David Drake

"Well, look, we -- we have seen, in the past, rampages of this sort. And in a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable. Even within the extraordinary military that we have -- and I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress -- there are going to be instances in which an individual cracks. I think the questions that we're asking now and we don't have yet complete answers to is, is this an individual who's acting in this way or is it some larger set of actors? You know, what are the motivations? Those are all questions that I think we have to ask ourselves. Until we have these answers buttoned down, I'd rather not comment on it."

On the contrary we see that there is documentation that [McVeigh] did not accept the Christian faith.

In an article by United Kingdom’s “The Guardian” about McVeigh’s execution, we find this reference:

“In his letter, McVeigh said he was an agnostic but that he would "improvise, adapt and overcome", if it turned out there was an afterlife. "If I'm going to hell," he wrote, "I'm gonna have a lot of company." His body is to be cremated and his ashes scattered in a secret location.”(SEE NOTE 5)

Note the above that McVeigh “said he was an agnostic” but not only that, but that he was defiant about hell itself and remain unrepentant. Then we also find the same statement that he was an agnostic admitted by Lou Michel during a cyber interview with CNN. Lou Michel spent hours interviewing McVeigh in writing a book titled, “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing”. Michel’s words are enlightening:

Lou Michel: McVeigh is agnostic. He doesn't believe in God, but he won't rule out the possibility. I asked him, ‘What if there is a heaven and hell?’

He said that once he crosses over the line from life to death, if there is something on the other side, he will -- and this is using his military jargon – ‘adapt, improvise, and overcome.’ Death to him is all part of the adventure.”

"If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers becaue they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory."

Co-worker Col. Terry Lee said that Nidal Malik Hasan told him he was opposed to the U.S. role in Iraq and Afghanistan and that, "we should not be in the war in the first place."

On Thursday morning, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went to his next-door neighbor at the rundown apartment complex where he rented a one-bedroom unit and gave her most of his belongings, saying he would not need them any more.

...Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don't believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You're set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.

And I said to the psychiatrist, but this cold [sic] be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he's educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I'm a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don't believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn't say, well, I'm just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.

[STEVE] INSKEEP: So we have a picture of a man, then, who, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was disliked by his colleagues. Or maybe disliked is not the word. Disturbed some of his colleagues is perhaps a better way to put it.

[DANIEL] ZWERDLING: No, and disliked is also a relevant word.

Terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base will soon get swine flu vaccines, despite complaints that American civilians should have priority, a military spokesman said Sunday.

Army Maj. James Crabtree, a spokesman for the U.S. jail facility in southeast Cuba, said the doses should start arriving this month, with guards and then inmates scheduled for inoculations.

He acknowledged there may be an "emotional response" from critics who argue that terror suspects should not be allocated swine-flu medications while members of the U.S. public are still waiting due to a vaccine shortage.

[...]

The top House Republican, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, told CNN's "State of the Union" show on Sunday that he does not agree with the H1N1 vaccination plans for detainees at Guantanamo.

"I don't think it's a good idea. The administration probably didn't think it would be very popular either; that's why they announced it on Friday night," Boehner said.

New York authorities raided several homes in Queens early Monday as part of an effort to dismantle a suspected cell of locally based Islamist militants, law enforcement officials said.

No one had been arrested in connection with the raids by Monday evening, a senior federal law enforcement official said.

Local and federal officials said they did not think any specific terrorist plot was disrupted by the action.

They said officials had been monitoring a small group that reportedly espoused radical ideologies aligned with Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

Suspicious behavior by at least some of the men in the group over the weekend prompted authorities to seek search warrants, officials said. A judge approved the warrants late Sunday for at least three homes and possibly other locations, local and federal officials said.

The raids, which took place before sunrise, may be related to ongoing surveillance of two suspected extremists in Queens.

Investigators had been monitoring the two suspects, who reportedly talked about contacts with militant groups in Pakistan and might have traveled there, according to a former anti-terrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case remained open.

