Fire Hydrant of Freedom

TERRORISM BRIEF

Al Qaeda Arrests and the Hunt for Osama bin Laden
May 23, 2005 1852 GMT

The May 2 capture of senior al Qaeda leader Abu Farj al-Libi in Pakistan set off a chain reaction of militant arrests in the country -- suggesting the
net is closing in on al Qaeda's top leadership -- including Osama bin Laden.

Within days of al-Libi's arrest, Pakistani forces captured 14 other al Qaeda
suspects near the border with Afghanistan. Then, on May 18, Pakistani police in Lahore arrested Maulvi Mohammed Sadiq, who allegedly provided logistical and financial support for al Qaeda operations.

Meanwhile, as the al Qaeda network unravels in Pakistan, arrests also are
being made in the Middle East and Europe. Amar al-Zubaydi, also known as Abu Abbas, a key aid to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was captured May 5 in Iraq. On May 18, authorities in northern Italy arrested three suspects with links to al Qaeda. Italian police said the suspects also are accused of dealing in false documents and drug trafficking.

Three days later, German police arrested a Palestinian living in Marburg.
The suspect, identified only as Ismail Abu S., reportedly is linked to al
Qaeda. He is the brother of Yasser Abu S., whose January arrest allegedly
foiled a plan for Yasser to fake his death in Germany and then travel to
Iraq to carry out a suicide attack against U.S. troops there. The insurance
payoff for the faked death was to be used to fund further al Qaeda
activities, according to German police.

Fraud investigations in the United States, Europe and Asia have led to the
arrest of several other al Qaeda members who allegedly have been using money laundering and document fraud to finance the network.

Several factors are working against al Qaeda at the moment. First, the close interpersonal relationships among the leadership -- which until now had spawned a loyalty that ensured operational security and personal protection-- are now becoming a detriment, as captured militants reveal details about others, as in al-Libi case has shown. Second, Pakistani intelligence officials cite a rift between al Qaeda's Arab and non-Arab members as a factor in many of the recent arrests. Captured Chechen, Uzbek and Tajik militants, officials say, have been giving up information about their Arab colleagues, which has enabled U.S. and Pakistani counterterrorism forces to close in on them.

Also, Pakistan has been changing its tone about bin Laden. Some officials
are openly saying his capture is imminent -- and even are acknowledging
cooperating with the United States in hunting him. Pakistani military
spokesperson Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said May 22 on Dubai-based ARY
television that projectiles fired by the U.S. military in Afghanistan during
offensive operations against militants had landed in Pakistani territory.
Sultan clarified that the U.S. military command in Afghanistan had notified
Islamabad in advance of the operation and of the possibility that the
projectiles would end up on Pakistani soil. In the not-so-distant past,
Islamabad would have been reluctant to acknowledge the extent of its
cooperation with Washington for fear of agitating the sizable segment of its
population that sympathizes with al Qaeda.

Perhaps most significant in the hunt for bin Laden is the U.S. State
Department program Rewards for Justice. Many of the biggest names in
international terrorism have been arrested after being informed on under
this program. Bin Laden's capture likely will be a direct result of this
program, as more high-value targets are arrested and the concentric circles of confidants around him shrink.

May 17, 2005, 1:07 p.m.
The Smug Delusion of Base Expectations
Count me out of the Newsweek feeding frenzy.

We're in the grips of a pathology. And it's not media bias.

Here's the late-breaking news (you'll want to be sitting down for this): The mainstream media is ideologically liberal and instinctually hostile to George W. Bush, U.S. foreign policy, and the American military.

No kidding. Really. If you want to throw the off-switch for the cognitive part of your brain- as many conservatives seem only to happy to do this week- then, by all means, that is the story you want to run with in this latest media scandal.

Newsweek, in reckless pursuit of a scoop that might score the daily double of embarrassing the Bush administration while heaping more disrepute on the Left's favorite punching bag, Guantanamo Bay, falsely reported a martial toilet-flushing of the Koran. Oops, I'm sorry, I mean the Holy Koran- after all, I don't want to be left out of the new, vast right-wing "we can be just as nauseatingly pious as they can" conspiracy.

The false report, according to the New York Times, instigated "the most virulent, widespread anti-American protests" in the Muslim world since...well, since the last virulent, widespread anti-American protests in the Muslim world- particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where at least 17 people have been killed.

That's right. The reason for the carnage is said- again and again, by media critics and government officials- to be a false report of Koran desecration. The prime culprit here is irresponsible journalism.

Is that what we really think?

Here's an actual newsflash- and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.

Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn't need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn't need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.

The outpouring of righteous indignation against Newsweek glides past a far more important point. Yes, we're all sick of media bias. But "Newsweek lied and people died" is about as worthy a slogan as the scurrilous "Bush lied and people died" that it parrots. And when we engage in this kind of mindless demagoguery, we become just another opportunistic plaintiff-- no better than the people all too ready to blame the CIA because Mohammed Atta steered a hijacked civilian airliner into a big building, and to sue the Port Authority because the building had the audacity to collapse from the blow.

What are we saying here? That the problem lies in the falsity of Newsweek's reporting? What if the report had been true? And, if you're being honest with yourself, you cannot say-- based on common sense and even ignoring what we know happened at Abu Ghraib-- that you didn't think it was conceivably possible the report could have been true. Flushing the Koran down a toilet (assuming for argument's sake that our environmentally correct, 3.6-liters-per-flush toilets are capable of such a feat) is a bad thing. But rioting? Seventeen people killed? That's a rational response?

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about Newsweek. I'm more worried about the response and our willful avoidance of its examination. Afghanistan has been an American reconstruction project for nearly four years. Pakistan has been a close American "war on terror" ally for just as long. This is what we're getting from the billions spent, the lives lost, and the grand project of exporting nonjudgmental, sharia-friendly democracy? A killing spree? Over this?

In the affirmative-action context, conservatives have written trenchantly about the "soft bigotry of low expectations" - the promotion of a vile dependency-ethos that says "you don't need to strive for better," as a result of which many people who might, don't. Our cognate sense of the Islamic world has become the smug delusion of base expectations.

Someone alleges a Koran flushing and what do we do? We expect, accept, and silently tolerate militant Muslim savagery and lots of it. We become the hangin' judge for the imbeciles whose negligence "triggered" the violence, but offer no judgment about the societal dysfunction that allows this grade of offense to trigger so cataclysmic a reaction. We hop on our high horses having culled from the Left's playbook the most politically correct palaver about the inviolable sanctity of Holy Islamic scripture (and never you mind those verses about annihilating the infidels - the ones being chanted by the killers). And we suspend disbelief, insisting that things would be just fine in a place like Gaza if we could only set up a democracy - a development which, there, appears poised to empower Hamas, terrorists of the same ilk as those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who see comparatively minor indignities as license to commit murder.

"Minor indignities? How can you say something so callous about a desecration of the Holy Koran?" I say it as a member of the real world, not the world of prissy affectation. I don't know about you, but I inhabit a place where crucifixes immersed in urine and Madonna replicas composed of feces are occasions for government funding, not murderous uprisings. If someone was moved to kill on their account, we'd be targeting the killer, not the exhibiting museum, not the "artists," and surely not Newsweek.

I inhabit a world in which my government seeks accommodation with Saudi Arabia and China and Egypt, places where the practice of Christianity results in imprisonment...or worse; in which Jews have been driven from almost every country in the Middle East, and in which the goal of destroying their country, Israel, is viewed by much of the globe as legitimate foreign policy; and in which being a Christian, an animist, or the wrong kind of Muslim in Sudan is grounds for genocide ? something the vaunted United Nations seems to regard as more of a spectator sport than a cause of action.

In my world, militant Muslims, capitalizing on the respectful deference of others, have been known tactically to desecrate the Koran themselves: by rigging it with explosives, by using it to secrete and convey terrorist messages, and, yes, even by toilet-flushing parts of it for the nuisance value of flooding the bathrooms at Guantanamo Bay. Just as they have used mosques as sanctuaries, as weapons depots, and as snipers' nests.

There's a problem here. But it's not insensitivity, and it's not media bias. Those things are condemnable, but manageable. The real problem here is a culture that either cannot or will not rein in a hate ideology that fuels killing. When we go after Newsweek, we're giving it a pass. Again.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
================================


'NEWSWEEK DISSEMBLED, MUSLIMS DISMEMBERED!' By Ann Coulter
Wed May 18, 7:01 PM ET
 


When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

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When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post -- which owns Newsweek -- decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of     Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter's scoops. Who's deciding which of Isikoff's stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate -- and interesting! -- than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for "trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs." But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there's no time for fact-checking -- before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of "Piss Christ."

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek's decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that "similar reports from released detainees" had already run in the foreign press -- "and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera."

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion." (I didn't see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You're covered -- al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff's Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, "I'll (expletive) kill myself."

But Newsweek couldn't wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in     Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family "honor" has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because -- wait, why did they do that again?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation -- though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don't kill people, Muslims do.) But then I wouldn't have sat on the story of the decade because of the empty threats of a drama queen gas-bagging with her friend on the telephone between spoonfuls of Haagen-Dazs.

No matter how I look at it, I can't grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff's stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff's not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:


A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she'd kill herself. (Evan Thomas' reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)


The need for "more independent reporting." (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)


"We were in Havana." (ABC president David Westin explaining why "Nightline" held the Lewinsky story.)


Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

Protecting a reporter's source.
How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: "Protecting the national interest"? If journalists don't like the ring of that, how about this one: "Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories."

Message: washingtonpost.com
Inventing Our Evolution
We're almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?

Post
Monday, May 16, 2005; A01

The surge of innovation that has given the world everything from iPods to talking cars is now turning inward, to our own minds and bodies. In an adaptation from his new book, Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau looks at the impact of the new technology.

Some changes in what it means to be human:

? Matthew Nagel, 25, can move objects with his thoughts. The paralyzed former high school football star, whose spinal cord was severed in a stabbing incident, has a jack coming out of the right side of his skull. Sensors in his brain can read his neurons as they fire. These are connected via computer to a robotic hand. When he thinks about moving his hand, the artificial thumb and forefinger open and close. Researchers hope this technology will, within our lifetimes, allow the wheelchair-bound to walk. The military hopes it will allow pilots to fly jets using their minds.

? Around the country, companies such as Memory Pharmaceuticals, Sention, Helicon Therapeutics, Saegis Pharmaceuticals and Cortex Pharmaceuticals are racing to bring memory-enhancing drugs to market before the end of this decade. If clinical trials continue successfully, these pills could be a bigger pharmaceutical bonanza than Viagra. Not only do they hold the promise of banishing the senior moments of aging baby boomers; they might improve the SAT scores of kids by 200 points or more.

? At the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, programs seek to modify the metabolisms of soldiers so as to allow them to function efficiently without sleep or even food for as much as a week. For shorter periods, they might even be able to survive without oxygen. Another program seeks to allow soldiers to stop bleeding by focusing their thoughts on the wound. Yet another program is investigating ways to allow veterans to regrow blown-off arms and legs, like salamanders.

Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment, resulting in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities and airplanes. Now, however, we have started aiming our technologies inward. We are transforming our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny. Serious people, including some at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such modification of what it means to be human to be a radical evolution -- one that we direct ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years.

"The next frontier," says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, "is our own selves."

The process has already begun. Prozac and its ilk modify personality. Viagra alters metabolism. You can see deep change in the basics of biology most clearly, however, wherever you find the keenest competition. Sport is a good example.

"The current doping agony," says John Hoberman, a University of Texas authority on performance drugs, "is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement." Some athletes today look grotesque. Curt Schilling, the All-Star pitcher, in 2002 talked to Sports Illustrated about the major leagues. "Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don't look right."

Steroids are merely a primitive form of human enhancement, however. H. Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the recent Athens Olympics may have been the last without genetically enhanced athletes. His researchers have created super-muscled "Schwarzenegger rats." They're built like steers, with necks wider than their heads. They live longer and recover more quickly from injuries than do their unenhanced comrades. Sweeney sees it as only a matter of time before such technology seeps into the sports world.

