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Somali Al Qaeda Affliliate, Al Shabaab, Executes Two Teen Girls For Being "Spies"

You know, if you were to creep up to the Gates of Hell and poke your head through for a glimpse, it would probably look something like Somalia right now.

This story, from Reporters Live, chronicles how al Shabaab in Somalis publicly executed two teenage girls the other day...one was 18 years old and the other 15 years old, charging them as spies for the government of Somalia.

From the article:

With a cry of “there is no God but Allah!” two young Somali girls ages 18 and 15 were executed before hundreds of witnesses in a spray of bullets in Mogadishu, Somalia, yesterday.

The two girls,Ayan Mohamet Jama and Huriyo Ibrahim died blindfolded while shocked villagers, forced to attend by Al Shabab, looked on.

These executions come amongst a string of Al Shabab- sponsored whippings, amputations and executions such as those suffered by the two young women — – all in the name of Islam and overseen by judges whose only qualifications are that they are men who claim to know the Koran.

As we have seen, if your group wants admittance to al Qaeda you pretty much have to torture, kill, maim and rape all of your local citizenry. Now, we saw this type of sadistic treatment of Iraqis in Anbar province completely backfire on al Qaeda in Iraq but Somalia is different - al Shabaab has total control of these villages and believe me, there is not going to be any sort of civilian "awakening" nor resistance. These people are at the mercy of islamic madmen.

Wouldn't allah and mohammed be so proud?

al-Qaida Executes Two Young Women Before Hundreds of Onlookers


With a cry of “there is no God but Allah!” two young Somali girls ages 18 and 15 were executed before hundreds of witnesses in a spray of bullets in Mogadishu, Somalia, yesterday.

The girls were sent to their deaths by Sheikh Mohammed Ibrahim in the town Belet Weyne which is an al–Qaida Islamic militia run village.

The charge brought against the two young women was that of spying for government soldiers.

The two girls,Ayan Mohamet Jama and Huriyo Ibrahim died blindfolded while shocked villagers, forced to attend by Al Shabab, looked on.

These executions come amongst a string of Al Shabab- sponsored whippings, amputations and executions such as those suffered by the two young women — – all in the name of Islam and overseen by judges whose only qualifications are that they are men who claim to know the Koran.

Video: It's Official ...The Thugs and Vote Frauders of the SEIU Are All For Harry Reid

Mastermind of Al Qaeda Cargo Plane Terror Plot Identified, U.S. Special Forces Barred by Yemen From Operation

To say that this article from DEBKA is full of "news" would be a helluva understatement!

First off, the DEBKA article names the al Qaeda operative who masterminded the terror bombing plot of putting the explosive-laden packages on the cargo plane flights headed to America - his name is Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri - a Saudi Arabian living in Yemen. Secondly, the article says that the Yemeni government refused to allow U.S. special ops forces to land in the country to try and take out the al Qaeda group in the country that fosters Al Asiri and the other terror elements there.

From the article:

The mastermind of the Al Qaeda (AQAP) plot to plant explosive packages aboard US-bound air freighters is identified by debkafile's exclusive counter-terror sources as Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri, a Saudi Arabian. He is hiding out at the main Al Qaeda fighting base in the Yemeni province of Al Gouf, 140 kilometers south of Sanaa.

Our sources also reveal that Saturday night, Oct. 30, Yemeni president Abdullah Ali Saleh was still refusing to allow Washington to land US special forces in Al Gouf to wipe out the al Qaeda bastion which has so far resisted all the Yemeni army's efforts to root it out. Based there, according to US and Saudi intelligence, is the al Qaeda (AQAP) infrastructure of terror planners and bomb makers who planted the two explosive packages taken off cargo flights bound for Chicago, US, on Friday.

With Yemeni troops falling back against AQAP, US and Saudi forces Saturday stepped up their UAV strikes on the Al Gouf hideouts to keep al Qaeda fighters from escaping to other parts of Yemen. The US drones came from Djibouti and the Saudi pilotless aircraft from Assir just north of Yemen.

Our military sources reveal that US Combined Task Force - CTF 151 has been standing by Yemen's Red Sea coast aboard the Marine amphibious assault ship USS Boxer awaiting the order to land in Al Gouf, while the Marines Expeditionary Unit 26 waits on the USS Iwo Jima, accompanied by additional US warships.

It appears that from an article at the Telegraph that this has been substantiated by U.S. officials that Al Asiri is the guy and it might also explain more how the Saudi intelligence community got the tip on this plot, since Al Asiri is one of their own and perhaps they've had their eyes and ears on him.

As for the Yemeni government not allowing the U.S. special ops from conducting an al Qaeda gutting operation - I don't know...does that sound like Barack Hussein Obama to you? Or perhaps is this all a ploy by Obama to try and set up some history for himself for fighting terror?

I wonder. What if all of a sudden the news breaks that U.S. special ops have landed in Yemen and taken out Al Asiri, the mastermind of the cargo plane plot - boy, we'd have tons of photo ops with President Obama the mighty anti-terror President! There would be banners all over: "Obama got his man when Bush couldn't!"

Of course, at the same time, it doesn't look all that great for Obama if a two-bitter like the Yemeni President is keeping these U.S. forces at bay.

Yemeni President bars US commando raid on al Qaeda package plotters


The mastermind of the Al Qaeda (AQAP) plot to plant explosive packages aboard US-bound air freighters is identified by debkafile's exclusive counter-terror sources as Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri, a Saudi Arabian. He is hiding out at the main Al Qaeda fighting base in the Yemeni province of Al Gouf, 140 kilometers south of Sanaa.

Our sources also reveal that Saturday night, Oct. 30, Yemeni president Abdullah Ali Saleh was still refusing to allow Washington to land US special forces in Al Gouf to wipe out the al Qaeda bastion which has so far resisted all the Yemeni army's efforts to root it out. Based there, according to US and Saudi intelligence, is the al Qaeda (AQAP) infrastructure of terror planners and bomb makers who planted the two explosive packages taken off cargo flights bound for Chicago, US, on Friday.

With Yemeni troops falling back against AQAP, US and Saudi forces Saturday stepped up their UAV strikes on the Al Gouf hideouts to keep al Qaeda fighters from escaping to other parts of Yemen. The US drones came from Djibouti and the Saudi pilotless aircraft from Assir just north of Yemen.

Our military sources reveal that US Combined Task Force - CTF 151 has been standing by Yemen's Red Sea coast aboard the Marine amphibious assault ship USS Boxer awaiting the order to land in Al Gouf, while the Marines Expeditionary Unit 26 waits on the USS Iwo Jima, accompanied by additional US warships.
Saudi King Abdullah and senior US and British government officials have been leaning hard on the Yemeni president to allow these forces to land and storm the bastion of al Qaeda's air freight package plotters. Ali Saleh Saturday night still stood by his refusal. To deflect their demands, the Yemeni president Saturday night began to disseminate an assortment of claims and data to show how hard he was working to crack the terrorist freight conspiracy.
Our sources report that even when he ordered Yemeni police to seize up to 30 pieces of suspect freight and arrest a woman and her mother as suspects of planting the explosive parcels on Fedex and UPS air freighters he was acting under duress. Saudi and US intelligence dropped this information in his lap with an ultimatum to take action or else they would take matters out of his hands.

The two women are believed to be no more than couriers at the end of the line who agreed to plant the parcels for a small sum. They are unlikely to have information that goes high up to the hideouts and identities of the planners. However, by locking them up in Yemeni cells, Ali Saleh has shut the door to US and Saudi counter-terror investigators trying to garner even small crumbs of information under questioning, although they are unlikely to accept this refusal without a fight.

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Suicide Bombing In Istanbul, Turkey Wounds 22, the World Says It's PKK, Holger Says It's Al Qaeda

A suicide bomber hit a city square today in Istanbul, Turkey wounding 12 civilians and 10 police and now the finger pointing game begins in Turkey. While the press is quick to blame this attack on the rebel Kurdish group, PKK, I would beg to differ - I think this attack was al Qaeda.

First this, from the article at DAWN:

A suicide bomb ripped through crowds of shoppers and cafe-goers in the heart of Istanbul on Sunday, wounding 22 people, as an extended unilateral ceasefire by the separatist PKK came to an end.