After a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court, jurors found the ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed, and two other men, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, guilty of plotting to use liquid bombs to blow up airliners en route from Heathrow to the United States.

Another defendant, Umar Islam, was found guilty of a more general charge of conspiracy to murder because jurors could not decide whether he knew of the specific targets in the plot three years ago.

Three other men, Arafat Khan, Ibrahim Savant and Waheed Zaman, were found not guilty of conspiracy to blow up aircraft but could face a retrial on the more general conspiracy to murder charge because jurors could not reach a verdict.

The eighth defendant, Muslim convert Donald Stewart-Whyte, was found not guilty on the terrorism charges but had pleaded guilty to a firearms offence.

Ali, 28, was the leader of an East London terror cell inspired from Pakistan, the court heard. He had planned to detonate home-made liquid bombs in suicide attacks on transatlantic aircraft bound for major north American cities.

It was the most complex and daring British-based terrorist conspiracy in modern times and, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, could have killed "hundreds of innocent people".

Prosecutors said that the plot was largely run from Pakistan and produced e-mails which mention a figure referred to as "Paps" or "Papa", believed to be a pen-name used by a British-born Muslim, thought to have been a key facilitator of al-Qaeda activity in Britain.

Bosnia remains mired in ethnic divisions 14 years after a peace agreement brokered largely by the United States came into effect, analysts say.

Bosnian leaders say Bosnia is hardening along ethnic and religious lines as U.S. and European hopes that it could be rebuilt as a pluralistic democracy appear stymied by political gridlock and economic hard times, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The newspaper said Bosnian Serbs are talking openly of secession, while ethnic Croatians are leaving the country and religious schisms with Muslims are widening, evidenced by street protests late last year sparked when Bosnian Muslim school officials in Sarajevo tried to ban "Santa Claus" from delivering Christmas gifts to kindergartens.

Former Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadzic, currently tried at the Hague Tribunal, says the US government, as agreed with other states, supplied Bosnian Muslims with weapons during war in Bosnia in the 1990s, despite the UN embargo, the Hague Tribunal announced. An investigation of the US Congress showed that between 1993 and 1995, discussions between US President Bill Clinton and US State Department officials were held at three intervals on the transfer of weapons to Bosnian Muslims by the Saudi Arabian, Turkish and Pakistani governments, Karadzic wrote in his submission to the Trial Chamber.

A 1997 document of the US Congress reveals how the Clinton administration --under advice from the National Security Council headed by Anthony Lake-- had "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base" leading to the recruitment through the so-called "Militant Islamic Network," of thousands of Mujahedin from the Muslim world.

[...]

Perhaps most threatening to the SFOR mission - and more importantly, to the safety of the American personnel serving in Bosnia - is the unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to come clean with the Congress and with the American people about its complicity in the delivery of weapons from Iran to the Muslim government in Sarajevo. That policy, personally approved by Bill Clinton in April 1994 at the urging of CIA Director-designate (and then-NSC chief) Anthony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, has, according to the Los Angeles Times (citing classified intelligence community sources), "played a central role in the dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Bosnia." Further, according to the Times, in September 1995 National Security Agency analysts contradicted Clinton Administration claims of declining Iranian influence, insisting instead that "Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel remain active throughout Bosnia."

[...]

The Clinton Green Light to Iranian Arms Shipments (page 3): In April 1995, President Clinton gave the government of Croatia what has been described by Congressional committees as a "green light" for shipments of weapons from Iran and other Muslim countries to the Muslim-led government of Bosnia.

Mary Robinson, an architect of the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which was boycotted by Secretary of State Powell because the Bush administration deemed it too hostile to Israel, has been hired as a professor in the Department of International and Public Affairs by Columbia University.

[...]

