A web journal committed to defend liberty, justice, and peace, by declaring the truth in love.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

27-28 February 2006

Saddam Hussein had WMD. It has been a fact, and is a fact. The greatest lie of all in the events of the last 3 years is the mantra of the left: "Bush lied." The Left lied. The IslamoFascists lied. The enemies of freedom, including (especially) those in the USA, lied. It is a tragedy of untold proportions that a nation at war against the adherents of the most fundamentalist version of Islam has been successfully torn apart, its ability to trust, its desire to stand together in unity, its patriotic love of country nearly destroyed. And done at the very time that the people most desperately need to believe in themselves, and in one another. This is the tragedy, that a war we are winning is being lost, and done by the ability of our enemies to get half of our people to believe them rather than their own leaders.

But Saddam had them. I said last week that I would say more about the issue, so here goes. First, I relate the article, published in Investor's Business Daily today (second part of a series begun on Friday), that dealt in graphic detail about the multiple sources of information about the discovery that Saddam's WMD stockpiles, materials, and equipment for making said weapons were taken out of Iraq in the period December 2002--March 2003 and stored in warehouses in Syria and the Bekaa Valley bordering Syria and Lebanon, and with the approval of the Syrian government. Consider this: that information has been provided by at least two former high-ranking officials in Saddam's regime, a former U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant general with high-level command responsibility at the time of the initial Iraq War in 2003, a general in charge at the time of Mosad, Israeli intelligence, the former head of the U.S. satellite spy system (himself a former U.S. Air Force general), former senior U.N. weapons inspectors, former members of the Iraq Survey Group, Jordan's King Abdullah and, as if that wasn't enough, actual finds of limited amounts of Iraqi WMD materials, and most of all, now, the first of the recorded tapes of Saddam Hussein's in-office conversations along with those of his top associates. All elicit the same conclusion, George Bush was absolutely justified in launching the war against Iraq.

But let me bring forward the information for you to read and judge for yourself. My thanks to Powerline, and Investor's Business Daily for the information I needed. First, the appropriate parts of the IBD article.


"Inconveniently for critics of the war, Saddam made tapes in his version of the Oval Office. These tapes landed in the hands of American intelligence and were recently aired publicly.

The first 12 hours of the tapes — there are hundreds more waiting to be translated — are damning, to say the least. They show conclusively that Bush didn't lie when he cited Saddam's WMD plans as one of the big reasons for taking the dictator out.

Nobody disputes the tapes' authenticity. On them, Saddam talks openly of programs involving biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear weapons.

War foes have long asserted that Saddam halted his WMD programs in the wake of his defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam's abandonment of WMD programs was confirmed by subsequent U.N. inspections.

Again, not true. In a tape dating to April 1995, Saddam and several aides discuss the fact that U.N. inspectors had found traces of Iraq's biological weapons program. On the tape, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, is heard gloating about fooling the inspectors.

"We did not reveal all that we have," he says. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct."

There's more. Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq's plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.

This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.

"What was most disturbing," said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq's WMD programs)."

Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using "proxies" in a terror attack.

9-11, anyone?

In short, let us repeat: President Bush was right. We had to invade to disarm Saddam — otherwise, he would have completely reconstituted his chemical, nuclear and bio-weapons programs when inspectors left.

Saddam probably knew better than to use them himself against the U.S. But it's likely he wouldn't have hesitated giving one or more to terror groups with which he had routine contact.

Lest you think we're making the case entirely based on these tapes, let us assure you that other evidence — mounting by the day — points to the same conclusion.

We've been very impressed by the story told by Georges Sada, the former No. 2 in Iraq's air force. He has written a book, "Saddam's Secrets," that details how the Iraqi dictator used trucks, commercial jets and ships to remove his WMD from the country. At the time, the move went largely undetected, because Iraq pretended the massive movement of materiel was to help Syrian flood victims.

Nor is Sada alone. Ali Ibrahim, another of Saddam's former commanders, has largely corroborated Sada's story.

So how was Saddam able to use his "cheat and retreat" tactics without being found out? He had help, according to a former U.S. Defense Department official.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," said John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense, in comments made at an intelligence summit Feb. 17-20 in Arlington, Va.

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special ops) units out of uniform that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.


That was in the first installment of the IBD series, on Friday (2/24). On today's IBD edition the other sources of information, supporting those conclusions, are cited concerning Saddam's activities, including his Osama bin Laden connection:

For example, three months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Israeli intelligence detected Iraq moving large amounts of military materiel into Syria, another Baathist dictatorship — materiel that could have included Saddam's WMD.

Last month, Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

On Jan. 25, 2004, Nizar Nayouf, a Syrian journalist who recently defected to France, told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that chemical and biological weapons were smuggled from Iraq into Syria when Saddam realized an American invasion was imminent.

Nayouf said he knew of at least three Syrian sites where Saddam's WMD were kept. One was in tunnels under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, part of an underground factory built by North Korea for producing a Syrian version of the Scud missile. Others were in the village of Tal Snan, adjacent to a Syrian air base, and in Sjinsjar, on the Syrian-Lebanese border.