The blast targeted riot-police patrolling the busy Taksim Square in the centre of the Turkish economic capital, police chief Huseyin Capkin said.

“We think it was a suicide attack,” he said, adding that 12 of the injured were civilians and 10 were police.

Capkin said none of the injured were in danger and the only fatality was the bomber, who blew himself up before reaching his intended target.

“He tried to get into a police bus but didn’t succeed,” he said.

Turkish television showed footage of police taking away the lifeless body of a man from the scene, as well as dazed and injured people receiving first aid.

Capkin did not say who was suspected of responsibility, but the separatist rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and extreme left-wing groups have carried out bomb attacks in the past in Istanbul, home to more than 12 million inhabitants.

Analysts quoted by television stations pointed to likely PKK involvement, whose unilateral ceasefire declared on August 13 was due to end on Sunday.

It's going to be easy to put this all on the PKK especially with that ceasefire ending just yesterday, but I point to al Qaeda for two reasons...first, al Qaeda has tried to make a splash on the world stage the past month - they had the big European plot that was sniffed out and just a few days ago we had the cargo plane package scheme. The second reason is that things are just too peaceful in Turkey - we have to notice here that this bombing targeted riot police and that is an al Qaeda trademark, to target police with bombings.

The fact that the military and the police in Turkey represent the biggest hurdle to an islamist regime taking over the political power in secular Turkey is reason enough that this country is high on the list for al Qaeda. I could be wrong on this but my gut says it's all part of a string of attacks planned by al Qaeda to raise their relevance on the world stage.

Suicide bomber wounds 22 in central Istanbul: police


ISTANBUL: A suicide bomb ripped through crowds of shoppers and cafe-goers in the heart of Istanbul on Sunday, wounding 22 people, as an extended unilateral ceasefire by the separatist PKK came to an end.

The blast targeted riot-police patrolling the busy Taksim Square in the centre of the Turkish economic capital, police chief Huseyin Capkin said.

“We think it was a suicide attack,” he said, adding that 12 of the injured were civilians and 10 were police.

Capkin said none of the injured were in danger and the only fatality was the bomber, who blew himself up before reaching his intended target.

“He tried to get into a police bus but didn’t succeed,” he said.

Turkish television showed footage of police taking away the lifeless body of a man from the scene, as well as dazed and injured people receiving first aid.

Capkin did not say who was suspected of responsibility, but the separatist rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and extreme left-wing groups have carried out bomb attacks in the past in Istanbul, home to more than 12 million inhabitants.

Analysts quoted by television stations pointed to likely PKK involvement, whose unilateral ceasefire declared on August 13 was due to end on Sunday.

The PKK said on September 30 that it had decided to extend its truce by one month, an announcement taken to mean it would end on October 30.

Istanbul governor Avni Mutlu said the bombing was the work of a “terrorist organisation” without elaborating. He told reporters that an investigation was underway to identify the culprits.

Murat Karayilan, a top commander of the outlawed PKK, last week said the PKK would no longer target civilians and wanted to extend a unilateral truce indefinitely if the government demonstrates a commitment to dialogue.

“We are actually in favour of a permanent ceasefire... We are waiting. We have not decided yet,” he told the Radikal newspaper.

Taksim Square, and the streets leading to it, attract tens of thousands of people a day and are patrolled by anti-riot police around the clock.

According to witnesses quoted by news channels, the powerful blast shook the area around 10.30 am (0830 GMT), blowing out windows in nearby offices and hotels.

Footage showed police and ambulances rushing to the scene.

Police immediately threw a security cordon around the area, and streets including the pedestrianised historic Istiklal were closed off, the CNN-Turk and NTV channels reported.

On June 22 a bomb exploded in a suburb of Istanbul as a bus full of soldiers was going past, killing five soldiers and the teenage daughter of one of them.

Responsibility was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), an obscure radical group loyal to jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, jailed for life in 1999.

The Turkish authorities say TAK is a front used by the PKK, especially when attacks claim civilian casualties.

The PKK has said TAK is a splinter group outside its control.

The PKK has waged a bloody 26-year campaign for self-rule in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey. — AFP

Video: Al Qaeda Training Video - Suicide Bombs In Your Ass (Take one in the ass for allah)

Video: Suicide Bombing Aftermath Against Police In Istanbul, Turkey

Yemeni Woman Arrested In Cargo Plane Terror Plot on U.S.

The Yemeni security forces have arrested a Yemeni woman in connection with the sending of bomb laden packages aboard cargo planes with a destination of American soil.

This just out from CBS News:

Yemeni authorities arrested a woman Saturday and searched for other suspects linked to al Qaeda's Persian Gulf faction in the plot to mail bombs powerful enough to down a cargo plane.

A spokesperson for the Yemeni embassy has confirmed the story to CBS News.

Officials said the woman was detained as part of a widening search for people believed to have used forged documents and ID cards in the plot thwarted Friday. Authorities on three continents scrambled to check planes from Philadelphia to central England, recovering two live explosive devices addressed to two synagogues in Chicago.

Two security officials told The Associated Press the woman was arrested in the al-Rawdah district near the airport in San'a, Yemen's capital. "According to our information, a woman has sent the packages through the agents (companies)," Saleh said in his briefing.

One of the Yemeni officials, a member of the country's anti-terrorism unit and close to the Yemeni team probing the case, said the other suspects had been tied to al Qaeda's faction in Yemen.

Now, look at this part of the story:

Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told reporters that the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates had provided information that helped identify the woman as a suspect.

Now, that all sounds a bit fishy to me - if that is factual then what I want to know is just how much information did the U.S. actually have on this whole thing and why hasn't it been more forthcoming? And since when is the U.A.E. a kingpin in terrorist intel? This could just be the Yemeni president trying to mend some fences with Washington but it still makes you wonder.

Some of the earlier reports say that the U.S. was tipped off by Saudi Arabia and there might be an element of truth there - the Saudis have found themselves in a quasi war with Shiites from Yemen over the past 9 months and I'm sure they are invested fully in gathering intel inside of Yemen and they may have stumbled upon this but I still wonder how Saudi Arabia can be monitoring Shiite rebels in the south and all of a sudden gain info on operations of al Qaeda.

Yemen Arrests Woman for Sending Mail Bombs


Yemeni authorities arrested a woman Saturday and searched for other suspects linked to al Qaeda's Persian Gulf faction in the plot to mail bombs powerful enough to down a cargo plane.

A spokesperson for the Yemeni embassy has confirmed the story to CBS News.

Officials said the woman was detained as part of a widening search for people believed to have used forged documents and ID cards in the plot thwarted Friday. Authorities on three continents scrambled to check planes from Philadelphia to central England, recovering two live explosive devices addressed to two synagogues in Chicago.

The dragnet in Yemen and the results of a preliminary investigation into one of the bombs in Britain reflected the seriousness of a plot that investigators said bore all the hallmarks of al Qaeda. Yemeni officials said the suspects were believed linked to al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the group's affiliate in the Persian Gulf.

Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told reporters that the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates had provided information that helped identify the woman as a suspect.

Two security officials told The Associated Press the woman was arrested in the al-Rawdah district near the airport in San'a, Yemen's capital. "According to our information, a woman has sent the packages through the agents (companies)," Saleh said in his briefing.

One of the Yemeni officials, a member of the country's anti-terrorism unit and close to the Yemeni team probing the case, said the other suspects had been tied to al Qaeda's faction in Yemen.

Several U.S. officials said they increasingly are confident of the involvement of al Qaeda's Yemen branch, the group behind the failed Detroit airliner bombing last Christmas. A Nigerian-born passenger tried to set off a bomb packed with PETN, an industrial explosive that was the same potent ingredient used in the mail bombs found Friday. But the suspect's underwear detonator failed to operate properly.

U.S. officials said al Qaeda's explosives expert in Yemen, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, was the likely suspect behind the bombmaking. Al-Asiri helped make the bomb used in the Christmas attack and another PETN device used in a failed suicide attack against the top Saudi counterterrorism official last year, officials said.

A U.S. official also said both bombs seized on Friday were attached to power supplies, a further indication that they were viable. All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

U.S. investigators said the mail bombs found in the UAE and England were headed to two synagogues in Chicago. But British Home Secretary Theresa May said it was possible that the cargo plane carrying the package from Yemen may have been the target, too.

