These quotes would be a riot! - Page 3 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Ustwo · 10-18-2006, 07:15 AM

I think the first thing removed in a liberal is his sense of humor.

If you were really interested in, contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way, you would have pmed me your message but instead you posted it here for all to read.

P.S. Read the Koran, you will find it very interesting I'm sure and its a pretty easy read.

hiredgun · 10-18-2006, 07:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NCB

Very well stated and I respect your honesty. However, I will have to take issue with you in regards to how moderate Muslims recognize the problem. If they do indeed recognize it, then they need to take the next step and come out en masse to denounce every act of violence done in the name of Islam. Anything short of that will be as if they have done nothing at all. Sorry, but I speak for a lot of Americans who feel enough time has been given for moderate Muslims to stpe up to the plate and stomp the extremism out of their own religion.

A lot of Muslims have spoken up, and I've talked about this earlier in the thread. Take a look at those posts. I agree that we need to do more. But I think your characterization, that this task is entirely the responsibility of the Muslim community itself, is unfair. How easy do you think it is to convince people with a message of moderation and peace when the dominant conservative discourse is one that condemns and blames the Islamic faith itself at every turn, and while, as far as most Muslims can see, the US has still provided no actual, plausible justification for the war it began 3 years ago?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

I think the first thing removed in a liberal is his sense of humor.

If you were really interested in, contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way, you would have pmed me your message but instead you posted it here for all to read.

P.S. Read the Koran, you will find it very interesting I'm sure and its a pretty easy read.

UsTwo, your cherry-picking of quotes from the Qur'an is not a useful way to try to understand Islam, unless your only purpose is to find ways to condemn it and reinforce your existing view. Let me demonstrate.

Lend me a little under 6 minutes and watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C10sSC2kB3Q

It is from Richard Dawkins' documentary on faith; Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and makes a pretty vitriolic attack on Christianity based on scripture. Can you please explain to me the difference between his analysis of the Bible, and your understanding of the Qur'an?

dc_dux · 10-18-2006, 08:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

I think the first thing removed in a liberal is his sense of humor.

If you were really interested in, contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way, you would have pmed me your message but instead you posted it here for all to read.

P.S. Read the Koran, you will find it very interesting I'm sure and its a pretty easy read.

Thank you for making my point for me again.

I have tried on numerous threads to discuss the issues with you in a civil and rational manner.... from your assertions about Carter and Rice to radio deregulation and the problems with islam.

More often then not, you respond with sarcasm and what you obviously think are "witty" and humorous retorts.

There is a reason I callled you out publicly on your latest...and I will continue to do so when I see an inane post. (consider this such a public response).

But I will also discuss the issues with you anytime you are prepared to do so in a mature and reasonable way.

roachboy · 10-18-2006, 08:21 AM

i'll answer the questions posed earlier in this thread, but not in this context.
you want an actual discussion, mojo, please start another thread.
this one is done.

NCB · 10-18-2006, 08:58 AM

Quote:

But I think your characterization, that this task is entirely the responsibility of the Muslim community itself, is unfair. How easy do you think it is to convince people with a message of moderation and peace when the dominant conservative discourse is one that condemns and blames the Islamic faith itself at every turn, and while, as far as most Muslims can see, the US has still provided no actual, plausible justification for the war it began 3 years ago?

No, its not unfair. Only Muslims can alter Muslim behavior and culture. Blaming the US for the Muslims community's own failures may bode well in liberal circles, but it doesnt exactly square with reality and represents either cowardice or refusal to condemn and reform their own people and religion

Ch'i · 10-18-2006, 09:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

you want an actual discussion, mojo, please start another thread.
this one is done.

I agree, make another thread for this mojo.

highthief · 10-18-2006, 09:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NCB

No, its not unfair. Only Muslims can alter Muslim behavior and culture. Blaming the US for the Muslims community's own failures may bode well in liberal circles, but it doesnt exactly square with reality and represents either cowardice or refusal to condemn and reform their own people and religion

http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php

Obviously, there are millions of Muslims who denounce terror, as any simple search of the net or news sites will show. People, however, speak of Islam as if it were one big religion, with some Pope sitting at the head of it telling people what to do. There is no centralization of Islam, and there are many sects. It is very obvious that in some parts of the Muslim world - Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan - a breeding ground exists for terrorism, due in part to the shithole conditions that these people live in brought about by constant warfare, poverty and oppression, and in part due to groups using Islam to motivate others into commiting terror attacks. Whereas other areas are much more stable, making genuine movement towards more secular, democratic, representative and liberal forms of government and society.

As for the line about not blaiming the US for Islamic terrorism, Iraq used to be a secular country without religious terrorism. Now it is a nation utterly engulfed by terrorism based upon religion, and in which the various sects prey upon one another.

Everyone involved in this - from Muslims around the world to the US and it allies - have had a hand in the rise of terrorism, and it is either incredibly partisan or incredibly uneducated to suggest otherwise.

I take exception to some of hiredgun's statements as well. I don't live in Pakistan, I'm not a Muslim, but I have absolutely heard Muslims speak of hating the US and the west (even while living here) and at least quietly applauding certain terrorist actions. I find it ... implausible to think he has never heard a Muslim express such sentiments in his presence, when surely, he knows more Muslims than I do.

hiredgun · 10-18-2006, 10:47 AM

I'm sorry you find my experiences implausible, highthief. They are mine, and true, although I don't make any particular claims as to how far they can be generalized. My connections to Pakistan are largely friends and family, and as you can imagine, it would not be easy to support anti-American terror when you have loved ones living in the bullseye.

host · 10-18-2006, 11:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

You, sir, are paranoid. So its all just one big conspiracy to get the oil and the folk on the right are too stupid and blind to notice. There's no such thing as islamofascists and militant islam is only a problem in conservative thought, not in the "real world" where, I assume, you reside.

Arguing, debating, or whatever its called, with a position such as yours is pointless to say the least. I'd much rather prefer to hear what Ch'i and DC_dux have to say, what they think. At least it contains substance. Sure beats hearing "its teh proaganda!!!!11!! you only 'know what you know' because your too stupid to think for yourself" bit I hear from you on any number of issues.

ps. you forgot the reverse vampires.

Great argument, stevo...and the agenda is about much more than oil......

Has the thought crossed any of your minds that it is "odd" that one man, neocon trained, PNAC member, Zalmay Khalilzad, "picked" Karzai to rule Afghanistan, served as US ambassador in Afghanistan, and then moved on to pick the Iraqi government coalition, and now serves as US ambassador to Iraq, after a track record of defining the US strategy for that region of the world, under the influence of "Jihad" book publisher, Thomas E. Gouttierre...obscure Nebraska professor, the only man from academia who apparently advises the US government on Afghan affairs?

If there really is an emerging "caliphate" that Bush is committed to stop, why are the ranks of diplomatic and DOD personnel, so "thin"? Why does Zalmay Khalilzad appear to be the "entire show"? <b>Can any of you who have been "spoon-fed" this "Isalmic Fascist" bullshit, and then enthusiastically "licked the spoon", even stand to read the following contradictions? Doesn't the reporting document that the CIA and USAID were the authors of jihad? What have you personally, been right about, lately? My advice is to open your mind. I'm sharing the information that I have found. It speaks volumes about you, when your reaction is to attack me personally, just because I show you things that threaten your belief systems.</b>

Quote:

http://vdedaj.club.fr/cuba/npa_fidel_20011102.html
<b>....I do not share the view that the United States' main pursuit in Afghanistan was oil. I rather see it as part of a geo-strategic concept. No one would make such a mistake simply to go after oil, least of all a country with access to any oil in the world, including all the Russian oil and gas it wishes. It would be sufficient for the U.S. to invest, to buy and to pay. Based on its privileges, the United States can even purchase it by minting reserve bonds on a 30 years maturity span.</b> That is how, throughout more than 80 years, it has bought products and services accounting for over 6.6 trillion dollars.

Military actions in Afghanistan are fraught with dangers. That is an extremely troubled area where two large countries have fought several wars. There are profound national and religious antagonisms between them. The population of the disputed territory is mostly Islamic. As the tempers grow frail, a war might break out; and both countries have nuclear capability. That risk is as serious as the destabilization of the Pakistani government by the war. That government is being placed in a highly complicated position. The Taliban emerged there, and they share the same Pashtun ethnia with an undetermined number of Pakistanis, in fact, no less than 10 million; and I have chosen the most conservative figure among those that have been mentioned. They also share with fanatic passion the same religious beliefs. The U.S. military are usually well versed in their trade. I have met some when, after retirement, they have visited Cuba as scholars. They write books, tell stories and make political analyses. I was then not surprised by the information released by The New Yorker magazine of October 29 in the sense that there was a contingency plan to seize the Pakistani nuclear warheads, in case a radical group took over the government of that country.

It was absolutely impossible for the American strategists to overlook that substantial risk. Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan, every picture of dead children or people dying or suffering from terrible wounds, tend to compound that risk. What is hard to imagine is the reaction of those responsible for protecting those weapons, to a plan that is by now of public domain as much as Chronicle of a death foretold by Gabriel García Marquez.

I am not aware of something the U.S. Special Services should know only too well, that is, where and how those nuclear warheads are kept and the way in which they are protected. I try to imagine -and it is not easy-- how such an action could be conducted by elite troops. Perhaps, one day someone might tell how it could be done. But, still, I find it hard to imagine the political scenario in the aftermath of such an action when the fight would be against over 100 million additional Muslims. The U.S. government has denied the existence of such contingency plan. It was to be expected. It could not do otherwise.

The most logical question that crosses my mind is whether the heads of governments and statesmen who are friends of the United States and have a longstanding political and practical experience did not see these potential dangers, and why they did not warn the United States and tried to persuade it. Obviously, America's friends fear it but do not appreciate it.

It is always difficult to try to guess when it comes to these issues. But, there is something of which I am absolutely certain: it would be sufficient if 20 or 30 thousand men used clever methods of irregular warfare, the same that the United States wants to use there, and that struggle could last 20 years. <b>It is completely impossible to subdue the Afghan adversary in an irregular warfare on that country's ground with bombs and missiles, whatever the caliber and the power of these weapons.</b>

They have already been through the hardest psychological moments. They have lost everything: family, housing, and properties. They have absolutely nothing else they can lose. Nothing seems to indicate that they will surrender their weapons, even if their most notable leaders were killed. The use of tactical weapons, which some have suggested, would have the effect of multiplying by one hundred that mistake and with it unbearable criticism and universal isolation. Therefore, I have never believed that the leaders of that country have seriously considered such tactics, not even when they were most enraged.

These are simply my thoughts that I am expressing to you. I think the way to show solidarity with the American people that lost thousands of innocent lives, including those of children, youths and elders, men and women to the outrageous attack, is by frankly speaking out our minds. The sacrifice of those lives should not be in vain, but rather it should be useful to save many lives, to prove that thinking and conscience can be stronger than terror and death.

We are not suggesting that any crime committed on Earth should be left unpunished, I simply do not have elements of judgement to accuse anyone in particular. <b>But, if the culprits were those that the U.S. government is trying to punish and remove, there is no doubt that the way in which they are doing it will lead to the creation of altars where the alleged murderers will be worshiped as saints by millions of men and women.</b>

It would be better to build an enormous altar to Peace where Humankind can pay homage to all the innocent victims of blind terror and violence, be it an American or an Afghan child. This is said by somebody who considers himself an adversary of the United States' policies but not an enemy of that country, one who believes to have an idea of human history, psychology and justice.

Having come to this point there is only one more issue left to discuss.

What is happening with the anthrax is absolutely incomprehensible. Real and sincere panic has been created. The stocks of medications to fight that bacterium are being depleted. Many people are buying gas masks and other devices, some of which cost thousands of dollars.

Extravagant behavior can cause more damage than the disease. When there is an outbreak of any disease, whatever the cause, it is essential to warn the people and to provide information on the illness and the measures that should be taken to prevent it, diagnose it and fight it. Diseases are carried from one country to another in natural ways, that is, through people, animals, plants, food, insects, commercial products and a thousand other ways, without the need for anyone to produce them in laboratories. That is how it has been historically. That is the reason for so many public-health regulations.

The chaos and the psychological reaction to anthrax have turned the American society into a hostage of those who want to hurt it, knowing beforehand that they will sow terror. On numerous occasions our country has had to face up to new diseases affecting people, plantations and herds, many of them deliberately introduced. No wonder our country has graduated 67,128 medical doctors and thousands of technicians in plant and animal health. Our people know what should be immediately done in such cases.

No other country in the world compares with the United States in the number of research centers, laboratories and medications, or the capacity to produce them or purchase them, to fight that or any other disease. In the face of real or imaginary risk, either current or future, there is no other choice but to educate the people to cope with them. This is what the Cubans have done.

<b>The causes that gave rise to panic should be analyzed. Certainly, it could not be said that the United States is not in risk of terrorist actions. However, I do not believe that under the present circumstances of generalized alertness, and the measures taken, any group inside or outside America could come up with a coordinated action, organized in every detail for a long time, synchronized and executed with such precision as that of September 11.</b>

In my view the main risk may lie with individual actions, or actions carried out by very few people from inside or outside America that could cause lesser or greater damage. None can be underestimated. But as important as the preventive measures that should be taken to tackle such risks, or even more important, is to psychologically disarm the potential perpetrators. And these include those who might want to do it out of political extremism, vengeance or hatred, or a significant number of people who are frustrated, unstable or deranged who might feel tempted by the spectacular or by wishes to be the main actors of well-known events. <b>They could drive the American people mad by sending mail with or without anthrax.</b> Everything possible should be done to put an end to panic, extravaganza and chaos, then danger will be reduced. ......

Quote:

Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War; $2 Billion Program Reversed Tide for Rebels Series: CIA IN AFGHANISTAN Series Number: 1/2; [FINAL Edition]
Steve Coll. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Jul 19, 1992. pg. a.01

.... During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet Union itself. <h3>Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans</h3>, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.

"We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union," Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.

Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire.

Eight years after Casey's visit to Pakistan, the Soviet Union is no more. Afghanistan has fallen to the heavily armed, fraticidal mujaheddin rebels. The Afghans themselves did the fighting and dying - and ultimately won their war against the Soviets - and not all of them laud the CIA's role in their victory. But even some sharp critics of the CIA agree that in military terms, its secret 1985 escalation of covert support to the mujaheddin made a major difference in Afghanistan, the last battlefield of the long Cold War.

How the Reagan administration decided to go for victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan's leftist government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union, some intelligence officials involved have decided to reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.

The most prominent of these former intelligence officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA, titled "The Bear Trap."

This article and another to follow are based on extensive interviews with Yousaf as well as with more than a dozen senior Western officials who confirmed Yousaf's disclosures and elaborated on them.

U.S. officials worried about what might happen if aspects of their stepped-up covert action were exposed - or if the program succeeded too well and provoked the Soviets to react in hot anger. The escalation that began in 1985 "was directed at killing Russian military officers," one Western official said. "That caused a lot of nervousness."

One source of jitters was that Pakistani intelligence officers - partly inspired by Casey - began independently to train Afghans and funnel CIA supplies for scattered strikes against military installations, factories and storage depots within Soviet territory.

The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in Washington, who saw military raids on Soviet territory as "an incredible escalation," according to Graham Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence official who counseled against any such raids. Fearing a large-scale Soviet response and the fallout of such attacks on U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, the Reagan administration blocked the transfer to Pakistan of detailed satellite photographs of military targets inside the Soviet Union, other U.S. officials said.

<h3>To Yousaf, who managed the Koran-smuggling program and the guerrilla raids inside Soviet territory, the United States ultimately "chickened out" on the question of taking the secret Afghan war onto Soviet soil.</h3> Nonetheless, Yousaf recalled, Casey was "ruthless in his approach, and he had a built-in hatred for the Soviets."

An intelligence coup in 1984 and 1985 triggered the Reagan administration's decision to escalate the covert progam in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. The United States received highly specific, sensitive information about Kremlin politics and new Soviet war plans in Afghanistan. Already under pressure from Congress and conservative activists to expand its support to the mujaheddin, the Reagan administration moved in response to this intelligence to open up its high-technology arsenal to aid the Afghan rebels.

Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujaheddin rebels with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military operations based on the satellite intelligence, intercepts of Soviet communications, secret communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban sabotage and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and other equipment.

The move to upgrade aid to the mujaheddin roughly coincided with the well-known decision in 1986 to provide the mujaheddin with sophisticated, U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Before the missiles arrived, however, those involved in the covert war wrestled with a wide-ranging and at times divisive debate over how far they should go in challenging the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Roots of the Rebellion

In 1980, not long after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up a sympathetic leftist government, President Jimmy Carter signed the first - and for many years the only - presidential "finding" on Afghanistan, the classified directive required by U.S. law to begin covert operations, according to several Western sources familiar with the Carter document.

The Carter finding sought to aid Afghan rebels in "harassment" of Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan through secret supplies of light weapons and other assistance. The finding did not talk of driving Soviet forces out of Afghanistan or defeating them militarily, goals few considered possible at the time, these sources said.

The cornerstone of the program was that the United States, through the CIA, would provide funds, some weapons and general supervision of support for the mujaheddin rebels, but day-to-day operations and direct contact with the mujaheddin would be left to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The hands-off U.S. role contrasted with CIA operations in Nicaragua and Angola.

Saudi Arabia agreed to match U.S. financial contributions to the mujaheddin and distributed funds directly to ISI. China sold weapons to the CIA and donated a smaller number directly to Pakistan, but the extent of China's role has been one of the secret war's most closely guarded secrets.

In all, the United States funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II.

In the first years after the Reagan administration inherited the Carter program, the covert Afghan war "tended to be handled out of Casey's back pocket," recalled Ronald Spiers, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, the base of the Afghan rebels. Mainly from China's government, the CIA purchased assault rifles, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light antiaircraft weapons, and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. Most of the weapons dated to the Korean War or earlier. The amounts were significant - 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983, according to Yousaf - but a fraction of what they would be in just a few years.

Beginning in 1984, Soviet forces in Afghanistan began to experiment with new and more aggressive tactics against the mujaheddin, based on the use of Soviet special forces, called the Spetsnaz, in helicopter-borne assaults on Afghan rebel supply lines. As these tactics succeeded, Soviet commanders pursued them increasingly, to the point where some U.S. congressmen who traveled with the mujaheddin - including Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.) and Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) - believed that the war might turn against the rebels.

The new Soviet tactics reflected a perception in the Kremlin that the Red Army was in danger of becoming bogged down in Afghanistan and needed to take decisive steps to win the war, according to sensitive intelligence that reached the Reagan administration in 1984 and 1985, Western officials said. The intelligence came from the upper reaches of the Soviet Defense Ministry and indicated that Soviet hard-liners were pushing a plan to attempt to win the Afghan war within two years, sources said.

The new war plan was to be implemented by Gen. Mikhail Zaitsev, who was transferred from the prestigious command of Soviet forces in Germany to run the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the spring of 1985, just as Mikhail Gorbachev was battling hard-line rivals to take power in a Kremlin succession struggle.

Cracking the Kremlin's Strategy

The intelligence about Soviet war plans in Afghanistan was highly specific, according to Western sources. The Soviets intended to deploy one-third of their total Spetsnaz forces in Afghanistan - nearly 2,000 "highly trained and motivated" paratroops, according to Yousaf. In addition, the Soviets intended to dispatch a stronger KGB presence to assist the special forces and regular troops, and they intended to deploy some of the Soviet Union's most sophisticated battlefield communications equipment, referred to by some as the "Omsk vans" - mobile, integrated communications centers that would permit interception of mujaheddin battlefield communications and rapid, coordinated aerial attacks on rebel targets, such as the kind that were demoralizing the rebels by 1984.

At the Pentagon, U.S. military officers pored over the intelligence, considering plans to thwart the Soviet escalation, officials said. The answers they came up with, said a Western official, were to provide "secure communications {for the Afghan rebels}, kill the gunships and the fighter cover, better routes for {mujaheddin} infiltration, and get to work on {Soviet} targets" in Afghanistan, including the Omsk vans, through the use of satellite reconnaissance and increased, specialized guerrilla training.

"There was a demand from my friends {in the CIA} to capture a vehicle intact with this sort of communications," recalled Yousaf, referring to the newly introduced mobile Soviet facilities. Unfortunately, despite much effort, Yousaf said, "we never succeeded in that."

"Spetsnaz was key," said Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA operations officer who was posted at the time as director of intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Not only did communications improve, but the Spetsnaz forces were willing to fight aggressively and at night. The problem, Cannistraro said, was that as the Soviets moved to escalate, the U.S. aid was "just enough to get a very brave people killed" because it encouraged the mujaheddin to fight but did not provide them with the means to win.

Conservatives in the Reagan administration and especially in Congress saw the CIA as part of the problem. Humphrey, the former senator and a leading conservative supporter of the mujaheddin, found the CIA "really, really reluctant" to increase the quality of support for the Afghan rebels to meet Soviet escalation. For their part, CIA officers felt the war was not going as badly as some skeptics thought, and they worried that it might not be possible to preserve secrecy in the midst of a major escalation. A sympathetic U.S. official said the agency's key decision-makers "did not question the wisdom" of the escalation, but were "simply careful."

In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, and national security adviser Robert D. McFarlane signed an extensive annex, augmenting the original Carter intelligence finding that focused on "harassment" of Soviet occupying forces, according to several sources. Although it covered diplomatic and humanitarian objectives as well, the new, detailed Reagan directive used bold language to authorize stepped-up covert military aid to the mujaheddin, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.

New Covert U.S. Aid

The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies - a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to Yousaf - as well as what he called a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels. At any one time during the Afghan fighting season, as many as 11 ISI teams trained and supplied by the CIA accompanied the mujaheddin across the border to supervise attacks, according to Yousaf and Western sources. The teams attacked airports, railroads, fuel depots, electricity pylons, bridges and roads, the sources said.

CIA and Pentagon specialists offered detailed satellite photographs and ink maps of Soviet targets around Afghanistan. The CIA station chief in Islamabad ferried U.S. intercepts of Soviet battlefield communications.

Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied secure communications gear and trained Pakistani instructors on how to use it. <b>Experts on psychological warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at the firing site.......</b>

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad
Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts

By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code......

Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.

<h3>The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture</h3> and that the books "are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy." Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.

Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID "will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries."

The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.

<h3>President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach "respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry."

The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.</h3>

AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.....

.... Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.

"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.

Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. <b>The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. .....</b>

.... AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. <b>But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.</b>

Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers. ....

.....<h3> Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.</h3>

"We were quite shocked," said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. "The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it."

....In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.

Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF's new texts could be used only as supplements.

Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.

About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as "civics" courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and "how to be a good Muslim."

UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old "militarized" books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.

On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.

"We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum," he said.

Quote:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/af...n/schools.html
Getting children back to school is a number one priority in Afghanistan's post war government. But the big question is: what will they learn?
Back to school in Afghanistan
CBC News Online | January 27, 2004

The National | Airdate: May 6, 2002
Reporter: Carol Off | Producer: Heather Abbott | Editor: Catherine McIsaac

....A student learns to add and subtract bullets
Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction. This isn't their idea. During decades of war, the classroom has been the best place to indoctrinate young people with their duty to fight. Government-sponsored textbooks in Afghanistan are filled with violence. For years, war was the only lesson that counted.

The Mujahideen, Afghanistan's freedom fighters, used the classroom to prepare children to fight the Soviet empire. The Russians are long gone but the textbooks are not. The Mujahideen had wanted to prepare the next generation of Afghans to fight the enemy, so pupils learned the proper clips for a Kalashnikov rifle, the weight of bombs needed to flatten a house, and how to calculate the speed of bullets. Even the girls learn it.

"We were providing education behind the enemy lines."

But the Mujahideen had a lot of help to create this warrior culture in the school system from the United States, which paid for the Mujahideen propaganda in the textbooks. It was all part of American Cold War policy in the 1980s, helping the Mujahideen defeat the Soviet army on Afghan soil.

University of Nebraska
The University of Nebraska was front and center in that effort. The university did the publishing and had an Afghan study center and a director who was ready to help defeat the "Red Menace."

"I think Ronald Reagan himself felt that this was a violation of the rights of the Afghans," <b>says Tom Goutier, who was behind the Mujahideen textbook project.</b> "I think a lot of those working for him thought this was an opportunity for us to do the Soviet Union some damage."

Goutier's personal involvement in Afghanistan began in 1964 as a young U.S. peace corps volunteer. Over the years, he rubbed shoulders with Mujahideen leaders and he learned Afghan languages. During the 1980s, his love of America and his love of Afghanistan merged.

"We were living in an era in which the Afghans were trying to learn to survive," he says. "They were fighting for their survival in which a million of them were killed, a million and a half wounded. So, at that time, there was a lot of militaristic thinking."

The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in 1979. Its fighting forces were well armed and ruthless. The Mujahideen fought the Soviets throughout the 1980s with a lot of covert aid from the U.S.

In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. put a rush order on its proxy war in Afghanistan. The CIA gave Mujahideen an overwhelming arsenal of guns and missiles. But a lesser-known fact is that the U.S. also gave the Mujahideen hundreds of millions of dollars in non-lethal aid; $43 million just for the school textbooks. The U.S. Agency for International Development, AID, coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program.

"We were providing education behind the enemy lines," says Goutier. "We were providing military support against the enemy lines. So this was a kind of coordinated effort indeed.

"I eventually was involved in some of the discussions, negotiations for removing the Soviets from Afghanistan. I was an American specialist in these discussions and many people in those discussions said just as important as (the) introduction of stinger missiles was the introduction of the humanitarian assistance because the Soviets never believed the U.S. would go to that extent."

"The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks," says CBC'S Carol Off. "What discussions did you have with the Mujahideen leaders? Was it any effort to say maybe this isn't the best for an eight-year-old's mind?"

"No, because we were told that that was not for negotiations and that the content was to be that which they decided," says Goutier.

There were those who opposed the text book project, such as Sima Samar who ran a school in those days, but opposition did little good.

Sima Samar
"I was opposing but we had no choice," says Samar, who served as minister of women's affairs for the interim government that ran Afghanistan after the Taliban were driven out. "It was already done and… nobody had the freedom to speak against all those things."

"I was interested in being of any type of assistance that I could to help the Afghans get out of their mess and to be frank also anything that would help the United States in order to advance its interests," says Goutier.

American interests were well served. But after the defeat of the Soviet empire, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan. The country descended into civil war. The U.S. gave almost no money to help rebuild after the war against the Soviets and no money to rewrite the school textbooks.

.....The latest war in Afghanistan is now over but there's a constant threat of a new one. In the markets, tailors make uniforms for the stream of young men who want to be mercenaries. Only hunting guns are sold now since the heavy weapons are banned. But they still exist, woven into the very fabric of the country.

The Afghan children who returned to school in 2002 got new textbooks with new ideas but from the same old publisher. The University of Nebraska secured the contract again for $6.5 million from the United States government.

However this time there was a promise that they will not contain war propaganda.

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200111260...xamined+.shtml
<b>CIA, scholar links to Asia, Mideast reexamined</b>

By Chris Mooney, Globe Correspondent, 11/25/2001

Andrew Hess, who teaches a course on Afghanistan at Tufts University, is one of the nation's top specialists on a suddenly crucial part of the world. Since the United States started its Afghan campaign - and began getting criticism for its lack of expertise in Central Asia - Hess has waited for the government to tap his knowledge.

He's still waiting.

This fall Hess has taken calls from newspaper reporters and television stations - but hasn't received one call from US intelligence. He says he's baffled.

''I'm the only person with a program at the graduate level in the United States that deals with southwest Asia,'' he said.

Since Sept. 11, the CIA has made clear that it is eager for recruits familiar with the Middle East and Central Asia, especially those who can speak Arabic, Dari, or Pashto. And applications have shot through the stratosphere, many from recent college graduates.

But the deeper knowledge of the area and language lies not with students but with professors like Hess. And when it comes to academics, many intelligence watchers say that contact with the CIA largely remains limited to those scholars who have well-established credentials as insiders.

....The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha <b>has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence.</b> ''We're at war,'' said center director Thomas Gouttierre. ''I'm an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.''....

Quote:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/refere...eo&match=exact
In Nebraska, an Oasis of Insight Into Afghanistan's Heart; [Biography]
Jodi Wilgoren. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 6, 2001. pg. A.8

WHEN Thomas E. Gouttierre, a baker's son from Maumee, Ohio, applied for the Peace Corps in 1964, he had never even flown on an airplane, never mind traveled beyond the United States. He wanted to go somewhere that ''wasn't hot'' and ''wasn't in the Western Hemisphere,'' so he listed Iran, Turkey and ''anyplace but Latin America'' as his three choices.

Soon Mr. Gouttierre was teaching English and coaching basketball in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Instead of the Peace Corps' standard two years, he stayed nearly 10. Then he came here to the University of Nebraska's Omaha campus, home to the nation's only Center for Afghanistan Studies and its largest library of works on Afghanistan. As dean of international studies, he visited 70-some nations before losing count, and has studied the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for the United Nations....

...THE Center for Afghanistan Studies was started in 1973 as the Omaha campus's attempt to break into international academics by focusing on an area few others considered. From 1986 to 1994, the university spent more than $50 million in grants training teachers and funneling textbooks to more than 130,000 students in Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The library has 8,000 manuscripts and documents on the region, from an 1860 handwritten volume of poetry known as the Haft Aurang to the Afghan Communist Party's first newspaper a century later.

Mr. Gouttierre, who graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, never finished his Ph.D., though he has three honorary doctorates....

Quote:

Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2002 Friday Home Edition
Section: Part A Main News; Part 1; Page 1; Foreign Desk
Headline: The World; Karzai Chosen As Leader, Vows To Rebuild Nation;

"Although challenged by two other candidates, his victory was preordained by the controversial influence of U.S. and other foreign advisors, which could taint the credibility of his tenure. Mohammad Zaher Shah, the nation's former king, <h3>withdrew from the political stage on the advice of President Bush's envoy [Zalmay Khalilzad].</h3> Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani's departure from the race is believed to have been arranged in return for a prestigious title to be bestowed later. Still, Karzai's selection--he received 1,295 of the 1,575 votes cast--clearly reflected majority sentiment among those gathered for the weeklong convocation. Even his rivals joined in the spirit of celebration over what they see as the beginning of a new age in their homeland."

Quote:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...zai%2c%20Hamid
Traditional Council Elects Karzai as Afghan President

June 14, 2002, Friday
By CARLOTTA GALL (NYT); Foreign Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 14, Column 1, 1201 words

....The United States, which helped put him in power as part of its war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, openly backed his candidacy. The American envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was on stage offering his congratulations this evening as the results were read inside the vast tent where the loya jirga has been meeting for several days.

<b>''He became a consensus candidate,'' said Mr. Khalilzad</b> in an interview after the election. ''It looked like he was going to win, and it happens often in Afghan loya jirgas when a victory looks inevitable, then they move towards a consensus.''

Mr. Karzai had won over the strongest challengers to his side earlier in the week, securing important endorsements from the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled out any post for himself, as well as a former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the strong Tajik faction in his own cabinet, including Defense Minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim. Mr. Karzai is an ethnic Pashtun.

A final challenge came when royalists put forward their own candidate for chairman of the loya jirga on Wednesday. But when the chairmanship was won this morning by Ismail Qasimyar, a supporter of Mr. Karzai, it became clear that there was broad support for him.......

Quote:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2589341.stm
Thursday, 19 December, 2002, 11:18 GMT
Afghan legal system under spotlight

...Mr Karzai has made it clear that Afghanistan, a predominantly Muslim society, <b>intends to maintain sharia law</b>, while at the same time establishing pluralistic democracy and an independent judiciary....

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middl..._khalizad.html
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
In September 2001, Zalmay Khalilzad, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a key player in the country's democratic process, was working as an obscure staffer in the National Security Council.