Human enhancement is hardly limited to sport. In 2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill to fund research at the molecular level that could lead to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream to fight cancer or fat cells. At the University of Pennsylvania, ordinary male mouse embryo cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it could open the way for two gay males to make a baby -- blurring the standard model of parenthood. In 2004, a new technology for the first time allowed women to beat the biological clock. Portions of their ovaries, frozen when they are young and fertile, can be reimplanted in their sixties, seventies or eighties, potentially allowing them to bear children then.

The genetic, robotic and nano-technologies creating such dramatic change are accelerating as quickly as has information technology for the past four decades. The rapid development of all these fields is intertwined.

It was in 1965 that Gordon E. Moore, director of Fairchild's Research and Development Laboratories, noted, in an article for the 35th-anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, that the complexity of "minimum cost semiconductor components" had been doubling every year since the first prototype microchip was produced six years before. And he predicted this doubling would continue every year for the next 10 years.

Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, would come to christen this claim "Moore's Law."

Over time it has been modified. As the core faith of the entire global computer industry, it is now stated this way: The power of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see.

Sure enough, in 2002, the 27th doubling occurred right on schedule with a billion-transistor chip. A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step is as great as all the previous steps put together. Twenty-seven consecutive doublings of anything man-made, an increase of well over 100 million times-- especially in so short a period -- is unprecedented in human history.

This is exponential change. It's a curve that goes straight up.

Optimists say that culture and values can control the impact of these advances.

"You have to make a distinction between the science and the technological applications," says Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project. "It's probably true that in terms of the basic science, it's pretty hard to stop that. It's not one guy in a laboratory somewhere. But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. "We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn't take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust -- "

Fukuyama thinks the school of hard knocks will slow down a lot of attempts. "People may in the abstract say that they're willing to take that risk. But the moment you have a deformed baby born as a result of someone trying to do some genetic modification, I think there will be a really big backlash against it."

Today, nonetheless, we are surrounded by the practical effects of this curve of exponential technological change. IBM this year fired up a new machine called Blue Gene/L. It is ultimately expected to be 1,000 times as powerful as Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. "If this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and health care," said Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, when the project was announced.

Proteins control all cellular processes in the body. They fold into highly complex, three-dimensional shapes that determine their function. Even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into an agent of disease. Blue Gene/L is intended to investigate how. Thus, breakthroughs in computers today are creating breakthroughs in biology. "One day, you're going to be able to walk into a doctor's office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup," Horn said.

What's remarkable, then, is not this computer's speed but our ability to use it to open new vistas in entirely different fields -- in this case, the ability to change how our bodies work at the most basic level. This is possible because at a thousand trillion operations per second, this computer might have something approaching the raw processing power of the human brain.

Nathan Myhrvold, the former technology chief of Microsoft, points out that it cost $12 billion to sequence the first human genome. You will soon be able to get your own done for $10, he expects.

If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better versions of themselves, the line between the engineered and the born begins to blur.

For example, in Silicon Valley, there is a biotech company called Rinat Neuroscience. DARPA provided critical early funding for its "pain vaccine," a substance designed to block intense pain in less than 10 seconds. Its effects last for 30 days. Tests show it doesn't stifle reactions. If you touch a hot stove, your hand will still automatically jerk away. But after that, the torment is greatly reduced. The product works on the inflammatory response that is responsible for the majority of subacute pain. If you get shot, you feel the bullet, but after that, the inflammation and swelling that trigger agony are substantially reduced. The company is deep into animal testing, is preparing reports for scientific conferences, and has now attracted venture capital funding.

Another DARPA program, originally christened Regenesis, started with the observation that if you cut off the tail of a tadpole, the tail will regrow. If you cut off an appendage of an adult frog, however, it won't, because certain genetic signals have been switched off. This process is carried out by a mass of undifferentiated cells called a blastema, also called a regeneration bud. The bud has the capability to develop into an organ or an appendage, if it gets the right signals. Early results in mice indicate that such blastemas might be generated in humans. The program, now called Restorative Injury Repair, is aimed at allowing regrowth of a blown-off hand or a breast removed in a mastectomy. (Instances of amputated fingertips regenerating in children under 12 have long been noted in scientific journals.) "We had it; we lost it; we need to find it again" was Regenesis's original slogan.
Snooze and Lose?

There are three groups of people usually attracted to any new enhancement. In order, they are the sick, the otherwise healthy with a critical need, and the enterprising. This became immediately obvious when a drug called modafinil entered the market earlier this decade. It is intended to shut off the urge to sleep, without the jitter, buzz, euphoria, crash, or potential for paranoid delusion of stimulants such as amphetamines, cocaine or even caffeine.

The FDA originally approved modafinil for narcoleptics who fall asleep frequently and uncontrollably. But this widely available prescription drug, with the trade name Provigil, immediately was tested on healthy young U.S. Army helicopter pilots. It allowed them to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, it turned out they could get up and do it again for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.

But it's the future of the third group -- the millions who, in the immortal words of Kiss, "wanna rock-and-roll all night and party every day" -- that holds the potential for changing society. Will people feel that they need to routinely control their sleep in order to be competitive? Will unenhanced people get fewer promotions and raises than their modified colleagues? Will this start an arms race over human consciousness?

Consider the case of a little boy born in Germany at the turn of this century. As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, his doctors immediately noticed he had unusually large muscles bulging from his tiny arms and legs. By the time he was 4 1/2 , it was clear that he was extraordinarily strong. Most children his age can lift about one pound with each arm. He could hold a seven-pound dumbbell aloft with each outstretched hand. He is the first human confirmed to have a genetic variation that builds extraordinary muscles. If the effect can be duplicated, it could treat or cure muscle-wasting diseases.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals is testing a drug designed to do just that as a treatment for the most common form of muscular dystrophy. Will athletes try to exploit the discovery to enhance their abilities?

"Athletes find a way of using just about anything," says Elizabeth M. McNally of the University of Chicago, who wrote an article accompanying the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This, unfortunately, is no exception."
Views of the Future

Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence pioneer and winner of the National Medal of Technology, shrugs at the controversy over the use of stem cells from human embryos: "All the political energy that has gone into this issue -- it is not even slowing down the most narrow approach." It is simply being pursued outside the United States -- in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Scandinavia and Great Britain, where scientists will probably achieve success first, he notes.

In the next couple of decades, Kurzweil predicts, life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years. Most diseases will be prevented or reversed. Drugs will be individually tailored to a person's DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells -- nanobots, as they are called -- will be routinely injected by the millions into people's bloodstreams. They will be used primarily as diagnostic scouts and patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person's body, it can be caught extremely early.

As James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, famously put it: "No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

Gregory Stock of UCLA sees this as the inevitable outcome of the decoding of the human genome. "We have spent billions to unravel our biology, not out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of bettering our lives," he said at a 2003 Yale bioethics conference. "We are not about to turn away from this."

Stock sees humanity embracing artificial chromosomes -- rudimentary versions of which already exist. Right now, the human body has 23 chromosome pairs, with the chromosomes numbered 1 through 46. Messing with them is tricky -- you never know when you're going to inadvertently step on unanticipated interactions. By adding a new chromosome pair (Nos. 47 and 48) to the embryo, however, the possibilities appear endless. Stock, in his book "Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future," describes it as the safest way to substantially modify humans because, he says, it would minimize unintended consequences. On top of that, the chromosome insertion sites could have an off switch activated by an injection if we wanted to stop whatever we'd started. This would give future generations a chance to undo whatever we did.

Stock offers this analysis to counter the argument offered by some bioethicists that inheritable genetic line engineering should be unconditionally banned because future generations harmed by wrongful or unsuccessful modifications would have no control over the matter.

But the very idea of aspiring to such godlike powers is blasphemous to some. "Genetic engineering," writes Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is "the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But the promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."

Stock rejects this view. "We should not just accept but embrace the new technologies, because they're filled with promise," he says. Within a few years, he writes, "traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible." His projections, he asserts, are not at all out of touch with reality.

Adapted from the book "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" by Joel Garreau, to be published May 17 by Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. ? 2005 by Joel Garreau. Reprinted with permission.

United States: The Questionable Merits of the 'No-Fly' List
May 13, 2005 1653 GMT

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) diverted Air France
flight 332 to Bangor, Maine, on May 12 after authorities discovered that one of the 169 passengers onboard matched a name on the federal government's "no-fly" list. The passenger and two of his family members -- a woman and a young child -- were taken off the Airbus A-330 flight from Paris to Boston at the Bangor International Airport, and the flight continued on to Boston. TSA officials later determined the "person of interest" was not the one on the list and he and his companions were released.

Although the no-fly list is meant to enhance security of air travel, its
effectiveness as a true protective measure is questionable. The list,
enacted in response to the Sept. 11 attacks and maintained by the TSA,
includes names of people suspected of posing "a risk of air piracy or
terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety." Passenger manifests
of airline flights are checked against the list and, if matching names are
found, the TSA can order the flight diverted and the individual detained.
Although it initially denied the list's existence, the TSA acknowledged in
October 2002 that it was, indeed, keeping -- and constantly updating -- such a list. The U.S. government declines to say how many names are on the list, but the number reportedly is as high as 31,000.

In April 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a nationwide
class-action lawsuit challenging the no-fly list on behalf of several
people. The suit is based on the argument that innocent travelers whose
names appear on the list are singled out as possible terrorists. According
to FBI documents obtained in 2004 by the American Civil Liberties Union,
more than 350 Americans had been delayed or denied boarding since the list's inception -- and apparently all were false alarms. Once added to the list, people usually are unable to find out why they were identified as a security risk and are unable to get their names removed.

Exacerbating the issue is the problem that the names on the list often are
transliterations into English of names in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and other
Middle Eastern, South Asian and African languages. Considering that many
terrorists are militant Islamists, Arab/Muslim names -- in their phonetic
form -- appear frequently. Add to this the fact that many Arab/Muslim names are commonly used -- such as Mohammed, Ahmed and Ali -- and the system raises a red flag if it picks up even one part of the name: first, middle or last. Further complicating the system is the unusual number of birthdates on the first or last day of a given month, which stems from lack of accurate record keeping in some areas of the third world. A person may know the month in which he or she was born, but not the date. Clerks issuing identification cards, then, often assign the birthday as the first or last day of the month. It is no surprise, then, that birthdays often match.

TSA officials said the man detained on the Air France flight had a slightly
different spelling and the exact birthday of someone on the no-fly list.
Without elaborating, the TSA officials said the name in question belonged to a "serious bad actor" with connections to terrorism.

One of the most notable examples of the confusion over names occurred in 2004 when U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy was stopped and questioned at airports five times because the name T. Kennedy appeared on the no-fly list. The phonetically spelled name al Kannadi (The Canadian) apparently was the nom de guerre of an al Qaeda member on the list. It took the senator three weeks and a personal appeal to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge before his name was removed from the list. If a prominent U.S. senator experienced these difficulties, it stands to reason that an ordinary individual with no high-level connections would find it nearly impossible to fix the problem.

Terrorists rarely travel with their real passports and make a point of using
many different aliases. The no-fly list would be effective if terrorists
used passports borrowed from individuals already on the list, such as those identified as having traveled to training camps or other safe havens.
Because the existence of the no-fly list is well known, however, someone
contemplating a terrorist attack likely would create a totally clean
identity, which is not difficult to do. The perpetrator would then "test"
the new document by taking a flight to see if it passed the security check.
The Sept. 11 hijackers took similar reconnaissance flights to observe flight
routes, times and airport/airline security measures.

