Target Centermass

Category: War on Terror

  • Jihadis in Our Midst

    Two terror suspects arrested in California

    The FBI has arrested two California men after one of them admitted he attended an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, Justice Department officials said on Wednesday.

    Hamid Hayat, 23, and his father, Umer, of Lodi, California, east of San Francisco, were taken into custody over the weekend. Both men are being held on charges of lying to federal authorities.

    Two other men were arrested in Lodi for violating terms of their visas, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Dean Boyd.

    The men have been identified as Muhammad Adil Khan — an imam at Farooqia Islamic Center — and Shabbir Ahmed, who is also an imam in Lodi, an administration source said.

    According to an FBI affidavit, Hamid Hayat told agents he attended al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan in 2003 and 2004.

    “Hamid advised that he specifically requested to come to the United States to carry out his jihad mission,” according to the affidavit. “Potential targets for attack would include hospitals and large food stores.”

    Hamid Hayat told agents the camp provided paramilitary training, including training in explosives and hand-to-hand combat, the affidavit said. During weapons training, photos of high-ranking U.S. political figures, including President Bush, were pasted onto targets, according to the affidavit.

    “Hamid further stated that he and others at the camp were being trained on how to kill Americans,” the affidavit said.

    Hamid, whose U.S.-bound flight from Korea was diverted on May 29 to Japan because his name appeared on a no-fly list, had originally denied any involvement in terrorism.

    After the plane was diverted, Hamid was interviewed by an FBI agent, the affidavit said. Hamid denied having any connection to terrorism or terrorist activities and was allowed to continue his travel to the United States, it said.

    Upon his arrival in California, Hamid again denied being involved in training camps.

    One day later, after taking a lie detector test, Hamid admitted that he had attended an al Qaeda training camp, the affidavit said.

    Hamid’s father, Umer, had originally denied that his son was involved in terrorist training camps and had said he knew of no such camps in Pakistan.

    After he was shown a videotape of his son admitting that he trained at the camp, Umer said he had visited the camps and had paid for Hamid’s flight to Pakistan to attend the training camp.

    Looks like a pretty open-and-shut case. I’d like to suggest we drain all the information from them that we can, provide them with due process, try ’em and fry ’em.

    Dr. Rusty Shackleford at the Jawa Report is all over the story with his own views, a variety of news sources and updates, and a round-up of postings from all around the blogosphere.

    Flag-rippers part of New York jihadist group

    The video that I posted below of American Muslims stomping on and then ripping up an American flag comes from a New York-based Muslim group called the Islamic Thinkers Society.

    I personally feel that desecration of our flag by my fellow Americans to be disgusting but certainly within their rights. The video is disturbing, not only in the treatment of the flag but also in the twisted, often non-sensical shoutings of the perpetrators. The group seems immature, begging not so much for support as for attention. It is such cult-like but childish behaviour that points to future dangers from others of like mind but stronger conviction.

    The Swanky Conservative also has the video, along with screen captures and commentary, on his cleverly-titled post “Don’t question their patriotism.”

    Islamists on the Left Coast. Islamists on the Right Coast. I say again that it is only a matter of time before the reality of this conflict hits the landscape of our nation again. The fight must be continued.

  • Bush Resists Carter Call to Shut Gitmo

    Former President Jimmy Carter has once again felt obligated to thrust himself onto the international stage by foolishly calling for the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo. He means well, I think. President Bush has been diplomatic in his response.

    US President George Bush left open yesterday the possibility of closing the Guantánamo Bay prison, a day after his White House predecessor Jimmy Carter called for it to be shut.

    “We’re exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America,” Mr Bush said when asked in an interview on Fox television if he would close the detention centre.

    He added, however, that comparisons between Guantánamo and the Soviet gulag were “just absurd”. Mr Carter had told a conference in Atlanta that the prison should be shut to demonstrate the US commitment to human rights.

    “Despite President George W Bush’s bold reminder that America is determined to promote freedom and democracy around the world, the US continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to our reputation as a champion of human rights because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo,” he said.