The bestowing of the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson is a travesty. Beyond that, it is a slap in the face to the pro-Israel community. Obama just met with the leaders of a collection of Jewish groups, ostensibly to quell their concerns about his approach towards Israel. Barely two weeks later, he gives an award to a person who has actively campaigned against Israel. Is this just a sign he couldn’t care less about what those leaders think or feel?

Robinson is an ardent foe of Israel and was the Commissioner of the U.N Human Right Commission when it condoned suicide bombing by the Palestinians as a legitimate means to establish a Palestinian state. As Jennifer Rubin points out in her blog at Commentary Contentions, Robinson has a pattern of anti-Israel actions stretching across many years (and continents).

...in her capacity as president of Ireland, [Robinson] also happily provided millions of dollars of support to the PLO, which were used in terror attacks:

During the last four years of Robinson’s tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

Ms. Robinson, in fact, is an anti-Semite, a Jew-hater, in practice if not on a personal, visceral level. That, by the way is not an accusation I make lightly. But when a person encourages anti-Semites in their agenda, presides over anti-Semitic meetings, endorses, however tacitly, attacks on Jews and defends those who murder innocent Jews by selective enforcement and double standards, the label fits. Criticism of Israel is one thing; endorsing Jew-hatred and protecting the murderers of Jews is quite another.

Ellison said that he is "not privy to the internal workings of the organization" that covered his costs, and that he complied with all House Ethics panel disclosure requirements. "Why should I waive a right that’s accorded me under the rules?" he said.

Tax records show the group that paid Ellison’s expenses, the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, received nearly $900,000 in taxpayer money in 2006 and 2007 from a rental arrangement for Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA), a charter school in Inver Grove Heights, Minn. a Twin Cities suburb.

The man who accompanied Ellison to Mecca, Asad Zaman, is executive director of the TiZA school, a political contributor of Ellison’s and was president of the Muslim American Society until August, when the Mecca trip was planned.

TiZA has been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and probed by state officials for allegedly promoting Islam, which would violate the church and state separation required of public schools — including charter schools.

The school received state funding to pay rent to the Muslim American Society Property Holding Corp., a nonprofit spinoff of the Muslim American Society that owned the building. The corporation then turned over $879,000 to the Muslim society as a grant.

Those close connections have opened Ellison to questions about the nature of the trip. Ellison on Tuesday called it "a private trip," adding that he had told the ethics committee of the trip beforehand and received its approval. A spokesman for the school says no public money was used for the trip, or Hajj, which Ellison took as a once-in-a-lifetime fulfillment of his religious duty as a practicing Muslim. The 16-day pilgrimage is considered one of the most solemn acts in Islam, one that is supposed to be undertaken free of debts and unmet family obligations.

Ellison has justified withholding the cost by citing the religious nature of his journey to Saudi Arabia, saying it had nothing to do with his duties as a congressman.

Such trips generally must be reported under congressional gift rules that call for full financial disclosure. IRS rules, moreover, bar nonprofit religious groups from furthering individuals’ "private interests."

Ellison, however, reported the trip under more permissive House rules for outside business activities — Boy Scout trips, for example — that are unrelated to congressional duties, but which are not purely for private benefit. Those rules do not require cost accounting.

A public figure who has faced some hostility as the first Muslim member of Congress, Ellison has been reluctant to reveal details of the trip, which is estimated to have cost several thousand dollars.

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison's groundbreaking pilgrimage to Mecca [was] paid for by an American Muslim organization that has ties to Islamic radicals and is "the Muslim equivalent of the neo-Nazi party," his critics say.

[...]

The trip was funded by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, a non-profit interfaith group that is one of 55 branches of the MAS nationwide. The pilgrimage was hailed by Muslim activists in the U.S.

[...]

"It is the de facto arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.," said Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. "The agenda of the MAS is to ... impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism policy."

The MAS was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement created in Egypt in 1928. Radical members of the Brotherhood founded the terror group Hamas and were among the first members of Al Qaeda.