In the fight against international terrorism, constant vigilance is
necessary -- though repeated false alarms call into question the
effectiveness of the TSA's no-fly list

Geopolitical Diary: Friday, May 13, 2005

Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Federal Security service, claimed
Thursday that foreign intelligence services were planning further
"uprisings," along the lines of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, in order to
undermine Russian influence in the former Soviet Union. Patrushev
specifically charged that the foreign services included U.S., British,
Kuwaiti and Saudi agents.

"Foreign secret services are ever more actively using non-traditional
methods for their work and with the help of different NGOs' educational
programs are propagandizing their interests, particularly in the former
Soviet Union," Patrushev said before the state Duma. "Our opponents are
purposefully and step-by-step trying to weaken Russian influence in the
former Soviet Union and the international arena as a whole. The latest
events in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan unanimously confirm this."
According to Patrushev, the next target will be Belarus' head of
intelligence, Viktor Veger, who also said that the attempts were being kept suppressed.

In a sense, there is nothing controversial in this view. The United States
has made it clear that it supports democratic movements in Eurasia, and that it is prepared to support these movements financially. The Russians have long charged that the Saudis were interfering in Muslim Central Asia,
supporting what they call Wahhabi movements. The inclusion of Kuwait in
Patrushev's statement is interesting, but only to a limited extent. This is
an old story.

In part, this is about a difference in perspectives. The United States
claims that it is simply supporting democratic movements. Moscow's view is that this is an internal affair for these countries, that the United States
is interfering with its sphere of influence and that the U.S. love of
democracy is simply a useful justification for power politics. All of this
is not, as we have been saying, particularly new.

What is new -- and extremely important -- is that the head of the FSB said
this in Russia's Duma. He undoubtedly said this with the knowledge and
approval of President Vladimir Putin, and he effectively linked Russian
interests to those of Belarus -- the state that has evolved the least since
the fall of the Soviet Union. It is also Russia's buffer with NATO and is of
vital strategic importance.

But most important is that the charge was made. It is now official that
Russia views the United States and others as conspiring against its
interests, and that the various democratic non-governmental organizations are actually operating as agents of the CIA. Put differently, the democratic movement in the former Soviet Union is perceived as a plot by Western intelligence to destroy Russia.

Now, if that is the Russian view, obviously some consequences follow. If
these NGOs are in fact CIA fronts, then their suppression is not only
permissible, but imperative. But more important still is the fact that if
these charges are believed, the Russian government must believe that the United States in particular is its enemy. Given what was said and who said it, it is hard to draw any conclusion other than that the Kremlin believes that the United States is plotting to destroy Russia -- and that Russia is going to resist.

We call that a cold war. It may not look and feel like the big one, but if
the Russians believe the charges they are making (and they do) and the
Americans won't back off (and they won't), that will pit the covert forces
of the United States against the covert forces of Russia. Caught in the
middle will be political forces in third countries from Belarus to Central
Asia, as well as, logically, liberal forces inside of Russia. Moreover, if
this speech is to be taken seriously, the counter-action by the Russians
should start quickly, since delay would be irresponsible.

It will be interesting in the extreme as to whether any senior Russian
official reinterprets these statements to give them a more limited or benign spin, or whether they will simply let them stand. The former would indicate that Patrushev simply got carried away; the latter, that this is a
calculated declaration of clandestine warfare, with NGOs caught in the
middle.

This situation is getting very serious, very fast. At the least, we know
that President George W. Bush must have really convinced Putin that he is
gunning for Russia.

Woof All:

Our editor, Ron "Night Owl" Gabriel tells me the hero here used to be a bodyguard for Marcos.

Crafty Dog
====================================


LOS ANGELES; Alleged Carjacker Meets Match; [Home Edition]
Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sep 7, 2001. pg. B.5
 Full Text (204   words)
(Copyright (c) 2001 Los Angeles Times)
A stranded motorist apparently got more than he bargained for when he allegedly tried to rob a 65-year-old good Samaritan who stopped to lend him a hand in West Covina, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Thursday.

Authorities said Anthony Salinas, 19, of Azusa ran out of gas in a stolen car on a West Covina street Wednesday and was trying to push it to a gas station when Elio Bongon, a janitor from Fontana, happened by in his pickup truck. Bongon offered Salinas and his girlfriend a ride to the station and gave them $10 to buy gas.

At the gas station, according to police, Salinas pulled what turned out to be a BB gun and ordered Bongon to give up his money and his truck. Bongon refused and attempted to disarm Salinas, they said. The gun discharged during the struggle, with a BB striking Salinas in the shoulder, police said. They said Bongon wrestled the gun away from Salinas and began hitting him on the head with it.

Salinas fled but was arrested a short distance away.

The district attorney's office Thursday charged Salinas with carjacking, along with attempted carjacking and second-degree robbery in connection with the encounter with Bongon.

San Gabriel Valley Tribune (West Covina, CA)

==============

Same story as covered by a more local paper
December 13, 2001
Carjacker gets 5 years in prison
Victim says he does regret trying to help Salinas
Author: Bill Hetherman Staff Writer
Section: Local
 

POMONA - An Azusa man who allegedly tried to rob a good Samaritan was sentenced Wednesday to five years and 10 months in prison.

Pomona Superior Court Judge Jack P. Hunt imposed the term on Anthony Salinas, 19. Salinas pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of carjacking and attempted carjacking. An attempted robbery count was dropped.

The good Samaritan, 66-year-old Elio Bongon, was once a bodyguard for then-Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.

Using his training in the martial arts, Bongon, of Fontana, disarmed Salinas after the defendant pointed a weapon at him that turned out to be a BB gun.

Bongon had a mixed reaction Wednesday to the sentencing.

"Actually, I forgive him, but he has to pay for what he has done," Bongon said. "I hope he will repent and not come out trying to get revenge against me."

Salinas' lawyer, Joseph Gibbons, said Wednesday his client is sorry for what he did and that he was under t! he influence of methamphetamine at the time.

"I've seen so many young people with drug problems," Gibbons said. "My client is not really a violent guy."

Three days before the attack on Bongon, Salinas stole a car from Javier Gonzales in the parking lot of a convenience store on Gladstone Street in Azusa, police said.

Salinas had one hand on what appeared to be the handle of a gun in his pocket, Gonzales told Azusa police.

Salinas was driving Gonzales' car when it ran out of gasoline on Sunset Avenue about 1 p.m. Sept. 5. Bongon, a janitor at Piano City at 210 N. Sunset Ave. in West Covina, helped Salinas push the car into the parking lot of the business.

"He told me he had no money to buy gasoline, so I gave him $10," Bongon testified at an earlier preliminary hearing.

Bongon said he drove Salinas to two places to buy a gas container. Without warning, Salinas pulled out a gun and pointed it at Bongon's right side, he said.

Bo! ngon said he grabbed Salinas' arm, got the gun away and beat him with the weapon until he ran away.

Police caught Salinas a short distance away on Yaleton Avenue when he pretended to be visiting someone and knocked on the door of a home he chose randomly, officers said.

Bongon said Wednesday he does not regret trying to help Salinas and will come to the aid of someone else in need if it happens again.

"I surely will," Bongon said. "I don't think everyone would, but in my opinion I have to do it."

-- Bill Hetherman can be reached at (626) 962-8811, Ext. 2236, or by e-mail at <A
HEF=mailto:bill.hetherman@sgvn.com/>bill.hetherman@sgvn.com[/url] .
(c) 2001 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.
Record Number: 1253649

http://www.reason.com/0505/fe.ak.straight.shtml

Here's an example of Russia being a pain in the a$$ for the US in a region outside of its true concerns , , ,
==================================


The Specter of Russian-Made Fighter Jets in Venezuela
May 05, 2005 15 09  GMT



Summary

Venezuela reportedly is looking to purchase Su-27 Flanker fighters from Russia instead of the less-capable Mig-29SMT Fulcrums it previously considered. This development would constitute a provocative move by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez -- one that would have serious implications in Latin America and beyond.

Analysis

Venezuela has expressed interest in acquiring two squadrons of Su-27 Flanker air-superiority fighters from Russia, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported May 4. The Venezuelans apparently are interested in the base model Su-27, which has been out of production in Russia since Sukhoi Corp. began producing the Su-30 variants for the export market. If a contract for the reported $250 million deal is signed, the aircraft -- 20 to 24 fighters -- would be transferred to the Venezuelan air force (FAV) from the Russian air force inventory.

Venezuela's interest in the Su-27 is significant in that acquiring the aircraft would make the FAV the most potent air force in South America and the Caribbean. The Flanker has a much longer range than the Mig-29SMT Fulcrum -- which Caracas also is considering purchasing from Russia -- meaning it can operate much further from Venezuelan air space. With a combat radius of nearly 1,000 miles, a Caracas-based Su-27 could participate in dogfights over Colombia, Cuba, most of Central America and the entire Caribbean Sea. Caracas' efforts to acquire advanced weaponry will alter the security environment in Latin America -- and give the United States more to ponder as it figures out how to deal with Venezuela.

Whether the FAV chooses the MiG-29s, the Su-27s or both, the new fighters will replace its aging F-16s, which the United States provided in the early 1980s. The F-16s, which the FAV deploys in two squadrons based at El Libertador air base in Maracay, spend most of their time on the ground because of low serviceability. The U.S. government stopped supplying the FAV with spare parts for its F-16s in 2001 after the Chavez government suspended military relations with Washington. Although the FAV has managed to keep some F-16s in the air despite maintenance difficulties resulting from the embargo -- a point of pride for the FAV -- the jets' long-term serviceability is in doubt.

In February, Caracas purchased 10 Mi-17 and Mi-26 helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles in a deal worth $120 million. Unlike these purchases, primarily intended to support border and internal security requirements, Su-27s would have implications far beyond Venezuela's borders.

The Su-27 is a long-range, advanced fighter capable of deploying powerful weapons. With even two squadrons of such jets, the FAV could dominate the air forces of neighboring countries. In other words, it would become the most powerful air force in Latin America, far surpassing the capabilities of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil.

Colombia always has eyed Venezuela with suspicion, but bilateral relations have deteriorated since Chavez came to power. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez has struck a nonchalant pose publicly, claiming he is not worried about the regional security implications of Chavez's arms-buying spree. Colombian media, however, recently disclosed an internal Defense Ministry memorandum that confirms Uribe is quite concerned about the Venezuelan arms build up. The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush also has voiced its concerns repeatedly in Latin America, Madrid and Moscow.






Caracas initially had expressed interest in purchasing the MiG-29SMT Fulcrum, which has a range of 465 miles if external fuel tanks are not attached. The external tanks, which have a negative impact on the fighter's performance, also take up space on the aircraft that could be used for weapons. The Su-27's range on internal fuel alone is almost twice that of the MiG-29. With no need to carry cumbersome external tanks, the Flanker can participate in aerial combat with all of its external stores stations available for missiles.

Meanwhile, in even considering the sale, Russia has a "weapon" with which to exert geopolitical pressure on the United States. In response to recent U.S. inroads along Russia's periphery, Moscow might be deciding to muddy the waters elsewhere for the United States -- and Venezuela, as a sore spot for Washington already, is a good launching pad. Certainly, forcing the United States to channel its resources from Central Asia and the Caucasus in order to counter Russian-caused problems elsewhere would relieve Moscow of some U.S. pressure.

Russia had once hinted at supplying Tu-22M Backfire bombers to China, but later backed off the sale. More recently, Moscow agreed to supply Syria with the Strelets surface-to-air missile system, despite objections from the United States and Israel. Of course, the Su-27 deal could be called off, or scaled back like the Chinese Backfire deals have been, but the political implications of the sale of Su-27s to a regime that is openly hostile to Washington would keep Washington off balance without a fighter going to Venezuela.

Relations between Caracas and Washington have deteriorated markedly since Chavez came to power, especially as Venezuela moved closer to Cuba, aligning its military planning with Havana's. In fact, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently said she considers relations between Washington and Caracas beyond hope of improving. With the United States beginning to refocus its attention to issues outside the Middle East, Chavez believes his country could be targeted for U.S. intervention.