A second package was discovered in Dubai, where white powder explosives were discovered in the ink cartridge of a printer, police said in a statement. The device was rigged to an electric circuit, and a mobile phone chip was hidden inside the printer, the statement said.

The bombs were constructed to be activated by cell phone and a timer, but investigators have not found either of those devices, said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a member of the House Homeland Security Committee who was briefed on the investigation.

CBS News Homeland Security correspondent Bob Orr reports that the so-called printer bombs found in two packages that were en route to the United States contained significant amounts of the explosive PETN - from 5 to 8 times the amount of explosive as the "underwear bomber."

According to one source, the amount of PETN discovered in the cartridge discovered in the U.K. was up to a pound.

Officials continue to investigate whether the bomb would have worked, a U.S. official said.

Yemeni authorities were checking dozens more packages in the search for the terrorists who sent the bombs, though there were no signs of additional explosives. Authorities questioned cargo workers at the airport as well as employees of the local shipping companies contracted to work with FedEx and UPS, a Yemeni security official said.

The White House said President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, called Yemen's president and made clear that the U.S. was ready to help his government against al Qaeda. The U.S. already assists Yemen with air strikes and other counterterrorism information.

U.S. officials temporarily banned all cargo shipments from Yemen. An employee at the UPS office in Yemen said the office had been instructed not to receive any packages for delivery for the time being. The U.S. Postal Service has decided not to accept any inbound mail from Yemen for now.

The U.S. has FBI, military and intelligence officers stationed in the country to conduct an inquiry. There are only a few international shipping locations in the impoverished Arab nation, but U.S. officials worried that record keeping would be sparse and investigators would have to rely more on intelligence sources to identify the would-be bombers.

Yemen is home to the radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who's linked to the Christmas attack and has inspired other terrorists with his violent message. Also hiding in Yemen is Samir Khan, an American who declared himself a traitor and helps produce al Qaeda propaganda.

Intelligence officials were onto the suspected plot for days, officials said. The packages in England and Dubai were discovered after Saudi Arabian intelligence picked up information related to Yemen and passed it on to the U.S., two officials said.

U.S. intelligence officials warned last month that terrorists hoped to mail chemical and biological materials as part of an attack on the United States and other Western countries. The alert came in a Sept. 23 bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that was obtained by The Associated Press.

Since the failed Christmas bombing, Yemen has been a focus for U.S. counterterrorism officials. Before that attack, the U.S. regarded al Qaeda's branch there as primarily a threat in the region, not to the United States.

The Yemen branch, known as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has since become a leading source of terrorist propaganda and recruiting. Authorities believe about 300 al Qaeda members operate in Yemen.

Video: UAV vs. Bad Guys

Is It Really Possible That Hugo Chavez Is Going To Have Nukes?

The opening line of the article here at Family Security Matters goes way beyond "sobering"... it states:

If something isn't done to prevent it, we'll likely be facing an emerging nuclear threat from President Hugo Chavez's Venezuela sometime in the next 10 years.

Now, if that doesn't send a chill down your spine, I don't know what will. But the article does address what some probably just have laughed off as some grand plans by a quircky dictator in Venezuela. Well, the fact of the matter is that this nutcase to our South, namely Hugo Chavez, has extremely close ties with every misfit nuclear power or nuclear wannabe in the world and I don't think there's an American alive who doesn't know of Chavez' hatred of America.

From the article:

Just two weeks ago, on one of several stops of his grand tour abroad, Chavez alighted in Russia (on his ninth visit there) to sign an agreement for the building of two 1,200-megawatt nuclear reactors and a research reactor back home, according to Russian sources.
As the most popular purveyor of proliferation problems (e.g., building North Korea's and now Iran's first nuclear reactors), Russia is a perfect place to start your nuclear program.
Of course, Chavez insists he's only looking to achieve energy independence. But anyone who looks at Venezuela's vast oil wealth is understandably skeptical that peaceful power generation is his real motive.
Consider some other stops on Chavez's seven-country whistle-stop tour. In Iran, he visited his "brother" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some experts fear Caracas and Tehran may already have some small-scale nuclear projects underway. Plus, the two regimes are reportedly working on the mapping and mining of Venezuela's uranium deposits, possibly the world's largest.
This would certainly benefit Iran, whose nuke program is laboring under punitive sanctions that are meant to inhibit access to supporting materials and technology.
Clearly, getting its hands on uranium won't be a problem for Caracas. But it might trade the raw material for Iranian uranium-enrichment technology -- technology that Venezuela is widely thought to have solicited from neighboring (nuclear) Brazil and Argentina. (They refused.)

As you can see, it looks like Chavez is trying to go the route of Iran in saying he needs nuclear reactors for energy - just a need of his people for running their A/C , yanno. And why shouldn't he try this approach....hell, it's worked like a charm for the Iranians.

The Iranians will have nukes within two years and Barack Hussein Obama and European leaders will STILL be sitting their with their thumbs up their asses.

But if you want to find a nut job even more off their rocker than Ahmadinejad and the whack job mullahs....just look at Chavez. With this madman having nukes, the likes of Columbia would be nothing but a smoldering, molten block of land. I've said several times that I didn't think Chavez was going to survive the economic and social collapse of his country - I only hope it happens a hell of a lot quicker now.

El Loco's Nuke Push


If something isn't done to prevent it, we'll likely be facing an emerging nuclear threat from President Hugo Chavez's Venezuela sometime in the next 10 years.
He vows that "nothing will stop us" from bringing "nuclear power" to Venezuela. Unfortunately, "nuclear power" is now a common coverup term for a nuclear-weapons program, such as we're seeing in Iran.
After five years of talking up his atomic aspirations without making much headway, the anti-American Chavez is finally getting somewhere.
Just two weeks ago, on one of several stops of his grand tour abroad, Chavez alighted in Russia (on his ninth visit there) to sign an agreement for the building of two 1,200-megawatt nuclear reactors and a research reactor back home, according to Russian sources.
As the most popular purveyor of proliferation problems (e.g., building North Korea's and now Iran's first nuclear reactors), Russia is a perfect place to start your nuclear program.
Of course, Chavez insists he's only looking to achieve energy independence. But anyone who looks at Venezuela's vast oil wealth is understandably skeptical that peaceful power generation is his real motive.
Consider some other stops on Chavez's seven-country whistle-stop tour. In Iran, he visited his "brother" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some experts fear Caracas and Tehran may already have some small-scale nuclear projects underway. Plus, the two regimes are reportedly working on the mapping and mining of Venezuela's uranium deposits, possibly the world's largest.
This would certainly benefit Iran, whose nuke program is laboring under punitive sanctions that are meant to inhibit access to supporting materials and technology.
Clearly, getting its hands on uranium won't be a problem for Caracas. But it might trade the raw material for Iranian uranium-enrichment technology -- technology that Venezuela is widely thought to have solicited from neighboring (nuclear) Brazil and Argentina. (They refused.)
Down the road, the concern is that Iran will also share with Venezuela the military dimensions of its nuclear program, such as ballistic-missile and nuke-warhead systems and technology.
The scenario has all the trappings of an over-the-horizon Cuban Missile Crisis.
Chavez also popped into Libya to see Moammar Khadafy, who had his own nuclear aspirations until a few years ago. Libya's program was helped by Pakistan's proliferator extraordinaire, A.Q. Kahn, and may still have some expertise to share.
He stopped in Syria, too, which had been (and may still be) receiving nuclear assistance from North Korea. (Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea in Syria in a 2007 raid.)
Chavez didn't visit North Korea on this tour, but he plainly wants to go -- he reportedly canceled a trip to see "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il earlier this year, after some opposition from the Venezuelan parliament.
But it's not just the possibility that we'll see a nuclear threat emanating from Venezuela in the years to come that should concern us; others in the region will feel the need to react, too. Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, for one, already has, reportedly saying this week that a Venezuelan nuclear program poses a serious threat to Latin American security.
Not all Chavez's neighbors have the resources -- but big powers like Brazil and Argentina, which had bomb programs in the '70s and '80s, might pursue nukes again. (Similarly, a number of Arab states are hedging against Iran's nuke-quest with their own new nuclear programs.)
What was President Obama's reaction to Chavez's Russian deal? "Our attitude is that Venezuela has rights to peacefully develop nuclear power . . . We have no incentive nor interest in increasing friction between Venezuela and the US, but we do think Venezuela needs to act responsibly."
Talk about the triumph of hope over experience.
It's clear: We're in the early stages of a potentially big problem. Being in denial or waiting to get tough, as we did with the Iranian nuclear program, likely would have the same ineffectual results.
Like an aggressive disease, a nuke program under Chavez would only get worse with time unless steps to deal with it are taken early on. The time to start is now.