But as the Bush administration's war on terror unfolded after 9/11, Khalilzad, an Afghan-born Muslim with a background in Middle East policy, rose to a prominent role as an adviser, Zalmay Khalilzad intermediary and policymaker. He was appointed as a special presidential envoy to Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban, and in 2003, Khalilzad became U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

He helped acting Afghan President Hamid Karzai set up a transitional government in the country of his birth and oversaw its first democratic elections in late 2004.

President Bush appointed Khalilzad to replace John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to Iraq in June 2005 where his first task was negotiating a compromise between the Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and secular groups over the constitution. He paid special attention to bringing Sunnis into the political process, especially after a coalition of Shiite parties won the most in parliamentary elections held in December 2005.

"The fundamental problem of Iraq is that the various communities are polarized along ethic and sectarian lines," Khalilzad told the NewsHour in February 2006. "And to deal with this problem, they need to form a national unity government, and that's what we are encouraging."

Khalilzad earned a reputation as a strategic thinker and one who can balance the complexity of politics in the Middle East with U.S. policy.

"He brings a lot more to bear than his predecessors, who knew nothing about Iraq. I wonder how many of our top decision-makers knew, a few years ago, the difference between Sunni and Shia," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with The New Yorker. "He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an insightful strategist. He has a unique advantage in a part of the world in which the United States has become massively engaged and does not have many people at the top equipped to deal with it."

In Iraq, Khalilzad lives in the Baghdad's Green Zone and travels in a security convoy often backed up with armed helicopters for air support. He works from his office in Saddam Hussein's former marble presidential palace supervising a staff of 5,000, the largest U.S. Embassy in the world.

Khalilzad was born in 1951 in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. His father worked in the local office of the ministry of finance. His mother, though illiterate, kept informed by having her children read the newspapers out loud to her.

His family moved to Kabul when he was in eighth grade. In high school he spent a year as an exchange student in California that he credits with giving him a different approach to his home country.

Khalilzad went on to attend Kabul University but transferred to the American University of Beirut after winning a scholarship. He studied political science and history of the Middle East in Beirut from 1970 to 1974. During this time, he met his wife Cheryl Bernard who was researching a dissertation on Arab nationalism. The couple has two sons.

In 1975, Khalilzad came to American to pursue his doctorate at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter, an expert in military strategy who helped him make contacts in Washington. <h3>Wohlstetter exposed Khalilzad to the so-called neoconservative approach to foreign policy that places an emphasis on using America's military power.</h3>

Khalilzad accepted a teaching position in the political science department at Columbia in 1979 and wrote articles about the Soviet Union's invasion into Afghanistan that received considerable attention from experts. In 1984 he became an American citizen and accepted a fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations.

From 1985-89, Khalilzad served as an adviser on Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war at the State Department where he wrote a policy paper that called for the U.S. to shift its focus from Iraq to Iran. He left the government for the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization where he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

During the first Persian Gulf war, Khalilzad worked for the Defense Department as the assistant deputy undersecretary for policy where he received the Department of Defense medal for outstanding public service.

Convinced that the United States had left unfinished business after driving Iraq from Kuwait, Khalilzad encouraged then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to remove Saddam Hussein from power and continued to push for regime change in Iraq.

After the war, he was assigned to analyze America's strategic position in the post-Cold War world and helped draft the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 that outlined a strategy for maintaining America's global hegemony using the threat of military force.

When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Pentagon and was a counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001, he moved to the National Security Council to become the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East and North African Affairs.

<b>Bush's "caliphate" message:</b> continued in next post....

host · 10-18-2006, 11:17 AM

...and this is the manipulated message....courtesy of the US government and the "Lincoln Group", that you've apparently bought into. It's as contrived and irrational, IMO, as Bush's description of how Saddam could have "avoided war".

Quote:

http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/di...9BPuH0.5717432
27 May 2004
U.S. Will Retain Command of Its Forces in Iraq, Powell Says

........SECRETARY POWELL: When I was Chairman at the end of the Cold War and I was testifying one day, I said, well, you know, the Soviet Union is gone, the Warsaw Pact is gone, you know, I'm running out of enemies. .........

You're "at war" with an "islamic fascist" "caliphate" bogeyman, that was created and produced by your own president and his government. <b>I am not !</b>

Quote:

http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2005/..._the_prez.html
<b>More Fatwas from the Prez</b>

........Now, how exactly could Saddam have avoided war? <b>By ridding himself of weapons that he didn’t have?</b> Iraq delivered a massive volume, tens of thousands of pages of documents, detailing everything about its nonexistent WMD program to the UN in December, 2002. He allowed UN inspectors access to every nook and cranny of the country. I think we know which party chose war.

Or this:

It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq -- and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that.

Well, that’s easy. To find out what went wrong, Mr. Bush, ask your vice president, who pressured the CIA to find what couldn’t be found, namely, Iraq’s WMD. Again and again, Cheney insisted that the CIA go back and sift the same data. Or ask Rummy, whose Feith-based intelligence shop cherry-picked tidbits to support the obsessive desire to go to war.

Or this nonsense:

[The terrorists’] stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia.

That may be their stated objective. But the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst believed it could create a new Symbionese state on the ruins of America, too. <b>Does Bush actually think he can scare America with the specter of some imaginary Evil Caliphate? Oh, right. He does.</b>

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051214-1.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 14, 2005

<b>President Discusses Iraqi Elections, Victory in the War on Terror</b>

....The stakes in Iraq are high, and we will not leave until victory has been achieved. (Applause.) Today there's an intense debate about the importance of Iraq to the war on terror. The constant headlines about car bombings and killings have led some to ask whether our presence in Iraq has made America less secure. This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone. The reality is that the terrorists have been targeting America for years, long before we ever set foot in Iraq.

We were not in Iraq in 1993, when the terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. We were not in Iraq in 1998, when the terrorists bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We were not in Iraq in 2000, when the terrorists killed 17 American sailors aboard the USS Cole. There wasn't a single American soldier in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001, when the terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people in the worst attack on our home since Pearl Harbor.

These acts are part of a grand strategy by the terrorists. Their stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, <h3>and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia.</h3> Hear the words of the terrorists. In a letter to the terrorist leader Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader Zawahiri has outlined plans that will unfold in several stages. These are his words: "... Expel the Americans from Iraq. ... Establish an Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq... Extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq." End quote. ....

Quote:

http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2005/...caliphate.html
Posted by Robert Dreyfuss on December 2, 2005 01:15 PM
<b>Bush V. the Evil Caliphate</b>

Eric Edelman is still lying for the Vice President. Edelman, from 2001, served as Dick Cheney's chief adviser on matters related to national security and Iraq. Since then Edelman has succeeded Douglas Feith, the man who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, as undersecretary of defense for policy. And he is still lying on Cheney's behalf. I caught up with him yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations. More on that, in a second. First, some background.

Three years ago, the Bush-Cheney team told us over and over that it was necessary to attack Iraq because Iraq was a central front in the war on terrorism. Right after 9/11, we now know, Bush personally insisted that Iraq was the chief culprit in that attack, even though the CIA demonstrated decisively that Al Qaeda was responsible for it and that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq. Vice President Cheney was the lead Liar-in-Chief about alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, insisting for example that Iraqi spies met with AQ operatives in Prague and repeatedly linking Baghdad to bin Laden. None of these ties existed. But we went to war anyway.

Now that the war is underway, and going badly, President Bush and his minions are still insisting, against all evidence, that Iraq is still at the heart of the war on terrorism. In his recent Annapolis speech, in the hefty Victory in Iraq document, and in other statements from administration officials, the Bush team is still misrepresenting the enemy. In fact, our real opponents in Iraq are not Al Qaeda, but the Iraqi resistance led by secular Baathists, former Iraqi military and intelligence officials, and a vast underground army of unhappy Sunnis, what U.S. intelligence calls POI's ("pissed off Iraqis"). But just as Bush lied about the terrorist threat from Iraq in 2003, he is doing it again: he is claiming that the real enemy in Iraq are Al Qeda-linked jihadists -- even though virtually all analysts of the war in Iraq say that the jihadists are only about 4 per cent of the fighters that U.S. forces face.

<h3>Which brings us to Edelman. Speaking at CFR yesterday, Edelman cited a long list of jihadist web site ravings, including one in which he quoted bin Laden claiming that the jihadists' goal in Iraq was to turn that country into the base for a new, worldwide Caliphate, a political-religious empire that Edelman warned would take over first the Middle East, then Europe, then the world.</h3> He ignored the reality that whatever outlandish claims bin Laden makes (and bin Laden is not in Iraq and has little leverage even over the small band of jihadists there), there is no chance that bin Laden's wild fantasies could come true. Certainly they do not represent an existential threat to world security, except in the sense that Al Qaeda can blow up things in London or Madrid. But Edelman presented the war in Iraq as the only way to prevent bin Laden from creating his worldwide Evil Calipjhate. (In the press corps, sitting in the back, there were audible titters at the stupidity of Edelman's claims.)....

Quote:

http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...ate_again.html
Posted by Robert Dreyfuss on February 21, 2006 10:09 AM
The Evil Caliphate, Again

The latest (official) incarnation of the Evil Caliphate is contained in a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing, which posits that the U.S. enemy in the Long War is made up of at least 12 million Muslims who want to establish an empire to battle the United States. The briefing was reported by the Washington Times. An excerpt:

The briefing was prepared for Rear Adm. William D. Sullivan, vice director for strategic plans and policy within the Joint Staff, which is under Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. Adm. Sullivan used it to deliver a lecture in January to a national security study group at Mississippi State University.

Bin Laden, the Joint Staff paper says, wants to "expand the Muslim empire to historical significance." And Iraq "has become the focus of the enemy's effort. If they win in Iraq, they have a base from which to expand their terror. ... Extremists now have an Emirate in Iraq that serves as a base of operations <b>from which they can revive the Caliphate [Islamic rule]. ... Baghdad becomes the capital of the Caliphate. The revived Caliphate</b> now turns its attention to the destruction of Israel."

Adm. Sullivan's briefing contains a map that shows the bin Laden-style caliphate conquering North and East Africa, the entire Middle East and Central and South Asia.

To me it sounds like the Protocols of the Elders of Islam. It’s nonsense, of course. As I’ve been writing for years now, the people we are fighting in Iraq are Baathists and former military officials and Sunni tribal and clan leaders, not Caliphate-mongers and bin Laden’s cronies. Is Adm. Sullivan’s intelligence that bad?

Quote:

http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...otherhood.html
January 03, 2006
The Neocon Brotherhood

The decision today by the Iraqi Islamic Party to take part in the gestating Iraqi government is important news, but not good news. There’s at least an outside chance that the IIP’s decision was partly the result of a U.S. covert operation by the Pentagon.

First of all, the news. The Iraqi Islamic Party is a branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood, the same fraternity that runs Hamas and the organization in Egypt that just won a big bloc of seats in the new Egyptian national assembly. It’s a Wahhabi-inspired, back-to-basics fundamentalist party that does, indeed, want to create the worldwide Muslim caliphate that President Bush is constantly warning us about. It is Sunni, and in the recent elections, the IIP was the mainstay for the Iraqi Accordance Front, one of the main Sunni parties in the Dec. 15 elections. the IIP-led Accordance Front represented the religious Sunnis, while another bloc represented the secular (and neo-Baathist) Sunnis. It is at least the third time that the IIP broke ranks with the opposition: when it joined the earlier Iraqi interim government, when it decided in October to support the constitution draft, and now its decision to join the Shiite-led coalition.

The IIP decision angered its erstwhile allies, as expected. <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002717034_webiraq02.html">Reported the AP</a>:

"We were shocked today when we heard that our brothers, who signed agreements with us yesterday to discuss just the fraudulent elections with the Kurdish leaders, instead were discussing forming a national unity government," Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the Sunni Arab National Dialogue Front, told The Associated Press.

What’s interesting here is an apparently covert relationship that has been developing between the IIP and the Pentagon, in part through the secretive Lincoln Group, the PR firm that planted paid propaganda in Iraqi media for the DOD. The New York Times <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/02/MNGKAGG5H61.DTL">revealed yesterday</a> that the Lincoln Group also had Sunni Iraqi clerics on its covert payroll:

<h3>Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm, was told early in 2005 by the Pentagon to identify religious leaders who could help craft messages that would persuade Sunnis in violence-ridden Anbar province to participate in national elections and reject the insurgency, according to a former employee.</h3>

Since then, the company has retained three or four Sunni religious scholars to offer advice and write reports for military commanders on the content of propaganda campaigns, the former employee said. But documents and Lincoln executives say the firm's ties to religious leaders and dozens of other prominent Iraqis are aimed also at enabling it to exercise influence in Iraqi communities on behalf of clients, including the military.

"We do reach out to clerics. We meet with local government officials and with local businessmen," Paige Craig, a Lincoln executive vice president, said in an interview. "We need to have relationships that are broad enough and deep enough that we can touch all the various aspects of society."

It isn’t clear if the Lincoln Group was dealing exclusively, or even primarily, with Muslim Brotherhood-linked clerics. But it ought be noted that one of Lincoln’s paid consultants, according to the Times, was Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. And Rubin is a co-thinker of AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who is on record (in his book, The Islamic Paradox) saying that the Muslim Brotherhood ought to be a main partner of the United States in the region.

Quote:

http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...ate_again.html
Bush on the Caliphate, Again

Four times yesterday Bush talked about the evil “caliphate” that radicals want to create. Unlike in the past, though, he spoke about it as if it already existed, accusing his imagined enemy of trying to “extend the caliphate” and “spread their caliphate.” <h3>I wish some reporter had the guts to ask the president to explain what he means, to explain what he thinks a caliphate is, and how a rag-tag band of Al Qaeda types hiding in Pakistan can conquer the land from Spain to Indonesia, which is what Bush keeps warning about.</h3>

Here are the relevant excerpts (you can read the whole transcript here):

The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.

The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives. And they want us to leave. And they want to topple government. They want to extend an ideological caliphate that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.

And they have objectives. They want to -- they want to drive us out of parts of the world to establish a caliphate. It's what they have told us.

It would give these people a chance to plot and plan and attack. It would give them resources from which to continue their efforts to spread their caliphate.

<b>...again with the blood (of American troops) for oil "line", and the "caliphate" bullshit:</b>

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101100922.html
Transcript
News Conference

CQ Transcripts Wire
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; 1:05 PM

OCTOBER 11, 2006

SPEAKER: GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

...BUSH: The enemy's doing everything within its power to destroy the government and to drive us out of the Middle East, starting with driving us out of Iraq before the mission is done....

<h3>....We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves</h3> that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West......

...QUESTION: Senator Warner says Iraq appears to be drifting sideways. And James Baker says a change in strategy may be needed.

Are you willing to acknowledge that a change may be needed?

BUSH: We're constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal. Our strategic goal is a country which can defend itself, sustain itself and govern itself.

The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.

The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. <b>There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives.</b> And they want us to leave. And they want to topple government. They want to extend an <b>ideological caliphate</b> that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.

<b>BUSH: They want to control oil resources</b> and they want to plot and plan and attack us again. That's their objectives.

And so -- and our strategic objective is to prevent them from doing that. And we're constantly changing tactics to achieve that objective. And I appreciate Senator Warner going over there and taking a look.

I want you to notice what he did say is: If the plan is now not working, the plan that's in place isn't working, America needs to adjust. I completely agree. That's what I talked to General Casey about.

I said: General, the Baghdad security plan is in its early implementation. I support you strongly but, if you come into this office and say we need to do something differently, I support you. If you need more troops, I support you. If you're going to devise a new strategy, we're with you. Because I trust General Casey to make the judgments necessary to put the tactics in place to help us achieve an objective.

And I appreciate Jimmy Baker's willingness to -- he and Lee Hamilton are putting this -- they got a group they put together that -- I think it was Congressman Wolf's suggestion -- or passed into law.

BUSH: We supported the idea. I think it's good to have some of our elder statesmen -- I hate to call Baker an elder statesman -- but to go over there and take a look and to come back and make recommendations.

