Iranian Terror Caucus: Kerry Akbar!

Feb 12, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

It is in the urgent interests of the people of the United States to restore our country's credibility in the eyes of the world. America needs the kind of leadership that will repair alliances with countries on every continent that have been so damaged in the past few years, as well as build new friendships and overcome tensions with others. We are convinced that John Kerry is the candidate best qualified to meet this challenge. Senator Kerry has the diplomatic skill and temperament as well as a lifetime of accomplishments in field of international affairs. He believes that collaboration with other countries is crucial to efforts to win the war on terror and make America safer.

[T]he Bush Administration stubbornly refuses to conduct a realistic, non-confrontational policy with Iran even where that may be possible.  As President, I will be prepared early-on to explore areas of mutual interest with Iran, just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam a decade ago.

Just as the U.S. State Department approves wider contact with Iran and as members of Congress begin planning the first official trips in 25 years, Tehran is sponsoring a 10-day conference of major terrorist organization beginning [this] week. The purpose of the conference is to discuss anti-U.S. strategy. Among the groups headed to Iran to participate are: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida allies Ansar Al Islam.

Khomeinism, a form of fascism, was, and remains, a consistent political doctrine. [...] [Today's ruling] Khomeinists sincerely believe that a woman is half as valuable as a man and that she should cover her hair because it emanates rays that drive men wild with lust. They genuinely believe that men who shave their beards will go to hell. They regard the West as a civilization in decline, and its values, including human rights and democracy, as decadent. Their strategic goal is to destroy Western-dominated civilization and replace it with a better, Islamic, one. They dream of wiping Israel off the map and, one day, hoisting their flag of faith atop the White House.

North Korea Has Gas Chambers

Feb 12, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp.
His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw.
"I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."

Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.

"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."

Why Should We Believe Them About the Patriot Act?

Feb 11, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

Obfuscating or outright lying about what the Patriot Act actually contains is no accident: It's part of the active, willing ignorance on the part of the opponents of the Bush administration to raise up a bogeyman figure. What's so silly about the council's contribution to this vacuous monologue is how seriously they take themselves while being decidedly unserious about honestly characterizing the Patriot Act.

Now the Al Gores Can Steal the Election

Feb 11, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

Electronic voting shows great promise.... But there are also grave concerns: Security breaches exposed as late as this weekend reveal that the results could be manipulated by hackers....Those blind spots have been exposed three times by independent researchers, first from Johns Hopkins University, then Rice University, and finally by a security firm hired by the state of Maryland to hack into the machines last weekend. In their report, the Maryland hackers picked the electronic locks on the voting machine cases "in under 10 seconds" and created fake access cards that gave them the ability to alter results and even end the election.

How “Mainstream” is Kerry?

Feb 11, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

"In the face of the Bush administration's failures, we know what kind of campaign the Bush attack machine will run," Kerry said. "They did it to my friend John McCain in South Carolina in 2000. They did it to my friend Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002. Well, it's not going to work in 2004, for a very simple reason: They're extreme. We're mainstream, and we're going to stand up and fight back."

According to the Globe, Kerry became involved in the anti-war movement upon his return, and asked for and received an early discharge from the Navy so he could continue those efforts. How could Kerry so easily abandon his comrades in Vietnam, and then, 30 years on, call on those same men and women to back his presidential ambition? Kerry now holds himself up as a war hero and asks for my vote. Yet, 30 years ago he stood with Jane Fonda and gave aid and comfort to an enemy still killing our brother veterans by the hundreds. Bush's honorable service in the National Guard bothers me less than Kerry's abandonment of his brothers, his switching sides and his active contribution to an enemy's efforts to kill Americans.

The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself. And few men can claim as large a role in the loss of national will that led to that defeat as John Kerry. A brave man in Vietnam, he returned home to appear before Congress and not merely denounce the war but damn his "band of brothers" as a gang of rapists, torturers and murderers led by officers happy to license them to commit war crimes with impunity. He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne.

Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest. The Kerrys ski at a spa the widow Heinz owns in Aspen, and they summer on Nantucket in a sprawling seaside "cottage" on Hurlbert Avenue [...] It's a wonderful life these days for John Kerry. He sails Nantucket Sound in "the Scaramouche," a 42-foot Hinckley powerboat. Martha Stewart has a similar boat; the no-frills model reportedly starts at $695,000. Sen. Kerry bought it new, for cash.

Antiglobalism and Antisemitism

Feb 10, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

An Israeli backpacker added: "I am a good Israeli. I accept the Palestinian right to violent resistance." He was crushed by the response of Faisal from Tullkarm: "I know better Israelis; they are dead."

Atkins Suffered Heart Attack According to Medical Examiner

Feb 10, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

...Dr. Robert Atkins, whose popular diet stresses protein-rich meat and cheese over carbohydrates, weighed 258 pounds at his death and had a history of heart disease, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

Atkins died last April at age 72 after being injured in a fall on an icy street. Before his death, he had suffered a heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a report by the city medical examiner.

...Last month, the diet guru's widow, Veronica Atkins, demanded an apology from Mayor Michael Bloomberg after Bloomberg called her late husband "fat." She told the Journal she was outraged that the report had been made public. "I have been assured by my husband's physicians that my husband's health problems late in life were completely unrelated to his diet or any diet," she said.

...Stuart Trager, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council in New York, told the Journal that Atkins' heart disease stemmed from cardiomyopathy, a condition that was thought to result from a viral infection.

Borakove said that, because of family objections to an autopsy, the medical examiner had conducted only "an external exam" and a review of Atkins' hospital records.

...One of the handwritten comments in the medical examiner's report referred to "MI" (myocardial infarction, the technical term for heart attack), the newspaper said. Trager said Atkins had no record of having had a heart attack, saying medical histories on examiner's reports are often written by less-experienced doctors who may not know a patient's detailed history.

...The mechanisms causing weight loss from the low-carbohydrate diets used in these studies should discourage doctors from recommending this approach to their patients. Followers of this diet complain of reduced appetite, nausea, and fatigue - all symptoms of illness. If followed strictly enough to enter ketosis - the goal of the Atkins diet - then there may be actual appetite suppression. Eating less, causes people to take in fewer calories and lose weight. Another result of eating less is they consume less saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and animal protein. Signs of improved health seem to appear because risk factors, like serum cholesterol, triglycerides, uric acid, and glucose, and blood pressure, decrease - and the patient is declared healthier. Not necessarily so. Similar benefits, for similar reasons, are seen when patients are placed on cancer chemotherapy - and doctors don't brag about these results.

If people want to know the truth about good nutrition, they simply need to look at the world picture. Populations following high-[unrefined] carbohydrate, low-fat, lower-protein diets, like those from traditional Asian and African countries are trim for a lifetime and avoid all the diseases common to people who follow the Western diet. The Atkins diet is simply an exaggeration of the unhealthy Western diet to a level that makes people sufficiently ill to lose their appetite.

Keeping Watch on Pakistan

Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

America has mounted a covert operation to safeguard Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and prevent warheads from falling under the control of rogue commanders or Islamist terrorists. Teams of American specialists, deployed in Pakistan's most sensitive military sites, have formulated launch codes to prevent the unauthorised use of nuclear missiles....America's involvement in compiling missile codes raises the possibility that it might be able to prevent Pakistan from launching its nuclear weapons.

Fame was no protection for one of Pakistan's most celebrated pop stars when he indulged in the "un-Islamic" practice of singing in public. Gulzar Alam was beaten with rifle butts and fists when 20 policemen armed with AK47s raided a wedding party where he was performing....

Mr Alam had fallen foul of the Islamist coalition running Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. For the first time, extreme religious parties have won outright control of the government of this crucial area near the border with Afghanistan. They have a simple manifesto: to reinvent the Taliban in a corner of Pakistan.

Since winning power less than 18 months ago the coalition has banned anyone from playing music or singing in public and confiscated thousands of music tapes from the bazaars. These were heaped on a huge bonfire in Peshawar and set alight by the local police chief....

When the provincial assembly meets next month the authorities will press ahead with the next stage of their campaign. They will introduce a law creating a new body modelled on the Taliban's "ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice."

This will have sweeping powers to intervene in any area of life and uphold "Islamic standards." The law will also create a parallel police and judicial system to implement a Sharia Law Act passed by the provincial assembly last year. [UK Telegraph]

What About the King David Hotel?

Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

Now, it's probably fair to characterize the attack on the King David Hotel as terrorism. But the question is at least somewhat murky. The Irgun, the group that carried out the bombing, selected the hotel as a military target, since it was the headquarters of the British military command. And, as the Jewish Virtual Library points out:

Irgun leader Menachem Begin stressed his desire to avoid civilian casualties and said three telephone calls were placed, one to the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post, warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would soon be detonated.

On July 22, 1946, the calls were made. The call into the hotel was apparently received and ignored. Begin quotes one British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying: "We don't take orders from the Jews." As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: a total of 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews. Few people in the hotel proper were injured by the blast.

In contrast to Arab attacks against Jews, which were widely hailed as heroic actions, the Jewish National Council denounced the bombing of the King David.

If the attack on the King David was terrorism, surely Palestinian Arab massacres of bus passengers or disco revelers--whose purpose is to murder civlians--qualify for the term.

“Intelligence Failure” Is a Non-Issue

Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

This, after all, was a regime that just before the first Gulf War sent its entire air force for safekeeping in Iran. If the intelligence services were wrong, every Western service and regime, from France to America, from Clinton to Chirac, failed. It is conceivable that Saddam Hussein found it important to pretend that he had nuclear weapons. He might have been like any moronic hooligan or bank robber who, faced with the police, pretends they have a weapon and often die as they reach for their toy pistol--or sunglasses.

Iraq was a regime that had a nuclear reactor (before Israel bombed it), attempted to acquire technological information abroad, refused to follow 16 U.N. resolutions, and periodically kicked out U.N.
inspectors. If its WMD program was only disinformation, it was believed because Iraq did its level best to make it credible.

Mr. Bush's policy was that his was a pre-emptive doctrine. His action was based on the notion that once you find WMD it's too late. If deployment is to be the proof of their existence, the price tag becomes too high.

[If Saddam Hussein] really didn't have any stores of unlawful weapons of mass destruction, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change....

It has since been established, by the Kay report, that there was a Baath plan to purchase weapons from North Korea, that materials had been hidden in the homes of scientists, and that there was a concealment program run by Qusay Hussein in person. This may look less menacing now that it has been exposed to the daylight, but there was no reason not to take it extremely seriously when it was presented as latent.

The Disaster of Bilingual Education

Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

The number of students in city bilingual education programs who passed English proficiency exams plummeted to less than 4% last year--an 82% drop from the year before. [NY Sun]

With “Allies” Like That…

Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Thursday for giving technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, heading off a showdown with hardliners....Musharraf also lashed out at fellow Muslim nations Iran and Libya for cooperating with international inspectors and turning over documents on their nuclear programs. "Muslim brothers did not ask us before giving our names," he said....He said Pakistan would not submit to any U.N. supervision of its weapons program, and that no documents would be handed over to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also ruled out an independent investigation of the military's role in proliferation. [USA Today]

“I Had a Good Time at Guantanamo, Says Inmate.”

Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

"I Had a Good Time at Guantanamo, Says Inmate."

So reads the jaw-dropping headline in today's Sunday Telegraph (London). It tells the story of Mohammed Ismail Agha, 15, an Afghan boy who spent 14 months in detention as a terrorist suspect at the Guantánamo Bay base. In the first interview with one of the three juveniles held there, Mohammed spoke to a reporter in southern Afghanistan, close to his home village:

They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons. … At first I was unhappy … For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer.

The American soldiers taught him and the two other underage captives to write and speak a little English and supplied them with books in their native Pashto language. As the three boys departed the base, U.S. soldiers gave them a send-off dinner. "They even took photographs of us all together before we left," Agha said.

As the Sunday Telegraph notes, these words of praise echo those of Faiz Mohammed, an elderly Afghan farmer released in October 2002 after spending eight months at Guantánamo: "They treated us well. We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes."

These testimonies need to be remembered at a time when so-called human rights agencies insist that the U.S. detention of prisoners in Guantánamo is immoral, contravenes international law, and so on.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Feb 7, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

The near pathological contempt so many hold for President Bush clouds their ability to put themselves in the commander-in-chief's shoes. On Sept. 11, in America, over 3,000 people lost their lives. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein continued to defy United Nations Security Council resolutions to come clean. He flouted the U.N.-sponsored Oil-for-Food program, diverting the money from its intended purpose. Critics quite properly accuse the U.S. intelligence community for failing to connect the dots and thus prevent 9/11. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the advanced nature of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program shocked intelligence analysts. Nuclear bomb testing in India and Pakistan came as a surprise, as did the advanced nature of Iran's and Libya's WMD programs. By all means, the U.S. intelligence failures call for serious soul-searching, and possibly housekeeping to improve accuracy.

But, in the case of pre-war Iraq, the president's critics suggest the following: Cross your fingers, hope for the best, and run the risk of another attack on American soil, this time possibly with chemical or biological weapons. No, the president acted upon the best available information and properly discharged his responsibility as commander-in-chief.

If the Specter/Ney/Biden efforts to "improve relations" [with the Iranian theocracy] were simply acts of folly by men who don't know better, one might laugh them off. But they have serious consequences, as our diplomats -- who actively encouraged the representatives' acts of appeasement -- must realize. The Iranian people overwhelmingly hate the regime, and look to Washington for encouragement and support to carry out a democratic revolution, and therefore the mullahs try to create opportunities to convince the people that the Bush administration in fact approves of the regime itself. Any warm statement from a famous American is a body blow to the democratic opposition, and a balm to the mullahs, just as every critical word from President Bush has encouraged the people, and weakened the tyrants. Appeasers are sent deep into the Inferno, because their acts are truly wicked, shoring up our would-be killers and discouraging our would-be allies inside the country.

America has convincing new evidence that Iran is hiding an atomic bomb project despite Teheran's promise to open up all of its nuclear facilities to international inspectors, a senior US official has told The Telegraph. He said the Teheran regime was secretly trying to build a second and more advanced uranium enrichment plant in parallel to the large facilities in the town of Natanz revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year. "There is no doubt in our mind that the Iranians have a lot that the IAEA does not know about," said the official. "The Iranians have a military programme that the IAEA has never set eyes on."

Democrats Using Their Brains?

Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

"Democrats are cute when they're being pragmatic. They furrow their brows and try to think like Republicans. Or as they imagine Republicans must think. They turn off their hearts and listen for signals from their brains..."

“Spying On” Means “Planning to Blow Up”

Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

An Iranian diplomat was arrested in Nigeria under suspicion that he was spying on Israel, Reuters reported.The Shin Bet confirmed the report. A police source in Nigeria told the news agency that the man was arrested on January 23rd after he was caught taking pictures of the Israeli embassy in the capital Abuja, with a digital camera. "A digital camera was found in his possession, with surveillance pictures of the embassy and several other international and local official buildings in the capital," a senior Israeli security source told Reuters. A Nigerian police spokesman said last Thursday that an Iranian was being questioned after taking photographs of strategic buildings in the capital.

On Thursday State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed that 16 Saudi nationals who had been accredited to the embassy in Washington had been asked to leave. "We were able to determine that they were not, in fact, working as diplomats in the Saudi Embassy, but rather were teaching in Northern Virginia and therefore were not entitled to diplomatic status. Since they were on diplomatic visas, ... we had to tell them your visa status is no longer valid. We gave them till Feb. 22 to clean up their affairs and leave the country," Boucher said. The place of instruction is the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America in Fairfax, Va. Phones at the institute were not answered Monday. The institute's Web site says it was established in 1989 and is affiliated with al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Dismissing Kerry: “The Guilty Rich and Angry Poor Coalition”

Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

[I]f Tuesday night was an indicator of where the Kerry campaign is headed, we predict the senator from Massachusetts is in for a rocky ride. And not only because the message is weak, in a country where lots of us enjoy miracle cures and cheap gasoline because of "the drug companies" and "big oil," and where a lot of middle-class workers have retirement accounts or union pension funds swelled with stock in energy and drug companies. But because the messenger is, well, hampered by his own circumstances.

How John Forbes Kerry can credibly campaign against "the economy of privilege" is beyond us. He was in Skull and Bones at Yale. He lives in a $10 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in Boston's Beacon Hill. He summers in Nantucket. Forbes estimated his net worth at $550 million, more than Jay Rockefeller.

Maybe between the guilty rich and the angry poor Mr. Kerry can cobble together a coalition to defeat Mr. Bush in November.Our guess is that there are far more of a third category of people--optimists who are happy that America is a place where hard workers with some luck can build vast fortunes. [January 29, 2004]

Public Schools: See No Evil

Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

Brooklyn middle-school teachers told city lawmakers yesterday they were ordered not to expel students no matter how severe the crime under the Education Department's school safety plan....

The directive came from a principal during a September staff meeting, he told admittedly "shocked" City Council members in a hearing on school safety. Students have choked each other, stabbed each other with pencils, and shot off bottle rockets in the cafeteria, but weren't punished, teachers at J.H.S. 258 testified. In some cases, there were under-the-table suspensions where a troublemaker was walked home and kept out of school for five days, but there's no record of a suspension, according to another J.H.S. 258 teacher, Dorian Hunter Jr. [NYSun, January 29, 2004]