Ahmed Mohammed and Yousef Megahed, that’s who. The two University of South Florida students who were caught with explosives in Goose Creek, SC, have finally been indicted for terrorism in Tampa.
Homeland security is up to the citizenry and the county sheriffs, not the DHS!
The establishment of the much-touted Department of Homeland Security has accomplished nothing more than to add another needless layer of bureaucracy over the FBI, the ICE, the Border Patrol, and who knows how many other federal bureaucracies that are still not getting the job done. It seems as though they don’t have any idea what their job is.
After 9/11, we have a right to expect that thorough background checks would be run on every foreigner applying for a student visa, and that there would be some monitoring of the whereabouts and activities of foreign students already in the U.S.
According to officials familiar with the case, Mohamed has been arrested previously in Egypt on terrorism-related charges. He is said to have produced an Internet video showing how to build a remote-controlled car bomb.
If that’s so, our government was careless enough to allow a known terrorist and e-jihadist into the US. Wow.
It appears that SurfControl has now reclassified the Anvil from ‘Games’ to ‘Blogs & Forums.’ This is probably a better classification, but I guarantee that’s going to keep the Anvil in many spam bins at workplaces. Well, at least it should be free for lunch.
Here’s the truth that Danny Pearl was trying to reveal… Courageous blogger Julia Gorin has a blog article, The Balkan Liar of Liars, that quotes a piece by reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by al Qaeda terrorists in 1999. I read the excerpt, and it got me to thinking. It turns out that Danny Pearl had been exposing the elaborate hoaxes that were being used to rationalize the 1999 Kosovo War.
Another strong motive for al Qaeda to kill Danny… Now, if the public had gotten wind of the fact that Bill Clinton and his collaborators in both parties were inducing the U.S. and NATO to fight on the wrong side in the Balkans - on the side of the local branches of al Qaeda - then that would’ve been the end of their cozy little deal. The public would have demanded we stop fighting a war on behalf of the Balkans jihadists, and the public might even have demanded that we switch sides in the war! Danny Pearl had been working to tell the public the truth about jihadism in the Balkans and elsewhere. So of course al Qaeda had to kill Danny Pearl to shut him up as quickly as possible.
Rope, tree, Clinton Administration, U.S. Constitutional definition of treason - some assembly required!You understood me correctly when I said that the Clinton Administration and its collaborators in both parties aided and abetted the avowed enemies of the U.S. (If you have any further doubts about their culpability, the article When the Government Fails to Protect its Citizens gives specifics on some of the laws that they violated.)
Keep in mind that the Clinton Administration continued to support Balkans jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda, even after Osama bin Laden had issued his fatwa (i.e., declaration of war and mobilization order) against the U.S, and after he had led al Qaeda to perpetrate armed attacks against American assets. By any definition, this makes Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda an enemy of the U.S.
When the public finally understands all of the implications, and all of the consequences, of what the Clinton Administration led us into in the Balkans - not if, but when - there will be a public outcry to indict all major participants in this evil debacle on charges of having violated the U.S. Constitutional definition of treason. They are well aware that treason is a capital offense!
That’s another reason why so many people don’t want the truth to come out, even now. Danny Pearl wasn’t the first person murdered for trying to tell the public the truth about this matter, and he’s unlikely to be the last. The same thing could happen to any of us bloggers, too, not that we care! But the more voices that clamor for an investigation, the less likely it is that anybody can shut it down by getting rid of me or anybody else!
There’s something YOU can do right now!
Honor Danny’s memory by seeking the truth about the Balkans, and not accepting propaganda and spin at face value. Add your own voice to the demand to get the truth out about the corruption and jihadism in the Balkans!
I practically never post anything to this blog about myself and my day-to-day experiences. After all, this blog is not about me! But this time, I’m making an exception, simply because, on my travels, I recently witnessed an odd series of events, and those events raised questions that need to be answered. I liveblogged these events on Twitter, along with more mundane details of the journey.
Event #1: Last Friday, northbound through rural Georgia on I-75, we were caught in an unexpected traffic jam. The slowdown turned out to be a “gaper’s block” caused by a roadside vehicle fire. When we got to the scene, we saw a motorhome that had burned all the way down to the chassis. We saw no other damaged vehicles, nor anything else indicating why the motorhome had burned.
Event #2: That same day, just a few hours later, we were westbound on I-24 through the mountains of Tennessee, when, once again, traffic came to a complete halt. When the traffic flow started up again, all motorists were herded onto the left shoulder, while a hazmat response vehicle sped by with its siren screaming. This time, we saw a truck cab that had burned all the way down to its chassis. Some liquid, probably fuel, had spilled onto the pavement. Little remained of the truck cab, but the remainder of the rig appeared undamaged. Here again, it was not apparent what had caused the fire.