Somebody said he said, "Well, you know, cut-and-run isn't working." That's not our policy.

Our policy is to help this country succeed, because I understand the stakes. And I'm going to repeat them one more time. As a matter of fact, I'm going to spend a lot of time repeating the stakes about what life is like in the Middle East.

It is conceivable that there will be a world in which radical forms -- <b>extreme forms of religion fight each other for influence in the Middle East; in which they've got the capacity to use oil as an economic weapon....</b>

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15239205/site/newsweek/
By Lisa Miller And Matthew Philips
Newsweek
Updated: 4:11 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2006

Oct. 12, 2006 - When President George W. Bush starts using fifty-cent words in press conferences, one has to wonder why, and on Wednesday, during his Rose Garden appearance, he used the word “caliphate” four times. The enemy, he said—by which he clearly meant the Islamic terrorist enemy—wants to “extend the caliphate,” “establish a caliphate,” and “spread their caliphate.” Caliphate? Really? Many people live long, fruitful lives without once using the word caliphate. Almost no one, with the exception of our president and some of his advisers, uses it as a pejorative.

As NEWSWEEK reported last month, the president and the people who prep him are still clearly casting about for the right phrase to pin on America’s elusive enemy. “Axis of evil” is outdated by now. “Islamist,” the preferred choice of scholars, has been deemed too jargony and academic. “Islamofascist” is a recent favorite, and in a speech last month the president used it as punctuation in a litany of other tags, notably “Islamic radicalism” and “militant jihadism.” The beauty of “caliphate” is that no one but students of Islamic history have much more than a vague idea of what it means. “Bush has been successful in defining terms in his own way,” said Steve Ebbins, a former Democratic speechwriter. “[The Bush administration] has captured the language. If you control the language, you control the message and are able to sway people’s attitude toward your policy. It’s a policy-endorsing mechanism.” Until last January, the president rarely used it, if ever. Since then, he’s used it more than 15 times.

A caliphate, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is the “office or dominion of a caliph”; a caliph is “a successor of Muhammad ... [the] spiritual head of Islam.” Simply put, the caliph is Islam’s deputy to the world. After the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D., his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, became the first caliph. (At the heart of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims, even today, is the question of succession: who has the right to become Islam’s caliph?) From the time of the Prophet’s death until the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, caliphs ruled over Muslims and presided over the Muslim expansion throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. These were the caliphates; some beneficent, some warmongering, in concept not unlike any other empire or dynasty.

In fairness, Bush isn’t the first person in recent history to appropriate the word caliphate and use it as a weapon. Osama bin Laden did it himself, most notably three years ago, in his statement to the United Sates via Al-Jazeera. “Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate, will not fall to you, God willing,” he said, “and we will fight you as long as we carry our guns.” Bin Laden’s rhetoric evoked, as it often does, an earlier, golden era of Islam, one that exists more in his imagination than in the lawless, crumbling city of Baghdad today. Backers of the war in Iraq—Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, not to mention hawks like Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania—jumped on the word and used it in speeches dozens of times.

Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations, says bin Laden’s word choices distort Islam for the world, and he wishes the president would take more care. When Ahmed heard “caliphate” Wednesday morning, he thought of the way Bush used the word “crusade” after September 11. “There’s a fundamental misunderstanding with the president and his advisers on core Islamic issues,” Ahmed said. “He’s getting bad advice, they’re misinformed on Islamic terminology.” Either that, or he’s making a strategic rhetorical choice.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011301816.html
Reunified Islam: Unlikely but Not Entirely Radical
Restoration of Caliphate, Attacked by Bush, Resonates With Mainstream Muslims

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 14, 2006; Page A01

ISTANBUL -- The plan was to fly a hijacked plane into a national landmark on live television. The year was 1998, the country was Turkey, and the rented plane ended up grounded by weather. Court records show the Islamic extremist who planned to commandeer the cockpit did not actually know how to fly.

But if the audacious scheme prefigured Sept. 11, 2001, it also highlighted a cause that, seven years later, President Bush has used to define the war against terrorism. What the ill-prepared Turkish plotters told investigators they aimed to do was strike a dramatic blow toward reviving Islam's caliphate, the institution that had nominally governed the world's Muslims for nearly all of the almost 1,400 years since the death of the prophet Muhammad.

The goal of reuniting Muslims under a single flag stands at the heart of the radical Islamic ideology Bush has warned of repeatedly in recent major speeches on terrorism. In language evoking the Cold War, Bush has cast the conflict in Iraq as the pivotal battleground in a larger contest between advocates of freedom and those who seek to establish "a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia."

The enthusiasm of the extremists for that vision is not disputed. However unlikely its realization, the ambition may help explain terrorist acts that often appear beyond understanding. When Osama bin Laden called the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "a very small thing compared to this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years," the reference was to the aftermath of World War I, when the last caliphate was suspended as European powers divided up the Middle East. Al Qaeda named its Internet newscast, which debuted in September, "The Voice of the Caliphate."

Yet the caliphate is also esteemed by many ordinary Muslims. For most, its revival is not an urgent concern. Public opinion polls show immediate issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and discrimination rank as more pressing. But Muslims regard themselves as members of the umma , or community of believers, that forms the heart of Islam. And as earthly head of that community, the caliph is cherished both as memory and ideal, interviews indicate.

That reservoir of respect represents a risk for the Bush administration as it addresses an issue closely watched by a global Islamic population estimated at 1.2 billion. Already, many surveys show that since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslims almost universally have seen the war against terrorism as a war on Islam.

"Why do you keep invading Muslim countries?" asked Kerem Acar, a tailor in central Istanbul. "I won't live to see it, and my children won't, but one day maybe my children's children will see someone declare himself the caliph, like the pope, and have an impact."

The issue comes into sharp relief in Turkey, which is often held up as a democratic model for other Muslim nations but where empathy with fellow believers runs deep -- as Karen Hughes, a presidential adviser and undersecretary of state, was reminded in September when angry complaints about civilian casualties in Iraq dominated a public appearance in Ankara, the capital.

Here, the last caliph, an urbane scholar, Abdulmecid Efendi, was unseated in March 1924 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the charismatic military officer who conceived modern Turkey as an exemplar of the system that places sovereignty in the nation-state rather than faith. Importing from France the notion that religion had no place in public life, Ataturk decreed that Islamic religious law was second to "the rule of law" by the state.

Ataturk's mausoleum, on a hilltop where Turkish officials had gathered to honor his memory, was ground zero for the 1998 plot. Its ringleader, Metin Kaplan, was imprisoned in Turkey after being extradited from Germany, where he was known as the "Caliph of Cologne." Many Turks found the grandiloquent title less than amusing, said Husnu Tuna, his attorney.

"People called me when I took this case and asked, 'Why are you defending a person who lowers the value of an Islamic concept?' " Tuna said. "I heard that both from individuals and from officials, including police and security."

Caliph, from the Arabic word khalifa , means successor to the prophet Muhammad. Competition for the title caused the schism between Shiite and Sunni lines of the faith, and the Shiites soon stopped selecting caliphs. But in the dominant Sunni tradition, the office embodied the ultimate religious and political authority, enabling Ottoman sultans to hold together an empire across three continents for more than 500 years. Ataturk appealed to Muslim solidarity in the battle to drive European powers off the Anatolian peninsula after World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.........

highthief · 10-18-2006, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredgun

I'm sorry you find my experiences implausible, highthief. They are mine, and true, although I don't make any particular claims as to how far they can be generalized. My connections to Pakistan are largely friends and family, and as you can imagine, it would not be easy to support anti-American terror when you have loved ones living in the bullseye.

I'm not saying you are being untruthful, but often people hear things but don't file them away, especially when they may find themselves in a position of conflict between conflicting ideologies and loyalties. It happened in Europe in WW2, it happens in Israel and Palestine today, and I am pretty sure it happens to a large number of Muslims, also (Americans too, for that matter).

Polls such as this:

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1766106.htm

lend some credence to the idea that support for terrorism, while hardly universal as some on Team Bush like to claim, is nevertheless, substantial even in nations like Indonesia, a somewhat less hard line Muslim nation than many others.

And this one:

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=248

Seaver · 10-18-2006, 01:28 PM

Ok Host, so Karzi is a proven ally with strong tribal roots in Afghanistan and a deep understanding of the culture. So obviously using him to aid our interests proves that Islamiscism is simply made up in order for Bush to declare war.

Sorry, if we weren't using Karzi's expertise in the region I would be pissed.

ubertuber · 10-18-2006, 01:59 PM

Ustwo quite sniping this thread. If you want to be here, at least attempt to contribute some substance.

dc_dux · 10-18-2006, 02:45 PM

Foreign Affairs magazine conducted a survey recently on "Public Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy:

Quote:

A general finding:
Americans are looking out on a world where they see growing dangers, few solutions and little in U.S. foreign policy that seems to be working. ... Our first indicator shows that public anxiety on international affairs is at high levels (a score of 130 on a 200-point scale), enough to show a deep dissatisfaction with current policies.

On Islam, terrorism and the Middle East:
On the plus side, the public gives the government good grades on some elements of the war on terror. Some 56 percent assign the government an "A" or "B" grade for giving the war on terror the attention it deserves, and 47 percent give high grades for hunting down terrorists.

There has been an increase in the number of those who say they worry a lot about the rise of Islamic extremism, from 31 percent in January to 38 percent now, and only 18 percent say they don't worry about it at all. Fifty percent of Americans say at least half of the world's Muslims are anti-American.

But although worry is up, the public has doubts about our ability to solve the problem. Only 1 in 5 Americans (19%) gives the United States an "A" or "B" grade for "having good relations and reputation with Muslim countries," while twice as many (39%) give a "D" or "F." Nearly three-quarters worry that our actions in the Middle East are aiding the recruitment of terrorists, with 37 percent saying they worry "a lot." That's up four points since January. (The survey was in the field before the controversy over a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has led to increased jihadist recruitment.)

About half the public (53%) say "improved communication and dialogue with the Muslim world will reduce hatred of the U.S." Yet only 36 percent say "establishing good relations with moderate Muslims" is something the government can do a lot about. Few believe "doing more to help Muslim countries develop economically" would help the nation's security a great deal (20%, down from 27% in June 2005).

http://www.confidenceinforeignpolicy...cy_mideast.htm

What is most striking is the finding that "nearly three-quarters worry that our actions in the Middle East are aiding the recruitment of terrorists."

If that overwhelming majority of Americans surveyed feel that our policies are aiding the recruitment of terrorists, isnt it logical that moderate muslims around the world would have the same sentiment?

I would put myself among the 53% who believe that "improved communication and dialogue with the Muslim world will reduce hatred of the U.S."

There is no guarantee of success and certainly nothing we, or any outsiders do will have an immediate impact, but IMO, dialogue and a change in policy would be a step in the right direction.

Ch'i · 10-18-2006, 03:25 PM

Ustwo, stevo, mojo, ect: You've made a claim that Islam causes violence, but have yet to prove it.

Seaver · 10-18-2006, 03:37 PM

I dont see anywhere where they said Islam causes terrorism. They said that Islam and it's history more than lends itself to this mentality. That the warlike and aggressive nature of Muhammad and his companions early on in the religion's history reverberate itself today and fuels the fires of terrorism.

They posted statistics which help their argument that many Muslims, even Westernized Muslims, openly support terrorism and state that it is allowed by Islam.

Never did they state that Islam leads to terrorism, that the Arabs/Turks/Egyptians/(Fill in race here) are savages or are born terrorists. Never did they state that if you are Muslim you hate the West and want to kill innocents.

NCB · 10-18-2006, 03:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ch'i

Ustwo, stevo, mojo, ect: You've made a claim that Islam causes violence, but have yet to prove it.

How many people have to be killed in the name of religion before it becomes "provable" for you? 1000? 10000? Whats the number?

Ch'i · 10-18-2006, 04:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

I dont see anywhere where they said Islam causes terrorism.

I said violence, as did the one I directed my post towards:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei

There has to be some correlation attesting to the idea that violence and Islam are related.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Quote:

Originally Posted by NCB

How many people have to be killed in the name of religion before it becomes "provable" for you? 1000? 10000? Whats the number?

I fail to see the connection between killings in the name of a religion and Islam causing this violence. Don't confuse the two.

Seaver · 10-18-2006, 05:01 PM

Quote:

There has to be some correlation attesting to the idea that violence and Islam are related.

As my Psychology teacher pounded into our heads, "Correlation does not equal Causation." Correlation means they have a similarity, as in when one increases another does (or decreases) in a relatively close scale. Now it is a fact that if you rule out Islamic terrorists, the level of terrorism acts in the world dramatically decreases (though there still are acts).

Willravel · 10-18-2006, 05:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NCB

How many people have to be killed in the name of religion before it becomes "provable" for you? 1000? 10000? Whats the number?

Yes, the name of religon kills. Because we've agreed on that fact, the next logical conclusion is to stop all religon. We should probably start with the biggest, theoritically saving the most people from death fastest. Which is the biggest religon, again? I'm trying to remember. It's like Judism and Islam, but not quite. It has followers in the highest eschelons of our own government. It rhymes with "fisty annity".

NCB · 10-18-2006, 07:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Yes, the name of religon kills. Because we've agreed on that fact, the next logical conclusion is to stop all religon. We should probably start with the biggest, theoritically saving the most people from death fastest. Which is the biggest religon, again? I'm trying to remember. It's like Judism and Islam, but not quite. It has followers in the highest eschelons of our own government. It rhymes with "fisty annity".

Your post wouldve been relevant 400 years ago, but there wasnt a fucking interweb to post on back then.

Willravel · 10-18-2006, 07:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NCB

Your post wouldve been relevant 400 years ago, but there wasnt a fucking interweb to post on back then.

I was building off your thought process, which I believe is fundamentally flawed, and shooting back at you....and then you took it apart. It's a common liberal tactic, you see. We repeat back to you what you say, then you call it absurd.

Ch'i · 10-18-2006, 08:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

As my Psychology teacher pounded into our heads, "Correlation does not equal Causation." Correlation means they have a similarity, as in when one increases another does (or decreases) in a relatively close scale. Now it is a fact that if you rule out Islamic terrorists, the level of terrorism acts in the world dramatically decreases (though there still are acts).

I was under the impression that Mojo, like Ustwo, was making a generalization about Islam and Muslims. If your description is what Mojo meant then I am inclined to agree. There is more to Islamic terrorism than religion, however.

stevo · 10-19-2006, 06:40 AM

I think all I've been saying (in this thread) is that the "small minority" of muslims that are extremist and supporters of terrorism isn't as small as the left lilkes to believe. Take the poll I posted about Indonesia and lets expand on it a bit. If 18,700,000 indonesian muslims support terrorist activities against the west in the name of islam, and only 1% actually do something about it, then thats 187,000 people willing to kill you because you live in the west. And thats just from one country. Although, I beleive that if you take 100 extremist, terrorist supporting muslims you'll find more than one willing to kill you. That 1% figure is very low.

Moskie · 10-19-2006, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

the "small minority" of muslims that are extremist and supporters of terrorism isn't as small as the left lilkes to believe.

Ok, that's fair. This is probably a direct result of the fact that we want the percentage of non-extremist muslims in the world to be higher than it is now.... which I think is something we should all want, right? I mean, I don't think anyone in this thread is going to say "I wish there were more Muslim extremists in the world."

But spreading the notion that Islam is evil does just that. Now, some of you might say I'm just denying reality in order to serve a purpose, but I disagree with that. It is not impossible to be a moderate, peaceful Muslim. Some of you believe that it's improbable, but we know it's not impossible. So us on the left have latched onto that notion, and are trying our best to make it more and more probable.

roachboy · 10-19-2006, 08:10 AM

there are problems with the way in which this correlation is being discussed, however.

seaver is correct in that correlation is not causation.
but it does not follow that all correlations are equal.
there are stronger and weaker.
and there are false ones.

the logic behind correlations here is basically a syllogism.
you know, the "all cretans are liars" thing (a=b, b=c, so a=c)
the issue with this is simple: if the variables you introduce into the game are screwy, the results of the operation will not tell you anything about that--all a syllogism does is enable you process whatever variable you introduce in a manner that is (presumably) formally correct.

among the problems with the definition of variable are:

1. you cannot equate the range of small dissident muslim groups that are the center of this contruct "terrorist" these days with islam as a whole and not end up with worthless correlations.

