Shortly following the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling that allowed companies to inject their religion into female employees’ healthcare, Holly Fisher decided to poorly “troll” liberals a bit.

Our heroine bravely stood in front of a Hobby Lobby store wearing a “PRO-LIFE” t-shirt and holding a Chick-Fil-A cup. She captioned her photo “HOW TO MAKE A LIBERAL’S HEAD EXPLODE,” and set it loose on Twitter.

………

This photo gained Holly the admiration of the conservative world. Quickly, she became a hero to all who have trouble figuring out how to work a microwave. [I love that turn of phrase MGS] Unfortunately, her new photo — the one conservatives adored — bore a striking resemblance to “the White Widow,” a jihadist suicide bomber who blew herself and four other people up in 2004.

………

“The conservative woman behind several viral photos cheated on her combat veteran husband repeatedly & then lied about it, Gotnews.com has learned,” [The world’s worst undeserving claimant of the term “Journalist”, and member of the class Myxogastria, Charles C.] Johnson wrote.

According to Johnson, multiple sources within the Tea Party confirmed that Fisher had a prolonged affair with Joel Frewa, a now-former video editor for the Tea Party News Network. Johnson says Frewa resigned after word of the affair began to leak out.

“The affair took place at a “Restoring the Dream” event, a Faith & Freedom conference, and on Election night 2014,” Johnson said.

The irony here is delicious, but it is far from surprising.

H/t Blade at the Stellar Parthenon.

Well, I Missed this News Story

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Were any of the rest of you aware that a few days before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, ISIS managed to kill the Saudi general responsible for protecting the kingdom’s northern border against the terrorist group:

Last week, just before the Charlie Hebdo attack, ISIS sent a suicide team across the border into Saudi Arabia.  Here’s what happened.

  • The attack was successful.  The team found and killed the Saudi general (Oudah al-Belawi) in charge of the country’s nothern border zone at the outpost he was visiting (here’s a pic of the state funeral for some of the men killed in the attack).
  •  The target was significant.  General Oudah al-Belawi was in charge of the multi-billion dollar Saudi effort to secure the northern border against ISIS.  Not only has Saudi Arabia sent 30,000 additional troops to guard the northern border, it’s building a highly automated 600-mi security wall to protect itself (lots of robots and sensors).  Here’s a great graphic of the monstrosity from the Telegraph.  My take:  What a waste of time and effort. 

………

Here why this attack is signficant.  

  • It tells us that ISIS is starting to focus on Saudi Arabia –> with good reason.  The reason is that there’s simply no other way to unite the various groups under the ISIS banner.  ISIS, like all open source movements, needs to keep moving in order to stay alive (like a shark).  Right now, ISIS has stalled.  A jihad to retake the holy sites from the corrupt regime in Riyadh can serve as a simple plausible promise that can reignite the open source war ISIS started, on a global scale.

I can think of no better target for ISIS brutality than the House of Saud.

If this corrupt regime is devoured by the monster that they created, it would be poetic justice.

Unfortunately, it will be the subjects of that corrupt monarchy will bear the brunt of any conflict.

Thank You Lassana Bathily

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He was an employee at the Hyper Cacher supermarket who managed to get about 15 people into hiding during the hostage taking and subsequent siege:

As the authorities in France worked on Saturday to piece together the sequence of events at a kosher supermarket in Paris where a gunman and four hostages were killed on Friday, there was an outpouring of praise online for a young employee credited with saving the lives of some customers by hiding them in a cold-storage room.

The employee, Lassana Bathily, 24, was identified in the French news as a Muslim from Mali who worked at the supermarket, Hyper Cacher, near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris.

………

When the people he had hidden came out at the end of the siege, Mr. Bathily said, “they congratulated me.”

“They said, ‘Really, thanks for thinking of all these ideas.’ I said, ‘It’s nothing, it’s life.’ ”

It ain’t nothing.

You kept your head, and helped a lot of people.

It is a big deal.

And in Domestic Terrorism Today………

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Someone set off a pipe bomb near the offices of the Colorado Springs:

An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of a building housing the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP on Tuesday, officials said.