    In addition to closing Guantánamo Bay and two dozen other detention facilities, Mr Carter said, the US needed to make sure all detainees were told the charges against them.

    Short answer for the former president: No. Now go be quietly supportive, or at least just quiet, like a good ex-president.

    On a related note, I’ve heard this book is a good read. I’ll have to give it a gander.

  • The Subtle Tricks of al Jazeera

    Want to be an effective propaganda machine? There’s always the Big Lie. Blasting the audience with a repetition of a falsehood while eliminating or drowning out the truth will work, as was ably shown by Nazi Germany. There are alternative, more subtle means, though.

    One possible way is to pass yourself off as a legitimate news agency and then tweak the stories. Ah, the devil is always in the details.

    For your examination, I present al-Jazeera.

    Now, I’m not normally an al-Jazeera reader. Mrs. Greyhawk led me down this path in her latest Dawn Patrol post. In the link, al-Jazeera trumpets that the American media is turning against American efforts in Iraq.

    American media no longer accept Bushs war lies [sic]

    In the story, al-Jazeera lists a collection of American newspaper stories published on or near Memorial Day that decried the current situation in Iraq. Mostly, the article is accurate in its painting of the stories. However, a couple of subtle touches jumped out at me.

    The piece pointed to a column from June 2 by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune. The original text reads as follows:

    The dilemma the U.S. faces in fighting the insurgents is that military methods are not enough to solve the problem and may make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene.

    The al-Jazeera plays with it slightly:

    “The dilemma the U.S. faces in fighting the (anti-occupation fighters) is that military methods are not enough to solve the problem and may make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene. …

    The edit there is obvious in comparison — “anti-occupation fighters” has been substituted for “insurgents” by al-Jazeera. Is this a minor detail? No, when one considers how al-Jazeera defines anti-occupation fighters. As this al-Jazeera poll page shows, the terrorist group Hezbollah is also classified as an anti-occupation movement. Yes, the same Hezbollah that supports the occupation of Lebanon by Syria and bloodily opposes the occupation of Israel by, well, Israel.

    At least that change used a parenthetical notation to demonstrate an al-Jazeera edit. Now, for a more subtle tweak.

    We then turn to what al-Jazeera introduces as “the most powerful denunciation … from an unlikely source.” That is how a June 1 piece by the editorial board of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is, admittedly fairly accurately, framed. The original opens with the following:

    President Bush was among the 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery when he said it. But it was clear Monday that the president was referring to the more than 1,650 Americans killed to date in Iraq when he said, “We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists.”

    Here is the supposed same piece from al-Jazeera:

    “President Bush was among the 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery when he said it. But it was clear Monday that the president was referring to the more than 1,650 Americans killed to date in Iraq when he said, ‘We must honour them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the “terrorists”.’

    Note the difference? Without any journalistic acknowledgment of the edit, al-Jazeera inserted quote marks around the word “terrorists.” The reader is left to believe one of two things — either the original piece included the doubting quote marks or President Bush held up his two hands and gave the internationally-annoying insert-quote-marks hand gesture while speaking. The latter being obviously unlikey, al-Jazeera has managed to add even greater spin to the original piece.

    I have utter faith in the ability of our mainstream media to grab hold of defeat from the jaws of victory and hold onto it tenaciously, given the opportunity. They’ve managed it before. If they are willing to let an opposing propaganda machine use them yet again, then that is one thing, disgusting though it may be. If they are willing to let the enemy play them in violation of the media’s own standards of journalism, well, then that is another. That is a media betraying its own country’s military efforts, their own progeny’s security and their very own professional integrity. What does that leave, people?

    Nothing but a mindset.

    My guess — the “American” mainstream media will continue to let such issues slide, and the al-Jazeera propaganda machine, which could be answered globally by an integrated effort, will continue to roll on and be painted as a “legitimate” alternative media source. Sometimes, really all too often, my life-long love of journalism is sickened by the modern state of the craft.

