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Several
new links....Please explore!
by
IseFire
- Wed 04/14/04; 8:57 pm EST
I've added several new links to Isebrand.com. Please check them
out.
New tile-
Air America Radio
New links under "Views" (i.e. blogs)-
Electablog
Corrente
New under "News w/ Views"-
Bush Watch
New under "Activism"-
Unmarried
America
New under "Research"-
PR Watch
Economic Policy Institute
One Thousand Reasons
Ashcroft
wasn't worried about terrorism
by
IseFire
- Mon 04/12/04; 6:59 pm EST
With Attorney General John Ashcroft's appearance before the 9/11
Commission coming soon, it's a good time to resurrect Albert Hunt's
highly relevant Wall Street Journal column, "The Unaccountable
Attorney General," from June 6, 2002. (Emphases below are mine.)
One
reason, the FBI explains, that it didn't respond last summer to
an agent's warnings about suspicious activities at flight schools
by Middle Eastern men was a lack of resources. But there were enough
FBI agents to eavesdrop on New Orleans hookers and their clients.
.....
[A ]s the nation's chief law enforcement officer, John
Ashcroft's pre-Sept. 11 agenda was fighting gun control, abortion,
state laws permitting assisted suicide or medical marijuana, and
going after hookers and their clients, not terrorism.
.....
The endless drudgery of monitoring flight schools was not the path
to advancement in the Ashcroft criminal justice system.
What
makes this more galling was the willingness of the Bush camp to
blame the Clinton administration for the failure of American counter-terrorism:
documents show that Ms. Reno, whatever her failings, was far more
committed to fighting terrorism than Mr. Ashcroft. The attorney
general's efforts to rewrite history, painting himself as an anti-terrorist
warrior from the get-go is simply duplicitous.
.....
The only two top officials retained by George W. Bush a year and
a half ago were CIA Director Tent and Richard Clarke, the terrorism
expert at the National Security Council.
The
Justice Department sought huge budget increases and Attorney General
Reno stressed the fight against terrorism. There were excesses,
such as the establishment of an alien terrorist removal court, to
secretly evict suspected terrorists, but it appears not to have
been used.
In
a May 1998 strategic directive, Ms. Reno listed her only "tier
one" priority as combating "terrorist and criminal activities
that directly threaten national or economic security." In her
memorandum to budget heads for the 2002 budget, her final one, counter
terrorism and cyber crime were accorded the top priority.
By
contrast, Mr. Ashcroft cut back on the counter-terrorism
emphasis. In his directive to budget heads for the 2003 budget,
he too laid out priorities, over a dozen; none pertained to anti-terrorism.
Although
last summer the FBI complained that it lacked sufficient resources
in the war against terrorism, the attorney general rejected the
bureau's request for $57.8 million for more counter-terrorism agents,
intelligence researchers and language translators. In a letter to
Budget Chief Daniels Sept. 10, the attorney general outlined his
initial requests for more funds. There are no add-ons for counter-terrorism,
but there is a reduction in grants to state and local governments
for anti-terrorism.
Waves...
by
IseFire
- Sun 04/11/04; 6:59 am EST
Every military operation seen from any temporal perspective, be
it minute-to-minute or first aggression to last shot, can be described
as a series of waves: troops advance; troops rest; defenses are
built; defenses are overrun; tactics are planned; tactics are executed,
etc.
I suspect that every relative pause in insurgent momentum in Iraq
will be spun by Oil Club Shrub as the final insurgent defeat. But
I suspect that each pause will be followed by new insurgent action.
Granted...one action must ultimately be the last one. Granted...each
may be weaker than the one before until the insurgency fails. But
there is a 50/50 chance at best that the "last act" will
be not the final insurgent shot fired, but rather the final American
soldier withdrawn in Vietnam-style "'peace' with honor."
And getting to that event could take years, especially if Club Shrub
continues to rule America, ever more isolating us from the UN and
our allies.
The Iraqis have firearms; tens of thousands of them. The Iraqis
have anti-armor weapons, mostly RPGs, as we see repeatedly on television.
Today they shot down an Apache helicopter with a SAM. They have
TNT. Therefore, the population despite our efforts was never even
close to sufficiently unarmed. Disarming them now is impossible.
IMPORTANTLY: The borders of Iraq are more open now that during
Saddam's reign, greatly increasing the chances of yet more arms
trickling if not pouring in. The Shiite-Sunni alliance against American
occupying troops also of course involves Saddam's former military,
including probably special forces veterans from Desert Storm and
the war against Iran.