The Muslim American Society's former secretary general has acknowledged that the group was founded by the Brotherhood, and in 2004 he estimated that about half of MAS members were in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al-Shabab militants in the south-central Somali town of Baidoa have beheaded seven people in what is believed to the largest mass execution carried out in Somalia by the al-Qaida-linked group since 2006.

According to relatives of the victims, the charges against the seven Somalis ranged from being Christians to spying for the Transitional Federal Government. They say none of the people were tried before the executions were carried out on Friday.

The executions have shocked the people of Baidoa, which was once the base of Somalia's transitional parliament. The town fell to al-Shabab insurgents in January, following the pull-out of Ethiopian troops from Somalia.

[...]

...the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said carrying out such punishments without due process violated Somali and international laws and could be considered as war crimes.

[...]

Western intelligence officials believe al-Shabab is now a proxy army for the al-Qaida terrorist organization and pose a serious threat to the security of the region and to the Western world.

Last May, dozens of Afghan language Bibles sent to a soldier in Afghanistan were confiscated and then destroyed by fire because the command believed the Bibles were intended to proselytize Muslims, which is a violation of military rules and Afghan law. A Pentagon spokesman said the act was a “force protection” measure to preclude Afghans from perceiving the U.S. military was trying to convert Muslims, which could lead to a violent anti-American reaction.

Two weeks ago, the year-old Bible burning incident was resurrected by three journalists who corroborated to attack evangelical Christians for using the military to advance their religious views. This episode demonstrates four disturbing phenomena: a double standard, a one way cultural and religious bias, political correctness, and the antagonizing of many of our best albeit evangelical Christian soldiers.

[...]

...the Bibles were burned rather than returned. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Wright said “The decision was made that it was a ‘force protection’ measure to throw them [Bibles] away, because, if they did get out, it could be perceived by Afghans that the U.S. Government or the U.S. military was trying to convert Muslims.” Wright indicated troops at posts in war zones are required to burn their trash.

Why desecrate the Christians’ holy book? Would it not have been better to return the Bibles to the church and avoided the controversy?

There’s not a chaplain or commander in the armed forces that would dare burn a stack of Korans, Islam’s holy book. They would be terrified by the predictable reaction. The logical conclusion is that burning Bibles is okay because law-abiding Christians are not going to threaten to slit throats over insults to their religion. Neither will they instigate rebellion by unruly mobs as Muslim Imams and terrorist groups do.

Second, cultural and religious sensitivity is all one way. For the privilege of spending our blood and treasure in Muslim deserts, American soldiers are expected to abandon or deny their Christian teachings, crosses and Bibles.

A photograph of President Barack Obama taken during the phone conversation with Jewish State's Primer Benjamin Netanyahu has "offened" [sic] some Israelis, reports said.

White House photographer Pete Sousa on Monday snapped a photo of the president while he talked on the phone with Netanyahu, Huffington Post said.

The photo shows Obama sitting with his feet propped on his desk, holding the receiver on his hand. To some Israelis, however, the photo is offensive and an "insult" to Israel.

...some Israelis see the official White House photograph as an insult.

But isn't that an Arab tradition, not an Israeli one? Well, yes, apparently, but things are often more complicated than meets the eye in the region. "It is not a Jewish custom necessarily, but Israel feels enough a part of the Middle East after 60 years to be insulted too," CBS News reported.

It also doesn't help that the photo was released in the same climate in which President Obama has pushed Israel farther than past presidents to suspend the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged.

French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.

Flight AF 447 crashed in the mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm.

While it is certain there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.

Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), the French equivalent of MI6, were dispatched to Brazil.

It was there that they established that two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic.

A source working for the French security services told Paris weekly L'Express that the link was "highly significant".

Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.

There is a possibility the name similarities are simply a "macabre coincidence", the source added, but the revelation is still being "taken very seriously".

France has received numerous threats from Islamic terrorist groups in recent months, especially since French troops were sent to fight in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials are minimizing French media suggestions of possible terrorist involvement in the mid-Atlantic crash 10 days ago of Air France Flight 447, which apparently fell out of the sky while heading into a patch of severe weather en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.

