Friday, November 13, 2009
china confidential
Allah's Ayatollah Can't be Removed
Iran's Supreme (Clerical Fascist) Leader rules by divine right, an important Iranian official says, explaining that the turbaned tyrant is neither appointed nor selected; rather, he is "discovered."
Click here for the story.Obama Travels, US and Democracies Suffer
Lawrence Solomon's analysis is must reading.No president has travelled more than Barack Obama in his first year — his current trip to Asia is his eighth. The first seven took him nowhere. In the afterglow of each, his prestige declined as his results proved ephemeral.
His first trip, to Ottawa — a fly-in fly-out, same day affair without pomp and circumstance or announcements of substance — was among his best for doing the least harm. Trip Two, to Europe to convince his counterparts to spend spend spend their way out of the economic recession, began poorly for him when Europe’s leaders flatly refused. Trip Two ended spectacularly in Istanbul, at the Turkish Grand National Assembly, with a high-profile speech that reached out to a pivotal Muslim country.
Turkey, the Middle East’s largest economy, had been proudly secular since the 1920s when the country outlawed Islamic rule and turned decisively toward the West. At the time of Obama’s speech, in April of this year, Turkey was an ally of Israel’s, it was a member of NATO and it wanted to join the European Union. But Turkey was also a divided country, having elected a controversial government that Turks across the political spectrum suspected was closet Islamic. Many feared Turkey was teetering away from the West. Obama’s job was to keep this vital country in the Western fold.
Obama’s visit was a “statement about the importance of Turkey, not just to the United States, but to the world,” he told the Turks in an address that referred to stains on American history, and that endorsed the pro-Islamic government at the expense of the more Western, secular Turks. “When people look back on this time, let it be said of America that we extended the hand of friendship.”
Last month, it became evident that Obama had failed spectacularly in staunching the Turkish drift away from the West. Turkey abruptly cancelled a joint air exercise with Israel and NATO and revealed that it instead would be conducting joint military exercises with Syria, with which it had entered a military alliance. Syria is an ally of Iran and a country that the U.S. deems a state sponsor of terrorism. With pro-Western Turks neutered, anti-Americanism is now on the rise in Turkey. Many political commentators consider Turkey lost to the Western camp.
Obama’s next Muslim trip — to Cairo in June — was his most ambitious of all, a game-changing effort to reframe America’s relationship with the Muslim world by legitimizing the conduct of Muslim regimes while turning the screws to Israel. If he intended to embolden moderates to bring hostile parties closer together, he failed. Iran scoffed at his offer of peaceful nuclear technology, Saudi Arabia refused to make even a token goodwill gesture toward Israel, and the Palestinians hardened their demands against Israel, expecting Israel to cave under U.S. pressure. The Israeli public then lost its trust in Obama, no longer seeing him as an honest broker, let alone an ally. In a recent poll, only 4% of Israelis view Obama as pro-Israel. Neither are Israelis confident that Obama can talk Iran out of its nuclear weapons program. War with Iran is closer than ever before and peace between Israel and the Palestinians more distant.
Obama’s trip to Russia? The cooperation he hoped for on Iran never happened. He did, however, yield to Russia’s demand that the U.S. scotch plans to install a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, former communist countries long fearful of Russian designs and now fearful of American resolve.
Obama’s other trips — to Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas and Europe again in July — accomplished little of note. His last trip, to Copenhagen to make the case for Chicago as the venue for the 2016 Olympic Games, resulted in Chicago’s immediate elimination.
Will the Asia trip mark a turnaround for Obama and be consequential for human rights or for the economy, two areas that especially involve the China portion of his trip? No sign yet that the actions of a diminished president will lead to progress on the economy.
Continue here.Chuck Norris Speaks Out
A patriot speaks truth to power.
Actor Chuck Norris said in a television interview that the Copenhagen Climate summit this December in Denmark is where U.S. President Barack Obama will establish a new world order.
"He (Obama) is going over there (climate summit) to create a one world order," Norris said. "In this conference they are going to take our money and send it to Third World countries, since they have suffered so much."
Norris also mentioned that the day Copenhagen Climate summit starts is the exact same day Pearl Harbour happened, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.
POSTSCRIPT: This reporter was fortunate to have met and interviewed Norris in Israel many years ago. Norris is a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people.An Intelligence Bonanza for Al Qaeda
By John Yoo
Trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda, tie up our courts for years on issues best left to the president and Congress, and further cripple our intelligence agencies’ efforts to fight terrorists abroad.
KSM and his co-defendants will have all of the benefits and rights that the U.S. Constitution accords those who live here, most importantly the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it was obtained.