Nayouf's claims were in effect confirmed two months earlier in a briefing to reporters on Oct. 20, 2003, by officials of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in Washington. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of NIMA when the Iraq War began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, who was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom, told WABC radio in September 2004: "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."

In an interview with the London Telegraph in January 2004, David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), said he uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program," Kay told the Telegraph. "Precisely what went to Syria, and what happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Charles Duelfer, Kay's successor as ISG head, testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Oct. 6, 2004, that "a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria."

"There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points," said Duelfer. "We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."

Jordan's King Abdullah may have an opinion on that. In April 2004, his country foiled a plot that involved five vehicles carrying a combined total of 20 tons of chemical weapons laced with conventional explosives.

The weapons would have released a cloud of poison gas sufficient to kill 80,000 people and, in Abdullah's words, "would have decapitated the government." The trucks were intercepted 75 miles inside the Jordanian border. They were coming from — you guessed it — Syria.

Still more answers may lie in the 35,000 boxes of documents that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence, says he's trying to get translated and released into the public domain. He told Fox News' Neil Cavuto recently that "we verified that it is Saddam's voice on these tapes" and that the "12 hours of tape is only the tip of the iceberg."


Powerline goes on to remind us of the fact that Saddam Hussein's connection with Al Qaeda, if not with the 9/11/2001 attacks, is long and well-established, including his training of many thousands of terrorist mujaheddin in three different terrorist bases, including in the use of chemical WMD, referring to a major article done on 6th January concerning a story released by Stephen Hayes of the Daily Standard.

The bottom line is that President Bush told the truth, and the world wide Left has been guilty of protracted lying themselves.


One good piece of news comes from The Counterterrorism Blog. It appears that Said Hussaini, the mastermind of the horrific attack on the Atocha rail station in Madrid that killed 192 in March 2004, as well as that of major attacks in Morocco, has been captured. Apparently the story discloses that a great deal of cooperation between American intelligence operatives and European agencies resulted in his capture at the Syria-Iraq border. It appears that he had been very busy recruiting mujaheddin for Mr. Bin Laden's jihadi army, traveling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria before his apprehension. It is no doubt amazing what is going on that we will rarely know, if ever.

Well, that's all for now. Hasta la vista.







Saturday, February 25, 2006

Saturday, 25 February 2006

I have to say that I am really bothered about what to do about Islam and Muslims. I want to accept them, know that so many are wonderful people. Then I read things like the kidnapping, beating, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris this week. I want to be open minded about my fellow human beings who worship in mosques rather than churches. But how do you deal with this shocking crime?

Here's the link to that story in the Wall Street Journal: it says a lot. But I'll put on a few quotes and lines from that article.

In life, Ilan Halimi sold cellular phones on a boulevard named after Voltaire, off a square dedicated to la République. He was an ordinary young Frenchman, except for one thing; he was Jewish, which got him killed. So in death, after 25 days of torture, Ilan Halimi became a symbol of this Continent's failures in dealing with its poor and maladjusted Muslims.

His story is shaking France in a deeper, possibly more lasting, way than the recent riots or the ongoing fracas over the Muhammad cartoons. Last week, on a Monday morning, Ilan was found naked, handcuffed, with burns and bruises over 80% of his body, stumbling on train tracks in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, south of Paris. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Each detail of his kidnapping and ordeal that emerged in the past week fed widespread popular outrage.

On Jan. 20, the 23-year-old Ilan, depicted here, went for a rendezvous with a young woman he met at his store and fell right into the hands of his kidnappers. In the previous month, this group tried to entrap six other men, four of them Jewish, using women as bait. Ilan was whisked to the cité de la Pierre-plate, a large housing project in Bagneux, a Paris suburb (or banlieue) that's home to immigrant and French lower-middle-class families. In an empty third-floor apartment and later a basement utility room, he was tortured to death. Several times, as Nidra Poller this week reported in the Journal's European editorial pages, the kidnappers called Ilan's family and read them verses from the Quran while their son screamed in agony in the background. Their demands for ransom from Ilan's modest parents never turned out to be serious. . . . .


Yet France's bigger worry is its Muslim population of five million, also Europe's largest. So it's not the anti-Semitism but the crime itself and the profile of the perpetrators that best explain the national revulsion. To put it bluntly, Ilan Halimi, many people here figure, could just as easily have been a Christian.

Since the riots petered out in early November, the country, contrary to impressions, hasn't been calm. On New Year's Day, a gang of some 40 young, mostly Arab men terrorized a Nice-Lyon train, sexually assaulting and robbing passengers, car by car. A female applied arts teacher in a Paris banlieue was repeatedly stabbed this December by one of her male students during class; in the schools dominated by kids of immigrants, teachers often report being intimidated or attacked by their pupils. And cars continue to burn nightly, if in fewer numbers.