The explosion knocked items off the office walls but no one was injured.

Agents from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives went to the scene after the blast to gather evidence and place markers.

The FBI said that a gasoline can was placed next to the device but the contents did not ignite.

According to the the FBI, officials are seeking a “potential person of interest,” described as a balding white male, about 40 years old.

“He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate,” the FBI said in a statement said.

Seeing as how Colorado Springs is a Mecca* for right wing bigots, the first conclusion that I jumped to was that this was somehow or other this is tied to the Talibaptist presence in that town.

I may be wrong, but I’d give some serious odds that I’m right.

*Yes, I know that the whole “Mecca” thing is an unfortunate metaphor.

We Need to Recognize the Fact That the Right to Blaspheme is an Essential Right

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I do not think that there is really much more to say about the religiously motivated shooting of staff at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris:

The police organized an enormous manhunt across Paris on Wednesday for three suspects they said were involved in a brazen and methodical slaughter at a satirical newspaper that had lampooned Islam.

The terrorist attack by masked gunmen on the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead — including the top editor, prominent cartoonists and police officers — and was among the deadliest in postwar France. The killers escaped, traumatizing the city and sending shock waves through Europe and beyond.

Officials said late Wednesday that the suspects had been identified and that two were brothers. They were identified as Said and Cherif Kouachi, 32 and 34, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. French news reports said the brothers had been born in Paris, raising the prospect that homegrown Muslim extremists were responsible.

Religion has been one of the most powerful, and most violent, forces in human history.

To degree that we as a species have any rights at all, we must protect the right to mock and insult religion.

More Weirdness in the Anthrax Mailings

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about the issues with the FBI’s investigation of the Anthrax mailings, and now it appears that the GAO report on this matter has attracted the interest of The New York Times:

A congressional inquiry into the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the anthrax mailings of 2001 has identified major gaps in genetic evidence that purportedly links the germs to Bruce E. Ivins, the Army microbiologist blamed for attacks that killed five people, sickened 17 others and shook the nation.

The Government Accountability Office study, requested in 2010 and made public on Friday, echoes earlier criticism from the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, its expert panel found that the bureau’s analysis of the genetic evidence “did not definitively demonstrate” a firm link between the mailed anthrax spores and a sample taken from Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and more generally was “not as conclusive” as the bureau had asserted.

The G.A.O. had better access to F.B.I. records and deepened the genetic critique, finding that the bureau’s investigation “lacked several important characteristics” that could have strengthened its case. “A key scientific gap,” the 77-page report said, was the bureau’s failure to investigate whether samples of anthrax spores could naturally mutate enough to obscure their putative links to Dr. Ivins.

I think that it is more than likely that Dr. Ivins was involved in the anthrax mailing.

I know that the FBI was flailing wildly, and was looking for anyone that they could finger as the perp, and Ivins was the 2nd person that the FBI aggressively harassed, the first being Steven Hatfill, and it appears that in both cases, the FBI was hoping for a suicide to end their search.

Another Statement of Obama’s that is “Inoperative”*

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Cliff Stone, who worked with the State Department finding places to send innocent Guantánamo detainees once they were cleared for released, has resigned in the slow pace of releases:

The State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is resigning, dealing another blow to President Obama’s efforts to close a facility that top administration officials say is a blight on the country’s international standing.

The resignation of Cliff Sloan, a close confidant of Secretary of State John Kerry, comes as officials at the State Department and the White House have increasingly expressed frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Sloan denied that he was leaving because he was frustrated by foot-dragging at the Pentagon. He said he had always intended to stay a maximum of 18 months, noting that he was right on schedule.

“Frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners,” my ass.

The military is not a democracy. Barack Obama is commander-in-chief.

If someone is dragging their feet, Obama can fire them.

What’s more, I would argue that he has a moral obligation to fire them.

Guantánamo is more than a moral cancer on America. It is a source of outrage in the Arab world, and is one of the most power recruiting tools that Jihadis have.

*Yes, I am invoking the memory of former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.