More questions about the Dubai Ports World Deal

 While browsing through the sites I try to check in on at least weekly, I found the following:

An anonymous source has provided the Northeast Intelligence Network with a translated copy of a recovered Al Qaeda document from Afghanistan dated 14 May/June 2002. The text informs officials of the UAE that “we have infiltrated your security, censorship, and monetary agencies along with other agencies that should not be mentioned.”

In light of the current debacle with Dubai Ports World, and fears of security vulnerabilities at 21 American port facilities, this document is further evidence of the need for a full, no-stone-left-unturned review of the transaction and its implications.

The translated text of the entire message can be found at The Northeast Intelligence Network’s website.

While many categorize the expressed reactions from both sides of the aisle in this story as “knee-jerk” or “Islamophobia,” the possibilities brought to light by such documents as this one would lead me to agree that the US should proceed with caution in this matter.

Flaming Arrows and “The Elephant in the Middle East Living Room”

The news this past week has been abuzz with terms like “Islamophobia” and knee-jerk reaction to the news of DPW “buying” control of ports here in the USA.  While sitting here watching flaming arrows shooting back and forth over this event, I sought to understand whether or not this truly is “Islamophobia” or whether there are rational reasons for objecting to what is perceived as an event which may lead to unwise, unprecidented access and insight to US security, Homeland Defense plans/policies and/or infrastructure. My search lead me to “The Elephant in the Middle East Living Room” which I believe gave me a better understanding of the root of this issue.

  Within Sunni Islam, along with several more moderate schools, there are two varieties of theocratic totalitarianism. Both of these are Salafists, believing that only a literal version of the model of rule implemented in the seventh century in Islam has ultimate legitimacy. Both have the objective of rule by a unified mosque and state; for some this theocracy is personified by the caliph. Different individuals in these movements emphasize different aspects, but generally the common objective is to unify first the Arab world under theocratic rule, then the Muslim world, then those regions that were once Muslim (e.g. Spain), then the rest of the world. 

Call me naive, but my brain embraces this picture much as it would a picture of “all Christians are Right-Wing Whackos,” with the sins of the few painting the picture of the many.

Such totalitarian visions seem crazy to most of us; we thus tend to underestimate their potency. Yet the Salafists’ theocratic totalitarian dream has some features in common with the secular totalitarian dreams of the twentieth century, e.g., the Nazis’ Thousand Year Reich, or the Communists’ World Communism.

Oh, wonderful – Nazis and Commies. Not exactly in line with the picture in my mind of a church split erupting at the Sunday picnic over whose wife’s recipe for Chess pie is best.

Embracing Diversity

While the rest of you are celebrating Presidents’ Day, I am off work, “Embracing Diversity.”  I suppose this was my company’s way to get around giving us an additional paid holiday for MLK’s birthday while not showing favoritism to the presidents of our country, who have all been male and white.

So, I must go now – I have diversity to embrace.

Smoking Cannons

Will there ever be a break down of the left-leaning MSM, to admit that there was a legitimate reason for going into Iraq that did include real fear of Saddam reconstituting his WMD program? Deep inside me flickers a hope that this will, someday, occur; but the part of me that views constant rhetoric such as the “Bush lied, people died” garbage sincerely doubts it.

The tape recordings of Saddam discussing WMDs are said by Ryan Mauro of Worldthreats.com to be a “smoking cannon.” If all of this information proves out, the left in the US and UK are going to face an enormous embarassment and loss of credibility. As usual, it will take some time for the new information to travel from the blogosphere to the alternative media, and finally into the so-called mainstream media. Even then, the Bush haters will not concede that Saddam was a threat to the US. http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=98

This morning, while prying my eyes open with a steaming cup of New England’s finest coffee, my ears caught a breaking news update on “The War on Terror” on Fox and Friends Weekend edition. The part that seeped through to my chilled brain consisted of ‘analysis of tapes show that Russia and Brazil assisted Saddam in moving his WMDs  to 4 specific locations – 3 in Syria and a fourth in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.’ That really woke me up, and I sat riveted to the TV for a good long time, never to hear or see any additional information about this story. So, in my ever-increasingly caffeine laden state, I went on an Internet hunt to see what I, a non-skilled net-news detective could find.
 
I decided this reference must’ve been to a non-profit, non-partisan conference scheduled for this weekend in Arlington, Virginia, by John Loftus’s organization, The Intelligence Summit.  I will admit that I was a bit overwhelmed by the PowerPoint presentation I found on the Intelligence Summit’s website. http://www.intelligencesummit.org/   Admittedly, there are parts of the the PP presentation which contains excerpts from the tape transcripts that leave big question marks in my mind, but I know every PP presentation I’ve ever scripted was meant to hit the high-points, not fill in every single blank. Otherwise, they would be stand-alone presentations, and I wouldn’t need my business attire – I could sit here at home, in my sweats and sneakers, and write powerpoint presentations then email them to my boss. But I digress. 

Chilled by more than the frigid temperatures here in Southeast Texas, I read on. Website to website.  

Al-Safir: A Fourth Location for the Iraqi WMDs? 

