Category Archives: Terrorism

Triple Agent, Or Agent Of Allah?

Homeland Security, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Terrorism, The West

AGENT OF ALLAH. He was supposed to be a double agent. Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, was confident that they had “flipped” “suicide bomber Humam Muhammed al-Balawi, the Jordanian double agent who killed seven CIA operatives and his Jordanian handler” in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, on December 30, as reported by ABC.

But al-Balawi was just flipping the bird to Jordan and, more poignantly, to the US.

Al Balawi was born in Kuwait in 1977, raised in Jordan and attended medical school in Turkey. He had been arrested by Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, more than a year ago. Believing they had flipped al Balawi and made him a double agent, the Jordanians released him from prison and sent him to Afghanistan to penetrate al Qaeda by pretending to be an aspiring foreign jihadi.

The naive, American, CIA operatives salivated, setting up a meeting with “the supposed informant” at the “C.I.A.’s Forward Operating Base Chapman in the southeastern province of Khost” (NYT). Having strapped explosives to his body, Al Balawi blew himself up, taking with him one of the spy agency’s elite teams.

Al Balawi had “strong jihadi credentials” for a reason. He was a strong Jihadi.

This is what I’m getting at: The liberal aims to make humanity over in his image. As the creed of left-liberalism sees it, each and every individual has the potential to be a liberal. When operating from the foolish and infinitely arrogant premise that every Muslim is no more than a lesser Westerner struggling to unleash his inner liberal—you’re bound to play footsie with fanatics.

Muslims such as Al Balawi simply possess stronger core beliefs than the average CIA operative can fathom—even the “elites” among them.

Yemen Via Al Jazeera

Foreign Policy, Just War, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

A’s For Al Jazeera, becasue AJ is one of the best news channels. If I could get Al Jazeera, I’d spend much less time ferreting for facts absent from American “news” media.

Writes Marwan Bishara: “As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.

One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen’s proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.

But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK “counterterrorism” policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.

By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.

Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.

Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen’s interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country’s affairs.”

[SNIP]

I don’t know who Marwan Bishara is, but do Brush up on reality with his Al Jazeera analysis of the “Onward To Yemen” impetus, courtesy of the neoconservatives and their neoprogressive philosophical soulmates.

Distrust my recommendation? My fervently pro-Israel father is surely credible on this front. According to dad, the only fair shake Israel ever gets in the media broadcasting in the democratic South Africa is from … Al-Jazeera.

Updated: Jihadis Really Really Hate Us

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, Journalism, Terrorism

Says John Brennan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in an interivew with CNN’s Gloria Borger: “We have made quite a bit of progress this year in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaida organization. We’ve taken the battle to them. We have eliminated a number of their senior leaders and operatives. But that doesn’t mean that they still don’t have a capability of carrying out attacks. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to look for ways and vulnerabilities in our system to get their operatives either here to the United States or in other places to carry out these attacks.”

Replies MICHAEL SCHEUER, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999: “Mr. Brennan is blowing smoke. You have some dead bodies — I agree with that; it’s all to the good — but no impact on the overall organization. … I think it’s stronger than it was at 9/11, certainly because the support and opposition across the Muslim world to American foreign policy is far greater today than it was in 9/11.”

I’ve covered Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, favorably: “When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.”

Still, I’m not sure what he’s advising.

“Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral home,” Scheuer comments. “More Yemenis than any Arab nationality fought against the Soviets. There would have been more Yemenis in the 9/11 attacks, except they couldn’t get visas as easily as the Saudis.”

And he recommends that, “We stop depending on surrogates. We stop depending on Pakistan. We stop depending on Yemen and use our own strong right arm. There is no — there’s no clause in the Constitution that says President Obama can delegate the defense of America to a Yemeni dictator.”

I don’t know what that means. Do you? Gloria doesn’t inquire. Like most journalists today, she possesses very little intellectual curiosity.

Update (Jan. 4): Is there a reason to so carefully distinguish “Islam” from “Jihadist Islam”? The latter is a redundancy. Jihad is part of Islam.

Updated: The Barbarian West

Europe, Free Speech, Islam, Jihad, libertarianism, Terrorism, The West

What’s another bout with a 48-hour flu, my second this season, compared to the ordeal the heroic Kurt Westergaard—illustrator of the the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons, depicting the connection between Muhammad and the violence that disfigures the Muslim world—must live with day-in and day-out.

Satire is a highly civilized and refined way of exposing “folly, vice, or stupidity,” to follow the dictionary. For lampooning the connection between Muhammad, author of Islam, and the savagery and atavism that grip the Muslim world today, Westergaard’s life has been continually threatened.

“On Friday night, a 28-year-old Somali man, armed with an ax and a knife, tried to enter the home of Kurt Westergaard in Aarhus Denmark. Westergaard was at home with his visiting 5-year-old granddaughter when he heard the suspect trying to break in. ‘I locked myself in our safe room and alerted the police.'” (The Examiner.com.)

“Unable to smash the front door with his ax, the suspect was shot once in the knee and once in the hand by police. The wounds are not life-threatening.” [Why not?]

AND:

“Police were aware of the Somali suspect’s background from previous activities in east Africa and had a permit to live in Denmark.”

A pattern.

I’ve said it again and again: This is not a failure of Jihad; Jihad is doing just fine for itself, functioning as it ought to. Rather, attacks on the lives of the likes of the late Theo van Gogh, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Westergaard, and Wafa Sultan showcase the West at its miserable emasculated worst.

Contrary to some libertarian opinion, a free society is not one in which civilized courageous, peaceful human beings fear for their lives, but one in which such individuals thrive, as their assailants cower in dank corners, hunted and exterminated like vermin.

Updated (Jan. 4, 2010): A little timid for my taste, but well worth a read: “Heeere’s Muhammed!”