Haqqani Network Taliban Attack FOB in E. Afghanistan, Repelled by U.S. Troops and Air Support, 30 Taliban Killed UPDATE: 80 Taliban Killed

One of the favorite spots for the Taliban to mass an assault on U.S. FOB's in Afghanistan is Paktika province which is a bit off the beaten path in eastern Afghanistan. If you recall, Paktika was the location of one of the worst assaults on a U.S. base last year. Well, this mass assault by the Haqqani Network Taliban didn't go quite as well for them as U.S. troops fought back valiantly and called in Apache and fixed wing air support who decimated the marauding Taliban.

From the article at The Long War Journal:

US troops beat back the latest attempt by the Haqqani Network and the Taliban to overrun a combat outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The US troops killed more than 30 Haqqani Network fighters who carried out a coordinated, massed assault in Paktika province.

The attack began at 1:30 a.m. this morning, when the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network massed a large number of fighters outside Combat Outpost Margah, an International Security Assistance Force public affairs official told The Long War Journal. The fighters "attacked from all directions with rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and mortar fire," ISAF stated in a press release.

US troops returned fire and called in air and helicopter support against the enemy fighters. Aircraft launched three guided bombs at "an insurgent firing position" and attacked "a large number of insurgents near the outpost," ISAF stated.

ISAF estimated that more than 30 of the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network fighters were killed in the strike. Five US soldiers were wounded in the clash, "however all continued fighting."

The fact that five U.S. troops were wounded shows just how serious this attack was - please note that all five of those American soldiers kept their weapons blazing while injured.

I think what sets this attack apart from the one that killed so many of our troops before is the quick response by air support - if you read between the lines of the article, you can tell that a couple of well-placed JDAMs probably took out the bulk of the 30 dead Taliban and it's my guess that the Apache gunships probably were shooting fish in a barrel.

We escaped one here, that's for sure. It won't be the last.

UPDATE: From a report I just saw at DAWN - there's an update on what exactly we did to the Taliban during this attack. It says that 80 Taliban were killed in the defense response!

An Afghan official said Saturday that 80 Taliban insurgents were killed during a failed attack on a Nato combat outpost near the border with Pakistan.

“Fresh information that we received from intelligence sources shows that 80 Taliban have been killed. The bodies of the militants were left on the battlefield,” said Mukhlis Afghan, spokesman for the governor of eastern Paktika province.

Nato said earlier that 30 Taliban had been killed as international troops repelled an attack on the outpost in Barmal district, which sits on the border of Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area.

Now, when we can jump from 30 dead Taliban to 80 dead Taliban...that's a good update!

US troops repel Haqqani Network assault on eastern Afghan base


US troops beat back the latest attempt by the Haqqani Network and the Taliban to overrun a combat outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The US troops killed more than 30 Haqqani Network fighters who carried out a coordinated, massed assault in Paktika province.

The attack began at 1:30 a.m. this morning, when the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network massed a large number of fighters outside Combat Outpost Margah, an International Security Assistance Force public affairs official told The Long War Journal. The fighters "attacked from all directions with rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and mortar fire," ISAF stated in a press release.

US troops returned fire and called in air and helicopter support against the enemy fighters. Aircraft launched three guided bombs at "an insurgent firing position" and attacked "a large number of insurgents near the outpost," ISAF stated.

ISAF estimated that more than 30 of the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network fighters were killed in the strike. Five US soldiers were wounded in the clash, "however all continued fighting."

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Al Jazeera that the fighters inflicted "high casualties" on Afghan and ISAF forces after overrunning six Afghan police outposts. He claimed that only eight Haqqani Network fighters had been killed during the assault. But the Taliban exaggerate Afghan and Coalition casualties on a daily basis, often claiming that scores of troops are killed and dozens of "tanks" are destroyed.

The Taliban and its sub-group, the Haqqani Network, are seeking to overrun ISAF and Afghan outposts in an effort to gain a propaganda victory. The massed attacks are carried out by anywhere from 50 to 200 fighters, and are filmed by propaganda teams. Al Qaeda and other terror groups often participate in the attacks as well.

The attacks tend to begin early in the morning. Enemy forces usually commence the attack with mortar and rocket strikes, while waves of fighters move toward the outer perimeter and attempt to breach the wire. The enemy fighters seek to get as close to the base as possible to negate the ISAF air advantage; once inside the security perimeter ISAF air crews would have to risk firing on their own personnel.

Repeated Taliban assaults against remote US combat outposts in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, and the near-overrunning of outposts in Kamdesh and Wanat, contributed to the decision by ISAF to withdraw from the area within the past year. The Taliban and al Qaeda quickly moved into the abandoned regions and established safe havens in the area, then proceeded to launch attacks on neighboring districts.

Background on recent attacks on US outposts in eastern Afghanistan

The Haqqani Network launched five massed assaults on US outposts between late August and September. Each of the attacks failed, and the Haqqani Network incurred heavy casualties. The bases are strung along the Haqqani Network's rat lines into North Waziristan in Pakistan, where the terror group's leadership is based.

On Aug. 28, Haqqani Network fighters launched coordinated attacks against Forward Operating Bases Salerno and Chapman in Khost province. US and Afghan troops routed the Haqqani Network fighters, killing more than 35, including a commander, during and after the attacks. Several of the fighters were wearing US Army uniforms, and 13 were armed with suicide vests. During raids in the aftermath of the attacks, US forces killed and captured several commanders and fighters.

On Sept. 2, the Haqqani Network attempted to storm Combat Outpost Margah in the Bermel district of Paktika province. US troops repelled the attack with mortar and small-arms fire, then called in helicopter gunships to finish off the attackers; 20 were reported killed.

On Sept. 21, US troops killed 27 Haqqani Network fighters as they mustered to assault Combat Outpost Spera.

And in the last attack, on Sept. 24, Haqqani Network suicide bombers attempted to breach the outer perimeter of Forward Operating Base Gardez in Paktia province. Five suicide bombers were killed by US forces.

The Taliban and the Haqqani Network have also launched attacks at several major installations across the country this year. In May, a small team attempted to breach security at Kandahar Airfield after launching a rocket attack on the base; another small team conducted a suicide assault at the main gate at Bagram Airbase in Parwan province. In June, the Taliban launched an assault against Jalalabad Airfield in Nangarhar province. The Taliban carried out a suicide assault against the Afghan National Civil Order Police headquarters in Kandahar City in July; three US soldiers were killed in the attack, which included a suicide car bomber and a follow-on assault team. And in early August, the Taliban again conducted a complex attack at Kandahar Airfield. All of the attacks were successfully repelled by Coalition and Afghan forces.

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Video: The Changing of the Guard (Sweden)

Obama Confirms Bombs Were Headed On Cargo Planes To Jewish Centers In Chicago

I'm not going to add much to this story at Breitbart as it is now being reported that Barack Hussein Obama's press conference has confirmed that there were indeed explosives planted in cargo on cargo planes headed to Chicago, Illinois - specifically headed for Jewish centers in Chicago.

The explosives were found in cargo planes in Dubai and in Britain and both had originated in Yemen. Obviously this is al Qaeda and obviously, this is just another example of islamic terrorists smelling blood in the water in regards to counter-terror capabilities in America.

As is typical of al Qaeda, they are constantly morphing their tactics of terror - about the time that Janet Napolitano has all of our resources checking passengers headed to America, the al Qaeda leadership has changed tactics to this new look of planting explosives in cargo. It's my guess that after six months of looking at this incident, Napolitano will have a whole new set of regulations in place for cargo coming into America...and of course, by that time, al Qaeda will be on to a whole new tactic.

Feel safe, America?