2. you cannot operate with no strict definition of what "terrorism" is and not end up with worthless correlations.

there are others that have to do with the effects of the category "terrorist" in stripping all considerations of politics away, all considerations of often very complex contexts, of simplifying situations not because they are amenable to it, but because you have introduced a fucked up category and find yourself performing the implications of that category as such (and not as a descriptor involving "the world")

on the first, i would hope that the problem is self-evident.
on the second, everything turns on the notion of "terrorism"--which is self-evidently an empty signifier that is given such content as it has as a function of ideological framing devices---if it means anything, it means "actions the present american administration does not like." and its specific signified is filled in by political argument.

so say you were to ask people in--o i dont know--indonesia, say the question "do you approve of the actions of al qeada?" the responses would not translate into "do you approve of terrorism" in any rational way simply because the question is not being interpreted that way in the survey--in other words, al qeada's actions mightbe understood elsewhere as political--that is about particular issues directed against reasonable targets with particular ends in mind--none of which follows from the notion "terrorism"

this kind of problem seems to me so entirely self-evident that i find it cotinually baffling to read posts from folk, particularly on the right here, that attempt to gloss over them--i assume that if you thought about what you were saying, you would in all likelihood not say it, simply given the severe problems of defining the basic terms--and a syllogism is really a kind of stupid machine in that (again) it does not enable any evaluation of WHAT is being processed, it simply IS a process.

given that, i tend to assume that the persuasive power of this kind of argument has to come from somewhere else--it is not reasonable analytically, it is flawed logically, etc.---and i find few good places to go in order to explain why these arguments are held up as viable.

so this explains to some extent my reactions to this kind of argument and to this kind of thread.

good to see folk putting their cards on the table above, tho, and beginning to nuance what they have been posting on this. thought i would do the same.

host · 10-19-2006, 11:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

Ok Host, so Karzi is a proven ally with strong tribal roots in Afghanistan and a deep understanding of the culture. So obviously using him to aid our interests proves that Islamiscism is simply made up in order for Bush to declare war.

Sorry, if we weren't using Karzi's expertise in the region I would be pissed.

It's Khalilzad....he's the "one man" necon muslim "show"..., not Karzai....he's only the US/Khalilzad installed, "mayor of Kabul".....

Quote:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/cus...views.start=11
Tragic but true history, December 10, 2005

America has been the biggest supporter of international Islamism in the world, indeed, and a major financial source for it to get on its legs. However the role of America and the victories of Islamists have only sometimes coalesced.

Let us do a rundown:
Militant Islam begins in the early 20th century in Egypt among the Muslim Brothers and in Saudi among the Wahabbis and in Pakistan. Militant Islam gains its first victories in Iran(1979) and unleashes the Algerian civil war, then beats the Russians in Afghanistan, takes over Sudan. Then it spreads to Lebanon in the 1980s, Egypt as well and Pakistan and then into Europe in Bosnia in 1990s and Chechnya as well. Then there is 9/11. All the while it maintains Saudi as a rear bease.

America's support for this long history is scattered. America bankrolled the war in Afghanistan against the Communists. America supported the Muslim Brothers against Nasser in the 50s and 60s. America was involved in Bosnia and sided with Militant Islam against the Serbs. The case for American support of Hamas is tangential, and more an Israeli blunder. America had its first battle with Militant Islam in Lebanon in 1982. America ignored the Algerian Civil war. '

The truth is more blurry than this volume makes out. America didnt create militant Islam. America helped it grow. However America didnt 'cause' 9/11 anymore than America caused the Holocaust or America caused the Bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rather like in the latter cases, America is part of the picture. The choice to kill people in suicide mission is the fault and responsibility of the terrorist and his leader. America hopefully has learned from this disasterous policy, however in the case of Pakistan and Saudi, perhaps America is still blind.

<b>In my last post, I highlighted the reasons why I believe that the US is the principle "author" of Islamic militancy, as policy. The president's "message", is repetitive, inflammatorym and incoherent, given the background of US actions. If you pattern your opinion after what he says, your thougts will be incoherent, too, and your posts here reinforce my observation....</b>

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051006-3.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
October 6, 2005

President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

video screen capture
multimedia

President's Remarks
video image view

Fact sheet In Focus: National Security
Fact sheet In Focus: Renewal in Iraq
Fact sheet Fact Sheet: War on Terror
Fact sheet Fact Sheet: Plots, Casings, and Infiltrations Referenced in President Bush's Remarks on the War on Terror

10:07 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. (Applause.) Thank you all. Please be seated. (Applause.) Thank you for the warm welcome. I'm honored once again to be with the supporters of the National Endowment for Democracy. Since the day President Ronald Reagan set out the vision for this Endowment, the world has seen the swiftest advance of democratic institutions in history. And Americans are proud to have played our role in this great story....

....The images and experience of September the 11th are unique for Americans. Yet the evil of that morning has reappeared on other days, in other places -- in Mombasa, and Casablanca, and Riyadh, and Jakarta, and Istanbul, and Madrid, and Beslan, and Taba, and Netanya, and Baghdad, and elsewhere. In the past few months, we've seen a new terror offensive with attacks on London, and Sharm el-Sheikh, and a deadly bombing in Bali once again. All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.

<h3>Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.</h3> This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.

Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th. Other militants are found in regional groups, often associated with al Qaeda -- paramilitary insurgencies and separatist movements in places like Somalia, and the Philippines, and Pakistan, and Chechnya, and Kashmir, and Algeria. Still others spring up in local cells, inspired by Islamic radicalism, but not centrally directed. Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world.

We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their "resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands." Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

President George W. Bush addresses his remarks on the War on Terror, Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, speaking before the National Endowment for Democracy at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington. White House photo by Eric Draper Second, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they've set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, <h3>and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.......</h3>

....Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence -- the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers -- and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory. (Applause.)

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, "what is good for them and what is not." And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that his -- that this is the road to paradise -- though he never offers to go along for the ride.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life. We've seen it in the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg, and Margaret Hassan, and many others. In a courtroom in the Netherlands, the killer of Theo Van Gogh turned to the victim's grieving mother and said, "I do not feel your pain -- because I believe you are an infidel." And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the militants are fellow Muslims.

When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple -- the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. These militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity. (Applause.) We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags, and the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth they have endless ambitions of imperial domination, and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves. Under their rule, they have banned books, and desecrated historical monuments, and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form, and to control every aspect of life, and to rule the soul, itself. While promising a future of justice and holiness, the terrorists are preparing for a future of oppression and misery.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in liberty are weak and decadent. Zarqawi has said that Americans are, quote, "the most cowardly of God's creatures." But let's be clear: It is cowardice that seeks to kill children and the elderly with car bombs, and cuts the throat of a bound captive, and targets worshipers leaving a mosque. It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people. It is courage that keeps an untiring vigil against the enemies of a rising democracy. And it is courage in the cause of freedom that once again will destroy the enemies of freedom. (Applause.)

And Islamic radicalism, like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure. By fearing freedom -- by distrusting human creativity, and punishing change, and limiting the contributions of half the population -- this ideology undermines the very qualities that make human progress possible, and human societies successful. The only thing modern about the militants' vision is the weapons they want to use against us. The rest of their grim vision is defined by a warped image of the past -- a declaration of war on the idea of progress, itself. And whatever lies ahead in the war against this ideology, the outcome is not in doubt: Those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation, decline, and collapse. Because free peoples believe in the future, free peoples will own the future. (Applause.)

We didn't ask for this global struggle, but we're answering history's call with confidence, and a comprehensive strategy. Defeating a broad and adaptive network requires patience, constant pressure, and strong partners in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and beyond. Working with these partners, we're disrupting militant conspiracies, destroying their ability to make war, and working to give millions in a troubled region of the world a hopeful alternative to resentment and violence.

First, we're determined to prevent the attacks of terrorist networks before they occur. We're reorganizing our government to give this nation a broad and coordinated homeland defense. We're reforming our intelligence agencies for the incredibly difficult task of tracking enemy activity, based on information that often comes in small fragments from widely scattered sources, here and abroad. We're acting, along with the governments from many countries, to destroy the terrorist networks and incapacitate their leaders. Together, we've killed or captured nearly all of those directly responsible for the September the 11th attacks; as well as some of bin Laden's most senior deputies; al Qaeda managers and operatives in more than 24 countries; the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, who was chief of al Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf; the mastermind of the Jakarta and the first Bali bombings; a senior Zarqawi terrorist planner, who was planning attacks in Turkey; and many of al Qaeda's senior leaders in Saudi Arabia.

Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th, including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States. We've stopped at least five more al Qaeda efforts to case targets in the United States, or infiltrate operatives into our country. Because of this steady progress, the enemy is wounded -- but the enemy is still capable of global operations. Our commitment is clear: We will not relent until the organized international terror networks are exposed and broken, and their leaders held to account for their acts of murder.

Second, we're determined to deny weapons of mass destruction to outlaw regimes, and to their terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation. The United States, working with Great Britain, Pakistan, and other nations, has exposed and disrupted a major black-market operation in nuclear technology led by A.Q. Khan. Libya has abandoned its chemical and nuclear weapons programs, as well as long-range ballistic missiles. And in the last year, America and our partners in the Proliferation Security Initiative have stopped more than a dozen shipments of suspected weapons technology, including equipment for Iran's ballistic missile program.

This progress has reduced the danger to free nations, but has not removed it. Evil men who want to use horrendous weapons against us are working in deadly earnest to gain them. And we're working urgently to keep weapons of mass destruction out of their hands.

Third, we're determined to deny radical groups the support and sanctuary of outlaw regimes. State sponsors like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve no patience from the victims of terror. The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they're equally as guilty of murder. (Applause.) Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to be an enemy of civilization. And the civilized world must hold those regimes to account.

Fourth, we're determined to deny the militants control of any nation, which they would use as a home base and a launching pad for terror. For this reason, we're fighting beside our Afghan partners against remnants of the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. For this reason, we're working with President Musharraf to oppose and isolate the militants in Pakistan. And for this reason, we're fighting the regime remnants and terrorists in Iraq. The terrorist goal is to overthrow a rising democracy, claim a strategic country as a haven for terror, destabilize the Middle East, and strike America and other free nations with ever-increasing violence. Our goal is to defeat the terrorists and their allies at the heart of their power -- and so we will defeat the enemy in Iraq.

Our coalition, along with our Iraqi allies, is moving forward with a comprehensive, specific military plan. Area by area, city by city, we're conducting offensive operations to clear out enemy forces, and leaving behind Iraqi units to prevent the enemy from returning. Within these areas, we're working for tangible improvements in the lives of Iraqi citizens. And we're aiding the rise of an elected government that unites the Iraqi people against extremism and violence. This work involves great risk for Iraqis, and for Americans and coalition forces. Wars are not won without sacrifice -- and this war will require more sacrifice, more time, and more resolve.

The terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we've ever faced. They're unconstrained by any notion of our common humanity, or by the rules of warfare. No one should underestimate the difficulties ahead, nor should they overlook the advantages we bring to this fight.

Some observers look at the job ahead and adopt a self-defeating pessimism. It is not justified. With every random bombing and with every funeral of a child, it becomes more clear that the extremists are not patriots, or resistance fighters -- they are murderers at war with the Iraqi people, themselves.

In contrast, the elected leaders of Iraq are proving to be strong and steadfast. By any standard or precedent of history, Iraq has made incredible political progress -- from tyranny, to liberation, to national elections, to the writing of a constitution, in the space of two-and-a-half years. With our help, the Iraqi military is gaining new capabilities and new confidence with every passing month. At the time of our Fallujah operations 11 months ago, there were only a few Iraqi army battalions in combat. Today there are more than 80 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces. Progress isn't easy, but it is steady. And no fair-minded person should ignore, deny, or dismiss the achievements of the Iraqi people.

Some observers question the durability of democracy in Iraq. They underestimate the power and appeal of freedom. We've heard it suggested that Iraq's democracy must be on shaky ground because Iraqis are arguing with each other. But that's the essence of democracy: making your case, debating with those who you disagree -- who disagree, building consensus by persuasion, and answering to the will of the people. We've heard it said that the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds of Iraq are too divided to form a lasting democracy. In fact, democratic federalism is the best hope for unifying a diverse population, because a federal constitutional system respects the rights and religious traditions of all citizens, while giving all minorities, including the Sunnis, a stake and a voice in the future of their country. It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq -- but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower; it is a healthy, sturdy tree. (Applause.)

As Americans, we believe that people everywhere -- everywhere -- prefer freedom to slavery, and that liberty, once chosen, improves the lives of all. And so we're confident, as our coalition and the Iraqi people each do their part, Iraqi democracy will succeed.

Some observers also claim that America would be better off by cutting our losses and leaving Iraq now. This is a dangerous illusion, refuted with a simple question: Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources? Having removed a dictator who hated free peoples, we will not stand by as a new set of killers, dedicated to the destruction of our own country, seizes control of Iraq by violence.

There's always a temptation, in the middle of a long struggle, to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world, and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder. This would be a pleasant world, but it's not the world we live in. The enemy is never tired, never sated, never content with yesterday's brutality. This enemy considers every retreat of the civilized world as an invitation to greater violence. In Iraq, there is no peace without victory. We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory. (Applause.)

The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there's no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.

America is making this stand in practical ways. We're encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow. We're making our case through public diplomacy, stating clearly and confidently our belief in self-determination, and the rule of law, and religious freedom, and equal rights for women, beliefs that are right and true in every land, and in every culture. (Applause.)

<b>As we do our part to confront radicalism, we know that the most vital work will be done within the Islamic world, itself. And this work has begun. Many Muslim scholars have already publicly condemned terrorism, often citing Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Koran, which states that killing an innocent human being is like killing all humanity, and saving the life of one person is like saving all of humanity. After the attacks in London on July the 7th, an imam in the United Arab Emirates declared, "Whoever does such a thing is not a Muslim, nor a religious person." The time has come for all responsible Islamic leaders to join in denouncing an ideology that exploits Islam for political ends, and defiles a noble faith.</b>

Many people of the Muslim faith are proving their commitment at great personal risk. Everywhere we have engaged the fight against extremism, Muslim allies have stood up and joined the fight, becoming partners in a vital cause. Afghan troops are in combat against Taliban remnants. Iraqi soldiers are sacrificing to defeat al Qaeda in their own country. These brave citizens know the stakes -- the survival of their own liberty, the future of their own region, the justice and humanity of their own tradition -- and that United States of America is proud to stand beside them. (Applause.)

With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers. And yet the fight we have joined is also the current expression of an ancient struggle, between those who put their faith in dictators, and those who put their faith in the people. Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision -- and they end up alienating decent people across the globe. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that regimented societies are strong and pure -- until those societies collapse in corruption and decay. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that free men and women are weak and decadent -- until the day that free men and women defeat them.

We don't know the course of our own struggle -- the course our own struggle will take -- or the sacrifices that might lie ahead. We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice. We do know the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history. And we do know the cause of freedom will once again prevail.

May God bless you. (Applause.)

stevo · 10-19-2006, 12:20 PM

Whats with those articles host? You can't actually believe them. I mean, you said yourself that islamofascism doesn't exist, yet here you go posting these articles. What gives?

roachboy · 10-19-2006, 12:35 PM

well stevo, the word "islamofascism" exists, obviously, because you like to use it and i dont think you just made it up.
and since you use the word, i would assume that it has some organizing power for you, if not much in the way of explanatory power.
but that does not mean that the phenomenon you organize by using this word actually exists in the world---only in the way you stage the world as you use the category to organize it.
ideological categories are like that--this is how the operate, and this is what they are (they are how they operate)

that help?

of course, i am not speaking for host here---i dont think we are pursuing the same kind of argument in this context.

stevo · 10-19-2006, 12:57 PM

Quote:

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.