Event #3: While I was still pondering the odds of having seen two roadside fires involving large vehicles on the same day, traffic stopped again, just up the road on I-24 in the mountains of Tennessee. Sure enough, we could see clouds of smoke in the distance. When we finally went past the scene, we saw two active grass fires, with firefighters working on putting them out. At one of the fires, I saw a large rectangular area of burned grass. It appeared that a burned vehicle, the size of a truck, bus, or motorhome, had just been removed.
Was this a coincidence, or something else? I discussed this with someone else who shares my interest in counterterrorism and tracking unusual events. He said that fires like these are strictly local news, and that if they don’t take place near a city or town, they might not be reported at all. Even when they do make the local news, it’s very unlikely that anybody would put them all together and report on the fact that an unusual number of vehicle fires happened on the same day. These three fires might well have been a coincidence, but we have too little data to draw that or any other conclusion.
On the other hand, what if it wasn’t a coincidence? If a group of people wanted to cause havoc and destruction, and to have a good chance of getting away with it, what might they do? We’ve all been led to expect an apocalyptic attack one or more major cities, which would make the national news and launch an immediate manhunt. But what if they were to sabotage and burn dozens, or hundreds, of vehicles in rural areas instead? How would anybody connect the dots?
Since then, I’ve been searching for any mention of these fires in the local news, to no avail. As of this writing, I’ve yet to find any news story that I can associate with the date and location of these particular fires. That’s frustrating, but it tells me that we can’t rely on the mainstream media, or official sources, to recognize these dots, much less connect them!
This is where citizen journalism comes in, which means you and me. Use whatever tools are available to do the job. If you don’t have a video camera or a camera phone, at least get a phone with web browsing and text messaging capability, so that you can transmit the details of what you encountered.
How would a database or wiki help? The task of “connecting the dots” would be much easier if we had a database or wiki that everyone could use for reporting unusual events and local-scale disasters, and that everyone could search to find patterns and causes of events. In order to be useful, this would have to be a large-scale project that takes in and organizes detailed data from all over the U.S. It would take plenty of resources to start up such a database or wiki on a server that could handle the traffic, to launch and promote the project, and to sign up enough participants to give the project a good start. This is not a one-person job; clearly, it would take more funds and more time than I presently have at my disposal. Nonetheless, this is my proposal for the future, and if enough other people are interested, we could get it done!
For now, we can improvise by using the “blogosphere” itself as our database. If you witness anything unusual, regardless of whether or not you think it is terrorism-related, just blog about it and then pass the information along to others. If possible, set up your blog so that you can make blog posts from your mobile device. Even if all you have is a forum membership somewhere, a Twitter account, or a MySpace page, use it as a vehicle for recording what you saw! After awhile, the search engines on the Web will find these blog posts, and anyone will be able to use them to look for patterns in unusual events. Using even the simplest blogging or microblogging system will get your data out into the world where good use can eventually be made of it.
On Digg, I posted a comment to elaborate further on what this database or wiki should contain:
If you can find an interactive, real-time map of disasters, please let me know. But I’m looking for records of disasters on a local scale, that are never posted anywhere but the local news - or are not posted to any media at all. And I’m also looking for a repository of data that goes back into the past, to make it easier to search for patterns over time.
Noteworthy things to track include the following:
Disease outbreaks in humans, animals, and plants
Unusual numbers of, or disappearances of, wildlife (such as the recent bee dieoff)
Power outages, Internet and phone service outages, and other infrastructure failures (such as the recent bridge collapse) whether there were casualties or not
The vast majority of these things will result from natural causes or human error, and not from terrorism. Nonetheless, knowing about those other causes could potentially save many lives also.
Update - August 16, 2007:
Here’s a link to a very disturbing incident. I have no further information about this, and do not know whether there is any connection between this new incident and the ones that I noticed previously. In this instance, the news story implies gang activity.
‘Splodeydopes (i.e., homicide bombers) - in South Carolina, of all places? Just after I had finished installing the Breitbart news feed on this blog, I noticed that the feed had served up a news item about two ’splodeydopes of Middle Eastern extraction having been apprehended in South Carolina with explosive devices. Too little information was available at that time to write a full-fledged blog post, so I posted Explosives found in South Carolina - connection with enemy combatants with the information I had. I hoped that posting even this sketchy information would help to keep everyone focused on this topic, and everyone’s eyes and ears observing their surroundings - especially those in South Carolina who might be in a position to notice something.
As it so often does, the FBI seems to be putting everybody back to sleep rather than on alert. It’s amazing that they were unwilling to acknowledge the obvious signs of terrorist activity, despite the fact that the two men were caught near the closely-guarded Naval Weapons Station Charleston, where nuclear weapons are handled and where enemy combatants have been held.