  • Hey, Senator Biden

    Shut up or start making sense. It’s your call.

    Two days ago, I pointed y’all to a blog post by Chad at In the Bullpen examining the call by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Some asylum) to shut down the Guantanamo detention center. Chad appropriately titled the piece “Biden is Off His Rocker.”

    Today, I’ve found more evidence that the man is losing his grip.

    Having recently returned from his fifth visit to Iraq, Sen. Biden spoke of the need to avoid a complete withdrawal from the country.

    “And if we leave now, I guarantee you there will be a civil war, which a lot of our folks are worrying about now anyway,” said Biden, D-Del., said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “We made a giant mistake in the beginning over the objection of a number from both parties.”

    U.S. forces decommissioned the entire army, the so-called de- Ba`athification and that left Iraq with no military, according to Biden.

    Biden said the training of Iraqi troops is on track, however, the United States waited a year and a half to start the process of training Iraqi troops.

    A year and a half? That would be a tragic mistake indeed. By Biden’s count, the training of Iraqi forces by Americans did not begin until at least October 2004. Well, he’s been there five times — he must know what he’s talking about, right?

    Wrong. In fact, not even close. In January 2004, the Department of Defense released the following:

    The first of nine brigades planned for the new Iraqi army nearly is complete, the officer responsible for helping to rebuild the country’s military reported in a Baghdad briefing today.

    Addressing progress in the rebuilding effort, Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, commander of the coalition’s military assistance and training team in Iraq, said three battalions of Iraqi soldiers have graduated from military training academies since October. The desired “end state” is to eventually have “Iraqi officers and soldiers take over the training of their own soldiers,” Eaton said.

    “I would like to emphasize that this will be an Iraqi Army, trained by Iraqis,” he said.

    And who were the Iraqis hoped to relieve from the duty of training their forces? You guessed it, the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to one of its own briefings from September 2003. Oh by the way, the coalition included Americans.

    Let me begin with a little bit on the new Iraqi army, as such. The new Iraqi army began training the first battalion around the first of August, and that first battalion will be commissioned and enter operational service on October 4th, the training being now about three-quarters completed.

    The training takes place at a place called Kirkush, which is an old Iraqi military base about 80 kilometers northeast of Baghdad and about 30 kilometers from the Iranian border, which we reconditioned and are using as the training facility. As battalions go through, we will expand the capacity of that facility and have something like four battalions ready and operational by early next year.

    The actual day-to-day training is being done by U.S. contract trainers with very close Coalition military oversight. The military oversight is done by an organization called the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team, which is commanded by an American, Major-General Paul Eaton, who was, until he took up this assignment, the commander of infantry training for the United States Army. So we have sent our best expert on that issue.

    His deputy is British, and his staff includes officers from a variety of Coalition countries.

    NATO trainers began arriving in August 2004 to expand efforts, and a military academy for Iraqi officers was already in the works in October 2004, when Biden claims we became involved in training Iraqi forces.

    Well, the good senator was only off by well over a year.

    Then there’s another curious statement just today by the senator during the confirmation hearings on Zalmay Khalilzad, nominee for the position of U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

    Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said on returning from his fifth visit to Baghdad that he and the American public were losing patience.

    “I’m not sure I could in good faith, a year from now, if things aren’t drastically different, continue to support American forces being in Iraq because we just seem not to get it yet,” he told Mr Khalilzad. The US “loss” of Iraq would be an “absolute disaster for the better part of a generation”, he said.

    Let me see if I can get a grip on this convoluted bilge spewing forth from Biden. Losing Iraq would be an absolute disaster but he cannot support the presence of our forces there another year without great improvement. Did I get that right? If things are not drastically improved, the senator would prefer to opt for what he himself sees as a tragedy.

    He calls for the shutting down Gitmo, either lies or is grossly mistaken about American training efforts in a country where he’s been on the ground enough times to know better, and shows a convoluted but resoundingly spineless support of our efforts while knowing the dreadful consequence of failure.