Arrested spies commonly use this right to get a better deal out of the government, which will want to avoid opening up its intelligence sources and methods on KSM, what information it got from him, and what else it knows about his fellow al Qaeda operatives.
Finding out what the U.S. intelligence agencies know about al Qaeda will be an incalculable boon to the terrorist organization, which will be able to drop plans and personnel it knows are compromised, and push harder in areas we appear to know nothing about.
Our intelligence agents and military personnel will now have to conduct their capture of the enemy—often in battlefield conditions—under all of the strictures that apply to arrests of garden-variety criminals in the United States. Knowing that al Qaeda leaders may be tried in court, our soldiers and agents will have to gather evidence at the scene of “arrest” and secure it to the standards of a civilian court, all while entering a hostile environment, protecting their own personnel, and leaving without casualties.
This is no idle prediction. All one has to do is look at what happened in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the twentieth hijacker who was captured before 9/11 in the United States—his desire to learn how to take off but not land jetliners while at flight school tipped off the FBI. His trial never reached a single proceeding before a jury, and he tied up the court in knots for four years (the case had to go back and forth between the trial and appellate courts several times), because he too demanded that the government produce all of its intelligence on him in public. The only reason the trial ended was because Moussaoui decided to plead guilty at the last minute. KSM, his co-defendants, and their lawyers will not save the government from itself this time, and our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.Gold Bounces Back, Closes at Record High
U.S. President Barack Obama is presiding over the decline--or death--of the dollar.US Army Covering Up Hasan's Islamist Ties
The U.S. Army did nothing when presented with powerful evidence that one of their own--Major Nidal Malik Hasan--was in contact with Al Qaeda and its supporters and agents. Reason: liberal indoctrination that diversity is more important than security.
The Obama administration and its adoring media stooges care more about protecting organized Islam (virtually synonymous with Islamism) than the American people.
Worse, the hard-core Communists who back Obama's personality cult are actually happy to see U.S. soldiers and civilians gunned down by islamist terrorists. For the Communists, the United States is the "Great Satan"--Iran's term--and the sooner it has brought to its knees the better. The same holds true for the "Little Satan"--Israel--in the Communist view.Obama Move Could Hurt NY Recovery
So say real estate experts in the New York market. The trial of the war criminals is a security nightmare that promises to tie up police and traffic for 3-4 years while elevating the terrorist threat to New York.Obamanation: US Rights for War Criminals
Obama's Friday surprise: U.S. Constitutional rights for mass-murdering, Islamist war criminals.
A cowardly sneak attack while the publicity-mad President is touring Asia (and accomplishing nothing).
Tens of millions of dollars will be spent on trying ... war criminals ... in ... civilian courts ... in New York City, scene of their mass murder.
Intelligence sources will be compromised. Security will be jeopardized. A fortune will be wasted.
And the Left ... the miserable, Islamist-sympathizing, America-hating Left ... and their fellow travelers and dupes ... will rejoice in another blow to American power and prestige. The Left will root for acquittal or a hung jury.
Imagine Obama as President after World War II. There would have been no Nuremberg trial. Obama would have brought Nazi war criminals to New York for civilian court trials. Obama would have brought Japanese war criminals to Hawaii for civilian court trials.Japan Sees Obama as Weak and Amateurish
US Begs North Korea to Quiet Down
OBAMA DISREGARDED PLEA FROM 9/11 FAMILIES
November 9, 2009
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Obama:
On September 11, 2001, the entire world watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then turned the fully-fueled planes into missiles, flying them into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 3,000 of our fellow human beings died in two hours. The nation's commercial aviation system ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan was turned into a war zone, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for days and causing tens of thousands of residents and workers to be displaced. In nine months, an estimated 50,000 rescue and recovery workers willingly exposed themselves to toxic conditions to dig out the ravaged remains of their fellow citizens buried in 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and concrete.
The American people were rightly outraged by this act of war. Whether the cause was retribution or simple recognition of our common humanity, the words "Never Forget" were invoked in tearful or angry rectitude, defiantly written in the dust of Ground Zero or humbly penned on makeshift memorials erected all across the land. The country was united in its determination that these acts should not go unmarked and unpunished.
Eight long years have passed since that dark and terrible day. Sadly, some have forgotten the promises we made to those whose lives were taken in such a cruel and vicious manner.
We have not forgotten. We are the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and other family members of the victims of these depraved and barbaric attacks, and we feel a profound obligation to ensure that justice is done on their behalf. It is incomprehensible to us that members of the United States Congress would propose that the same men who today refer to the murder of our loved ones as a "blessed day" and who targeted the United States Capitol for the same kind of destruction that was wrought in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, should be the beneficiaries of a social compact of which they are not a part, do not recognize, and which they seek to destroy: the United States Constitution.