Maybe I should hyphenate it? if I asked about militant jihadism would I get the same response?

host · 10-19-2006, 11:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

Maybe I should hyphenate it? if I asked about militant jihadism would I get the same response?

Consider that current US ambassador to Iraq, and former US ambassador to Afghanistan, (aka "Viceroy") Zalmay Khalilzad was an assistant professor at Columbia U., influenced by Carter Nat.Security Advisor, Z. Brzezinski. Consider that <b>"jihad"</b> was a psy-ops "tool" of US, "force multplication policy, intent on destabalizing the Soviet military in Afghanistan, by exploiting the latent religious "fervor" of the native islamic Afghan people....and that a larger goal was to, as Richard Pipes is quote saying, below, to incite "hatred that can quickly explode into genocidal fury", by US "ops" aimed at muslims in Soviet provinces.

I document the reporting of Richard Pipes as a "neocon", in 1981, <b>and the "Team B", "op" that was a predecessor of the more recent neocon effort to challenge and manipulate CIA intelligence about Iraqi WMD....in order to exaggerate the threat of the Soviet Union in the late 70's and early 80'a....</b>

Consider that much of the influence on your opinions about islam and about the islamic "threat", comes from the hyperactive islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, son of Richard Pipes, and, a Bush "recess appointee" who is as much of a belligerant and as lacking as a diplomat, as John Bolton.

It amazes me that so many folks who embrace the politics to the right of the center, also embrace the "thinking" of these militarist neocon nutcases....what have they been "right" about, compared to what their meddling has cost the US, during the past 30 years. Brzesinksi's decisions in countering the Soviets, via Afghanistan, place him squarely....in the late 70's, in the neocon "camp".

<b>Consider that, as Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard, your "targeting" of militant islam is the "son" of your own neocon forebearer's short sighted, and failed strategy....you're now "very concerned" by the "blow back" of the CIA brainwashing of young central Asian and middle eastern muslims, over at least the past 30 nearly years..... the implication is that your "belief system", and you're GWOT "leaders", are all "rubbing one off", in a "circle jerk" that is the "fruit" of the failed "psy-ops" that you now clamor for even more of, because your own neocon polluted government stays "on message" (the "caliphate" ...from spain to indonesia....bullshit...) to perpetually tweak your fears....</b>

Quote:

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/zbi-zal.htm
.....The second problem with the Khalilzad/Unocal argument, related to the first, is that it violates a prime rule learned by every first year statistics student. That rule is, "Correlation Does Not Prove Cause."

Right off the bat, no less than three hypotheses could easily (indeed better!) explain the *correlation* between Khalilzad's gig at Unocal and his present high-power position in Afghanistan.

* Hypothesis 1: Khalilzad Was Used As A Door Opener *

Khalilzad has been a key player in the Imperial policy of using Afghanistan to hurt Russia, a policy that began in 1979 and has never stopped. Therefore he is very powerful, and Unocal hired him, as companies often hire powerful people, as a figurehead, because his name opens doors in Washington and Afghanistan, and he had no objection to taking their money. And precisely because he has been a key foreign policy strategist (since 1985), now that NATO is once again using Afghanistan to attack Russia, it is natural that he take direct charge in Afghanistan.

And/or:

* Hypothesis 2: Unocal Was Used by Khalilzad as a Cover for Covert Work *

Since 1979, US and Saudi secret services and their offspring, the Pakistani ISI (secret service), have managed the attack on Afghanistan, in which Khalilzad was a *very* high-level operator. He accepted the job at Unocal as a cover for some covert assignment involving relations with the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, or whomever

And/or:

* Hypothesis 3: Unocal Acted as an Agent of Western Policy in Afghanistan *

Pipelines mainly benefit the governments of the countries they pass through in the same way that taxi rides benefit the taxicab owners: because sovereign governments are paid a fee based on the volume of oil that passes through their territories. The Imperial plan was for the Taliban to consolidate control of Afghanistan by defeating or uniting with the Northern Alliance. Therefore Unocal, which enjoys friendly relations with the CIA, dangled the carrot of a pipeline before the Taliban, stressing:

"the benefits such a pipeline could bring to this desperately poor and war-torn country"

with the proviso that:

"the project could not and would not proceed until there was an internationally recognized government in place in Afghanistan that fairly represented all its people." http://web.archive.org/web/200111211...ews/091401.htm

Under cover of being a consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad's role was to assist the Unocal people in properly dangling the pipeline carrot.

Hypotheses One, Two and Three are not contradictory. All three could be true. Moreover they are not pure speculation because they are based on the study of actual data. Some of this data is cited in articles you can link to in *Further Reading*, at the end.

I dug up some fresh data during 30 hours spent on the Internet reading newspaper and other reports published over the past 17 years about Zalmay Khalilzad. It's clear that he's important, so I will try to assemble a chronological account of Khalilzad's career. Anyway, as an appetizer, here are two pieces of information from the mid-1980s.

* Zalmay Khalilzad in 1986 *

According to a Feb. 5, 1986 article in the Washington Post, on Feb. 1, 1986 Khalilzad participated, as an "outside [i.e., outside of government] expert" on Afghanistan, in a VIP seminar on Afghanistan, sponsored by US Secretary of State George P. Schultz. Other participants included:

* Caspar W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense;

* William J. Casey, Director of CIA;

* Zbigniew Brzezinski, formerly the Security Adviser to President Carter and, according to his own 'boast', a key planner of the terrorist war against Afghanistan in the 1980s;

* Donald Rumsfeld and James Schlesinger, both at that time former secretaries of defense;

* And William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, and previously perhaps the top CIA expert on Russia.

Prof. Zalmay Khalilzad was then about 35 years old. The men named above were in their 50s, 60s or older.

* Zalmay Khalilzad In 1985 *

The year before Secretary of State Shultz's seminar, Zalmay Khalilzad's name came up in an AP dispatch which I've posted in full below.

Here are a few things I noticed about the dispatch:

* Though Khalilzad was then about 34 years old, the AP refers to him as a "luminary".

* Khalilzad was on the Board of a company called Friends of Afghanistan. Also on the Board was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a key advocate of using Afghanistan to attack Russia. (2)

* According to the AP dispatch, in 1985 Congress passed a law creating a fund to influence public opinion to support the terrorist Mujahideen. Congress virtually ordered that Friends of Afghanistan be hired for this work. It authorized $500 000 to start (about $1 Million today) with another $500 000 expected.

This AP dispatch is evidence that a) though very young, Khalilzad was an associate if not a protege of Brzezinski and b) Khalilzad was already trusted by the powers-that-be to oversee the crucial work of organizing public support for the unsupportable US policy of fostering Islamic terrorism to destroy the Soviet Union. The "marching order" (AP's phrase) to hire Friends of Afghanistan certainly sounds like Friends was a top-level CIA front disguised as a private company, the better to deal with the press.

* The media has now rewritten history, propagating the view that US officials were simply unaware of the Islamic fanaticism of the pro-US side in Afghanistan. <b>Zalmay Khalilzad has voiced this "we didn't know" line himself.</b> (I have unfortunately misplaced the quote in which he claims "I never knew how bad they were" but hopefully I'll find it again.)

As the AP dispatch below demonstrates, during the 1980s war the Western media misdescribed Islamic fundamentalists as "rebels." Thus the AP says:

"Afghan rebels, called the Mujahadeen [sic!], have been battling 100,000 Soviet troops..."

<b>as if Mujahideen were a local name for these "rebels" rather than an Arabic word. 'Mu' means 'one who.' 'Jahid' equals 'Jihad' means 'struggle' or 'strive for' but in practice - and abundantly in the Muslim holy writings, alhadith, the narrations about the life of Muhammad - it means leaving home to fight for Islam. So a Mujahid is one fights for Islam. "Een" makes it plural. So Mujahideen are Islamic holy warriors. Muslim holy texts devote much attention to the special place in heaven reserved for slain Mujahideen.</b> (See for example http://www.2600.com/news/mirrors/har...ihad/grade.htm )
It is inconceivable that any reporter covering the Afghan travesty <b>was unaware that the US was promoting Islamic holy warriors. Prof. Khalilzad, who is from Afghanistan, of course knew exactly what sort of forces were being created by the CIA et al in his country.</b> The job of Friends of Afghanistan was precisely to play down the Islamic holy warrior reality, and play up the phony 'victimized rebels fighting Soviet tyranny' baloney.

In any case, unless Khalilzad's career did a nosedive after 1985-6, surely he is *not* a person one would define by his very brief stint as "an advisor to Unocal."

We'll look at Khalilzad more in a later article, but for now, here is the AP dispatch.

[Note added 1 March 2003: That article can now be read.] http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/khalilzad-facts.htm

-- Jared Israel.

Headline: U.S. Provides $500 000 So Afghan Rebels Can Tell Their Story

AP, September 16, 1985, Monday, PM cycle SECTION: Washington Dateline

By JOAN MOWER

WASHINGTON

Guerrillas in Afghanistan are about to get money from the United States government for a public relations campaign intended to bring their struggle against Soviet troops to the world's attention.

The money will train Afghan rebel journalists to use television, radio and newspapers to advance their cause. Reporters will be given mini-cameras to photograph the war inside Afghanistan.

"It is the goal of this project to facilitate the collection, development and distribution of credible, objective and timely professional-quality news stories, photographs and television images about developments in Afghanistan," said a notice in the Federal Register. The program will be overseen by Uncle Sam's own propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency. Congress appropriated $500 000 to hire experts and may provide more later.

In making the money available, Congress all but instructed USIA to consider an organization like Friends of Afghanistan, a new group whose board includes former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, known for hard-line anti-Soviet views.....

Quote:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
According to this 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA's intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan's destruction as a nation.

M.C.
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. <h3>But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.</h3> And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, <b>I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.</b> Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

<b>Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?</b>

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Quote:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...-dec/clem.html
Air University Review, November-December 1986
The Soviet Union:
Crisis, Stability, or Renewal?

Dr. Ralph S. Clem

<b>the Ethnic Factor</b>

......The maintenance of this "Soviet empire" is then said to be dependent on clever manipulation of the political system and the pervasiveness of the secret police. Such a situation, according to Richard Pipes, means that ". . . ethnic conflicts in the USSR assume the form of a battle of wits . . . [wherein the non-Russians] . . . try to outsmart Moscow."23 Beneath the surface, however, Pipes believes that "there smolders resentment and, in some areas, hatred that can quickly explode into genocidal fury should the heavy hand of Russian authority weaken."24.......

Quote:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990215/hiro/2
article | posted January 28, 1999 (February 15, 1999 issue)
The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'

Dilip Hiro

page 2 of 4 | PREV 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT

As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to Riyadh.

The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which contributed equally.

The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were imparted by the ISI. <h3>In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose of nationalism and Islam.</h3> The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.

Quote:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analy.../0402teamb.php
A History of Threat Escalation
Remembering Team B
By Tom Barry | February 12, 2004

The most notorious attempt by militarists and right-wing ideologues <b>to challenge the CIA was the Team B affair in the mid-1970s.</b> The 1975-76 “Team B” operation was a classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war. Concocted by right-wing ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury the politics of détente and the SALT arms negotiations, which were supported by the leadership of both political parties. 1

The historical record shows that the call for an independent assessment of the CIA's conclusions came from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB--pronounced piffy-ab ). But <b>the fear-mongering and challenges to the CIA's threat assessments--known as National Intelligence Estimates--actually started with nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who laid down the gauntlet in a 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” 2 Wohlstetter answered his rhetorical question negatively, concluding that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing the “missile gap.”</b> Having inspired the Gaither Commission in 1957 to raise the missile gap alarm, Wohlstetter applied the same threat assessment methodology to energize hawks, cold warriors, and right-wing anticommunists in the mid-1970s to kill the politics of détente and increase budget allocations for the Pentagon. Following his Foreign Policy essay, Wohlstetter, who had left his full-time position at RAND to become a professor at the University of Chicago, organized an informal study group that included younger neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and longtime hawks like Paul Nitze.

PFIAB, which was dominated by right-wingers and hawks, followed Wohlstetter's lead and joined the threat assessment battle by calling in 1975 for an independent committee to evaluate the CIA's intelligence estimates. Testimony by PFIAB President Leo Cherne to the House Intelligence Committee in December 1975 alerted committee members to the need for better intelligence about the Soviet Union. “Intelligence cannot help a nation find its soul,” said Cherne. “It is indispensable, however, to help preserve the nation's safety, while it continues its search,” he added. George Bush Sr., who was about to leave his ambassadorship in China to become director of intelligence at the CIA, congratulated Cherne on his testimony, indicating that he would not oppose an independent evaluation of CIA intelligence estimates.

Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Support Team B

Joining in the chorus of praise, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Bechtel's president George Shultz also congratulated Cherne, implicitly adding their backing for an independent threat assessment committee. 3 Led by several of the board's more hawkish members--including John Foster, Edward Teller, William Casey, Seymour Weiss, W. Glenn Campbell, and Clare Booth Luce--PFIAB had earlier in 1975 called for an independent evaluation of the CIA's national intelligence estimates. Feeling that the country's nuclear weapons industry and capacity was threatened, PFIAB was aiming to derail the arms control treaties then under negotiation.

Shortly after President Gerald Ford appointed Bush to be the new director of intelligence, replacing the beleaguered William Colby, Bush authorized PFIAB's plan for an alternative review. The review consisted of three panels: one to assess the threat posed by Soviet missile accuracy; another to determine the effect of Soviet air defenses on U.S. strategic bombers; and a third--the Strategic Objectives Panel--to determine the Soviet Union's intentions. The work of this last panel, which became known as the Team B Report, was the most controversial. As Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Team B exercise, wrote: “Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by ‘independent' analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel's members. Rather than including a diversity of views ... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.” 4

<b>Team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and William Van Cleave, both of whom would become members of the second Committee on the Present Danger, as well as Gen. Daniel Graham, whose "High Frontier" missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars."</b> The team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Seymour Weiss--all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter. 5 Although Richard Perle played no direct role in Team B, he was instrumental in setting it up. It was Perle who had introduced Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught Czarist Russian history at Harvard, to Sen. Henry Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes, who served as Team B's chairman, later said he chose Wolfowitz as his principal Team B adviser "because Richard Perle recommended him so highly." 6

Committee on the Present Danger Follows Team B

The Team B Report, released as an “October surprise” in an attempt to derail Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential bid, argued that “Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded.” The team had arrived at this conclusion of Soviet intent from an assessment of the USSR 's capabilities, but they ignored evidence pointing to an opposite conclusion.....

......But as Anne Hessing Cahn establishes in her history of the Team B affair, some of the CIA estimates critiqued by Team B were themselves exaggerations, particularly the estimates of Soviet military spending. “With the advantage of hindsight,” she explains, “we now know that Soviet military spending increases began to slow down precisely as Team B was writing about an ‘intense military buildup in nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by the West's self-imposed restraints or by the [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)]'.” “But even at the time of the affair,” continues Cahn, “Team B had at its disposal sufficient information to know that the Soviet Union was in severe decline. As Soviet defectors were telling us in anguished terms that the system was collapsing, Team B looked at the quantity but not the quality of missiles, tanks, and planes, at the quantity of Soviet men under arms, but not their morale, leadership, alcoholism, or training.” 8

The Team B report paved the way for the second Committee on the Present Danger, which formed weeks after Team B had released its findings. The committee's first major policy statement, titled What Is the Soviet Union Up To? was written by Team B leader Richard Pipes, who along with other participants in the Team B exercise--including Foy Kohler, Paul Nitze, and William Van Cleave--were founding members of the Committee on the Present Danger.

Team B as Model for Post-Cold War Intelligence

Right-wing ideologues and militarists frequently cite the example of Team B as a successful model for challenging moderate threat assessments by the foreign policy establishment, particularly the CIA and the State Department. In prevailing over the CIA, Team B demonstrated that “strategic intelligence” based on a policy-driven analysis of an adversary's perceived intentions could triumph over fact-based intelligence. Through adroit organizing by hawks inside and outside of government, the Team B effort helped re-launch the cold war.