Long-range, heavily armed Su-27s in the FAV's possession, however, would complicate any U.S. military intervention in the region. Air superiority -- gaining and maintaining total control of the air over the battlefield -- is essential to U.S. military planning. In any U.S. operation against Venezuela, the formidable defensive obstacle presented by squadrons of Su-27s would have to be overcome before air superiority could be achieved. Moreover, the Su-27's long range would force U.S. air and naval units to operate further from Venezuelan skies.

If Chavez can acquire surplus Russian air force Su-27s for less than the cost of new MiG-29s, he certainly would get more bang for his buck, which would help ease the fiscal strain of his rearmament program. Combined with a huge militia reserve armed with new Kalashnikov and older FAL rifles, the Su-27 would provide another layer of defense between Chavez and Washington.

The specter of Chavez's air force operating the Su-27 would give Washington -- and its allies in the region -- plenty to think about.

Mmm, not too impresed by this one Buz.

Stratfor thinks that the continued viability of Russia is in question.  It sees the recent failure of Russia to control the election in the Ukraine (including its presumed role in the attempted hit on the man who is now the President of the Ukraine, as well as various consumated hits) as leaving Russia in a nearly untenable situation-- increased by other democratic revolutions/movements in the FSU and Russia's near abroad.

Strat predicts that Russia will do its best to be a pain in the ass elsewhere (Syria, Iran for example) in an attempt to cause us to back off in "its" sphere.  

Wonder if its a coincidence that Bush chose Russian speaking Russian expert Condi Rice for Secy of State?

Also, as the piece gets around to noting, India and the US are growing closer in various ways.

TERRORISM BRIEF

The Successful Prosecution of a Far-Reaching U.S. Indictment
April 27, 2005 1747 GMT

A U.S. district court in Alexandria, Va., on April 26 convicted Islamist
ideologue Ali al-Timimi on 10 felony charges stemming from his efforts to
encourage others to bear arms against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Al-Timimi, the primary lecturer at the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., urged his followers in late 2001 to travel to Afghanistan and defend the Taliban regime against the impending U.S. invasion. His conviction on a September 2004 indictment has proven that inspiring others to take part in militant activities can be prosecuted successfully.

According to the indictment, al-Timimi urged at least four of the 11 members of the Virginia Jihad Network (VJN) to take up arms against the United States and its allies. In doing so, al-Timimi apparently arranged for some VJN members to travel to the Pakistani section of Kashmir to train with the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group. During their training, some of the men fired assault rifles -- hence the firearms charges. No VJN member actually fought anywhere, but the LeT has been connected to other Islamist militant groups, which would explain a charge against al-Timimi for attempting to contribute services to the Taliban.

Rather than organize militant activity, al-Timimi provided the intellectual
impetus to others to take action against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The
conviction is an example of the post-Sept. 11 shift in the United States
toward more aggressive action against those who provide support of any kind to terrorist or militant organizations. In comparison, the United Kingdom still maintains a rather lax legal attitude toward those who support terrorist activities. London recently tightened some laws that deal with aiding terrorist groups, but a major law that would have broadened police powers to detain suspected terrorists was voted down in February.

Another example of the U.S. shift is the case involving Lynne F. Stewart,
the attorney for blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman who was convicted in February 2004 for her part in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. She faced five counts of providing material aid to terrorism for facilitating communication between the sheikh and his followers outside of prison and militants in Egypt.

Stewart allegedly used her privilege as Rahman's lawyer to bring one of his followers, Mohamed Yousry, along with her to meetings with the sheikh at his Minnesota prison. Rahman would pass instructions to his followers through Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar. The two co-defendants in Stewart's trial also were convicted on various charges.

Al-Timimi was born and raised in the United States, as were a number of his followers. Among them were Randall Royer and Donald Surratt, who pleaded guilty along with others in March 2004 to terrorism-related charges for training at the LeT camp to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Both were converts to Islam, and Surratt was a former U.S. Marine. In another case, U.S.-born Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 23-year-old from Falls Church, was arrested in Saudi Arabia and accused of being an al Qaeda member. He also was indicted in federal court for plotting to assassinate U.S. President George W. Bush. As U.S. citizens, they all were subject to anti-sedition and treason laws.

According to a 2004 survey conducted by the Institute of Social Policy and
Understanding, 8 percent of the 6 million to 7 million American Muslims
identify with any kind of Wahhabist causes. Of those who do, an even smaller minority support jihadist causes. Of course, as the Royer and Surratt cases have shown, an Islamic upbringing is not a prerequisite for supporting -- or taking part -- in jihadist causes.

Those two cases -- and especially the al-Timimi and Stewart cases -- have
shown however, that the U.S. legal system is now ready and willing to come down hard against those who never commit acts of aggression themselves, but whose speech or actions contribute to terrorism.
======================

TERRORISM BRIEF

European Islamist Extremism and the U.S. Security Threat
April 28, 2005 1720 GMT

The U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing April 27 to assess the rise of Islamist extremism in Europe. The hearing, sponsored jointly by the
Committee on International Relations and the Subcommittee on Europe and Emerging Threats, is indicative of mounting U.S. concern over the threat posed by Islamist extremists to Washington's allies in Europe -- and to the United States itself. As European countries continue to isolate their Muslim communities, Islamist extremism shows few signs of abating.

Norwegian televangelist Runar Sogaard reportedly sought police protection
after he enraged many Muslims in Sweden by calling the Islamic prophet
Mohammed a "confused pedophile" -- referring to the prophet's marriage to a 9-year-old girl -- in a March 20 sermon in Stockholm.

Following the sermon, a letter posted on a jihadist Web site and addressed
to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, implored al-Zarqawi to come to the defense of Muslims in Sweden. The letter was signed "The weakened Muslims in Sweden," implying the writer's belief that the country's 350,000 Muslims are being persecuted. The author also claimed that Sogaard would soon be killed, ". just like in Holland with the Dutchman ." The "Dutchman" is a direct reference to Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was shot and stabbed Nov. 2, 2004, in Amsterdam, allegedly by an Islamist militant who reportedly was upset over a film van Gogh made that took a critical view of Islam.

The chairman of Sweden's council of imams, Hassan Moussa, issued a statement April 22 advising Swedish Muslims against taking the law into their own hands even though, he said, Sogaard's comments "injure millions of Muslims all over the world."

The atmosphere in Western Europe is conducive to the development of
extremist views in young Muslims for several reasons. First, lax immigration policies have allowed those with radical and isolationist tendencies to settle in European Muslim communities. Second, many Muslim communities find themselves isolated from the mainstream society in the European countries where they have taken root, which leaves them vulnerable to the introduction of extremist ideologies. Some Muslims who became radicalized in Europe have ended up committing acts against the United States. For example, Mohammed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, both spent time in European universities, where, according to the 9/11 commission report, they came in contact with Islamist radicals.

Furthermore, Claude Moniquet, director of the European Strategic
Intelligence and Security Center, said during the joint committee hearing in Washington that some EU countries have been slow to reform the
asylum-seeking process and to coordinate among themselves to share
information about possible threats within their respective Muslim
communities.

These lapses can be exploited by Islamist radicals to gain footholds in the
EU countries' otherwise law-abiding Muslim communities. As long as these
conditions persist, Islamist extremism in Europe will continue to be a
security problem for the United States.

The updated list of US TSA permitted and prohibited items on US flights
may be found at:

http://www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Prohibited_English_4-1-2005_v2.pdf


Cattle prods and crowbars may not be carried onboard, and neither are martial arts or self-defense items permitted in carry-on luggage... including billy clubs, black jacks, brass knuckles, kubatons, night sticks, nunchakus or othermartial arts weatpons.

Sparks store clerk hurt after battling robber
Staff Report RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
4/20/2005 12:23 am

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A store employee was injured Tuesday during what appeared to be an attempted robbery at the Dhaka Convenience Store in the 2100 block of Victorian Avenue, Sparks police said.

The employee suffered head injuries and was transported by REMSA to Washoe Medical Center, where he was in the intensive care unit, police said.

It?s unclear whether any cash or merchandise was taken during the incident that happened about noon, police said.

An investigation found that a man allegedly took an aluminum baseball bat into the store with the intent of robbing it, police said.

The store employee also had a bat behind the counter and the two began fighting, police said.

Police said an employee from a neighboring business chased the man to a getaway car parked around the corner and provided a license plate information to a police dispatcher.

A 19-year-old man was being sought, police said. A warrant had not been issued Tuesday night.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Sparks police at 353-2225 and reference case No. 05-4877 or Secret Witness, which is anonymous and translates most languages, at 322-4900.

Geopolitical Intelligence Report:  From Islamism to Post Islamism
.................................................................

THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

From Islamism to Post-Islamism
April 18, 2005   1424 GMT

By Kamran Bokhari

Amid continuing efforts to resolve its post-Sept. 11 security crisis, the
United States and European countries increasingly are dealing with what once
would have been an unlikely array of political partners in the Muslim and
Arab worlds: Islamist groups.

Because they advocate the imposition of Islamic law in national politics,
Islamists -- or what Westerners formerly have referred to as Islamic
fundamentalists -- might at first glance seem to have little, if any, role
in the Bush administration's second-term push for democratization throughout
the world. But they are, in fact, among the United States' most potent
potential partners as Washington and others seek to conclude the jihadist
war and lay a foundation for relations with the Muslim world.

These efforts, which mark a significant shift in Washington's own
approach -- particularly in the Middle East -- will impact what has been a
long-running competition within political Islam: the struggle of moderate
Islamists of many varieties, who make up the bulk of the Muslim world, to
attain power without sacrificing their religious ideals or credentials.

As a political ideology, Islamism achieved its first major victory with the
Iranian revolution in 1979. At that time, in the context of the Cold War, it
was not perceived as the next great challenge for the United States or the
West. That perception emerged only with the Sept. 11 attacks and ensuing
war. For the past three and a half years, media attention to the issue has
created a perception -- correctly or otherwise -- that Islamism is
proliferating and poses a growing security threat.

Islamists make up a significant portion of the Muslim political landscape --
supported by believers who are concerned about the fate of Islamic values
and culture in the modern age, when Western and particularly American ideals
and culture seem to permeate the globe. Nevertheless, Islamist groups have
had little success in translating their popularity into votes and actual
political power.

But that is slowly beginning to change.

Mechanics of Moderation

Though logic dictates that some forms of radical and militant beliefs will
persist, Islamism on the whole increasingly is moving toward moderation.
This is evident in many areas -- including Lebanon and the Palestinian
territories, where groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are bidding to play a
part in mainstream politics.

This shift has little to do with any external factors. Instead, it is part
of a natural evolution for groups that thus far have been unable to capture
the imagination of the masses sufficiently to take political power. Turkey
is the only Muslim state in which an Islamist group of sorts -- the Justice
and Development Party (AK) -- controls the government, but even the AK can
be considered an "Islamist-lite" party, since it is a more pragmatic and
increasingly moderate version of its predecessors, the Virtue, Welfare,
National Salvation, and National Order parties going as far back as 1970.

As democracies around the world have shown before, ideology is important to
voters, but not more important than the material interests of the people.
Politically, ideology is a medium that allows a people to secure their
interests; if it does not succeed in doing that, it will remain a peripheral
concern.

For example, in the Middle East, Fatah has become an acceptable partner for
the United States and Israel at the peace talks table, but support among the
Palestinians is splintered because the government has not been able to build
sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, Hamas commands a great deal of local
support because of the social services it provides; but in order to achieve
power within the mainstream, the militant group ultimately will have to
compromise its ideological stance on the existence of a Jewish state.

Defining Islamist Movements

Though its intellectual roots stretch back to the social, economic and
political upheavals of the late 19th century, Islamism emerged as a
political movement in 1928, when the Ikhwan al Muslimeen (Muslim
Brotherhood) was founded in Egypt, and spread from there to British India,
where Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Group/Association) was launched in 1941. By
the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the Muslim countries had gained
independence from their European colonial rulers, these organizations and
their counterparts in other states became serious political entities.