Obama: Terror explosives found, bound for US


Authorities on three continents thwarted multiple terrorist attacks aimed at the United States Friday, seizing two explosive packages addressed to Chicago-area synagogues and packed aboard cargo jets from Yemen. Parts of the plot might remain undetected, President Barack Obama's counterterror chief warned.
Obama called the coordinated attacks a "credible terrorist threat" amid worldwide fears that al-Qaida was launching a major new campaign of assaults.

"The United States is not assuming that the attacks were disrupted and is remaining vigilant," Obama adviser John Brennan said at the White House.

One of the packages was found aboard a cargo plane in Dubai, the other in England. In the U.S., cargo planes were searched up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and an Emirates Airlines passenger jet was escorted down the coast to New York by American fighter jets.

No explosives were found aboard those planes, though the investigation was continuing on at least two.

Obama's sobering assessment, delivered from the White House podium, unfolded four days before national elections in which discussion of terrorism has played almost no role. The president went ahead with weekend campaign appearances.

The terrorist efforts "underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism," the president said. While he said both packages that contained explosives originated in Yemen, he did not explicitly assign blame to al-Qaida, which is active in the Arab nation and long has made clear its goal of launching new attacks on the United States.

Authorities in Dubai intercepted one explosive device. The second package was aboard a plane searched in East Midlands, north of London, and officials said it contained a printer toner cartridge with wires and powder. Brennan said the devices were in packages about the size of a breadbox.

While the president didn't specifically accuse Yemen's al-Qaida branch, officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were increasingly certain that was the source. The same group was responsible for the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner last Christmas.

The radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who now lives in hiding in Yemen, is believed to have helped inspire recent attacks including the Fort Hood shooting, the Times Square bombing attempt and the failed Detroit airliner bombing last Christmas Day.

Most of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the ongoing investigation.

Brennan later told reporters that the explosives "were in a form that was designed to try to carry out some type of attack," but he provided no further details.

"The forensic analysis is under way," he said, adding, "Clearly from the initial observation, the initial analysis that was done, the materials that were found in the device that was uncovered was intended to do harm."

What Are Russian Forces Doing In Eastern Afghanistan?

The Russians are back in Afghanistan. Now, they aren't there fighting on the side of U.S., Coalition and Afghan troops but they are there to assist on cracking down on the huge drug situation in the country.

From the report at The Long War Journal:

Russian counter-narcotics police have joined Coalition and Afghan forces in the first combined raid of its kind against drug labs in eastern Afghanistan.

The raid took place yesterday in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar and targeted and destroyed three heroin labs and a morphine lab. More than more than 2,000 pounds "of high quality heroin" and 344 pounds of opium were seized, according to RIA Novosti. The drugs had a street value of more than $250 million.

A joint force consisting of 70 personnel from Afghanistan's Counter-Narcotics Police, Russian's Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), the US' Drug Enforcement Agency, and the International Security Assistance Force carried out the raid early Thursday morning, according to a statement released by the US Embassy in Afghanistan. No casualties were reported during the counter-narcotics operation.

One of the drug labs that was targeted was in the district of Achin, a known location of an al Qaeda cell in eastern Afghanistan.

So, if you are the inquisitive type like I am, you might be asking, "why did the Russians get involved again in Afghanistan?" Well, the answer is....NATO asked them for help. From the article:

The counter-narcotics raid took place just three days after NATO announced it was exploring ways to increase Russian assistance in Afghanistan, to "include the contribution of Russian helicopters and crews to train Afghan pilots, possible Russian assistance in training Afghan national security forces, increased co-operation on counter-narcotics and border security, and improved transit and supply routes for Nato forces," according to a report in The Guardian.

Hmmm...reading that it seems the Russians are being asked to be a LOT more involved in Afghanistan and I gotta tell ya...Afghanistan and the war going on there is getting more complicated by the day. We have so-called peace discussions going on behind the scenes, there are reports that U.S. personnel are holding covert talks with the Taliban, there's rumors of Pakistani intelligence getting more involved with the Taliban and now we have Russians running around the country. Good grief.

I'll put it bluntly. This is the kind of damn mess you get when a city boy community organizer becomes Commander-in-chief of the United States military. What a bloody nightmare.

Russian forces join ISAF in narcotics raid in eastern Afghanistan


Russian counter-narcotics police have joined Coalition and Afghan forces in the first combined raid of its kind against drug labs in eastern Afghanistan.

The raid took place yesterday in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar and targeted and destroyed three heroin labs and a morphine lab. More than more than 2,000 pounds "of high quality heroin" and 344 pounds of opium were seized, according to RIA Novosti. The drugs had a street value of more than $250 million.

A joint force consisting of 70 personnel from Afghanistan's Counter-Narcotics Police, Russian's Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), the US' Drug Enforcement Agency, and the International Security Assistance Force carried out the raid early Thursday morning, according to a statement released by the US Embassy in Afghanistan. No casualties were reported during the counter-narcotics operation.

One of the drug labs that was targeted was in the district of Achin, a known location of an al Qaeda cell in eastern Afghanistan.

The raid was announced earlier today during a joint press conference held by Viktor Ivanov, the head of Russia's Federal Anti-Narcotics Committee, and Eric Rubin, the Deputy Head of Mission for the US Embassy in Russia. The officials said the operation had been planned more than three months in advance.

Ivanov indicated that further raids with Russian police in participation are in the works.

"We have made a request to send more Federal Drug Control Service staff to investigate the situation on the ground," Ivanov told reporters.

The counter-narcotics raid took place just three days after NATO announced it was exploring ways to increase Russian assistance in Afghanistan, to "include the contribution of Russian helicopters and crews to train Afghan pilots, possible Russian assistance in training Afghan national security forces, increased co-operation on counter-narcotics and border security, and improved transit and supply routes for Nato forces," according to a report in The Guardian.

The US has sharpened its focus on counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan over the past year, as a large portion of the Taliban's funding is estimated to come through the drug trade. Of the 367 people placed on a "kill or capture" list from 2009, 50 were top-level drug traffickers.

ISAF “had expanded authorities to go after counternarcotics targets that directly support the insurgency, the so-called narco-terrorism network nexus, where they fund or otherwise support the Taliban insurgency,” a defense US official told reporters in June 2009.

Drug smuggling has been linked to top Afghan officials, including the brothers of President Hamid Karzai.

Earlier this week, the US designated two Afghan narcotics traffickers who operate in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand as Specially Designated Global Terrorists "for providing financial and logistical support to the Taliban," according to a statement released by the US Treasury Department. "Haji Agha Jan Alizai, who has managed one of the largest drug trafficking networks in Helmand, and Saleh Mohammad Kakar, a narcotics trafficker who has run an organized smuggling network in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, were both designated today pursuant to Executive Order 13224."

Also, on Oct. 24, ISAF forces killed a Taliban commander named Faruk "during an operation to interdict narcotic smuggling in Reg-e Khan Neshin district, Helmand province."

"With the close proximity to Pakistan, and his close ties to Taliban leaders there, he was able to facilitate weapons and explosives into the area from Pakistan using narcotics as payment," ISAF stated.

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Palestinian Woman Calls Out Iran For What They Are...The Puppeteer of the Middle East Conflict

In this article over at Family Security Matters, you will see that the latest shipment of weapons and munitions headed to Hamas from Iran have been intercepted - this time in Nigeria - showing how Iran continues to try and find a new route for supplying the terrorist organization tasked with destroying any chance of Middle East peace.

And at least one person in Palestine is willing to stand up and call out the Iranians for what they are....puppeteers of hate and division.

As it says in the article, this Palestinian woman, Zainab Rashid, better look into one hell of a security detail after making these comments - either that or she better look into a new spot to live a long ways from Tehran.

Hamas's Iranian Puppeteer


For those who so naively believe that the way to defuse the Islamist threat to the world is first to solve the Israel/Palestinian conflict, further evidence – not that anyone who has eyes to see actually needs it – of the way in which the Palestinians are themselves being controlled by the forces of the jihad. For the third time, Iranian arms destined for Hamas in Gaza to attack Israel have been intercepted, this time in Nigeria. Ha’aretz reports:

Nigeria's secret service said on Tuesday it had intercepted 13 containers of weapons from Iran in what Israeli defense sources believe may be part of a new smuggling route from Iran to Hamas in Gaza. Rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives camouflaged as building material were seized in the Nigerian port of Lagos after being unloaded from an Iranian ship.