    Though I oppose the concept of term limits for members of the U.S. Congress, Biden does provide evidence to support at least consideration of the idea.

  • US Senator Urges Guantanamo Shutdown

    I wanted to blog about this piece but, bordering as it does on sheer politics, I’m surprised that Chad Evans at In the Bullpen nailed it already. Although he addressed it from another source, I’ll bow out to him that got there fastest with the mostest. And his post title tells all on the matter:

    Biden is Off His Rocker

  • Troops Uncover Bunker Network in Iraq

    Interesting.

    American troops have found a vast network of bunkers beneath the Iraqi desert which insurgents used as a base, complete with kitchen and air conditioning, the US military said at the weekend.

    The largest complex, measuring 166 by 269 metres, (546ft by 883ft) was carved from an old rock quarry near Karma, in the restive province of Anbar, west of Baghdad.

    It included a well-stocked larder, four furnished living spaces and rooms full of machine guns, mortars, rockets, black uniforms, masks, compasses, night-vision goggles and satellite telephones.

    […]

    The US 2nd Marine Division, backed by Iraqi soldiers, has been sweeping through Anbar in an effort to disrupt the communications and supply lines of an insurgency that has claimed more than 820 lives in the past five weeks.

    Last Thursday the troops spotted a lone building in the desert and inside it found a chest-style electric freezer. It hid the entrance to what a marine spokesman, said was possibly the largest underground insurgent hideout to be found in the past two years.

    Fresh food suggested recent use. There were showers and a functioning air conditioner; in summer, temperatures can reach 54C (130F).

    Spent cartridges on the surface revealed what appeared to be a firing range. Some 50 other weapons and ammunition caches have been found in Anbar in the past three days, said a US spokesman.

    The bunkers gave an insight into the logistics of using remote areas to group fighters and equipment for attacks.

    Since the fall of Falluja last November, insurgents have relied on scattered bases to sustain a campaign of assassination, car bombs and suicide attacks.

    US and Iraqi forces claimed another success in the northern city of Mosul when, after a brief battle, they captured Mullah Mahdi, nicknamed the Prince of Princes, with five other suspected members of Ansar al-Sunna, a group which has claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest bombings.

    And yesterday the government said that police had arrested a key aide to the leader of the Mosul branch of the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group.

    Mutlaq Mahmoud Mutlaq Abdullah, also known as Abu Raad, is considered a key financier for a militant known as Abu Talha, the purported head of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terror cell in the city.

    Despite the lengthy haul, I like to amuse myself with thoughts of the possible morale hit on the insurgents with the seizure of the air conditioner.

  • The Koran, the Gulag and the Military

    My apologies in advance for this long posting comprised mostly of quotes, but I wanted to handle these three stories together. For some reason, I think they just flow into each other to form a greater narrative.

    US details Guantanamo ‘mishandling’ of Koran

    The U.S. military for the first time on Friday detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including a case in which a guard’s urine splashed onto the Islamic holy book and others in which it was kicked, stepped on and soaked by water.

    U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, described five cases of “mishandling” of a Koran by U.S. personnel confirmed by a newly completed military inquiry, officials said in a statement.

    In the incident involving urine, which took place this past March, Southern Command said a guard left his post and urinated near an air vent and “the wind blew his urine through the vent” and into a cell block.

    It said a detainee told guards the urine “splashed on him and his Koran.” The statement said the detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran, and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty in which he had no contact with prisoners.

    Southern Command said a civilian contractor interrogator, who was later fired, apologized in July 2003 to a detainee for stepping on his Koran. In August 2003, prisoners’ Korans became wet when night-shift guards threw water balloons in a cell block, the statement said. In February 2002, guards kicked a prisoner’s Koran, it added.

    Note the dates there. We’re discussing isolated incidents, few and far between. I’ll be honest, though — I would like more details on the water balloon story.