(God, why are we there? Why but for the arrogance of power
and the stupidity of the American people and the complicity of the
media did we invade in the first place, in direct violation of international
law? We have unnecessarily set human history on a new unstable course.
It should be al-Qaeda who is seen as the great destabilizer, because
of 9/11. But who would have thought that we would invade IRAQ instead
of going after al-Qaeda, and as a result eclipse terrorism itself
as a force of destabilization? Terrorism against the West and America's
aggression in Iraq are a horrific combination of realities, each
with very violent consequences; each will result in a million gallons
of human blood shed worldwide.)
American combat deaths during this uprising have been very few relative
to the ferocity of the engagements. This could suggest insurgent
ineffectiveness. Will they get better bearings overtime, as the
mujahedeen eventually did against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan?
But Iraqi casualties are in the 100's and 100's. That will have
consequences later. Revenge will be sought by a 1,000 families.
Revenge will be taken by many of them, against our young men and
women in uniform.
Again
to Jessica
Stern (see my 4/7 post), this time the words of Dr.
Hani al-Sibai, the director of the London-based Al-Maqrizi Center
for Historical Studies. He is a radical, anti-US, and thus very
biased; but his words shouldn't be ignored: "When the United
States occupied Iraq, the border was actually uncontrolled."
Iraq, he says, "is currently a battlefield and a fertile soil
for every Islamic movement that views jihad as a priority."
He emphasizes that Iraq is a "better place" than Afghanistan
for waging jihad "in terms of the language, features of the
people, and popular sympathy -- whether in Iraq's Sunni regions
or its neighboring countries." He notes that "the continuation
of the anti-occupation resistance will produce several groups that
might later merge into one large group." Very few of the participants
in the Iraqi "jihad" are members of al-Qaida, he says.
"Nevertheless, the role of al-Qaida and its sympathizers in
Iraq is more like the salt of the earth and it's reminiscent of
the role of Arabs in Afghanistan who lifted the spirit of the Afghan
people, who fought and sacrificed thousands of martyrs." He
describes a new network of Salafi and other jihadist Sunni groups
that formed five months after the occupation began. The network
consists of mujahedeen, ulema, and political and military experts,
he says, together with a number of jihadist factions from the north
and south that previously operated separately. He concludes, "Even
if the U.S. forces capture all leaders of al-Qaida or kill them
all, the idea of expelling the occupiers and nonbelievers from the
Arabian Peninsula and all the countries of Islam will not die."
It is Easter.
[E]pulemur...in azymis sinceritatis, et
veritatis. Let us partake of the unleavened bread of
sincerity and truth. (I Cor. 5:7-8)
Oh
well...if they're Canadian Christians, they're probably not REAL
Christians anyway...
by
IseFire
- Fri 04/09/04; 7:09 am EST
A story
posted on the site of my former employer, BeliefNet,
surprised me. An evangelical Christian bookstore in Canada has actually
refused to stock the 12th installment of the Left Behind
series. The series--which has sold 40,000,000 copies in more than
30 languages--is a reinvention of "end times," books like
666, which is now so obscure I can't even find a reference
to it on Google. The series could also be described as a fictionalized
12-installment update of The Late Great Planet Earth. All
these book share a "premillennial
dispensationalist" theology, which I was well-versed
in at one point in my youth.
In the Left Behind series the United States' success is proportional
to the extent that it supports unequivocally the state of Israel;
the Antichrist is the Secretary-General of the United Nations; and
the European Union is a demonic fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
It never fails to amaze me how utterly, profoundly, breathtakingly
clueless about Christian history dispensationalists are.
They generally are completely ignorant of the fact that nearly every
generation of Christians has had a segment of it that sees evidence
of "end times" all around them and in the course of current
events. They would be embarrassed, I hope, to discover than many
generations, especially in the Middle Ages, had a hell of a lot
more "end times" evidence to point to than any Christian
does now. And in every generation, these "the end is near"
types were shown to be dead wrong: Jesus never came back; the Antichrist
never emerged; heaven was never established on earth; the Jews never
went en masse to hell.
There are many books out there that can inform you about Christian
"end times" thinking and behavior throughout history,
including before the time of dispensationalist theology, which isn't
even 200 years old. One that is also a good example of scholarship--yet
is a very readable book--is Cohn's The
Pursuit of the Millennium...if you should want
to learn about this stuff...which you should. After all, it informs
the foreign policy of the Bush Administration.
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