We adamantly oppose prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in Article III courts, which would provide them with the very rights that may make it possible for them to escape the justice which they so richly deserve. We believe that military commissions, which have a long and honorable history in this country dating back to the Revolutionary War, are the appropriate legal forum for the individuals who declared war on America. With utter disdain for all norms of decency and humanity, and in defiance of the laws of warfare accepted by all civilized nations, these individuals targeted tens of thousands of civilian non-combatants, brutally killing 3,000 men, women and children, injuring thousands more, and terrorizing millions.
It is morally offensive to offer Constitutional protections to individuals charged with murdering 3,000 individuals, in essence, to jeopardize justice for war crimes victims, in order to make an appeal to the Muslim world. The use of Article III courts after the 1993 World Trade Center attack didn't stop any of the subsequent terrorist plots, including the attack on Khobar Towers, 19 Americans killed, the 1998 East African Embassy bombing, 212 killed, the USS Cole bombing, 17 sailors killed. The attacks of 9/11 were a resounding rebuke to the view that federal courts were an appropriate counterterrorism strategy. Afterward, we didn't send law enforcement personnel to apprehend the perpetrators, we sent the United States military, who captured them and held them pursuant to the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF).
The American people do not support the use of our cherished federal courts as a stage by the "mastermind of 9/11" and his co-conspirators to condemn this nation and rally their fellow terrorists the world over. As one New York City police detective, who lost 60 fellow officers on 9/11, told members of the Department of Justice's Detainee Policy Task Force at a meeting last June, "You people are out of touch. You need to hear the locker room conversations of the people who patrol your streets and fight your wars."
On May 21, you stated that military commissions, promulgated by congressional legislation and recently reformed with even greater protections for defendants, are a legal and appropriate forum to try individuals captured pursuant the 2001 AUMF, passed by Congress in response to the attack on America. Nevertheless, you announced a new policy requiring that Al-Qaeda terrorists should be tried in Article III courts "whenever feasible."
We strongly object to the creation of a two-tier system of justice for terrorists in which those responsible for the death of thousands on 9/11 will be treated as common criminals and afforded the kind of platinum due process accorded American citizens, yet members of Al Qaeda who aspire to kill Americans but who do not yet have blood on their hands, will be treated as war criminals. To date, you have offered no explanation or justification for this contradiction, even as you readily acknowledge that the 9/11 conspirators, now designated "unprivileged enemy belligerents," are appropriately accused of war crimes. We believe that this two-tier system, in which war criminals receive more due process protections than would-be war criminals, will be mocked and rejected in the court of world opinion as an ill-conceived contrivance aimed, not at justice, but at the appearance moral authority.
The public has a right to know that prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in federal courts will result in a plethora of legal and procedural problems that will severely limit or even jeopardize the successful prosecution of their cases. Ordinary criminal trials do not allow for the exigencies associated with combatants captured in war, in which evidence is not collected with CSI-type chain-of-custody standards. None of the 9/11 conspirators were given the Miranda warnings mandated in Article III courts. Prosecutors contend that the lengthy, self-incriminating tutorials Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others gave to CIA interrogators about 9/11 and other terrorist operations--called "pivotal for the war against Al-Qaeda" in a recently released, declassified 2005 CIA report--may be excluded in federal trials. Further, unlike military commissions, all of the 9/11 cases will be vulnerable in federal court to defense motions that their prosecutions violate the Speedy Trial Act. Indeed, the judge presiding in the case of Ahmed Ghailani, accused of participating in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, killing 212 people, has asked for that issue to be briefed by the defense. Ghailani was indicted in 1998, captured in Pakistan in 2004, and held at Guantanamo Bay until 2009.
Additionally, federal rules risk that classified evidence protected in military commissions would be exposed in criminal trials, revealing intelligence sources and methods and compromising foreign partners, who will be unwilling to join with the United States in future secret or covert operations if doing so will risk exposure in the dangerous and hostile communities where they operate. This poses a clear and present danger to the public. The safety and security of the American people is the President's highest duty.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "the challenges of terrorism trials are overwhelming." Mr. Mukasey, formerly a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, presided over the multi-defendant terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abel Rahman, the cell that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and conspired to attack other New York landmarks. In addition to the evidentiary problems cited above, he expressed concern about courthouse and jail facility security, the need for anonymous jurors to be escorted under armed guard, the enormous costs associated with the use of U.S. marshals necessarily deployed from other jurisdictions, and the danger to the community which, he says, will become a target for homegrown terrorist sympathizers--like the recent Fort Hood shooter--or embedded Al Qaeda cells.