    In the fifth “confirmed incident” of mishandling a Koran, Southern Command said a prisoner in August 2003 complained that “a two-word obscenity” had been written in English in his Koran. Southern Command said it was “possible” a guard had written the words but “equally possible” the prisoner himself had done but they did not offer any explanation of his possible motive.

    […]

    [Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo prison,] Hood said there were four additional incidents of “alleged mishandling” of the Koran that “we cannot determine conclusively if they actually happened.”

    “Mishandling a Koran at Guantanamo Bay is a rare occurrence. Mishandling of a Koran here is never condoned,” Hood said.

    No flushing. None. Minimal abuse of the Islamic holy text. Allegations investigated at each occurrence and action taken.

    In retrospect, these detainees are being treated in a perhaps unprecedented manner for their deserved non-POW status. Their faith is being respectfully honored and Newsweek’s allegations should never have gone to print as fact and cost lives.

    Amnesty Chief: ‘Gulag’ Not the Best Analogy

    The American head of Amnesty International admits his group did not pick the best analogy when it compared detainee conditions at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet-era “gulag” forced-labor system.

    “There are only about 70,000 in U.S. detention facilities, and to the best of our knowledge, they are not in forced labor, they are not being denied food. But there are some analogies between the gulags and our detention facilities,” William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in an interview with FOX News.

    Sure, and there are some analogies to be made between gulags and an unwilling child’s being forced to go off to summer camp. That doesn’t mean they make for valid points in public discourse.

    “The U.S. is running an archipelago of detention facilities — many of them secret facilities — around the world and people in those are being disappeared into them … they are being held incommunicado.”

    Amnesty International recently slammed the United States’ treatment of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba. In its latest worldwide report, Amnesty International angered many U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, with its gulag analogy. President Bush called claims of improper detainee treatment “absurd.”

    “It’s an absurd allegation,” Bush said in the White House Rose Garden this week. “The United States is a country that … promotes freedom around the world. When there’s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they’re fully investigated in a transparent way. It’s just an absurd allegation.”

    Bush said “every single complaint” regarding those detained is investigated.

    “It seemed like to me they [Amnesty International] based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth,” the president added. “And so it was an absurd report. It just is.”

    While U.S. officials admit there have been sporadic cases of questionable treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, they say it’s not at all widespread or of the magnitude Amnesty International claims. To refute that, Amnesty International on Thursday said officials should just open the doors of the detention center to humanitarian workers so they can see for themselves.

    Did you catch that? Well, let me translate it for you:

    We know you’re doing wrong. We have no way of proving it, but we’ll say it until you give us a chance to disprove it.

    That’s a pretty shabby approach for an international organization with such lofty endeavors.

    Maybe they should be slapped around a little more for the gulag reference.

    During a press briefing this week, Rumsfeld noted that most would define a “gulag” as where the Soviet Union kept millions of forced labor concentration camps “or where Saddam Hussein mutilated and murdered untold numbers because they held views unacceptable to his regime.”

    “To compare the United States and Guantanamo Bay to such atrocities cannot be excused,” he said. “Free societies depend on oversight and they welcome informed criticism, particularly on human rights issues. But those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness.”

    He added that “no force in the world has done more to liberate people … than the men and women of the United States military” and called Amnesty International’s allegations “reprehensible.”

    Not bad, but let’s back it up with someone who actually knows the stupidity of the analogy. How about Natan Sharansky, who actually suffered for his beliefs at the hands of the Soviets?

    Sharansky argued that Amnesty International compromises its work by refusing to differentiate “between democracies where there are sometimes serious violations of human rights and dictatorships where no human rights exist at all.”

    “This comparison between gulag and Soviet Union and United States of America, erases all these differences,” he said. “It makes moral equivalence between these two very different worlds and that’s unfortunately very a typical, systematical, mistake of Amnesty International.”

    I do not fault Amnesty International for pointing out what they feel are human rights violations; rather, I fault their manner of doing so, absent any frame of reference or sense of scope. By doing so, they impair their efforts against the great violators, undermine the efforts of minor offenders and damage their own reputation.