Islamist groups distinguished themselves from others -- which included
secular, nationalist and Marxist Muslim groups, to name a few -- by seeking
to establish or re-establish what they argued was an Islamic state in their
home countries. In other words, they wanted the state to implement Islamic
law. Beyond that, however, there is no agreement even today on exactly what
an Islamic state is or should be.

Not only are the reasons for this disagreement too vast to be explored here,
they also are less important than the means by which the various brands of
Islamists seek to achieve their goals. Though it is their attitudes toward
their religion and modernity that makes Islamists "moderate," "radical" or
"militant," it is their approach toward establishing their political goals
that defines their relationships with other Muslim and non-Muslim entities.

A vast majority of Islamists in almost all Muslim states are moderates: They
pursue the establishment of an Islamic polity through democratic means. At
the other end of the Islamist spectrum are the militant groups who want to
fight the incumbent regimes to attain power. During the 1990s, the militants
went transnational and began fighting the United States -- the main support
behind the existing Muslim regimes -- as a tactic toward this end goal. Al
Qaeda and its allies around the world represent the transnational jihadists.

In the middle are several groups that can be viewed as nonviolent but that
espouse a radical agenda. For example, Hizb al-Tahrir -- founded in 1952 by
Palestinians living in Jordan and now present in many parts of the world --
rejects the use of armed struggle but seeks to overturn the political
nation-state structure in order to re-establish the caliphate.

Intra-Islamist Contention

While the moderate, radical and militant labels refer to political
attitudes, the behavior of various Islamist groups can be classified as
either "integrationist," "isolationist" or "interactionist."

Moderate Islamists are integrationists, in the sense that they embrace the
existing structure and function of the state -- they are willing to work
within constitutional bounds to establish their Islamic government.
Moreover, they engage society by organizing themselves into various civil
society groups and reaching out to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood,
Jamiat-i-Islami and its counterparts in South Asia are key examples.

Radical Islamists are interactionists -- they interact with society to
foment popular revolution that would destroy the state power structure they
reject as illegitimate. They also seek out sympathetic elements within
existing state structures to support their efforts to oust those regimes.
But most radical groups reject both democratic and the existing autocratic
forms of government as un-Islamic, because they are secular systems. They
seek instead to restore the old caliphal/emiratic forms of governance --
though with some modifications to fit current realities. However, they also
reject the use of violence to further their political interests.

Militant Islamists -- most of whom are jihadists -- are isolationists. Not
only do they want to fight the state, but their operational needs for
secrecy preclude them from engaging the masses. Moreover, militant Islamists
subscribe to a top-down approach: The idea is to capture power and then
Islamize the state and society, Taliban-style.

Now, there are some exceptions to these rules. For example, both the
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite movement
Hezbollah maintain large militias and engage in violence, but they do not
direct their strikes at the Muslim state. Nor do they fit neatly into the
"jihadist" mold cast by al Qaeda, for various ideological, religious and
political reasons.

Their militant wings notwithstanding, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah seek to
establish an Islamic authority through armed struggle. They have routinely
acted as spoilers in the context of political developments from which they
were marginalized or excluded -- and as is now evident in the Middle East,
they seek to advance their position through electoral means.

Moderation Leading to Interface

Now, with the United States actively searching for political as well as
military solutions to its post-Sept.-11 security problems, the odds of
success for Islamists are greater than ever before. By adopting a more
democratic approach, it becomes possible for the Islamists not only to begin
working with other domestic groups, but to open up a channel of
communication with the United States as well. This already is occurring in
Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

The Bush administration's declarations that its war on terrorism does not
constitute a war against Islam or Muslims are much more than rhetoric.
Military action has been focused against transnational and local or regional
jihadists that have directly targeted the United States or its interests.
There is nothing in Bush doctrine per se that precludes Washington from
working with moderate Islamists -- but there are fears and uncertainty about
how to deal with nonviolent radical groups, which have evaded the spotlight
amid the manhunts for militants and political negotiations with others. The
fact that these radicals eschew violence but espouse revolutions that might
run counter to U.S. interests will complicate policymaking in this area for
some time.

Meanwhile, it is the moderate Islamists who present Washington's best option
for the future. As history has shown, non-Islamist moderates with whom the
United States initially thought to partner -- for example, Pakistani
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Saudi monarchy -- do not necessarily
enjoy the support of the masses. Now, the strategy is to engage certain
types of Islamists in political dialogue, as Washington looks to use the
weight of the majority to counter the radical and militant fringes.

Toward a Post-Islamist Era?

Islamists always represented a small fraction of the more than 1 billion
Muslims worldwide, and militants are an even smaller subset. This situation
has been impacted, however, by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent events.

Now, militant Islamists are on the run, and the search for viable
alternatives -- as well as democracy movements -- is lending itself to
dialogue between moderate Islamist actors and Washington.

At the intellectual and ideological level, integrationists, interactionists
and isolationists are all locked in a struggle for supremacy. The
integrationists have the upper hand, since the militants are busy trying to
save their skins and the radicals -- though heavy on diagnosis and dogma --
offer no tangible solutions to existing political problems.

However, the outcome of the struggle will depend, to a great extent, on
Washington, which is fast moving away from an emphasis on military
operations to one on calibrated negotiations. The U.S. contact with the
moderates does risk delegitimizing them, but concrete political results and
social improvements in the Arab/Muslim world would be the antidote.

The marginalization of the isolationists and the interactionists will allow
the integrationists to gain the upper hand within the Islamist camp. But
that does not necessarily mean that in the end the Islamist agenda will win
the day. Once they have made the transition from opposition to dominance,
these groups -- as we are seeing in Iraq -- likely will not be able to push
their religious agendas too far.

As a practical matter, Islamists now are undergoing an ideological
transformation. The heretofore heavy and rigid emphasis on doctrine is
giving way under concerns about how best to turn doctrine into action.

When the dust settles, the Islamists likely will come to terms with the fact
that the Quran and the Sunnah merely provide broad normative principles,
which are applicable only through broad-based discussions, debates and
negotiations -- a process facilitated by a democratic framework.

As belief in a specific and timeless Islamic polity crumbles, an age of
post-Islamism likely will emerge. In other words, the Muslim world is on the
verge of embracing a version of modernity that is in keeping with its
Islamic ethos. This would differ markedly from the periods of secularism and
Islamism that followed the death of the caliphal age.

In this post-Islamist age, Islamist and non-Islamist Muslim powerbrokers
will mingle. And in this environment, pragmatism will temper ideology.

(c) 2005 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

Great, Great Grandmother Shoots Robbery Suspect

POSTED: 1:32 pm EDT April 14, 2005
UPDATED: 5:47 pm EDT April 14, 2005

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A 64-year-old great, great grandmother behind the counter at a Westside convenience store knew when to do when an masked robber came in Thursday afternoon and fired two shots: she grabbed her gun and shot back.

"It scared the hell out of me. It really did," Janet Grammar said. "He shot twice at the back, past behind my head and he was getting ready to shoot me in my head. I had a gun under the counter, and I pulled it out and shot him in the chest."

Grammar told investigators she was pretty sure she hit him twice, and police found a blood trail and a gun in the Apple Gate Food Store. The suspect managed to run from the scene, prompting an intense search that included a helicopter and K-9 units and caused a brief lockdown of Wesconnett Elementary School, just across the street.

The search was cancelled with the suspect showed up less than an hour later at the emergency room of Orange Park Medical Center, police said. The suspect, who police have not named, was stabilized and flown by air ambulance to Shands-Jacksonville Medical Center.

The Apple Gate's owner said the store has been robbed three time in the last two weeks, and he think this suspect is the same man who's robbed him before.

"She was just defending herself, that was all," customer Charles Schoff said. "I'd probably do the same thing."

Grammar's twin sister, Denise Overstreet, told Channel 4's Dan Leveton she's not surprised her sister wasn't intimidated by an armed, masked man.

"She's not scared of her own shadow, let's put it that way," Overstreet said. "Maybe this will wake people up and maybe not come to this little store -- a mean lady works there."

There's no word on the condition of the suspect or what charges he'll be facing.  


http://www.news4jax.com/news/4379897/detail.html

a  friend writes
-------
If you thought the Google Maps were rather interesting, check these out (as it takes it in for a deeper picture imo).

http://terraserver.microsoft.com - Can view aerial pictures of properties where you can zoom in to see the neighborhood.

http://yp.a9.com - Can view business addresses / commercial properties from the front along with viewing what the other businesses around the area look like.

THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

The Push for Democracy: Ending the 'Karzai Effect'
April 06, 2005  1411 GMT

By Kamran Bokhari

As we recently noted, Washington has moved beyond the military stage of the U.S.-jihadist war and is now in the phase of negotiated settlements. Historically, there has been a problem with such accommodations --  particularly where Islamist forces are involved. This is something we often refer to as "the Karzai effect."

However, the second Bush administration, in its push for democracy around the world, appears to have found a way to achieve its ends without necessarily undermining its Arab/Muslim counterpart. Not only is Washington willing to gamble on the outcome of "messy" democratization, but it also is willing to go where it consciously has avoided going before -- facilitating the rise of Islamist (albeit relatively moderate) forces to power in Muslim states.

It should be remembered that during the first of the Bush administrations, in June 1992, an assistant secretary of state, Edward Djerejian, caveated Washington's support for the spread of democracy, noting somewhat ironically that the United States opposed systems characterized by "one man, one vote, one time." Djerejian was, of course, not referring to the time-honored "one man, one vote" tradition of the United States, but to the landslide victory of Algeria's Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front) in first-round elections there. His remark -- which expressed U.S. fears that an Islamist group would use legitimate elections to take power and then slam and lock the door shut behind it -- came to be viewed as the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward Islamism.

Like so many other notions, that was shattered by the events of Sept. 11,
2001. The transnational threat posed by militant Islamists prompted the
search for moderate voices within the Muslim world. Of those that emerged --  from secularists, regimes and traditionalists -- it is the Islamists the Bush administration has chosen to work with.

This can be seen in several examples from the Middle East: First, Islamist
(Shiite) forces in Iraq and in Iran were the United States' principal allies
in facilitating the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Second, Washington needed
political partners in Iraq who could deliver on a deal -- not secular
leaders who had no control over the street. Third, U.S. policymakers have begun to understand the factionalization within the Islamist movement and how to exploit it to advantage.

In stark contrast to the position voiced during his father's presidency,
President George W. Bush's administration is issuing bold statements. In
April 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration wanted to see an Islamic democracy emerge in Iraq -- pointing to Turkey's quasi-Islamist Justice and Development Party regime as a model. And in October 2004, Bush said that though it wasn't his first choice, Washington would accept an Islamic government, if democratically elected.

In Afghanistan, outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been
overseeing the integration of "moderate" Taliban forces into the political
process to boost President Hamid Karzai's standing within his own majority Pushtun community.

Now, the Bush administration has upped the ante. Not only has Bush set the spread of democracy as the cornerstone of his second-term foreign policy agenda, but the president in the State of the Union address called directly for Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- two of the United States' closest allies in the Middle East -- to democratize their authoritarian governments.

There is no doubt that the U.S. preference for democratic political systems, at least as applied in the West, is motivated by philosophy and ideology, but the push for democracy in other regions is thwarted by a host of structural and functional problems. Moreover, as with any country, national interest trumps altruism. Thus, the U.S. push for greater democratization in the world in general and in Arab/Muslim countries in particular is motivated primarily by the need and desire to safeguard U.S. national interests and its superpower status around the globe.

Over the long term, democratic processes conceivably could bring order to chaos. Autocratic structures breed social, political and economic
instability, especially in times of political transition. Because of this,
it is also more difficult to predict political turnovers and successions,
since any cracks in the structure can give hidden opposition forces a chance to explode onto the scene. As the world's sole superpower, the United States finds this problematic, since these situations can force it to intervene politically, economically and, of course, militarily.

