Category: Networks

The liberation of East Timor from Indonesia was Noam Chomsky’s pet issue for many years. It’s clear to people familiar with that issue that it was a major irritant to Southeast Asia’s Muslim fanatics, and a root cause of the Bali bombings, among other atrocities. Yet journalists of the “who am I to judge” school forget this, so people like Australian prime minister John Howard have to educate them:

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia’s involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn’t have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq — a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations — when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Jeff Jarvis opined recently that he thinks Chomsky sincere. I think his flip-flop in East Timor proves that he’s not. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and 7/7 were not retaliating for the liberation of Iraq.

See the full transcript of Howard and Blair’s press conference here. The good part is toward the end.

Here we go again:

Terrified passengers were evacuated from parts of London’s transport system today after incidents involving explosives at three underground stations and a bus.

The explosions were attempts to kill that had failed, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said tonight.

Two small blasts occurred on tube trains: one near Warren Street station in central London, and the other on a tube train near Oval station in south London.

A third small explosion was reported on a No 26 bus in Shoreditch, east London.

A suspect package was also found at Shepherd’s Bush station in west London.

One woman was reportedly injured at Warren Street, but there were no reports of casualties during the other incidents, which happened shortly before 1pm.

Sir Ian said tonight: “The intention must have been to kill.”

But he added: “The intention of the terrorists has not been fulfilled.”

Or maybe not, since these terrorists couldn’t pull it off. But this is a really bad sign because it probably signals a copy-cat bombing attempt that will be followed by others.

See this on America’s greatest enemy:

In 1998, an official People’s Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called “Unrestricted Warfare,” written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

“Unrestricted Warfare” recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. “The way to extricate oneself from this predicament,” the authors write, “is to develop a different approach.”

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the “bandwidths understood by the American military.” They envision a scenario in which a “network attack against the enemy” � clearly a red, white and blue enemy � would be carried out “so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed,” leading to “social panic, street riots and a political crisis.” Only then would conventional military force be deployed “until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty.”

It’s about time we started taking the China threat seriously. China is a fascist state that’s out to dominate the world, and we can’t let that happen.

HT Instapundit.

It turns out that the Plame leaker wasn’t Judith Miller, it was David Corn:

May notes that in Bob Novak’s column that first outed Valerie Wilson, Novak described her as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” He argues that this did not reveal Valerie Wilson as a truly undercover CIA officer–what’s known as a NOC (an officer under “nonofficial cover”). He then points out that when I wrote about the Novak column two days later, I referred to Valerie Wilson as “a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital important to national security.” Breathlessly, May writes, “Since Novak did not report that Plame was ‘working covertly’ how did Corn know that’s what she had been doing?” His answer: Joseph Wilson must have told me when I interviewed him after the Novak leak. Thus, Valerie Wilson was really outed by me because Joe Wilson leaked to me.

Larry O’Donnell would be an appropriate cell mate for him.

Cliff May summarizes:

The facts are these: (1) Bob Novak did not say that Valerie Plame was a secret agent; (2) David Corn did; (3) we don’t know who Bob’s sources were; (4) we know David’s source was Joe Wilson.

That’s clear enough.

This Pew Poll is good news:

• Support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence in defense of Islam has dropped since 2002 by 34 percentage points in Lebanon, 12 points in Indonesia and 8 points in Pakistan. The exception to the trend is Jordan, where support increased by 14 points, to 57%.

There are higher levels of support for suicide bombings that target Americans and their allies in Iraq, though they also have dropped. About half of Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco said those attacks were justified.

• Confidence in bin Laden has fallen by double-digit margins in Indonesia, Morocco and Lebanon since 2003. In Lebanon, only 2% now express confidence in him.

It puts the lie to the claim that the liberation of Iraq has made more terrorists.

HT Orin Kerr.

In his own words, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh explains why he hates us:

“I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion,” he told its three-strong panel of judges.

“I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same.” Earlier, Bouyeri had insisted that he did not recognise the authority of any non-Islamic court and forbade his lawyer to mount a defence.

Spectators in the maximum security courthouse in western Amsterdam gasped as Bouyeri then turned to the victim’s mother, Anneke, in the public gallery, and told her he felt nothing for her. Mrs van Gogh watched as he read out from what appeared to be a statement: “I don’t feel your pain. I have to admit that I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because you’re a non-believer.”

He added: “Maybe you could find some consolation if the maximum sentence is given.”

I should think that would clear up the confusion about the terrorists and what we might do to appease them. How many are willing to convert to Islam? Those who criticize the war but aren’t willing to convert are terrorchickens, of course.

HT Daily Pundit

Joe Wilson accidentally tells the truth:

BLITZER: But the other argument that’s been made against you is that you’ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you’ve tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

Damn, that has to hurt.

See Instapundit for more, indeed.

This was nice to read:

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

But the old bat had little choice, given that she was the laughing stock of the Western world after claiming that the man she calls “shrub” had killed more Iraqis than Galloway’s (and probably Joe Wilson’s) former employer.

George Galloway is Saddam’s man in England. It turns out that the terror bombers frequented a youth center where he was idolized:

The centre receives funding from the British government and the European Union, as well as charitable funds, and as such is officially secular and non-political. But in practice, it was neither. On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. When some workers complained about these, they were harassed by other staffers.

The hostile, politicized mood at the centre stands in stark contrast to the descriptions of the young bombers made by their relatives and neighbours yesterday.

I wonder if we have youth centers in the US with posters of Joe Wilson on display. If we do, it’s certainly a red flag for terror.

HT Daily Pundit.

Volokhtician Jim Lindgren has some good questions for Lyin’ Joe:

Here it would be good to ask Wilson whether he thought that by lying about what he found in Niger and what he told the CIA and how he was selected, he was gambling with his wife’s safety. How could he be sure that people would know that Plame was a covert agent, or that there was a law against revealing her identity? Perhaps someone might have reasonably believed that they were correcting misimpressions that Wilson himself had created. Did Wilson realize that he had put the Administration in something analogous to a Catch-22?: Wilson can lie about how he was hired but the Administration can’t correct his lie without outing his wife. Did Wilson consciously decide to gamble with his wife’s safety by lying in a way that would be hard for the Administration to correct?

Will the lapdog imperialist media ask them? I doubt it.