So many in the west – including, I suspect, those who are not hostile to Israel, merely indifferent – fail to grasp that a key reason for the Israel/Arab impasse is that the Palestinian side has always been controlled by state actors pulling its strings. The current chief puppeteer is Iran, assisted by its ally in infamy, Syria. This is even more striking since Hamas, who are Sunni Muslims, are in cahoots with Shia Iran, theologically their sworn enemies.

Palestinian reformist Zainab Rashid absolutely gets the point. In an important article which should be disseminated far and wide, she writes on the liberal Arab website Aafaq:

"What exists is an Arab-Israeli conflict, not a struggle as the resistance front's media continuously claims. The Arab dictatorships use this conflict... as a pretext [to avoid reform] whenever questions arise regarding democracy, pluralism, and government turnover. This is the truth, and there is much evidence to support it.

"The most convincing proof is the attempts of these regimes to make deceitful and callous use of the Palestinian cause and to manipulating Palestinian elements in order to spark disputes. They miss no opportunity to sabotage peace efforts, as we saw at the outset of the latest round of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, when Hamas received a directive from the Syrian and Iranian regimes which control it to carry out two attacks in the West Bank, shortly before the first session of peace talks, with the intent of undermining the negotiations. This is what all the dictatorships have done throughout the history of this struggle in order to prevent its resolution.

"If we want this struggle to end, we must stop Islamizing the [Palestinian] cause by interpreting [current] affairs according to what is written in religious texts... How can we resolve this struggle while people, relying on the holy texts, still believe in the depths of their hearts that it will continue until Judgment Day, when the trees and rocks will call on the Muslim to come kill the Jews hiding behind them?”

In other words – as I have said before -- those who think resolving the Israel/Palestinian issue will help defeat radical Islam have got it precisely the wrong way round. The Israel/Palestinian issue will only be resolved if radical Islam is first defeated.

Even more important is what Zeinab Rashid goes on to say:

"Today, nine years after the terrorist crime of 9/11, the number of condemnations against this crime from the Muslim world has yet to reach the number of condemnations which the entire world voiced against the Reverend Terry Jones's intentions to burn the Koran. Reverend Terry Jones's initiative revealed the difference between the diffident and embarrassed tone of the Muslim condemnation [of 9/11]... and the harsh condemnation voiced by the entire world [against Terry Jones's intentions]...

"Up till now, no important and widely-followed Muslim leader has dared to declare that the head of the terrorists, Osama bin Laden, or the perpetrators of this crime, are heretics. The reason for this is that they carried out jihad al-talab [holy war against infidels on their own soil], which is considered an obligation incumbent upon all [Muslims], [but] which, if carried out by some, exempts the rest... [In other words,] the crime of 9/11 was carried out by [people who acted as] representatives of all Muslims.

In another sense, according to shari'a, those who carried out the 9/11 crime were immeasurably better Muslims than the so-called moderate sheikhs. The problem lies in the fact that in Islam there is no moderation versus extremism. [My emphasis] [Moreover,] in reality, one who calls himself a moderate has no power, money, or equipment with which to carry out what can be carried out by an extremist, who does have some power, as well as plenty of money...

..."Violence is at the foundation of Islam. Any attempt to claim that violence has no roots in Islam, and that [Islam] was spread by pleasant and tolerant means, is an attempt to turn religious texts upside down..."

I hope this woman has personal protection. What courage.

She undoubtedly puts herself in danger by speaking such home-truths. How shameful that, in the land of the free, our spoiled and frivolous liberals are quite incapable even of hearing them.

Pakistani Gunship Helicopters Continue To Pound Orakzai, 12 Taliban Killed

Just a short blurb here from DAWN but it shows how the Pakistanis continue to pound Orakzai agency in the NW part of the country and the latest gunship helicopter strikes killed 12 Taliban.

This is starting to look more and more like a formal offensive that certainly wasn't announced but we'll take it!

Just a guess on my part but perhaps this is some preliminaries that the Pakistani military is undergoing prior to taking on the major offensive in North Waziristan - I've said before that the North Waziristan operation will more than likely be the most difficult of all previously conducted by the Pakistanis and perhaps Orakzai plays some role in softening that whole operation up.

Twelve militants killed in Orakzai air strikes


KALAYA: At least 12 militants and a security official were killed and 13 others, including five troops, were injured in attacks on security forces and air strikes by gunship helicopters in Orakzai Agency on Thursday.

Officials said that a convoy of security forces was going from Kalaya to Meshti Bazaar area when it was targeted with a remote control device.

A security official was killed and five others wounded, while their vehicle was destroyed.

The security forces cordoned off the area soon after the attack and launched a search operation.

Meanwhile, gunship helicopters targeted suspected locations of rebels in Khadezai, Meshti Kandao and Chappar Mamozai areas of the tribal region, killing 12 militants.

Four hideouts were also destroyed in the air strikes.

Video: Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

Photo of the Day: A Heartbeat Away

(Hat Tip: Doug @ SondraK)

It's Us Against Them...the American People vs. Public Sector Unions

Okay, I've said many times that as a member of the U.S. Congress, the very first bill I would author would be one that bans public sector unions in this country. Unions came about as a protection for the worker against a monopoly of employers...that was 125 years ago. Today, we have public sector unions whose employer, in essence, is us...the American people. I ask you... do you consider yourself a greedy, undermining boss who seeks to abuse your employees? Are you people out there in America the kind that wants to treat teachers badly as they watch over your kids 8 hours a day? Of course not. The fact that we have public sector unions in this country is testament of how far socialism has corrupted our American system of government.

So, in this article at Family Security Matters, there's a good hard look at how often it's the American people and our kids who lose whenever the public sector unions win. Now, I could go into a tirade and prove to you how when PRIVATE sector unions win, we all lose too but I'll save that for later.

I'll leave you to the article below but ask you this ... how do you really feel about paying the salary for a person in America who takes some of that money of yours and gives it to public sector union leadership who then in turn takes that (your) money and gives it to Communists and Socialists?

When Government Unions Win, Everybody Else Loses


Not too much good news about public education coming out of our nation’s capital. Michelle Rhee resigned as chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. She was doing everything she could to break the left-wing teachers’ union’s power to protect its deadwood teachers and principals. She modified the teacher evaluation process by taking student progress on tests into consideration and she fired over 200 ineffective teachers and administrators. She had the support of Mayor Adrian Fenty, but other public employee unions including the infamously left-wing SEIU joined up to defeat him and pull the rug out from under Rhee. The American Federation of Teachers spent over $1 million in the effort.

Unions won. Students lost.

This came on the heels of another bit of bad news last year in our capitol city when Congress (which administers the District of Columbia) eliminated a school choice program for 1700 DC school children. President Obama, who sends his children to an expensive private school in DC, did nothing to support the school choice program for poor DC kids. Democrats are beholden to the teachers’s unions, which are the biggest supporters of that party nationwide, just ahead of trial lawyers. School choice anywhere it’s offered is anathema to teachers’ unions. Most of their political capital is spent defeating school choice (voucher) programs nationwide.

Here too, unions won. Students lost.

Shortly after Michelle Rhee resigned, the DC school system started feeding dinner to students as well as breakfast and lunch. According to an article at change.org, “This new early dinner program will feed 10,000 kids who may spend up to 10 hours a day at school in early-care and after-school programs.” So, now US taxpayers are feeding three meals a day to school kids in our nation’s capital. They’re spending ten hours a day in school with early care and after school programs, yet change.org is lamenting that food stamp aid may be cut to pay for it. “Forty percent of households reported not having enough money to buy food at least one time,” the article claims, and the federal government is “robbing Peter to pay Paul” when it cuts food stamps.

Why don’t those households have enough money for food when their kids are getting two or three free meals at school in addition to their food stamps? Are they bartering their food stamp benefits for other things on the street corner? According to an article in the Washington Examiner, the Washington DC school system has the fattest kids in the country. “The District has the highest childhood obesity rate in the country [according to] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” yet we’re supposed to feed them still more? What the heck is going on down there?