In the longer term, democracies provide much greater stability, while
authoritarian systems are far superior at controlling disruptions in the
short term. By pushing for democracy -- even in the Middle East -- the
United States is tacitly signaling that the security crisis touched off by
the Sept. 11 attacks is over and that Washington feels sufficiently secure
and in control to weather short-term disruptions in political systems
abroad.

In the case of the greater Middle East region, whose modern history is
replete with conflicts, Washington appears no longer interested in
short-term, patchwork solutions involving a strongman or proxy group. This is not to say the United States will be pulling its support from the
incumbent authoritarian regimes forthwith. Far from it. Washington is trying to strike a balance by pressuring current rulers to gradually open up the system and, meanwhile, to develop mechanisms whereby alternative and viable leadership can emerge as the autocrats depart the scene, avoiding chaos scenarios in which the United States must intervene on some level.

That explains the logic -- but what about the timing of this initiative? The
answer sheds important light on the future direction of the Middle East. We already have noted that the success in Afghanistan and even more so in Iraq has prompted the Bush administration to extend the democratic experiment to the entire region. Meanwhile, natural forces -- read, old age -- are making regime change inevitable in a number of Middle Eastern states in the near term.

This is most obvious in Egypt, where the failing health of President Hosni
Mubarak will force him to appoint a successor. Saudi King Fahd is monarch in name only; his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz, runs affairs in Riyadh. But between them, the crown prince and three immediate princes -- Defense Minister Sultan, Interior Minister Nayef and Riyadh Gov. Salman, who are full brothers of the king and the elite of the Sudairi Seven -- range in age from 69 to 75. It is likely that they, along with Abdullah, could die in quick succession, opening up a power contest between other factions of the House of Saud.

While democratization in the Saudi kingdom is at best a very long-term hope, given the conservative Wahhabist culture and the deeply entrenched monarchical system, other areas, such as Jordan, Syria, Libya and the Persian Gulf states, are in similar situations: The existing autocratic system could be swept away should a wave of democratic fervor strike the region -- as it did in Eastern Central Europe and select areas of the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more recently in the last year in the Caucuses and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, Washington faces the prospect that it could be forced to have
dealings with Islamist militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. As the Palestinian state begins to take shape -- with the Israeli withdrawals and Palestinian Legislative Council elections in July -- Hamas will be playing a greater role in daily life. In fact, it is expected to make a significant showing in the summer elections.

Officials in Washington understand that at some point -- sooner rather than later -- the Palestinian authority and eventually the state will be based on a power-sharing arrangement between the secular Fatah and the Islamists. Nonetheless, Washington continues to push for democratization of the Palestinian political landscape. In Lebanon, the Bush administration has dropped hints that it is willing to deal with the Shiite militant Islamist movement Hezbollah.

These cases are both a bit complicated, since neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has yet made the shift from being an armed resistance organization to a fully respectable political group. But the very fact that the Bush administration is willing to give these Islamist actors some space on the political stage is quite significant.

It is not just that Washington needs to work with political groups who
command grassroots support; Hamas and Hezbollah exist by default and must be dealt with somehow. The theory is that those who demonstrate some semblance of willingness to play by the rules of democratic politics can be given a stake in the system, which will eventually moderate and temper their radicalism -- which is fueled by exclusion and the need to engage in the politics of protest from the outside.

If successful, this shift on Washington's part could be highly effective in
establishing a bulwark against al Qaeda or other transnational Islamist
militants. In other words, it is Islamist -- not secular -- forces that not
only can stem the tide of the al Qaeda phenomenon but act as a buffer
against a possible jihadist resurgence. Of course, the Bush administration
would not have dared the attempt if it was clear that democratization would bring jihadist groups into power -- Djerejian's principle still stands. It was only after realizing that al Qaeda has been unable to topple any Muslim regimes, and that it is growing increasingly weak, that Washington could safely announce the democracy initiative.

Even with the moderate Islamists, Washington is moving cautiously -- making sure Islamists do not end up dominating the system. In Iraq, this was apparent with the tinkering of the electoral laws and the Transitional
Administrative Law -- the country's interim constitution -- by U.S. civilian
administrator Paul Bremer to make a mixed government unavoidable.

On a final note, it is interesting that democratization could, in a
significant way, stem the tide of anti-American sentiments in other parts of the world. If political forces backed by the masses come to power as a
result of the Bush administration's push for democracy, this will over time
improve the U.S. image in foreign eyes.

For this to happen, the Bush administration knows it needs to extend olive branches, which it has done by appointing new officials at the Pentagon and State Department -- and most obviously by removing some of the most hawkish neoconservatives from policymaking positions. The reshuffle is Washington's way of trying to prepare the ground for the growth of democracy, without making any new governments appear to be puppets or otherwise engineered pro-U.S. regimes. The appointment of Bush confidante Karen Hughes to lead the public diplomacy drive in the Middle East/Muslim world further exemplifies this trend.

In essence, Washington understands that if deals are going to be cut, the
United States first must create an environment conducive to deal making.
This means U.S. proposals must not be viewed as immediate threats to the survival of Arab or Muslim regimes that have assisted its war against al Qaeda, and that anti-Americanism within the region must be contained within acceptable levels.

If democratization and engaging moderate Islamists works, Washington just might be able to rid itself, for good, of the Karzai effect.

(c) 2005 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

Military Amputees Find Camaraderie
Associated Press
March 29, 2005

FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas - Cpl. Isaiah Ramirez endured the rigors of Marine Corps basic training and two tours of high-risk duty in Iraq.

But since his lower right leg was shot off in January, Ramirez says he'll be happy just to walk again.

Ramirez, 21, took his first steps toward that goal this month at Brooke Army Medical Center, where two dozen amputees wounded in the Iraq war have become a tightly knit group as they adjust together to life-altering injuries.

The medical center's amputee center, which opened this year, is the second such facility created by the Defense Department to treat service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I love being around here - it makes you feel more normal," said Ramirez, who grew up in Long Beach, Calif.

Ramirez was on foot patrol in Ramadi on Jan. 11 when he was hit above his right ankle by an anti-tank round. He said he was alert while a combat medic quickly performed a crude amputation on the city street.




 
"I've learned that I've got to stop thinking about the things I could have done," said Ramirez, who had planned to be a career Marine. "I'm just glad to be here."

Army Spc. Albert Ross sat with Ramirez recently to answer his questions while the Marine was fitted for a prosthesis. Ross is a good role model for Ramirez: He lost the same part of his right leg to a rocket-propelled grenade in Baghdad last summer and has recovered well enough to run a quarter-mile on a treadmill.

In turn, Ross, from Baker, La., takes inspiration from Sgt. Chris Leverkuhn, an Army reservist from Logansport, Ind.

Leverkuhn, 21, had his right leg amputated just above the knee after an improvised bomb exploded under the floorboard of the fuel tanker he was riding in. The truck's driver was killed in the Jan. 2, 2004, attack outside Ramadi.

Leverkuhn has endured three dozen surgeries with more to come. He has progressed from bed to wheelchair to walker to crutches to cane. Now he can jump foot-high hurdles and dribble a basketball around small cones on the floor.

"Half the time when I'm wearing pants, people don't know that I'm an amputee," Leverkuhn said.

The workout room is the amputee center's social hub, where patients pump out a steady stream of wisecracks and PG-rated insults between sets on the weightlifting machines.

"We all give each other a hard time, but we don't do any of that until we know a person and know how they'll take it," said Leverkuhn, who has laminated a picture of a chopper-style motorcycle to his prosthesis.

Col. Robert Granville, an orthopedic surgeon who performs amputations and subsequent operations, is constantly awed by the casual, can-do atmosphere.

"I can't imagine being a 19, 20-year-old guy and facing the life challenges they have to face," said Granville. "We attempt to empathize, but we can't."

Army 1st Sgt. Daniel Seefeldt, a 22-year veteran, said the camaraderie at the amputee center got him past the nightmares he had after losing his lower left leg to a homemade bomb in Baghdad in September.

"A lot of the reason I'm not thinking about it is being with the other amputees," said Seefeldt, 41, of Manitowoc, Wis. "We're all close, like a family. If you're depressed, you have people here to lift your spirits."

During weekend visits to see his wife and two children, Seefeldt does laundry and straightens up around the house. In late November, barely six weeks after his amputation, he cooked Thanksgiving dinner.

"I do it every year," Seefeldt said matter-of-factly, "and this year was no different."

Ramirez, whose wife gave birth to the couple's first child in late February, is months away from rattling any pots and pans. He first needs to learn how to balance himself and re-establish the rhythm of his gait.

The support he's getting at the amputee center will shore him up on his upcoming return to Southern California to see family and his old surfing buddies.

"I worried when I saw them that they would have pity for me," Ramirez said. "I want them to see me and think, 'He's doing pretty good.'"

Woof All:

The classy Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan (e.g. his 40th Anniversary of Normandy speech and many others) and the author of "When Character was King" (stellar biography of Reagan) and other works.  IMHO a great writer.

Crafty
==========================


PEGGY NOONAN

In Love With Death
The bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people.

Thursday, March 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

God made the world or he didn't.

God made you or he didn't.

If he did, your little human life is, and has been, touched by the divine. If this is true, it would be true of all humans, not only some. And so--again, if it is true--each human life is precious, of infinite value, worthy of great respect.

Most--not all, but probably most--of those who support Terri Schiavo's right to live believe the above. This explains their passion and emotionalism. They believe they are fighting for an invaluable and irreplaceable human life. They are like the mother who is famously said to have lifted the back of a small car off the ground to save a child caught under a tire. You're desperate to save a life, you're shot through with adrenaline, your strength is for half a second superhuman, you do the impossible.

That is what they are trying to do.

They do not want an innocent human life ended for what appear to be primarily practical and worldly reasons--e.g., Mrs. Schiavo's quality of life is low, her life is pointless. They say: Who is to say it is pointless? And what does pointless even mean? Maybe life itself is the point.


I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? Is it because they are compassionate, and their hearts bleed at the thought that Mrs. Schiavo suffers? But throughout this case no one has testified that she is in persistent pain, as those with terminal cancer are.

If they care so much about her pain, why are they unconcerned at the suffering caused her by the denial of food and water? And why do those who argue for Mrs. Schiavo's death employ language and imagery that is so violent and aggressive? The chairman of the Democratic National Committee calls Republicans "brain dead." Michael Schiavo, the husband, calls House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "a slithering snake."

Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.

Why are they so committed to this woman's death?

They seem to have fallen half in love with death.

What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?

Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-the-tube people is not.

I do not understand their certainty. I don't "know" that any degree of progress or healing is possible for Terri Schiavo; I only hope they are. We can't know, but we can "err on the side of life." How do the pro-death forces "know" there is no possibility of progress, healing, miracles? They seem to think they know. They seem to love the phrases they bandy about: "vegetative state," "brain dead," "liquefied cortex."


I do not understand why people who want to save the whales (so do I) find campaigns to save humans so much less arresting. I do not understand their lack of passion. But the save-the-whales people are somehow rarely the stop-abortion-please people.

The PETA people, who say they are committed to ending cruelty to animals, seem disinterested in the fact of late-term abortion, which is a cruel procedure performed on a human.

I do not understand why the don't-drill-in-Alaska-and-destroy-its-prime-beauty people do not join forces with the don't-end-a-life-that-holds-within-it-beauty people.

I do not understand why those who want a freeze on all death penalty cases in order to review each of them in light of DNA testing--an act of justice and compassion toward those who have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law--are uninterested in giving every last chance and every last test to a woman whom no one has ever accused of anything.

There are passionate groups of women in America who decry spousal abuse, give beaten wives shelter, insist that a woman is not a husband's chattel. This is good work. Why are they not taking part in the fight for Terri Schiavo? Again, what explains their lack of passion on this? If Mrs. Schiavo dies, it will be because her husband, and only her husband, insists she wanted to, or would want to, or said she wanted to in a hypothetical conversation long ago. A thin reed on which to base the killing of a human being.