Their winning may well be their undoing
by RYAN MAURO 

In recent days, General Georges Sada, the #2 man in Saddam Hussein’s Air Force, came forward describing the movement of WMDs to Syria using two converted civilian aircraft in 56 flights. The transportation, which also included a ground shipment, was done under the guise of humanitarian aid after a dam collapsed in Syria in June of 2002. This supports a main thesis of my book, Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq. http://www.worldthreats.com/middle_east/al-Safir.htm

Russia Hid Saddam’s WMDs
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | October 2, 2003 

On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led “aggression” against Iraq as “unwarranted” and “unjustifiable.” Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian “military expert” was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since. 

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=10111 

An excerpt from an interview with Ryan Mauro found at FrontPage magazine:

FP: Your book also shows how Saddam moved his WMDs into other countries. Can you give us a summary of the evidence?
Mauro: Saddam passed his WMDs into other countries long before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Iraq’s WMDs have long been, all the way back to the 1990s, connected to other state’s WMD programs. By the late 1990s, a great part of Iraq’s nuclear program was based in Libya as a joint project. Iraqi WMD would be routinely moved in and out of Syria to avoid inspections.
So the fact that Syrian defectors, Iraqi scientists and foreign intelligence sources indicate the WMD was moved to Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Iran is not surprising at all. American satellites saw traffic moving from Iraq into Syria between January 2003 and the war’s beginning, and at this time the Iraqi border guards were replaced with Iraqi intelligence. Iran has even taken in some Iraqi chemical and biological weapons equipment, just like they took in Iraqi aircraft in 1991.  
I detail in my book how this was not some change in policy by Iraq, it was simply an expansion of previous cooperation. UN inspectors even confirmed in the 1990s this was going on. Iraqi WMD expertise has been confirmed to be in other countries as well (and Duelfer confirmed that Qusay Hussein prepared for such expertise to go to Syria). This is not at odds with Duelfer or Kay, who both confirmed there were reports of WMD going to Syria and that trucks full of “Iraqi equipment” went to Syria but we don’t know the contents. Duelfer even said there was evidence Syria offered to harbor Iraqi WMD, but he couldn’t confirm that they did in fact do that because the insurgency stopped his team from completing the investigation. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19899    

I didn’t need much more coffee to wake me up.   Even as beffudled as I was when I started reading, I have pain in my heart and my head when I think of the people who seriously believe that Saddam did NOT have any WMDs. I suppose if they were honest with themselves, they might more accurately state that he did, but became wiley enough  begin housing them outside Iraq. 

As I said, I am not a net-news detective, so I’ll just post the links, and let you make up your mind for yourself. After all, that is what I started this entry hoping for – that ‘sheeple’ would open their eyes and make up their own minds, rather than following blindly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

   

    

  

 

 

 

 

The latest bloviations blaming Bush

         

Recently, a friend forwarded this tongue in cheek “news report” to me. I found it just too perfect a satire on the MSM to keep it to myself, but caution any who read it to remember – it is NOT a legit news story, and I can’t post its origin, as that was not sent along…. However, the attribution of it being a NBC news report is (I truely hope) a joke.  

        

Bush Fails To Prevent East Coast Blizzard            

Minorities Hit Hardest    

    

by Brian Williams      NBC 02/12/06     

As President Bush and his staff cowered in the White House, the snow continued to pile up on the many poor and African American victims who could not afford to get out of town or to safety in Florida.      

Crucial supplies of blankets, hot cocoa, popcorn and dark rum, so essential to surviving the stress of any major snowstorm,  lay in stores undelivered.      

“Where is the government?  I need my sidewalk shoveled so I can get out to buy my danged lottery tickets!” said one D.C. resident from his living room.    

“Why are we wasting money in Iraq when we could be spending it here on me?”      

Progressive blogs blasted the President for his inaction. “We find the timing terribly suspicious,  just as the Domestic Spying hearings kick into high gear,  what happens? A major northeast Blizzard. Why now?” wrote one blogger.     

Hearings into the Blizzards’ effect on hearings are almost a certainty.      

Howard Dean has suggested he will call for an investigation once his new medications kick in and John Kerry took a break from the sporting activities of the glamorous super-rich in some exotic locale (random choice: Ice Sailing in Finland) to call for new legislation outlawing snowstorms.    

“The Republican Congress has dropped the ball once again. I have always been a staunch supporter of anti-snow legislation, except for certain locations where I ski. Snow has no business on our roads and the President and Congress knows that.”      

Calls for impeachment over “SnowGate” as some are calling it already are mounting as deeply as the snow itself, and what will be discovered underneath will prove to have a truly chilling effect on the Republicans, as the inevitable thaw proceeds. Or something like that.      

  

More breaking news……   

 

Al Sharpton wants an investigation as to why snow is ALWAYS white.          

 Cheney has stock in Tru-Value Hardware. Do you have any idea how many SNOW SHOVELS they sold today to the unsuspecting consumer?        

  

 

I demand to know why FEMA has been so late in reacting to this storm. THEY KNEW IT WAS COMING! And yet they failed to have crews in place to fix the electricity as soon as it went off. It just shows that Bush and the Republicans just don’t care about the people in the N.E.

   

  

The Senate needs to investigate this with administration people under oath.   I’ll bet that the great junior senator from N.Y. has opened the doors of her home to all of the heatless poor of her neighborhood and is busy baking cookies for them while her husband applies body heat to the nearly frozen teen-aged girls.