Most newspapers report the per-pupil cost for DC schools at $13,000 per year, but if an article in the Washington Times is correct, the real number is $24,600! That’s the figure you get when you take all the money spent on the schools and divided it by the number of students. My only question at this point is: when are we going to provide beds for them? We babysit them before and after school, we feed them, we teach them to brush their teeth, teach them about the birds and the bees, provide counseling - so what’s left for parents to do? Where is it going to end?

The school choice program that Democrats in Congress cut cost the Washington DC school district only $7500 per pupil. At $24,600 per pupil the District spends, that would be a net savings of more than $17,000 per student. The 1700 students who took advantage of it were thriving. Their parents were happy with it too, but the teachers’ unions were not because it shone a bright light on what a bloated, corrupt education bureaucracy the unions created and preserved. If it expanded and was copied across the country, the teachers’ union monopoly would be smashed and Democrats would lose their biggest constituency. It had to go.

The federal government administers Washington, DC. Its schools are among the most expensive in the country, yet its students score among the lowest on standardized tests. If there’s a congressman or senator who sends his/her kids to the public schools in that city, I don’t know who it is. Nevertheless, that same federal government is taking more and more control of all the nation’s schools through an expanding US Department of Education.

As a long-time public school teacher, I don’t see that as an encouraging trend.

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New Report Calls Out Islam As Posing As a Religion, Fighting Sharia Key To Stopping Islamofascism

Truly a great article here from Family Security Matters that details a new report out that represents one of the few that has actually tackled the truth about Islam and called it out for what it is...a fake.

This article is full of examples of how islam is charading as a religion and really, truly is a violent political ideology.

I've excerpted the whole article below - well worth the read.

Islamism is a Threat Posing as a Religion


This is the central message of an important new report released by the Center for Security Policy in Washington DC.

Entitled Shariah: The Threat to America: An Exercise in Competitive Analysis - Report of Team B II (pdf), the study is the product of an extended period of research, analysis and debate, undertaken by a large team of security policy experts, which seeks to re-orientate American national security policy regarding the Islamist danger.

In doing so it focuses on the core of Islam, its system of law, or "shariah", conceptualised as a totalitarian ideology akin to communism, Nazism and fascism, and pursued by Muslim supremacists who seek "to impose ... a global totalitarian system cloaked as an Islamic state and called a caliphate" (p.6).

The report emphasises that the extremely aggressive Islamist campaign of "civilizational jihad" is not entitled to constitutional protection because it is not primarily a religious pursuit involving "the sacrosanct realm of private conscience and belief", but is a political project that "seeks to supplant our Constitution with its own totalitarian framework" governing every area of life (p.8).

In advancing this argument, the report pointedly accepts the standard Muslim definition: "shariah is held by mainstream Islamic authorities ... to be the perfect expression of divine will and justice and thus is the supreme law that must comprehensively govern all aspects of Muslims' lives, irrespective of when and where they live. Shariah is characterised as a 'complete way of life' (social, cultural, military, religious, and political), governed from cradle to grave by Islamic law" (p.37).

For adherents to shariah there can be no compromise with any other system of laws, politics, beliefs or behaviour. In particular, "the West [is] an obstacle to be overcome, not a culture and civilisation to be embraced or [even] tolerated", much less respected (p.6).

Note that the report stresses that such a totalist and exclusivist conception of shariah is not limited to Muslim radicals or extremists; quite the contrary, it insists that this is the authoritative view of shariah held throughout the mainstream Muslim world, across the spectrum from the largely irrelevant "moderates" to highly effective militant Islamists.

It follows from the premise that Islamism and shariah are totalitarian in their very nature, and that claims to the contrary are either ignorant and misguided, or deliberately deceptive, in accordance with the Muslim principle of deliberate lying (taqiyya) to non-Muslims to further their interests.

Unfortunately, in the report's critique of the current Obama Administration it is often not clear whether the responsible officials are unforgivably ignorant or intentionally deceptive. For example, it cites John Brennan, Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor, who has decreed that the term "jihadist" will no longer be used to describe violent Islamist extremists because "jihad" means "to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal" (p.15).

While this is one (archaic) use of the term, the claim is essentially incorrect, as all relevant uses of "jihad" intend it to mean holy war undertaken to extend the hold of Islam over the globe. As the report observes: "Brennan's assertions directly contradict the teaching of leading Islamic scholars [and] the top counterterrorism advisor to the President of the United States has a professional responsibility to know these facts" (p.15).

As Brennan is unlikely to be ignorant of such a basic detail it appears he is prevaricating and should be located in the second category above, with all that this implies about the Obama Administration's strategy of appeasement towards Islamism and terrorism.

Unsurprisingly, as the report points out, in the vital sphere of law enforcement, security and defence policy, the relevant information about the nature of shariah and its role in Islamism "is not even taught at a basic level" at the FBI, CIA, or at the Departments of State, Defence, Justice or Homeland Security (p.19). Instead, the Administration has pursued "the failed strategy of fictionalising the state of Islam in the vain hope that reality will, at some point, catch up to the benign fable" (p.7).

An excellent case study in the consequences of this official strategy of studied ignorance, naivety and dissimulation concerns the massacre carried out by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood army base in Texas in November 2009, in which he murdered 13 people. Even though "Hasan announced himself an enemy combatant ... no-one was either able or willing to process that information properly" (p.16).

And while he was quite explicit about his jihadist views, "few in the Administration, the media, academia or the rest of the elite seemed capable of comprehending [his] motives" (p.16). Consequently, virtually every aspect of the Hasan case was subjected to "spin" by the Administration and quickly became politicised, when a robust and unconditional denunciation of such Islamist atrocities and their shariah-based justifications was clearly called for.

Another case involved "a Muslim woman whose request for a legal restraining order against her Moroccan husband who had serially abused and raped her was denied by a New Jersey family court judge [who] ruled that the abusive husband had acted according to his Muslim (shariah) beliefs and thus not with criminal intent" (p.18).

Such examples illustrate the extent to which Islamism is winning the civilisational jihad by utilising a stealth strategy, involving "multi-layered cultural subversion, the co-opting of senior leaders, influence operations and propaganda, and other means of insinuating shariah into Western societies", in accordance with the promise of a prominent Islamist that their work is "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilisation from within and sabotaging its miserable house [until Allah's] religion is made victorious over all other religions" (p.17).

As the report acknowledges (p.8), its assessment echoes the analysis of Robert Spencer in Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs (2008). It also parallels other prominent works, including Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (2006), by Steven Emerson; The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy (2007), by Walid Phares; and The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (2010) by Andrew McCarthy.

However, the report also draws together a great deal of material and is a major resource for those who choose to resist the jihadists' ideological onslaught, providing a wealth of information and analysis in a document that is not only written in a clear, concise and engaging fashion, but is also freely available for download from the Center for Security Policy website.

Above all, it is also quite deliberately combative, being modelled on the efforts of the original "Team B", a group of national security experts, who were invited in 1976 by the then CIA Director (later President) George H.W. Bush, to conduct a "competitive analysis" of then-prevailing official U.S. government intelligence estimates of Soviet intentions and offensive capabilities, at a time when it was felt that a period of détente had been reached between the West and the USSR.

In contrast to the comfortable illusions of the policy establishment, "Team B found that the Soviet Union was, pursuant to its ideology, determined to secure the defeat of the United States and its allies and the realisation of the worldwide triumph of Soviet Communism" (p.5).

This analysis provided the intellectual foundation for Ronald Reagan's successful presidential campaign in 1980 and for "his strategy for destroying the Soviet Union and discrediting its ideology" that came to fruition a decade later (p.6).

Now that America is faced with a similarly determined and well-resourced totalitarian threat, "Team B II" recommends a major policy overhaul and a series of urgent measures to meet the new challenge (see "Measures needed", listed below).

Implicit in the "Team B II" concept is the notion that its recommended approach will not only more effectively combat Islamism and the colonisation of Western societies by shariah but will also form the basis of a successful political campaign, contesting the Obama Administration's policy of appeasement towards the Muslim world, which appears to have failed (witness Iranian President Ahmadinejad's recent outrageous accusation at the United Nations of American complicity in the 9/11 attacks).

Central to such developments may be the unfolding saga of the provocative attempt to probe American resolve by establishing a large mosque near "Ground Zero" in New York.