The pull-the-tube people say, "She must hate being brain-damaged." Well, yes, she must. (This line of argument presumes she is to some degree or in some way thinking or experiencing emotions.) Who wouldn't feel extreme sadness at being extremely disabled? I'd weep every day, wouldn't you? But consider your life. Are there not facets of it, or facts of it, that make you feel extremely sad, pained, frustrated, angry? But you're still glad you're alive, aren't you? Me too. No one enjoys a deathbed. Very few want to leave.

Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous.
And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life.

Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

Military.com launched a new online employment and education resource last week in support of the Department of Defense Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center (24/7 Family Support). The new Career Center, located online at www.Military.com/support and accessible via 1-888-774-1361, builds on efforts by the Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center to ensure that Servicemembers with severe injuries have easy access to all available resources to assist with their recovery and rehabilitation. The Career Center offers an extensive job board powered by Monster, the leading global online careers property, as well as employment assistance, education options and benefits information for severely injured Servicemembers and their families. The Career Center also enables employers to express their interest in hiring people from this exceptional talent pool. Resources are drawn from the Office of Military Community and Family Policy as well as from every branch of military service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Labor and private organizations. Go to the new Career Center at www.Military.com/support

March 23, 2005, 7:44 a.m.
Disarming Facts
The road to bad laws is paved with good intentions.

By John R. Lott Jr.

The last ten days have seen three horrific multiple-victim public shootings: the Atlanta courthouse attack that left four murdered; the Wisconsin church shooting, where seven were murdered, and Monday's high-school shooting in Minnesota, where nine were murdered. What can be learned from these attacks? Some take the attacks as confirmation that guns should be completely banned from even courthouses, let alone schools and churches.

The lessons from the courthouse shooting are likely to be different from the other two attacks in that there were armed sheriff's deputies present. Even if civilian gun possession were banned at the courthouse, the officers still had guns. Not only did they fail to stop the attack, they even facilitated it, because the 200-pound former football linebacker who was facing trial for rape was able to take the gun.

Guns are most useful in stopping criminals at a distance. The threat of using the gun against a criminal can allow one to capture him, or at least can cause the criminal to break off his attack. Police have a much more difficult job than civilians. While civilians can use a gun to maximize the distance between themselves and criminals, police can be satisfied with simply brandishing a gun and watching the criminal run away. Their job requires physical contact, and when that happens, things can go badly wrong.

My own published research on criminals assaulting police shows that the more likely that an assault will be successful, the more likely criminals will be to make it. The major factor determining success is the relative strengths and sizes of the criminal and officer. In particular, when officer strength and size requirements are reduced because of affirmative action, each one-percent increase in the number of female officers increases the number of assaults on police by 15 to 19 percent. The Atlanta-courthouse shooting simply arose from such a case.

There is a broader lesson to learn from these attacks. All three attacks took place in areas where gun possession by those who did the attack as well as civilians generally was already banned ? so-called "gun-free safe zones." Suppose you or your family are being stalked by a criminal who intends on harming you. Would you feel safer putting a sign in front of your home saying "This Home is a Gun-Free Zone"?

It is pretty obvious why we don't put these signs up. As with many other gun laws, law-abiding citizens, not would-be criminals, would obey the sign. Instead of creating a safe zone for victims, it leaves victims defenseless and creates a safe zone for those intent on causing harm.

A three-year prison term for violating a gun-free zone represents a real penalty for a law-abiding citizen. Adding three years to a criminal?s sentence when he is probably already going to face multiple death penalties or life sentences for a murderous rampage is probably not going to be the penalty that stops the criminal from committing his crime.

Many Americans have learned this lesson the hard way. In 1985, just eight states had the most liberal right-to-carry laws ? laws that automatically grant permits once applicants pass a criminal background check, pay their fees and, when required, complete a training class. Today the total is 37 states. Bill Landes and I have examined all the multiple-victim public shootings with two or more victims in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and found that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.

No other gun-control law had any beneficial effect. Indeed, right-to-carry laws were the only policy that consistently reduced these attacks.

To the extent attacks still occurred in right-to-carry states, they overwhelmingly happened in the special places within those states where concealed handguns were banned. The impact of right-to-carry laws on multiple-victim public shootings is much larger than on other crimes, for a simple reason. Increasing the probability that someone will be able to protect themselves, increases deterrence. Even when any single person might have a small probability of having a concealed handgun, the probability that at least someone will is very high.

Unfortunately, the restrictive concealed-handgun law now in effect in Minnesota bans concealed handguns around schools and Wisconsin is one of four states that completely ban concealed handguns, let alone not allowing them in churches. (There was a guard at the Minnesota school and he was apparently the first person killed, but he was also apparently unarmed.) While permitted concealed handguns by civilians are banned in Georgia courthouses, it is not clear that the benefit is anywhere near as large as other places simply because you usually have armed law enforcement nearby. One possibility is to encourage prosecutors and others to carry concealed guns around courthouses.

These restrictions on guns in schools weren't always in place. Prior to the end of 1995 when the Safe School Zone Act was enacted, virtually all the states that allowed citizens, whether they be teacher or principles or parents, to carry concealed handguns let them carry them on school grounds. Even Minnesota used to allow this.

Some have expressed fears over letting concealed permit holders carry guns on school campuses, but over all the years that permitted guns were allowed on school property there is no evidence that these guns were used improperly or caused any accidents.

People's reaction to the horrific events displayed on TV such as the Minnesota attack are understandable, but the more than two million times each year that Americans use guns defensively are never discussed ? even though this is five times as often as the 450,000 times that guns are used to commit crimes over the last couple of years. Seldom do cases make the news where public shootings are stopped or mothers use guns to prevent their children from being kidnapped. Few would know that a third of the public-school shootings were stopped by citizens with guns before uniformed police could arrive.

In an analysis that I did during 2001 of media coverage of guns, the morning and evening national-news broadcasts on the three main television networks carried almost 200,000 words on contemporaneous gun-crime stories. By comparison, not one segment featured a civilian using a gun to stop a crime. Newspapers are not much better.

Police are extremely important in deterring crime, but they almost always arrive after the crime has been committed. Annual surveys of crime victims in the United States continually show that, when confronted by a criminal, people are safest if they have a gun. Just as the threat of arrest and prison can deter criminals from committing a crime, so can the fact that victims can defend themselves.

Gun-control advocates conveniently ignore that the nations with the highest homicide rates have gun bans. Studies, such as one conducted recently by Jeff Miron at Boston University, which examined 44 countries, find that stricter gun-control laws tend to lead to higher homicide rates. Russia, which has banned guns since the Communist revolution, has had murder rates several times higher than that of the United States; even under the Communists, the Soviet Union's rate was much higher.

Good intentions don't necessarily make good laws. What counts is whether the laws ultimately save lives. Unfortunately, too many gun laws primarily disarm law-abiding citizens, not criminals.

? John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns and More Guns, Less Crime.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comme...00503230744.asp

Laws Must Protect the Rights of Military Dads
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
 


When the Iraq war began two years ago, tens of thousands of fathers who serve in the Armed Forces expected hardship and sacrifice. However, they never expected that their children might be taken from them while they were deployed, or that their own government might jail them upon their return.

Military service sometimes costs men their children.  The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act provides that if a parent moves a child to a new state, that new state becomes the child's presumptive residence after six months. With the long deployments necessitated by the war, a military spouse can move to another state while her spouse is deployed, divorce him, and then be virtually certain to gain custody through the divorce proceedings in the new state.

Given service personnel?s limited ability to travel, the high cost of legal representation and travel, and the financial hardships created by child support and spousal support obligations, it is extremely difficult for fathers to fight for their parental rights in the new state. For many, their participation and meaningful role in their children?s lives ends?often permanently--the day they were deployed.

In one highly-publicized case, Gary S., a San Diego-based US Navy SEAL, had his child permanently moved from California to the Middle East against his will while he was deployed in Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The 18-year Navy veteran with an unblemished military record has seen his son only three times since he returned from Afghanistan in April, 2002. Meanwhile he is nearly bankrupt from child support, spousal support, travel costs, and legal fees.

To solve the problem, the federal government must amend the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 2003 (SCRA) (formerly known as the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act) to specifically prohibit the spouses of active duty military personnel from permanently moving children to another state without the permission of the active duty military spouse or of a court. In addition, the UCCJEA needs to be modified to state that the presumption of new residence does not apply if the children are taken in this wrongful fashion.

Also, states must do more to prevent custodial parents from moving children out of the lives of noncustodial parents, except in cases of abuse or dire economic need. For example, last year the California Supreme Court decided in LaMusga that courts should restrain moves that harm children by damaging the loving bonds they share with their noncustodial parents.

While some military fathers face the loss of their children, others face prosecution and jail for child support obligations which their service has rendered them unable to pay.

Support orders are based on civilian pay, which is generally higher than active duty pay. When reservists are called up to active duty they sometimes pay an impossibly high percentage of their income in child support.

For example, a California naval reservist who has three children and who takes home $4,000 a month in his civilian job would have a child support obligation of about $1,600 a month. If this father is a petty officer second class (E5) who has been in the reserves for six or seven years--a middle-ranked reservist--his active-duty pay would only be $2,205 before taxes, in addition to a housing allowance.  Under current California child support guidelines, the reservist?s child support obligation should be $550 a month, not $1,600.

A reasonable reader unfamiliar with the wonders of the child support system would probably think ?OK, but the courts would just straighten it out when the reservist gets back?certainly they wouldn?t punish him for something that happened because he was serving.? However, the federal Bradley Amendment prohibits judges from retroactively modifying child support beyond the date which an obligor has applied for a modification.  Reservists can be mobilized with as little as one day?s notice. If a reservist didn?t have time or didn?t know he had to file for a downward modification, the arrearages stay, along with the interest and penalties charged on them.

When the arrearage reaches $5,000?a common occurrence during long deployments?the father can become a felon who can be incarcerated or subject to a barrage of harsh civil penalties, including seizure of driver's licenses, business licenses and passports.

In addition, reservists who return from long-deployments often find that their civilian earning capacity is now diminished. This is particularly true for the 6% of reservists who are self-employed, and whose businesses are often destroyed by their absence. Family law courts are notoriously unforgiving of fathers who suffer wage drops. Many if not most will have their former incomes imputed to them, meaning that their child support will not change despite their drop in income. Saddled with mounting arrearages, some reservists will return to fight a long battle to stay out of jail.

Some reservists have their child support deducted automatically from their pay.  Once deployed these fathers may lose 60% or 70% of their income and incur huge debts or face home foreclosures.  

To date Missouri is the only state to adequately address the issue. During the first Gulf War it passed a law requiring that reservists? support obligations be automatically modified when they are called up for active duty. Other states, including California and Illinois, are currently considering legislation that would help reservists. However, tens of thousands of reservists were deployed before they could file for downward modifications. Only a repeal of the Bradley amendment?already widely seen as bad law within family law circles?can prevent them from facing years of debt, harassment, legal woes or even incarceration upon their return from active service.

Like many veterans, Gary says he was very na?ve about the troubles military fathers face in family law.

?The failure of our leaders in Washington to protect military fathers is a national disgrace,? he says. ?Reservist fathers shouldn?t be turned into deadbeats. And no father should ever, ever lose his son or daughter simply because he served his country.?


This column was first published in the Army Times and Marine Corps Times (3/28/05).

Jeffery M. Leving is one of America's most prominent family law attorneys. He is the author of the book Fathers' Rights: Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved in a Custody Dispute. His website is www.dadsrights.com.

Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist and a nationally-syndicated radio talk show host. His columns have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers.

Glenn can be reached via his website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.

Fighting Crime the 11th Century Way....