A new video posted on the Internet featuring inebriated American Jewish youth in a Jerusalem bar spouting hate-filled sentiments has garnered massive exposure and caused a firestorm in the media and the Jewish world.

In the video, filmed on June 3 and titled "Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on the Eve of Obama's Cairo Address," the visitors to Israel are asked their opinions on President Barack Obama and his relationship to the Jewish state

"You're all about talking to the Arabs," says one. "You're going to Cairo making a speech to the Muslim world trying to get them to love you, what about the Jews, man? What are we, chopped liver? You don't care about us. Are we nothing to you? Do we matter? Do you care if we get driven into the sea? Do you care if we get nuked? Are we even... ugh... do you care about us?!"

"My grandmother was in Auschwitz, Obama," he adds. "We're not going to take any Auschwitz bullshit! Listen, Obama, my grandma's number was 1268493, I remember her number on her arm, dude. And listen, never again will we deal with this, never again!"

"He's a f**khead... I don't know politics, but he's a s**thead! Anyone who wants to take away my gun rights is an a***ole. He's an a***ole and deserves to get shot," declares a bandana-wearing youngster.

The camera shifts to his friend, who denounces Obama, frat-boy style: "Obama shouldn't pressure Israel for shit. Netanyahu told him to f**k himself and that's how we do it here in Israel baby, (applause) yah!"

Another member of the group stands up and declares, "I worked for the Obama campaign, but honestly, you f**kin' with Israel, you mother, STOP IT!" He stands and points his finger at the camera lens.

"White power, f**k the ni***rs!" declares the bandana-clad drunken youth as a final word from the group, grabbing the microphone to make his point.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Blumenthal, an American documentary filmmaker, defended his video.

Asked about its editing, he said that in the two hours of video he collected, "no people were edited out who expressed pro-Obama sentiments."

Why did he use the interviewees featured?

"These were the most direct responses. I had to make the video watchable," Blumenthal said.

He denied that using inebriated teenagers to represent "a slice of reality, but reality nonetheless," was irresponsible journalism. "Reporting is no less credible when it happens at a bar," he said.

Teenagers armed with grenades and suicide vests are the latest recruits for Sunni insurgents trying to find ways to outwit heightened security measures and attack American and Iraqi forces, the U.S. military said Saturday.

The use of boys also serves a propaganda purpose — the soldiers face criticism for harming children if they fire back.

Insurgents first turned to women to carry out suicide bombings, causing U.S. and Iraqi troops to step up recruiting and training of female searchers at checkpoints to seek explosives easily hidden under women's robes.

Now, they appear to be using youths and weapons that are easier to hide, such as grenades, as they face omnipresent checkpoints and convoys aimed at bolstering security gains that have caused the level of violence to plummet nationwide.

"With grenade attacks, insurgents hope to capitalize on reports of civilian injuries blamed on a coalition response to the attack," said Maj. Derrick Cheng, a spokesman for U.S. forces in northern Iraq. "However, the reality is that the grenade explosion itself causes the majority of civilian casualties."

The statement issued Saturday was the first to provide detailed allegations of teenage suspects in what the military called "a growing trend of children carrying out attacks on Iraqi security and U.S. forces."

Army Col. Gary Volesky, who commands U.S. troops in northern Iraq's Ninevah province, said grenade attacks are on the rise but a "more disturbing trend" was the recruiting of children to throw them.

On May 9, U.S. soldiers killed a 12-year-old boy who the military said was thought to be involved in a grenade attack in the northern city of Mosul. Local residents said he was an innocent civilian. But the military said the boy was found with 10,000 dinars, or about $9, in his hand, which they said suggested he had been paid by insurgents.

At least five other youths between the ages of 14 and 19 have been involved in grenade and suicide attacks in recent weeks in northern Iraq, it said.