The end of the cold war did not bring to a close the long-running dispute between the national security alarmists on the right and the more conservative analysis of security threats by the CIA, the State Department, and the military itself. <b>In the case of Iraq , the ideologues and militarists, following the Team B model, insisted on the primacy of strategic intelligence. Once again the U.S. government allowed a militarist policy by ideology and fear-mongering to trump facts and reason..</b>

Quote:

HAWK' OR REALIST?; REAGAN ADVISER PIPES INSISTS HE'S THE LATTER; [FIRST Edition]
Nina McCain Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Jan 25, 1981. pg. 1

Richard Pipes arrived in America on his l7th birthday, July ll, l940. He and his father and mother had fled from the Nazi invasion of Poland.

One of his most vivid memories of his new country was seeing an advertisement with a quotation from Benjamin Franklin.

"It said something like, Unforeseen events need not change the course of men's lives.' I laughed. I had witnessed the outbreak of war in Poland, seen my house destroyed, been forced to leave home and migrate thousands of miles."

The chasm between American optimism and the Eastern European experience of the ravages of war has shaped Richard Pipes' view of the world and, for the next few years, Pipes will have a hand in shaping America's foreign policy. The Harvard professor will be the specialist on the Soviet Union for the Reagan Administration's National Security Council.

<h3>He is one of the leading figures in a group of intellectuals who are lumped together under the label "neoconservative,"</h3> many of whose members write for the combative Commentary magazine. Pipes shares with them a conviction that America has grown soft and sleepy about national defense and a determination to lead a reawakening.

Pipes says he and and like-minded members of the Committee on the Present Danger are "the same kind of people who, in l936 or l937, would have backed Churchill in England. (People who said* Germany is arming, preparing for war, and we are doing nothing."

Substitute the words "Soviet Union" for "Germany" and you have a rough notion of Pipes' approach to US-Soviet relations.

Pipes is the latest in a series of Soviet experts to serve in the highest councils in Washington. Like those who have preceded him, from Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen and George Kennan to Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Marshall Shulman, Pipes brings his own interpretation of US-Soviet relations to the job.

Although he shares a common Eastern European background with Kissinger andBrzezinski, Pipes is sharply critical of what he regards as their "ego trips," and of the doctrine of detente which Kissinger first espoused and more recently downplayed.

The problem with detente - the pursuit of arms limitation, trade agreements and a stabilized US-Soviet relationship - Pipes argues, is that the Russians aren't playing by the same rules. While American strategists talk about nuclear parity and deterrence, the Soviets are aiming for superiority and, ultimately, victory.

Often described as a "hardliner" or "hawk," Pipes prefers to think ofhimself as a realist.

"If you want to prevent nuclear war, or to contain the damage, you have to look at it realistically," Pipes said in an interview last week. "That does not mean I am in favor of nuclear war. You would have to be insane (to favor such a war) . . . I am a very pacific person. I don't even own a gun."

Pipes is particularly critical of the notion, which he says has been sold to Americans by a succession of political leaders of both parties, that nuclear war is "unthinkable" and "unimaginable."

"The idea that the explosion of one nuclear bomb means the end of mankind leads to paralysis," he says. "You have to look at it very coldly . . . If a physician is confronted with a terrible disease, he is not likely to cure it by tearing his hair out. You want a physician who is cool."

A tall, slender man whose dark hair is in retreat from a high forehead, Pipes personifies cool. Juggling an interview and a steady stream of phone calls from well-wishers, he managed to be gracious, pleased and unflustered.

Pipes is an expert on 19th century Russian who has spent 34 of his 57 years at Harvard, first as a graduate student and then as a professor. As he tells it, if the Harvard history department had been more flexible, he might not be on his way to Washington now.

After a couple of years at a small college in Ohio and three years in the Air Force, Pipes came to Harvard interested in the history of art and philosophy, which he wanted to combine somehow with the Russian studies he had begun at Cornell under Air Force auspices.....

.....He first caught the eye of Washington insiders in 1970 when he delivered a paper on US-Soviet relations to the American Historical Association. An aide to Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) liked the paper and Pipes became a consultant to Jackson's Permanent Committee on Investigations.

But it was not until l976 that he gained national attention when he headed the "B-team," a group of non-governmental experts brought in by President Ford's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to assess US estimates of Soviet strength. The experts looked at the same data used by the "A team," the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and came to startlingly different conclusions.

The team's highly critical report charged that the CIA had consistently underestimated the nature and extent of the Soviet threat. It warned that the Soviets would soon be militarily superior to the US and could use that superiority to force US withdrawal from crucial areas like the Mideast.

Coming in the midst of the Nixon-Ford era of relatively good relations with the Soviet Union, the report struck at the very foundations of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) and created turmoil within the intelligence community.

Out of the "B team"came the Committee on the Present Danger (there was some membership overlap), and a widely-discussed article in Commentary in which Pipes set out his views on Soviet strategy.

In that article, entitled "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," he argued that Americans have been deluded into believing that the Soviets accept detente and have renounced nuclear war.

"The strategic doctrine adopted by the USSR over the past two decades," he wrote, "calls for a policy diametrically opposite to that adopted in the United States by the predominant community of civilian strategists: not deterrence but victory, not sufficiency in weapons but superiority, not retaliation but offensive action."

The Soviets, he wrote, used to sustaining enormous casualties in war (20 million in World War II) and with a much more widely dispersed population, do not share the American conviction that nuclear war is suicidal. Soviet leaders, Pipes claimed, regard nuclear war as not only thinkable but winnable.

"In the United States, the consensus of the educated and affluent holds all recourse to force to be the result of an an inability or an unwillingness to apply rational analysis and patient negotiation to disagreements: the use of force is prima facie evidence of failure."

In contrast, he wrote, "The Soviet ruling elite regards conflict and violence as natural regulators of all human affairs."

Pipes says he prefers the American view but thinks it "not always realistic."

He regards himself as a "very standard, traditional liberal" and a Democract who has been forced out of the party because it has shifted so far to the left....

.."In the first place, Harvard is nowhere near as liberal as people think," he says. "And, secondly, I have good friends who say, Your political views are crazy but you're a nice fellow.' "

In fact, a number of Pipes' colleagues and other Russian specialists regard his political views as not only crazy but dangerous.

"If he really believes all that stuff he writes," says one Soviet expert and government consultant who asked not to be named, "and if he's going to be pouring it into the ear of Ronald Reagan, who is not terribly well informed, it is going to make it even more difficult for this powerful nation to behave with restraint."....

Quote:

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/010540.html
Militant about "Islamism"
Daniel Pipes wages "hand-to-hand combat" with a "totalitarian ideology."

by Janet Tassel

"It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution."

~Daniel Pipes

Richard Pipes, Baird research professor of history, recounts in his recent book, Vixi, that when Daniel, his first child, was born in 1949, he felt as if he himself were being reborn. To mark the event he even quit smoking.

And, in a sense, with the birth of Daniel, Richard Pipes was indeed reborn, perhaps even cloned. Daniel '71, Ph.D. '78 (early Islamic history), is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block. Both are essentially loners, non-belongers (the subtitle of Vixi is Memoirs of a Non-Belonger), and fighters. Pipes the elder, the fiercely anti-communist cold-warrior, head of President Ford's Team B (formed to evaluate the CIA's estimates of Soviet nuclear intentions) and Soviet policy adviser to President Reagan, was cursed as a "wretched anti-Sovietist" by Pravda—and pretty well marginalized at Harvard for his politics.

In some ways Daniel, a specialist on Islam as an influence in history, is even more an outsider than his father. Founder and director of his own think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), his current role in academe is gadfly. Though he taught world history from 1978 to 1982 at the University of Chicago, history at Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy strategy at the Naval War College from 1984 to 1986, he has parted ways with the academy—to the satisfaction of both, it seems. "I have the simple politics of a truck driver," he told an interviewer, "not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning." More congenial was his stint on the policy-planning staff at the State Department in 1983 and his seven years as director of a Philadelphia think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before starting Middle East Forum in 1994.

At Middle East Forum, he is publisher of Middle East Quarterly, which he says, "seeks out voices excluded from the scholarly debate, voices more aligned with the pro-American views of mainstream Americans." And he has initiated Campus Watch, a website and speakers' bureau that monitors Middle Eastern studies at North American universities—"a kind of Consumer Reports," he says, "for students, parents, alumni, and legislators" to air perceived biases and inaccuracies. This is yet another irritant to critics like Rashid Khalidi, Said professor of Arab studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, who calls the Campus Watchers "intellectual thugs"; Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, deems the project "cyberstalking." "Crude McCarthyism" and "totalitarianism" are among the less vitriolic terms used by other scholars to describe Campus Watch. In addition, Pipes is now in his final year as a director of the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace....

....The Washington Post editorialized that the nomination was a "cruel joke," pointing out that the institute was supposed to be working on a special initiative to create a bridge between cultures, but "Mr. Pipes has long been regarded by Muslims as a destroyer of such bridges." The Arab American Institute, an activist policy organization headed by James Zogby, released a statement saying, in part, <h3>"For decades Daniel Pipes has displayed a bizarre obsession with all things Arab and Muslim.

Now, it appears that his years of hatred and bigotry have paid off with a presidential appointment. One shudders to think how he will abuse this position to tear at the fabric of our nation."</h3>....

Quote:

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1040
Why the Left Loves Osama [and Saddam]

by Daniel Pipes
New York Post
March 19, 2003

* German version of this item

Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far Left to the fatalities of 9/11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein?

Right after the 9/11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos." Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized it by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." Norman Mailer called the suicide hijackers "brilliant."

More recently, it appears that none of the millions of antiwar demonstrators have a bad word to say about Saddam Hussein nor an iota of sympathy for those oppressed, tortured and murdered by his regime. Instead, they vent fury against the American president and British prime minister.

Why is the Left nonchalant about the outrages committed by al Qaeda and Baghdad?

Lee Harris, an Atlanta writer, offers an explanation in a recent issue of the Hoover Institution's journal, Policy Review. He does so by stepping way back and recalling Karl Marx's central thesis about the demise of capitalism resulting from an inevitable sequence of events:

* Business profits decline in the industrial countries
* Bosses squeeze their workers;
* Workers become impoverished;
* Workers rebel against their bosses, and
* Workers establish a socialist order.

Everything here hangs on workers growing poorer over time - which, of course, did not happen. In fact, Western workers became richer (and increasingly un-revolutionary). By the roaring 1950s, most of the Left realized that Marx got it wrong.

But rather than give up on cherished expectations of socialist revolution, Harris notes, Marxists tweaked their theory. Abandoning the workers of advanced industrial countries, they looked instead to the entire populations of poor countries to carry out the revolution. Class analysis went out the window, replaced by geography.

This new approach, known as "dependencia theory," holds that the First World (and the United States above all) profits by forcefully exploiting the Third Word. The Left theorizes that the United States oppresses poor countries; thus Noam Chomsky's formulation that America is a "leading terrorist state."

For vindication of this claim, Marxists impatiently await the Third World's rising up against the West. Sadly for them, the only true revolution since the 1950s was Iran's in 1978-79. It ended with militant Islam in power and the Left in hiding.

Then came 9/11, which Marxists interpreted as the Third World (finally!) striking back at its American oppressor. In the Left's imagination, Harris explains, this attack was nothing less than "world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era."

Only a pedant would point out that the suicide hijackers hardly represented the wretched of the earth; and that their objectives had nothing at all to do with socialism and everything to do with - no, not again! - militant Islam.

So desperate is the Left for some sign of true socialism, it overlooks such pesky details. Instead, it warily admires al Qaeda, the Taliban and militant Islam in general for doing battle with the United States. The Left tries to overlook militant Islam's slightly un-socialist practices - such as its imposing religious law, excluding women from the workplace, banning the payment of interest, encouraging private property and persecuting atheists.

This admiring spirit explains the Left's nonchalant response to 9/11. Sure, it rued the loss of life, but not too much. Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, explains: "The great [Wall Street] speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"

The same goes for Saddam Hussein, whose gruesome qualities matter less to the Left than the fact of his confronting and defying the United States. In its view, anyone who does that can't be too bad - never mind that he brutalizes his subjects and invades his neighbors. The Left takes to the streets to assure his survival, indifferent both to the fate of Iraqis and even to their own safety, clutching instead at the hope that this monster will somehow bring socialism closer.

In sum: 9/11 and the prospect of war against Saddam Hussein have exposed the Left's political self-delusion, intellectual bankruptcy and moral turpitude.

Quote:

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/273
Daniel Pipes' Weblog
The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures

June 17, 2004

Take a look at the picture at left of Joelle Aubron, a French woman just released from prison for health reasons (a brain tumour) after serving seventeen years for her murderous activities in Action Directe, the extremist left-wing group.

Note anything odd about her headgear? It's a Palestinian-style keffiye. It may not be exactly what you'd expect a French woman to wear (in the Middle East, by the way, it's a purely male article of clothing), but her wearing it serves as a perfect symbol of the blossoming red-green alliance. Leftists and Islamists are both totalitarians and both hate Western civilization – so what does it matter that they differ on some niggling details, for example about women? For more on this alliance and its implications, a key topic, see my "The Left ♥ CAIR, MPAC, et al." and watch for David Horowitz' forthcoming Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, published by Regnery. (June 17, 2004)

Quote:

http://www.blogger.com/r?http%3A%2F%...s%2F000793.php
August 31, 2004
Daniel Pipes on Tariq Ramadan: Why French literacy still matters
by Scott Martens

Readers of my <a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000782.php">previous comment</a> on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship, whose career has been built on politically driven attacks, and who has set up with his “Campus Watch” as a terrorist front designed to intimidate academics and ensure that there is as little debate, discussion or rational thought on Israel, US foreign policy or Islam as possible. His reseach and scholarship are not intended to better inform action but to support specific agendas, usually revolving around hating some foreign force or people. Instead of fostering debate, his work is intended to intimidate. Pipes advocates religiously targetted surveillance, he supports making federal university funding conditional on ideology, and he has helped to terrorise professors who are named on his website. In short, I think Pipes is swine.

He is a second generation right-wing tool, the son of one of the men most responsible for America’s “Team B”, which grossly overblew the Soviet menace in the 70s and 80s - causing massive US defense spending and resulting deficits - and complained that anyone with a better sense of reality was soft on communism. Normally, Pipes’ parentage would constitute poor grounds for condeming him as having a pathological relationship to facts. But keep this in mind, since it constitutes one of his arguments against Ramadan.

All you need is Google to find out why I think these things about Daniel Pipes. It’s not a lot of work. His <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/">own website</a> provides ample examples.

But, today, I will be targeting something a little more specific. Pipes has <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2043">put up on his website</a> his comment on Tariq Ramadan’s visa denial, originally published in the New York Post on Friday. In it, he makes specific points against Tariq Ramadan, linking, in some cases, to articles on the web in support. These articles are primarily in French. As a service to our non-francophone readers, we will be translating the relevant sections, since they lead one to the conclusion that Pipes assumes his readers will just take his word on their contents.

We report, you decide.

First, Pipes’ claims:......

Quote:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...le.asp?ID=9048
Dr. Daniel Pipes and CAIR's Lynch Mob
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2003

As a Senate committee prepares to meet today to discuss the nomination of Dr. Pipes to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies are working to turn the hearings into a lynching party of Borkian proportions.....

Quote:

http://baltimorechronicle.com/jul03_pipes-stalled.shtml
SENATORS GET IT RIGHT!
Daniel Pipes nomination stalled in committee
Special to the Chronicle

(WASHINGTON D.C., July 23, 2003) -- Members of the Senate committee charged with recommending Daniel Pipes to serve on the board of the US Institute for Peace (USIP) asked Chairman Judd Gregg (R-NH) for more time to gather more information on the "controversial nominee."

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), in calling for more time, cited one of Pipes' statements--"Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most." (National Review, 11/19/90), Senator Kennedy ended by urging his colleagues to oppose Pipes' nomination.....