The report has obvious implications for Australia, which lacks the resources required to put together its own "Team B". Nevertheless, we similarly face a stealth campaign by Islamists and their allies in politics, academia and the media, committed to infiltrating shariah into our society, under the guise of multiculturalism, anti-racism, anti-discrimination, human rights, etc.

The above recommendations are sensible and, while the universities are compromised, there are many concerned and well-informed people in the community.

Consequently, it may be that the opportunity exists for political leadership and a more robust policy in this area. Civilisational jihad is the challenge of our times and the future of our nation will be determined by how we rise to meet it.

Measures needed to counter Islamic jihad

Urgent measures recommended by "Team B II" include:

• resisting attempts to establish shariah, either as a parallel system of laws or as the sole system in Islamist-dominated enclaves and "no-go areas";
• preventing the establishment of such areas;
• denying immigration entry to those who advocate or adhere to shariah;
• cutting government funding to shariah advocacy groups and their front organisations;
• using hate laws to prohibit supporters of shariah from holding positions in government-funded bodies;
• proscribing shariah-compliant finance systems and other practices that promote and facilitate the development of shariah;
• enforcing sedition laws and applying them to imams and mosques that advocate shariah;
• preventing the use in schools of textbooks that promote shariah and withdrawing funding to such schools; and
• generally educating the population about the nature of the shariah threat.

U.S. Drone Hits North Waziristan House, 7 Taliban Will Miss Halloween Festivities

Nice. Two hellfires fired from a U.S. predator drone this morning nailed a house in North Waziristan killing 7 Taliban/al Qaeda making it two days in a row now of UAV strikes.

Middle of the week strikes are a bit unusual so perhaps the CIA is making up for the nine day lull in any strikes...I just hope it continues today and through the weekend.

Here's the story from DAWN:

Seven killed in US drone attack in North Waziristan


PESHAWAR: A US drone attack on a house in North Waziristan on Thursday killed seven people, more causalities were feared, security officials said.
Two missiles were fired at a house in Ditta Khel, killing seven people also making it the third such attack in North Waziristan within 24 hours, DawnNews reported.

The covert US drone campaign stepped up strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt on the Afghan border last month over intelligence claims of a Mumbai-style terror plot to launch attacks on European cities.

Around 35 such attacks since September 3 have killed more than 185 people, according to an AFP toll. Around 150 drone strikes since August 2008 have killed more than 1,200.

The United States considers Pakistan’s tribal belt an al Qaeda headquarters, and Western officials say the drone campaign is seen as integral to US-led efforts to beat back a nine-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. —Agencies

Video: Tracking, Hunting, Destroying Insurgents...Hellfire by Hellfire

U.N. Investigators Are Attacked By Lebanese Pawns of Hezbollah In Beirut

Okay, some may not know all that much about the investigation that has been going on forever regarding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri but I'll put it in a nutshell. The former Prime Minister Hariri was assassinated in 2005 and all of the evidence and circumstances of the case point the guilt of that assassination on Hezbollah and Syria - Syria aided in the plotting and set up of the assassination while Hezbollah carried it out. So that is what happened. This was a hugely popular leader in Lebanon and the factions in Lebanon that aren't violent Hezbollah demanded an investigation that the U.N. finally agreed to carry out and ever since then, Hezbollah has done everything it can to disrupt and stall and end those investigations.

Well, today...Hezbollah supporters went as far as literally attacking U.N. investigators on the streets of Beirut. From the article at Breitbart:

A crowd "violently attacked" a team of U.N. investigators gathering evidence Wednesday in the death of a former Lebanese prime minister and stole several items from them, authorities said.
The two investigators and an interpreter received medical attention, according to a statement from the prosecutor's office at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

The melee at a private clinic in Beirut underscored the charged emotions behind the international tribunal looking into Rafik Hariri's 2005 assassination, and it raised concerns about intimidation and interference in the probe.

"During the meeting, a large group of people showed up unexpectedly and violently attacked the investigators and their female interpreter," the statement said. The Lebanese army "extracted" the staffers and they received medical attention.

Wednesday's incident happened at a gynecology clinic on the first floor of a residential building in Beirut's southern suburb of Ouzai, a Hezbollah stronghold.

The chances of this investigation getting finished are slim and a condemning verdict against Hezbollah and Syria even slimmer. The fact of the matter is that Hezbollah is stonewalling an investigation that was originally sanctioned by the then Lebanese government and now, that government, with some leadership changes, is too scared or corrupt to really put Hezbollah in its place.

As you'll see in the article, real macho Hezbollah sent WOMEN in to this clinic to attack the U.N. investigators - I guess when Hezbollah isn't hiding behind women during a firefight with the Israelis, they are using them to rough civilians up, huh?

I don't know...I would say some American troops stationed in a U.N. role up in the Balkans could be transferred down to Beirut for a couple of months and I'd say they would have a better say in how the progress of this investigation goes - if those troops decided to take out some long-deserved revenge against Hezbollah for the Marines barracks bombing in Beirut, all the better.

Crowd attacks UN investigators in Beirut


BEIRUT (AP) - A crowd "violently attacked" a team of U.N. investigators gathering evidence Wednesday in the death of a former Lebanese prime minister and stole several items from them, authorities said.
The two investigators and an interpreter received medical attention, according to a statement from the prosecutor's office at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

The melee at a private clinic in Beirut underscored the charged emotions behind the international tribunal looking into Rafik Hariri's 2005 assassination, and it raised concerns about intimidation and interference in the probe.

"Those who carried out this attack must know that violence will not deter the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a court of law, from fulfilling its mandate," said a statement from the tribunal's president, Judge Antonio Cassese.

The Hague-based court said the visit had been arranged in advance "in accordance with legal safeguards" and that members of the judicial police and the army accompanied the investigators.

"During the meeting, a large group of people showed up unexpectedly and violently attacked the investigators and their female interpreter," the statement said. The Lebanese army "extracted" the staffers and they received medical attention.

The statement also said several items were stolen, but it did not elaborate.

The tribunal has not yet indicted any suspects in the assassination, but speculation that the court could name members of the Hezbollah militant group has raised fears of violence between the heavily armed Shiite guerrilla force and Hariri's mainly Sunni allies.

Wednesday's incident happened at a gynecology clinic on the first floor of a residential building in Beirut's southern suburb of Ouzai, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Dr. Iman Sharara, who runs the clinic, said two men—an Australian and a French national—showed up with a Lebanese interpreter for an appointment to go through some phone records. She said the men requested the phone numbers of up to 17 patients who had visited her clinic since 2003.

When she went outside to speak to her secretary, she saw a large group of women force their way into the building, screaming and trampling on documents belonging to the clinic.

"It looked like a real battle," she told reporters. "The investigators fled. The interpreter, they pulled her hair, they snatched things from them ... I returned to my clinic, hid inside and called my husband."

A police official said more than 30 women stormed the building, with another 75 or so remaining outside. He added, on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give public statements, that the crowd cursed the tribunal and one protester stole an investigator's briefcase. It was not known what was inside.

Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV station called the investigators intrusion on a private clinic "scandalous." It quoted witnesses as saying female patients at the clinic became angry when they saw two foreign investigators walk in.

The clinic is in a conservative Shiite Muslim area and the presence of foreign men may have provoked sensitivities.

The tribunal stressed Wednesday that the visit with the doctor was conducted "in a respectful manner."

The massive truck bombing that killed Hariri and 22 other people along Beirut's Mediterranean waterfront on Feb. 14, 2005 was one of the most dramatic political assassinations the Mideast has seen. A billionaire businessman, Hariri was Lebanon's most prominent politician after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990.

Suspicion fell on neighboring Syria, since Hariri had been seeking to weaken its domination of the country. Syria has denied having any role in the murder, but the killing galvanized opposition to Damascus and led to huge street demonstrations helped end Syria's 29-year military presence.

Since then, speculation has grown that Hezbollah—which is backed by Syria—will be indicted. Though the tribunal has not yet named any individuals or countries as suspects, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has announced that he expects members of his group to be indicted. He vows not to hand them over to be prosecuted.

Many fear that indictments of Hezbollah members could trigger violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. In 2008, sectarian clashes killed 81 people and nearly plunged Lebanon into another civil war.