    Military Tops Public Confidence List in New Gallup Poll

    The American public has more confidence in the military than in any other institution, according to a Gallup poll released this week.

    Seventy-four percent of those surveyed in Gallup’s 2005 confidence poll said they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military – more than in a full range of other government, religious, economic, medical, business and news organizations.

    The poll, conducted between May 23 and 26, involved telephone interviews with a randomly selected sample of 1,004 people 18 and older, Gallup officials said. Those surveyed expressed strong confidence in the military, with 42 percent expressing “a great deal” of confidence in the military and 32 percent, “quite a lot” of confidence. Eighteen percent said they have “some” confidence, 7 percent, “very little,” and 1 percent, “none.”

    Public confidence in the military jumped following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has remained consistently high, Gallup officials noted. The 2002 survey reflected a 13 percent increase in confidence in the military over the previous year’s poll. The public expressed a 79 percent high-confidence rate in the military in 2002, an 82 percent rate in 2003, and a 75 percent rate in 2004.

    Well, the dip in 2004 is easily accounted for with the Abu Ghraib abuses being repeatedly plastered all across the mainstream media. Underplayed or entirely omitted by the media’s coverage was that the military had announced an investigation months in advance of the “breaking” story. Just as was the case in the first story above about Koran abuse at Gitmo, the military was already correcting its issues long before the media came along to stir the pot. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the reason for the close of the story.

    The Gallup organization noted that public trust in television news and newspapers reached an all-time low this year, with 28 percent of responders expressing high confidence in them.

    The American military takes care of itself by policing its own. Generally, the public recognizes this despite attacks by the media and organizations like Amnesty International. Why is this so? Well, a large portion of the citizenry has had close relations with those who serve their country honorably. Few have personally had any positive contact with the media and have to rely on visible examples, such as Dan Rather’s crumbled and pathetic defense of the AWOL forgeries and the blood on the retracted hands of Newsweek.

  • Fake Bin Laden E-mail Hides Virus

    Forewarned is forearmed.

    Users are being warned not to open junk e-mail messages claiming Osama Bin Laden has been captured.

    The messages claim to contain pictures of the al-Qaeda leader’s arrest but anyone opening the attachment will fall victim to a Microsoft Windows virus.

    Since 1 June anti-virus companies have been catching the junk mail messages in large numbers.

    Security firms fear that interest in Bin Laden’s whereabouts could spark a big outbreak.

    […]

    James Kay, chief technology officer at Blackspider, said that the company had stopped more than a million copies of the message since it first appeared.

    “We’ve seen a lot of it overnight when the US was awake,” said Mr Kay.

    “We kind of expected that it would be targeted at the US because of the language used in it,” he said.

    Warnings about the fake Bin Laden arrest virus have also been issued by Panda Software and F-Secure.

    The vulnerability exploited by Psyme is found in Windows 2000, 95, 98, ME, NT, XP and Windows Server 2003. Users were urged to update their version of Windows to close the loophole.

    This latest virus is the third to use the name of the al-Qaeda leader to trick people into opening it.

    According to the article, known subject lines for the virus-laden emails are as follows:

    God Bless America!
    God Bless!
    Captured
    Captured! Finally!
    Finally!
    Finally! Captured!
    He has been captured
    God Bless the USA!

    A good rule of thumb is to be wary of any incoming attachments and to keep anti-virus software up to date.

  • Not Tonight

    Just can’t seem to get in a blogging mood.

    I would suggest some fine reading for you, as both Austin Bay and Publius Pundit‘s Robert Mayer tackle the grandstanding, gulag-spewing Amnesty International.

    Oh yeah, speaking of organizations seeking to use isolated and prosecuted cases of abuse as a means to chip away at American efforts, the ACLU has won its latest case to get its grubby collective mitts on more Abu Ghraib photographs. Expect to see a few of them soon on a front page near you.