.....Senator John Ensign (R-NV) appeared to support Pipes' positions on American Muslims, citing Ronald Reagan's saying "peace through strength."

Following the hearing, Arab, Muslim and Interfaith Groups convened a press conference in the hallway. The moderator, Sarah Eltantawi, Communications Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said "The American Muslim and Arab communities will remember who voted which way on Pipes for a long time to come. We are very pleased with the outcome of today's hearing, but the fight is not over."

Quote:

http://www.muslimsforbush.com/mission/mission10.html
DANIEL PIPES

UPDATE:

We here at Muslims For Bush would like to report that Daniel Pipes, himself, has gotten in touch with us, regarding the point we had originally written about below. In his email to us, which was very polite, Daniel Pipes did write that he had, in fact, been saying that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" well before his appointment to the United Sates Institute for Peace (USIP). We are very happy that Daniel Pipes has taken the time out to write to us and we feel that it is a very good demonstration of his efforts to build bridges of unity with Muslims in America and around the world. Daniel Pipes also left us with this link, showing his earlier statements - http://www.danielpipes.org/article/421 ...

.....While we strongly oppose the appointment of Daniel Pipes to the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), it should be noted that the behavior of Pipes changed drastically, shortly after being placed upon the board. Almost overnight, Daniel Pipes went from someone who highly alienated many Muslims with his strong criticisms, to a man whom self coined his signature phrase as, “militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.”xxv Despite our opposition to Pipes’ nomination, we are happy to see that President Bush has prevailed upon Pipes, regarding the importance of becoming tolerant and inclusive of all religious faiths, within our great country and around the world!

It should also be noted that, despite being close friends with Senator Kennedy, Senator Kerry did not join Kennedy in publicly condemning the nomination of Daniel Pipes, despite Kennedy’s calls for condemnation against Pipes.xxv

NCB · 10-20-2006, 04:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

I was building off your thought process, which I believe is fundamentally flawed, and shooting back at you....and then you took it apart. It's a common liberal tactic, you see. We repeat back to you what you say, then you call it absurd.

touche

Ustwo · 10-24-2006, 12:25 PM

Quote:

Indonesian officials say they will release at least two Islamic militants in jail for involvement in the 2002 terrorist bombings on the resort island of Bali, to mark the end of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan.

As Indonesians prepare to celebrate the holiday, Eid al-Fitr, prison officials say they will release at least two Muslim militants on Tuesday, the day most people will celebrate the end of the holy month.

Jakarta traditionally reduces prison sentences on holidays for prisoners who show good conduct.

Another strong statement against terrorism from a 'moderate' Islamic state.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-10-23-voa23.cfm

dc_dux · 10-24-2006, 12:52 PM

I heard it on the news earlier.

The two prisoners were released a month early from the 5 year sentence they received for hiding one of the Bali bombers after the attack. The three bombers are in death row.

I can understand the anger of relatives of those killed in the Bali attack, but I am more impressed that the Indonesian government has stepped up there anti-terrorism effort, having "arrested and jailed more than 300 Muslim militants" since the attack.

Ustwo · 10-24-2006, 01:11 PM

Quote:

SANTA ANA, CA — Five Islamic militants were arrested May 5 for the beheading of three Indonesian schoolgirls in Poso, on the island of Sulawesi, in October 2005, according to Compass Direct. Two additional suspects have not yet been publicly identified, reported Compass.

Two of the arrested men were involved in the murders,” national police spokesman Brig. Gen. Anton Bachrul Alam told reporters. “Another was detained for carrying ammunition, while the other two were arrested as accessories to the crimes.”

The five suspects, arrested in Tolitoli regency, Central Sulawesi, were identified by The Jakarta Post as Apriyantono, alias Irwan; Arman, alias Haris; Asrudin, Nano and Abdul Muis. According to Compass, some Indonesians use only a single name.

According to officials, the men are suspected of attacking Theresia Morangke, 15; Alfita Poliwo, 17; Yarni Sambue, 15; and Noviana Malewa, 15 early in the morning as they walked to a Christian school in Poso district. The first three girls were beheaded; Malewa received serious injuries to her face and neck but survived the attack.

Yes, people like the above.

dc_dux · 10-24-2006, 01:20 PM

Here is a Wash Post article:

Quote:

Two Islamic militants jailed for the Bali bombings that killed 202 people were freed Tuesday, and nine others had their sentences reduced to mark the end of the Islamic fasting month.

Indonesia traditionally cuts prison terms for some inmates on national holidays, and the justice ministry said more than 43,000 convicts benefited this time.

But the decision to include convicted terrorists was likely to anger countries that lost citizens in the Oct. 12, 2002, suicide attacks on two crowded nightclubs.

"After what I've survived, to see these people get rewarded ... it's something we Westerners just don't understand," said Australian Peter Hughes, who suffered burns to 54 percent of his body.

"I hate to think what the families of the victims who died are going through."

Mujarod bin Salim and Sirojul Munir, who were convicted of hiding two of the bomb plotters, had up to 45 days shaved from their five-year sentences.

Bin Salim walked free from the main prison on Bali island on Tuesday afternoon, said Ilham Jaya, the prison warden, and Munir left the jail in East Kalimantan's capital of Balikpapan several hours earlier

"I'm happy that I'll be able to spend time with my family again," said Munir, adding he had nothing to do with the attacks.

Nine other militants convicted of relatively minor roles in the bombings also had 45 days cut from their sentences.

Indonesia has arrested hundreds of al-Qaida-linked militants in recent years and jailed 33 people in the 2002 bombings, the first in a series of attacks in Indonesia blamed on the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network.

The government says three militants on death row for the Bali attacks and three others sentenced to life are not eligible for the prison term reductions.

Munir admitted to letting Mubarok, an old classmate who is now serving life, stay in his home for several days in November 2002. He said he had no idea his friend was fleeing justice.

"As soon as I learned through the newspapers that he was involved in the Bali bombings, I asked him to leave and gave him a little money for transportation," Munir told The Associated Press by telephone.

"My mistake was not telling police he had been at my house."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102400206.html

I dont deny that there are still serious problems in Indonesia with muslim extremists, but it seems you want to focus more on those problems that the serious efforts made by the Indonesian government to crackdown on Jemaah Islamiyah -- the more than 200 suspected JI-linked militants captured or killed and the country's 2003 anti-terrorism legislation that allows for detention without trial.

Progress is being made in Indonesia, particularly under the new government, but obviously not as quicky as anyone would hope and continued criticism likes yours is appropriate as long as you dont generalize about the vast majority of over 1 billion muslims there that are not perpetrating or supporting violence or terrorism.

Ustwo · 10-24-2006, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

I dont deny that there are still serious problems in Indonesia with muslim extremists, but it seems you want to focus more on those problems that the serious efforts made by the Indonesian government to crackdown on Jemaah Islamiyah -- the more than 200 suspected JI-linked militants captured or killed and the country's 2003 anti-terrorism legislation that allows for detention without trial.

Progress is being made in Indonesia, particularly under the new government, but obviously not as quicky as anyone would hope and continued criticism likes yours is appropriate as long as you dont generalize about the vast majority of over 1 billion muslims there that are not perpetrating or supporting violence or terrorism.

Yea I guess girls getting their heads cut off are kinda a put off, but I'm sure they are working on the issue.

Though I did find this sort of ironic...
and the country's 2003 anti-terrorism legislation that allows for detention without trial

dc_dux · 10-24-2006, 07:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Yea I guess girls getting their heads cut off are kinda a put off, but I'm sure they are working on the issue.

Though I did find this sort of ironic...
and the country's 2003 anti-terrorism legislation that allows for detention without trial

Yep...it is truly a shame that Indonesia cant solve their problems overnight, but I believe iin acknowledging the progress they are making, not mocking it.

I thought the "detention without trial" was ironic as well, but then again, Indonesia doesnt have 200+ years experience with Constitutional law.

Ustwo · 10-24-2006, 09:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

Yep...it is truly a shame that Indonesia cant solve their problems overnight, but I believe iin acknowledging the progress they are making, not mocking it.

I thought the "detention without trial" was ironic as well, but then again, Indonesia doesnt have 200+ years experience with Constitutional law.

Ah I see, if they had 200 years of constitutional law such a measure wouldn't be needed to fight this terrorism. It gives some sort of magic shield vrs terrorists eh?

I hear if you drape yourself in the constitution you become bullet proof and terrorists see the error of their ways.

host · 10-24-2006, 10:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Another strong statement against terrorism from a 'moderate' Islamic state.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-10-23-voa23.cfm

You seem to have it "all figured out", Ustwo.... you perceive "clarity" coming from our government officials which apparently permits you to "discern" that the US government and it's leaders' efforts and pronouncements concerning the GWOT, are "Good"....are accurate....are reliable...you trust them to tell you who the "good guys" are, and who the "bad guys" are....and who the "good countries" are....and who the "not so good" countries are....the ones who are not totally "on board" the prosecution of the US defined GWOT and of the US defined "bad people".....

In an update to the following thread:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...38#post2142738

I provide information for "the rest of us", folks who see only politcally motivated propaganda intended mostly to terrorize and control the American electorate, and misleading....... and at times, contradictory bullshit from our government and our leaders....which they attempt to pass off on us "truth", as justification for what they do and say. If I were an Indonesian leader, I would not only be reluctant to cooperate in the GWOT with the US, I would distance my country from the US "effort".

I'm an American....because of what our leaders seem to want me to "know", I know less, each time they "release" new info on the "progress" in the GWOT, than I knew before:

10-18-2006, 07:15 AM	#81 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	I think the first thing removed in a liberal is his sense of humor. If you were really interested in, contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way, you would have pmed me your message but instead you posted it here for all to read. P.S. Read the Koran, you will find it very interesting I'm sure and its a pretty easy read. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

10-18-2006, 08:21 AM	#84 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i'll answer the questions posed earlier in this thread, but not in this context. you want an actual discussion, mojo, please start another thread. this one is done. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-18-2006, 01:28 PM	#92 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	Ok Host, so Karzi is a proven ally with strong tribal roots in Afghanistan and a deep understanding of the culture. So obviously using him to aid our interests proves that Islamiscism is simply made up in order for Bush to declare war. Sorry, if we weren't using Karzi's expertise in the region I would be pissed. __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

10-18-2006, 01:59 PM	#93 (permalink)
ubertuber spudly Location: Ellay	Ustwo quite sniping this thread. If you want to be here, at least attempt to contribute some substance. __________________ Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

10-18-2006, 03:37 PM	#96 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	I dont see anywhere where they said Islam causes terrorism. They said that Islam and it's history more than lends itself to this mentality. That the warlike and aggressive nature of Muhammad and his companions early on in the religion's history reverberate itself today and fuels the fires of terrorism. They posted statistics which help their argument that many Muslims, even Westernized Muslims, openly support terrorism and state that it is allowed by Islam. Never did they state that Islam leads to terrorism, that the Arabs/Turks/Egyptians/(Fill in race here) are savages or are born terrorists. Never did they state that if you are Muslim you hate the West and want to kill innocents. __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

10-18-2006, 10:47 AM	#88 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	I'm sorry you find my experiences implausible, highthief. They are mine, and true, although I don't make any particular claims as to how far they can be generalized. My connections to Pakistan are largely friends and family, and as you can imagine, it would not be easy to support anti-American terror when you have loved ones living in the bullseye.

10-18-2006, 03:25 PM	#95 (permalink)
Ch'i Artist of Life	Ustwo, stevo, mojo, ect: You've made a claim that Islam causes violence, but have yet to prove it.

10-19-2006, 06:40 AM	#104 (permalink)
stevo Rail Baron Location: Tallyfla	I think all I've been saying (in this thread) is that the "small minority" of muslims that are extremist and supporters of terrorism isn't as small as the left lilkes to believe. Take the poll I posted about Indonesia and lets expand on it a bit. If 18,700,000 indonesian muslims support terrorist activities against the west in the name of islam, and only 1% actually do something about it, then thats 187,000 people willing to kill you because you live in the west. And thats just from one country. Although, I beleive that if you take 100 extremist, terrorist supporting muslims you'll find more than one willing to kill you. That 1% figure is very low. __________________ "If I am such a genius why am I drunk, lost in the desert, with a bullet in my ass?" -Otto Mannkusser Last edited by stevo; 10-19-2006 at 06:43 AM..

10-19-2006, 08:10 AM	#106 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	there are problems with the way in which this correlation is being discussed, however. seaver is correct in that correlation is not causation. but it does not follow that all correlations are equal. there are stronger and weaker. and there are false ones. the logic behind correlations here is basically a syllogism. you know, the "all cretans are liars" thing (a=b, b=c, so a=c) the issue with this is simple: if the variables you introduce into the game are screwy, the results of the operation will not tell you anything about that--all a syllogism does is enable you process whatever variable you introduce in a manner that is (presumably) formally correct. among the problems with the definition of variable are: 1. you cannot equate the range of small dissident muslim groups that are the center of this contruct "terrorist" these days with islam as a whole and not end up with worthless correlations. 2. you cannot operate with no strict definition of what "terrorism" is and not end up with worthless correlations. there are others that have to do with the effects of the category "terrorist" in stripping all considerations of politics away, all considerations of often very complex contexts, of simplifying situations not because they are amenable to it, but because you have introduced a fucked up category and find yourself performing the implications of that category as such (and not as a descriptor involving "the world") on the first, i would hope that the problem is self-evident. on the second, everything turns on the notion of "terrorism"--which is self-evidently an empty signifier that is given such content as it has as a function of ideological framing devices---if it means anything, it means "actions the present american administration does not like." and its specific signified is filled in by political argument. so say you were to ask people in--o i dont know--indonesia, say the question "do you approve of the actions of al qeada?" the responses would not translate into "do you approve of terrorism" in any rational way simply because the question is not being interpreted that way in the survey--in other words, al qeada's actions mightbe understood elsewhere as political--that is about particular issues directed against reasonable targets with particular ends in mind--none of which follows from the notion "terrorism" this kind of problem seems to me so entirely self-evident that i find it cotinually baffling to read posts from folk, particularly on the right here, that attempt to gloss over them--i assume that if you thought about what you were saying, you would in all likelihood not say it, simply given the severe problems of defining the basic terms--and a syllogism is really a kind of stupid machine in that (again) it does not enable any evaluation of WHAT is being processed, it simply IS a process. given that, i tend to assume that the persuasive power of this kind of argument has to come from somewhere else--it is not reasonable analytically, it is flawed logically, etc.---and i find few good places to go in order to explain why these arguments are held up as viable. so this explains to some extent my reactions to this kind of argument and to this kind of thread. good to see folk putting their cards on the table above, tho, and beginning to nuance what they have been posting on this. thought i would do the same. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 10-19-2006 at 08:15 AM..

10-19-2006, 12:20 PM	#108 (permalink)
stevo Rail Baron Location: Tallyfla	Whats with those articles host? You can't actually believe them. I mean, you said yourself that islamofascism doesn't exist, yet here you go posting these articles. What gives? __________________ "If I am such a genius why am I drunk, lost in the desert, with a bullet in my ass?" -Otto Mannkusser

10-19-2006, 12:35 PM	#109 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well stevo, the word "islamofascism" exists, obviously, because you like to use it and i dont think you just made it up. and since you use the word, i would assume that it has some organizing power for you, if not much in the way of explanatory power. but that does not mean that the phenomenon you organize by using this word actually exists in the world---only in the way you stage the world as you use the category to organize it. ideological categories are like that--this is how the operate, and this is what they are (they are how they operate) that help? of course, i am not speaking for host here---i dont think we are pursuing the same kind of argument in this context. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-24-2006, 12:52 PM	#114 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	I heard it on the news earlier. The two prisoners were released a month early from the 5 year sentence they received for hiding one of the Bali bombers after the attack. The three bombers are in death row. I can understand the anger of relatives of those killed in the Bali attack, but I am more impressed that the Indonesian government has stepped up there anti-terrorism effort, having "arrested and jailed more than 300 Muslim militants" since the attack. __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire