Month: July 2005

I’m sure you heard yesterday that the A’s have climbed into a tie with the Twins for the AL Wild Card after being left for dead a few weeks ago:

How well are the A’s playing right now? They’ve won six in a row, 12 of 14, and 22 of 27 to climb a season-high eight games over .500.

Oh, and they’ve also pulled into a tie with Minnesota for the American League Wild Card lead. Seven weeks ago, they were 12 1/2 games back in that race.

They’re now only 5 1/2 games behind the evil Anheim Angel-Yankees. I don’t know what sort of a deal Arte Moreno signed with the Devil, but experience says the A’s will be in the playoffs again.

No day is complete without some mention of the Rove/Plame non-scandal, so here’s a bit of Hitchens for you:

But the coverage of this non-storm in an un-teacup has gone far beyond the fantasy of a Rovean hidden hand. Supposedly responsible journalists are now writing as if there was never any problem with Saddam’s attempt to acquire yellowcake (or his regime’s now-proven concealment of a nuclear centrifuge, or his regime’s now-proven attempt to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from North Korea as late as March 2003). In the same way, the carefully phrased yet indistinct statement of the 9/11 Commission that Saddam had no proven “operational” relationship with al-Qaida has mutated lazily into the belief that there were no contacts or exchanges at all, which the commission by no means asserts and which in any case by no means possesses the merit of being true. The CIA got everything wrong before 9/11, and thereafter. It was conditioned by its own culture to see no evil. It regularly leaked—see any of Bob Woodward’s narratives—against the administration. Now it, and its partisans and publicity-famished husband-and-wife teams, want to imprison or depose people who leak back at it. No, thanks.

There you have it. Wilson told a series of lies about Saddam and his WMD program, and then tried to hide behind an official secrets act to keep them from being found out. Quite rightly, the Administration didn’t let him get away with his little ploy.

Once again, Communist China is suppressing information vital to the control of bird flu world-wide. The last time they did this was in connection with the SARS outbreak, and we’re seeing the the same pattern repeat itself:

“It might be another clumsy attempt at a cover-up. It might just be plain, everyday incompetence. Either way you’d think they would know better by now,” one international scientist said.

He said that suspicions about Beijing’s approach were heightened when independent scientists researching the avian flu outbreaks had their work thwarted by government officials. Guan Yi, a scientist from Hong Kong University who led the international research on the Sars virus, said last week that the authorities had tried to stop his team’s work on bird flu after he published an article in the journal Nature, warning of the global threat posed by the virus and linking it to other cases in China.

The Chinese government’s chief veterinary official publicly condemned his research, saying it had been conducted without permission and “lacked credibility”. The next day, officials visited Dr Guan’s laboratory in Guangdong province and told him to stop his research and hand over samples, citing a breach of safety regulations.

Further disquiet has been expressed by international researchers about China’s use of drugs designed to combat avian flu. Although China first reported a flu outbreak in February 2004, it emerged recently that its farmers had been trying to suppress a serious outbreak for more than eight years by feeding poultry with an antiviral drug meant for humans, in breach of international livestock guidelines.

As one of two main drugs used for treating human influenza, Amantadine should have had a key role in fighting any future pandemic.

Instead, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has become resistant to the drug because it was systematically fed to poultry.

The Chinese government denies reports that it encouraged its farmers to use the drug.

Scientists need information on this deadly new virus in order to build an effective anti-virus, especially important since it can be carried hundreds of miles by migratory birds.

China’s stonewalling essentially turns bird flu into a WMD, and takes away some of the mystery behind the decision of Valerie Plame’s CIA section to target the Chinese Embassy for bombing in Belgrade in 1999.

Apparently, Al Qaeda attempted to attack the UK, India, and Australia on 9/11/2001, but just couldn’t pull off all the attacks. Melanie Philips quotes the Times of London on the recent conviction, in India, of an AQ terrorist:

‘An Indian man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001.

‘Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. His lawyer has claimed, however, that the confession was “forcefully taken” and that Afroze was tortured by Indian police.

‘Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.’

So much for the theory that AQ is avenging Saddam these days.

H/T Captain Ed.

Scotland Yard deals with a terrorist:

At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform.

Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train.

My haiku for the occasion:

[Redacted out of respect for the dead man’s innocence.]

Here’s an eyewitness account from the Grauniad:

“An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers.

“He tripped and was also pushed to the floor and one of the officers shot him five times.

“One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He’s dead, five shots, he’s dead.

“I’m totally distraught. It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes.

“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified.

“He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket.

“Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don’t know. But it looked out of place in the weather we’ve been having.

“He was quite large, big built, quite a sort of chubby guy.

“I was crouched down and basically ran as fast as I could in a crouched position. I just was worried about bullets flying around.

“It was just an instinctive reaction to get out – people running in all directions, looks of horror on their faces, screaming, a lot of screaming from women, absolute mayhem.

“And the smell of cordite as well, the gunpowder smell, that sort of acrid sort of gunpowder smell.

“It was an absolute nightmare. I’m just waiting for the pubs to open to be quite honest – nice stiff Scotch.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I saw them kill a man basically. I saw them shoot a man five times.”

The Brits don’t fool around.

CORRECTION: It wasn’t Scotland Yard that shot the terror dude, it was the London Metropolitan Police. Sorry for the mistake. See CNN for more details.

UPDATE: It turns out that the suspect, for all his suspicious behavior, wasn’t actually involved with the terrorists. That doesn’t mean I fault the police for shooting him, because the climate of fear the terrorists created was the real culprit. That’s what terror does, after all.

Portland is a haven for terrorists, refusing to participate in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. So it comes as no surprise that one of the terrorists behind the London bombings trained fellow terrorists in Oregon:

July 21, 2005 — An al Qaeda operative who once traveled to the United States to help set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon was identified yesterday as the chief organizer of the London subway bombings.

U.S. and British officials named Haroon Rashid Aswat, who is British-born and of Indian descent, as the mysterious “fifth man” in the London attacks.

They said he entered Britain two weeks before the attacks despite being on a terror watch list, likely led the operation and then left the country a day before the blasts.

The Times of London reported cellphone records indicated he had 20 conversations with two of the London bombers in the days before the attacks and telephoned one of them the morning of the attack.

There were numerous reports that Aswat was already under arrest in Pakistan, but U.S. officials were unable to confirm that last night.

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said they believe Aswat is likely the same man who surfaced in 2003 in the Justice Department prosecution of a group of fanatics who tried to set up a jihad training camp in Bly, Ore., in 1999.

Actions have consequences, and coddling terrorists leads to more terrorist actions. This isn’t rocket science, folks.