By Peter Apps

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Tighter gun ownership laws are pushing South Africans to buy crossbows, spears, swords, knives and pepper sprays to protect themselves from violent crime.



"We've had to build an entirely new shop because the demand from people is so great," Justin Willmers, owner of Durban Guns and Ammo, told Reuters. "It can be anything from a Zulu fighting spear, battle axes, swords, crossbows."

New gun controls came into force last year under South Africa's Firearms Control Act, but some weapons shop owners say high crime rates are pushing law abiding citizens to look for alternative means of defending themselves.

Despite official figures showing the murder rate falling 10 percent in the year to March 2004, South Africa's Arms and Ammunition Dealers Association says individuals face a one in 60 chance of being the victim of a violent crime in any given year.

Many houses are surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, but with police turning down 80 percent of firearms license requests after an 18-month application process, Association spokesman Alex Holmes said people were forced to look at other options.

"It's not really a matter of choice," Holmes said. "Licensed firearms are not used in crime at any great rate."

Estimates of the number of illegal firearms in South Africa vary between 1 and 4 million, he said, but the real problem is from some 30-40,000 hardcore criminals using a small number of illegal guns.

SILENT CROSSBOW

South Africa began a firearms amnesty on Jan. 1 that to date has netted some 13,000 weapons, officials told Reuters, but critics say most of the weapons handed in are old and would never have been used for crime.

"It's mostly been grannies and grandpas that are handing in weapons that are probably unusable anyhow," Willmers said. In the meantime, people from all walks of life are acquiring weapons not restricted by law.

"The guys have just had enough," Willmers said.

Men are buying machetes to fight off hijackers or crossbows to shoot people breaking into their property, while women are more likely to buy a pepper spray, he said.

One customer successfully fought off three hijackers with a machete, slashing one, he said. A beggar had bought a pepper spray so he could fight off those who tried to steal his shoes as he slept on the street.

With some homeowners worried about prosecution if they kill intruders, the crossbow is particularly popular because of its silence and the difficulty of tracing the firer from forensic evidence, he said.

With no legal restrictions on sales, weapons shop staff had to exercise judgment in who they sold to, Willmers said.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto...ca_crossbows_dc

Hezbollah, The Party of God
March 15, 2005 23 12  GMT



By George Friedman

The "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon has encountered its antithesis, Hezbollah.

Comparisons have been drawn between what is happening in Lebanon and the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe or in Ukraine. These are poor analogies, however, since none of those revolutions encountered a force that was as hardened, as dedicated and as idealistic as they were -- nor one as well-armed. The closest one can come is the Romanian Revolution with its confrontation between demonstrators and the Securitate, the regime's secret police. The Securitate were fearsome, but in the end, isolated and hopeless. Not so Hezbollah.

Hezbollah originated in the Islamic revolution of Iran in the late 1970s. Until then, militant anti-Western forces in the Middle East were primarily Arabist and socialist. Their dream was not of a revival of Islamic religiosity, but rather the creation of a socialist, pan-Arab regime. Operationally, these Arabist militants were heavily dependent on secular Arab regimes such as Egypt, Syria or Libya, and on the support of Soviet-bloc intelligence services. In fact, apart from Israel, their primary targets were the religious Sunni monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The Saudis spent a great deal of money and collaborated closely with the United States to contain and defeat these movements.

Hezbollah, a militant successor of the secular Shiite political movement Amal, represented the international wing of Iran's Islamic Revolution. To some extent -- and this must not be overstated -- it was a creation of Iran's intelligence services. Certainly, Hezbollah members worked in close collaboration with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and did not stray far from Iran's national goals. In the sense that the Iranian revolution was the institutionalization of Shiite Islam, Hezbollah was both an Iranian and a Shiite organization.

For Iran, Hezbollah was intended to serve four purposes:

1. To challenge the secular Arabist movements by providing a powerful Islamist alternative to Nasserism.
2. To provide Tehran with a tool to challenge American interests in the Middle East and, potentially, globally.
3. To pose a threat to conservative Sunni monarchies: Hezbollah could not be dismissed as a secular force, yet it challenged the legitimacy of Sunni regimes that were complicit with the United States.
4. To provide a challenge to Israel emanating from outside the Nasserite mode of thinking.

These were more than sufficient reasons for the Iranians to have helped create Hezbollah, but there was also a fifth. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, it had the implicit support of the United States and the Arabian monarchies. Iran was strategically isolated. Its only potential ally was a dangerous one -- the Soviet Union. Officials in Tehran knew that dependency on the Soviets would, fairly quickly, lead to Soviet domination of Iran; thus, while they flirted with the Soviets, they were not prepared to go too far.

The only other regional power that shared Iran's anti-Iraqi interests was Syria. Though both Syria and Iraq were governed by Baathist parties, the bad blood between Damascus and Baghdad ran deep. The Syrians did not want to see Iran defeated in the war; Damascus feared a triumphant Iraq as much as it feared Israel. Geopolitically, there was a natural affinity between Syria and Iran.

There also was an ideological issue at work in the creation of Hezbollah. Because it viewed itself as the true heir to the old Ottoman province of Syria (which had encompassed Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan), Syria was highly ambivalent about the creation of a Palestinian state. Accepting the idea of such a state would have meant the repudiation of Damascus' dream of reclaiming for Syria what had been stolen from it in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which divided the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain at the end of World War I, tearing the province of Syria in half.

Because Damascus viewed the Palestine Liberation Organization as an enemy, it sponsored its own Palestinian groups in opposition to Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement. Syria's own Palestinian movements supported the destruction of Israel, but saw Palestine as part of Syria. Hence, there was a great deal of bloodshed between Fatah and pro-Syrian Palestinian groups. It is essential to recall that when Syria first invaded Lebanon in the mid-1970s, it was to crush Fatah in southern Lebanon and support Christian and Shiite allies against that movement. One of the reasons Israel was so comfortable with the initial intervention was its interests in Lebanon and those of Syria coincided.

For Syria, Lebanon was the key. In the 1970s, it was the most successful, Westernized country in the region, and Beirut -- with its banks -- was a financial center. The reclamation of Lebanon was not only the fulfillment of an ideological dream, but a critical pillar of Syria's economic development. In order to dominate the state, Damascus depended on the complex relationships between the Alawites -- a religious minority in the region -- and other groups: Christian, Druze, Sunni and Shia. Like Sicily, Syria-Lebanon was a kaleidoscope of alliances, double-crosses and accommodations. The Syrians had an advantage in this -- their army -- and a patron, the Soviet Union. But in the clan politics of Lebanon, Syrian dominance was far from preordained.

The alignment between Damascus and Tehran over Iraq, then, along with Syria's own attempt to reabsorb Lebanon, generated a mutual interest in the creation of a force in Lebanon that could work toward Iran's goals while also serving Syrian interests in the unfolding Lebanese civil war. Hezbollah became that interest. It served Iran by challenging Israel and the United States, while also threatening the Arabian monarchies. It served Syrian interests by challenging Palestinian secularists while retaining sterling anti-Israeli credentials. And for both Syria and Iran, Hezbollah became a tool for projecting power through terrorist attacks in the region.

Given that this was the Middle East -- and especially given that it was Lebanon -- ideology quickly mixed with business. Throughout the civil war and thereafter, Hezbollah became enmeshed in the complex business arrangements that were the foundation of the al Assad family's power and wealth, and in which senior Iranian officials and clerics also were involved.

Two areas were of particular importance to them all. The first was Beirut itself, where the real estate boom in the 1990s generated billions for all concerned. The second was the Bekaa Valley, a traditional smuggling route where drugs had been processed and staged for movement, first to Sicily and later to the Balkans, for resale in Europe. There were more billions at stake here.

Like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Hezbollah became the guarantor for Iranian and Syrian -- and its own -- commercial interests in the region. The group's interest in drugs took it to Latin America and to Europe, where its ideology also could be practiced. The 1994 attack against a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for example, was ideological. Hezbollah's presence in Latin America had commercial drivers as well. It all fit neatly.

As the situation in Lebanon stands today, then, the withdrawal of the Syrian army is the least interesting aspect. Two much more interesting problems exist.

First, private Syrian and Iranian economic interests in Lebanon define and control that country's economy. The alliances exist both beneath and above ideology -- and run beyond the region. You will find money that eventually traces back to Russia, Germany, the United States and even Israel deeply entangled with Syrian and Iranian money, as well as local funds, throughout the Lebanese economy. On the drug side, everyone who deals in drugs -- and these are big players indeed -- has a stake in the Bekaa Valley. The Syrian army can leave, but Syria will always be there.

Second, Hezbollah is the guarantor of much of the drug trade and is a player in the more legitimate enterprises as well. The group is a military power, and it has nowhere to go. Hezbollah is also very good at what it does, having practiced its craft for a quarter-century. The Israelis show little appetite for tangling with Hezbollah. The United States might have more of an appetite, but it should be remembered that fighting a well-armed, well-trained, experienced force on its own turf, when it has nowhere to retreat, can be done -- but it will cost.

This is why the Bush administration floated a plan that would allow a disarmed Hezbollah to play a role in Lebanon. Put differently, the Bush administration has told Hezbollah it can keep its commercial interests so long as it ceases to be an independent military force. Hezbollah can't buy that for two reasons: First, everyone has independent militias in Lebanon because no one trusts the central government to protect their rights; and second, the most lucrative segment of Hezbollah's interests involves things that most central governments won't protect.

Ultimately, Hezbollah's fate lies in the hands of Syria and, even more, Iran. Hezbollah is wealthy and strong, but unlike al Qaeda, it is dependent on the will of nation-states. The problem is that Iran in particular views Hezbollah -- even more than its nuclear program -- as a tool for controlling the United States. It is precisely the global nature of Hezbollah that makes it so effective. For Iran, Hezbollah keeps the United States honest and also reminds the Sunnis that they are not the only ones with suicide bombers -- an important point in internal politics.

In other words, the United States has hit the hard place in its follow-on strategy. The withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon doesn't begin to deal with the reality of al Assad family power in the country, nor does it deal with the foundation of Iranian power there. Hezbollah is the center of gravity of the problem. The United States can choose to fight the militants -- and we note aircraft carriers heading to the region -- or it can find a modus vivendi.

It is rare to point to Israel as a moderating principle, but the Israelis tried to fight Hezbollah and did withdraw from Lebanon. If the United States now feels emboldened enough to pick up where the Israelis left off, then, it seems that things are indeed going well in the region and the anti-terrorism war.

A thought now comes to mind: "Easy does it."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...t_pe/iraq_armor



Quote:
WASHINGTON - The Defense Department hasn't developed a plan to reimburse soldiers for equipment they've bought to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan despite requirements in a law passed last year, a senator says.


In a letter sent Wednesday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., asked details on the Pentagon's progress setting up the reimbursement program and questioned why it was not in place yet.


"Very simply, this is either negligence on their part, because they were not happy with this when it passed, or it's incompetence," Dodd said. "It's pretty outrageous when you have all their rhetoric about how much we care about our people in uniform."


The Pentagon had no immediate comment.


Soldiers serving in Iraq and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.


In response to the complaints, Congress last year passed Dodd's amendment requiring the Pentagon to reimburse members of the Armed Services for the cost of any safety or health equipment that they bought or someone else bought on their behalf.


Under the law, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations on the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item.


Dodd asked that Rumsfeld provide details on the department's progress. But he also said it was unclear what recourse he has, other than public embarrassment, to force the Defense Department to act.


Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who repeatedly decried the lack of equipment during his unsuccessful presidential campaign, said the Pentagon needs to move quickly to give the troops their reimbursement and armored Humvees.


"They should be living up to the letter of the law," Kerry said.


The latest emergency spending proposal for the war totals $81.9 billion, including $74.9 billion for the Defense Department. It includes $3.3 billion for extra armor for trucks and other protective gear ? underscoring a sensitivity to earlier complaints by troops.

WOW!  DOJ says right to bear arms is individual, not group!

http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.htm