  • By the Numbers: Suicide Bombers in Iraq

    The New York Post crunches some interesting numbers about suicide bombers in Iraq.

    More than 40 percent of the suicide bombers dispatched by terror leader Abu Musab al- Zarqawi to attack Iraqis and U.S. troops hailed from Saudi Arabia, according to a new study.

    Only 9 percent of the bombers were Iraqis, said the report by the SITE Institute, a counterterror group.

    The analysis bolsters the Bush administration’s claims that the Iraqi borders are not well policed and fanatical foreign jihadists have been streaming into the country to wreak deadly havoc.

    SITE recently discovered a “Martyrs’ List” that Zarqawi posted on a Web site to commemorate the fanatics who were recruited as foot soldiers in the group’s deadly campaign of car bombings and other attacks to undermine Iraq’s transition to democracy.

    I’m sorry. Did I type “suicide bombers” instead of “martyrs” a moment ago? Silly typo on my part.

    An analysis of 107 bombers whose names and backgrounds Zarqawi’s group published revealed that 45 of the dead extremists, or 42 percent, came from Saudi Arabia, said Rita Katz, SITE director.

    Many other bombers were Syrian, Kuwaiti, Palestinian, Afghani, Libyan and even French, while only 10 of the attackers, or 9 percent, were Iraqi-born.

    “What we see here is there are a lot of people who appear to be quite well educated leaving universities, good jobs and families to go to Iraq to fight the jihad,” Katz said.

    “It means there is huge support for Zarqawi and al Qaeda among the younger generation — particularly in Saudi Arabia — who are going to Iraq not to liberate Iraq, but to engage in the battle between the mujahedeen and the crusaders. This is in Iraq now. But it could be somewhere else tomorrow.”

    These numbers mean a couple of things. First, there is much support for the radical Islamist movement in the Arab countries outside of Iraq. Second, the Arab world in general, be it their spiritual leaders, political heads or regional media, are far too grounded in a culture centuries old, centuries past. The region as a whole needs some freakin’ shock treatment. Thus, the strategy of a free, democratic Iraqi populace. It may work and save millions of lives; it may yet fail and not avert the sustained attack on western civilization.

    My problem with the story in the Post is not content, but rather headline. To look at numbers on suicide bombers and project that to the entire situation with the headline “What Insurgency?” is simply wrong. Yes, there are Iraqi insurgents; they are predominantly Baathists and Sunnis who are fighting against a state where there role will be greatly diminished. The tactic of suicide bombings against civilians has not been alleged to be one of their weapons — such atrocities are predominantly in the realm of the outsiders, those that value Islamist cause over Iraqi life. You know, scum like the outsider Zarqawi.

    Iraq’s borders are an issue in keeping such foreigner crazies outside and away from innocent Iraqis.

    Foreign fighters running amok in Iraq are becoming a growing security issue for the new Iraqi government.

    Yesterday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari was at the U.N. Security Council, demanding that Syria do more to stop foreign terrorists from crossing into Iraq. He charged Syria was a “main transit route” for the guerrillas.

    Interestingly, the two blogs that pointed me to this story both took better takes on it than the headline writers at the Post.

    First, Kevin Aylward at Wizbang! gives the following:

    I’ve long been of the opinion that the argument that the war in Iraq would create a hotbed of terrorism was misguided. That Muslim jihadists from all over the Middle East are coming to Iraq to attack American forces is, in some respects, not necessarily a bad thing. Clearly these fanatics want to kill American’s and don’t much care where they do so. They’re out to get us, the only question is on whose turf the battle will be fought. At least in Iraq we have our trained military on the offensive against them.

    Then Chad at In the Bullpen adds this observation:

    What I do find interesting in this study is that none of the suicide bombers were Jordanian, Zarqawi’s country of origin. As suicide bombers are ordered to sacrifice theirselves, or sent in cars and detonated remotely without their knowledge, why haven’t more suicide bombers been Jordanian?