Finally, there is the sickening prospect of men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being brought to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, or the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few blocks away from the scene of carnage eight years ago, being given a Constitutionally mandated platform upon which he can mock his victims, exult in the suffering of their families, condemn the judge and his own lawyers, and rally his followers to continue jihad against the men and women of the U.S. military, fighting and dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan on behalf of us all.
There is no guarantee that Mr. Mohammed and his co-conspirators will plead guilty, as in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, whose prosecution nevertheless took four years, and who is currently attempting to recant that plea. Their attorneys will be given wide latitude to mount a defense that turns the trial into a shameful circus aimed at vilifying agents of the CIA for alleged acts of "torture," casting the American government and our valiant military as a force of evil instead of a force for good in places of the Muslim world where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are waging a brutal war against them and the local populations. For the families of those who died on September 11, the most obscene aspect of giving Constitutional protections to those who planned the attacks with the intent of inflicting maximum terror on their victims in the last moments of their lives will be the opportunities this affords defense lawyers to cast their clients as victims.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are asking to plead guilty, now, before a duly-constituted military commission. Mr. President, the families of their victims have a right to know, why don't you let them?
Respectfully submitted,
[CLICK HERE FOR THE LIST OF SIGNATORIES.]Communists Hope for 9/11 Terrorist Acquittal
The show trial could be doomed from the get-go.
The 9/11 mastermind could actually be acquitted--legally.
The Islamist enemy combatants are being handed a forum and platform for trying the United States in general and the Bush administration in particular.
The Islamist-appeasing Obama administration is bringing Al Qaeda mass murderers--enemy combatants--to the scene of their monstrous crime and giving them the rights of American citizens.
Across the country and the planet, Islamist sympathizers and Communists consumed with hatred of the U.S. are overjoyed....Obamanation: US Town's Christmas Parade Canceled
This American Jew is outraged.
The United States (thank G-d) is a Christian (as opposed to a Muslim) country, culturally, sociologically, historically. The Judeo-Christian heritage is the very foundation of the world's greatest democracy.
But ... in Obamanation ... an American small town has no apparent alternative but to cancel its annual Christmas parade.
Click here for the story.
-Ben NaftaliOnly a Day After Veterans Day, Islamist-Appeasing Obama Stabs New York and All America in Back, Spits on Graves of 9/11 Mega-Attack Victims
The Muslim-born (according to barbaric Islamist law), Islamist-appeasing President dithers about Afghanistan, downgrades what remains of the war against radical Islam, or Islamism (the new Nazism), and disrespects the memory of every victim of the 21st Century Pearl Harbor by deciding to bring the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind and four enemy combatants to New York York City for a civilian criminal court trial. Of course, Obama was out of the country--on a wasteful, diversionary tour of Asia--when the deed was done.
Click here for a must-read analysis, andhere for our early morning, rapid-fire analysis.Obama Administration Lies About Muslim Population
Speaking to the Turkish parliament and on French television, the President himself has described the U.S. (where 80% of the population identifies itself as Christian) as "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
He claimed "nearly 7 million" American Muslims in his June 4 address to "the Muslim world" from Cairo University--a speech that effectively elevated Islam to the status of a global superpower. Only minutes after he spoke (with the Muslim Brotherhood in attendance, thanks to a U.S. government request), an administration official referred to 8 million U.S. Muslims in a television interview. Even allowing for observant Muslims' notoriously high birthrates, that is a whopping increase!
Following the Egyptian event, a Pakistani newspaper, the Karachi daily Dawn, published an interview with Obama in which he said “we have 5 million Muslims.”
In fact, nobody knows the real number. A 2007 Pew survey estimated 2.35 million U.S. Muslims, of whom 35 percent were African-American. U.S. Muslim organizations count about 6 million members, a third of them African-American.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Gold bounces back, closes at a record high, as reported here.
President Obama's sneak attack on New York--a decision to bring the 9/11 mastermind and accomplices to the city for a civilian court trial--could seriously set back New York's real estate recovery.
China Confidential correspondents in Japan say the country's business and political leaders see U.S. President Barack Obama as a weak, ineffective, and amateurish leader.
The United States is reduced to begging Stalinist/Kimist North Korea to tone down its bellicose rhetoric. Click here for the story.
Obama disregarded the letter from 9/11 families, determined to drive New Yorkers through hell--again. The idea that the self-proclaimed, enemy alien mastermind of the Islamist mega-attacks is now considered innocent until proven guilty is beyond belief, worse than sickening.
The Islamist-appeasing Obama administration has made a habit of lying about the number of Muslims in the United States. Gross exaggeration serves a political purpose.
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