With each incident a gulf widens between a political elite whose first instinct is to appease and tolerate the rot in its midst and the hardening of popular views about crime, immigration and Islam. The clever politician, like Nicolas Sarkozy or, out on the extremes, populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, makes sure to be on the side of the voters. This split is apparent too in the war over the cartoons. Europe's establishment prostrated itself before the Islamic radicals, while its press and people were on the whole appalled by the assault on freedom of expression. Knowing which way the wind blows, Mr. Sarkozy pointed out that he for one preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship."

Will Ilan Halimi be the wakeup call for France that the riots failed to be? An editorial in Le Monde, the voice of the French establishment, called his murder "a crime of an era, a sort of looking glass onto the true state of our society." No one here will as a result rush to aid America's global war on terror in Iraq or elsewhere. But the Europeans are in many ways in a bigger pickle than the U.S. The gravest threat to their safety and way of life comes not from across an ocean but just down the street.

Ciao.

Friday, February 24, 2006

It has been proved, though not to the satisfaction of those who believe that America is an evil nation, and George Bush is like Hitler. The Iraqi WMD is in Syria. The Russians helped them move them there, and it is waiting to be transferred into the hands of those its owners want to give them, people like Al Qaeda, but probably Hezbollah, which is Iranian-backed and is even larger than Al Qaeda.

More to come.

Friday, February 03, 2006

3 February 2006, Friday

Well, here I am in the midst of my apparent poverty, while a storm of greatly increasing intensity is set to sweep an apparent war into a deep one. Who would have thought that a small newspaper in Denmark, just publishing 12 cartoons about Mohammed and Muslims, which, by Western standards, were rather tame and silly, albeit stupid and insensitive, would unleash such a storm around the world. The Muslim "street", which has been subdued until now, has had its excuse for all-out jihad. We understand that they cannot create or display even positive and respectful representations of the prophet Mohammed, much less images that mock or condemn him. But when they expect everyone else in the world to refrain from any kind of artistic speech about him, then, if we abide by their demands, we have then, in effect, begun to bring Sharia law to the entire world.

Intolerance and disrespect toward other religions is not acceptable, and the Danes, and the large number of European media outlets that have republished the cartoons were stupid and disrepectful. It's just as disrespectful as when atheist homosexuals drop crucifixes in urine and defecate on pictures of Christ, or Kanye West poses in a parody of the suffering Jesus going to Calvary's cross, or when Jesse Jackson once called Jewish areas of New York "Hymietown", or when Muslims engage in speech every day around the world declaring jihad against Christianity and Israel, such as Iranian President Ahmadinejad's promise to wipe "the Zionist entity" off the face of the earth. But that's just the point: when Christians and others point out the faults of Islam and its teachings, Muslim clerics savage attack the critics as bigots and fanatics, and haul them into court to be fined or jailed, as was done in Australia. But when Muslim clerics support and incite Muslims to engage in suicide bombing against Israel and the West, as the grand imam of Gaza did today before 9,000 people!, if Westerners point out such intolerance, Muslim leaders and their people savagely attack Westerners as bigots and fanatics, and lobby media institutions to terminate and destroy the careers of anyone who dares to challenge them.

The fact is, we are at war. Not just a war, but jihad, in the truest sense of the word. So many Westerners still, after 9/11, after Bali, after Besalan, after Iraq, think that the Muslim fascists are just a small minority, who are despised by the rest of Islam, whose moderate peers can be easily mollified by superior technology, military might, and secular reason.

They're not. The Islamofascists are a large percentage of the Muslim faith, though still not a majority, and like those of any significant religious faith, will not respond to anything but a defeat so crushing that it strikes to the heart of their ability to keep their faith. In short, the only cure for a jihad is a crusade.....a victorious crusade.

Perhaps we are about to come to that fact, that those who love freedom, truth, even reason and science must learn that those things are protected by faith, the Christian faith. Even Judaism and Israel will find that their fate is bound up in the willingness of Christianity to fight for them.

Don't bother me with the tripe about the inhumanity of the Crusades and crusaders. I am a student of that period, and the barbarism of the Muslims, even then, far outstripped the far more publicized abuses and atrocities of the Westerners. This is not the 11th century, the people who call themselves Christians have figured out the proper provinces of faith and state. There will be no forced conversions in our agenda. But the things we cherish are to be fought for, with blood to be shed if neccessary....especially that of our enemies.

It will only take one more strike of the match. When it comes, there may be a couple of billion people, in most of the world, but especially in the United States, who will once again shout back at the Jihadists the old Crusader war cry of John de Welt, "God wills it!"

Yes, I say, "God wills it!"

News sources and Relevant columns used for this post are:

Fox News

Yahoo News Photos

Powerline Blog

Ralph Peters in today's Weekly Standard

The Belmont Club (a blog as insightful an ongoing analysis of the conflict between West and Islam as any I've found)

Thursday, February 02, 2006

2 February 2006

This is a great article about the expected testing and deployment of a laser attack gun by the U.S. Army and Air Force that can destroy enemy targets at a range of 10 miles while eliminating collateral casualties.

The link to the story, published in the Washington Times' Insight magazine, is here:

Let's see how this looks. Ciao.