Don’t assume that the South is immune to enemy infiltrators. Last year, I spoke with a gentleman who said that one of the reasons he chose to live in northern Mississippi was that his locale was “not on al Qaeda’s list of top ten thousand targets for attack.” He’s right, of course, and even though I love the American South for its own sake, I also have every reason to believe that the small-town and rural South does offer a better chance of avoiding instant destruction in a terror attack. That said, I caution everyone not to indulge in a false sense of security just because you happen to be living in the American South or in any thinly-populated, small-town or rural area.
Here’s the problem: The bad guys are taking root everywhere, not just in major metropolitan areas. Fact is, an out-of-the-way location can afford them concealment for terrorist training or other evil activities, where John or Jane Doe might not be around to spot anything suspicious. And of course, spotting things that are suspicious or abnormal is exactly where you come in.
But what if this was just an isolated incident? No chance of that. There have already been reports of jihadist recruitment, training, and other activity in small-town America for quite some time now. For example:
The take-home lesson? Always be sure to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity, even if you think you’re in middle of nowhere, because the fact is that there’s no such place as the middle of nowhere!
Updated 8/17/07: Added News Feed Widgets page to this blog. This page contains scrollable news feeds, with a link to a site where you can get customizable news feed widgets for your own blog or website. Widgets are available in several formats, depending upon where you want to place them on the page.
1389 has added several scrolling news tickers to 1389 Blog - Anitjihadist Tech. The tickers are free; you can go to these websites and add the code to your own blog or website. To see how they actually work, look for them below:
News Widgets from Widgetbox:
Please be patient; they take a little while to finish loading!
Want Widgetbox widgets for yourself?
To get any Widgetbox widget on this page:
Click on the Add Widget button under the widget.
Select Customize Widget from the pop-up menu.
Choose the frame dimensions and color that fit your blog or website.
Copy the code into a text or HTML widget box in your blog layout, or into any other place on your blog or website that accepts scripted code.
Save your layout.
To select other free widgets, including music and playable web games:
To install the news ticker, copy the code from the website and paste it into an element in your webpage or blog sidebar that accepts scripted code.
For instance, if your blog uses WordPress and you have selected a widget-ready template, add the code to a text widget. If no text widget is present in your sidebar, add a new one; otherwise, you can add the code to an existing text widget. Click on the text widget to open it, and paste the ticker code at the desired location.
What is the current status? As of 4:30 Eastern Time (US) 7/18/07, Gates of Vienna was back up.
So why be concerned about it now? Because other bloggers need to know about this situation, and because it’s time for Blogger to do something to prevent its blogs from being shut down either maliciously or by mistake. Gates of Vienna is a respected counterterrorist/antijihadist blog that in no way deserves to be treated as a “spam blog.” This situation also shows how easy it would be to misuse Blogger.com to censor another blog.
How did this happen? It is possible that someone unintentionally clicked the “flag” button in the Blogger.com toolbar while attempting to navigate. But then, if a single error like that can cause a blog to be blocked, something is very wrong with Blogger.com! More likely, Gates of Vienna was maliciously flagged as a “spam blog” multiple times by one or more individuals who object to antijihadistist messages being made available to the public. Either way, Blogger.com is allowing de facto censorship, and this is wrong. It allows wrongdoers of every stripe to muzzle anybody who may be trying to warn the public about the crimes they have committed or are preparing to commit. It also will intimidate some bloggers into keeping silent - though not this one!
Does this remind you of anything? It should! The Digg “bury brigade” has aroused intense controversy for exactly the same reason: because it became too easy for a few anonymous users to muzzle opposing points of view or to cover up uncomfortable facts simply by clicking on a little button.
What are we asking Blogger to do? Blogger should add safeguards to prevent the same thing from happening again to this or other blogs in the Blogspot domain. If Blogger.com fails to take action, then other blog owners will have reason to worry about losing access to their blogs. They’ll migrate to other blogging systems and and hosting providers that will help them to safeguard their ownership.
You may recall that I’ve blogged before about the issues that Blogger.com has with spam blogs (see Does Blogger.com think your blog is spam?) but this is a different situation. There is a very big difference between the minor inconvenience of requiring the blog owner to enter Captcha characters before posting to the blog, and the major intimidation Blogger.com causes by blocking the blog entirely.
Ask everyone else you know who has a blog to do the same.
Publicize the story in every other legitimate way that you can think of: StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Twitter, Pownce, word of mouth, chat rooms, you name it.
If you wish, post a comment here indicating where else this article is being publicized.
Contacting humans at Blogger.com: Google makes it especially difficult to contact anyone at Blogger.com directly. But at least for now, you can contact them at support@blogger.com. And here’s a website with rolling updates on how to contact Blogger.com: How to Contact Blogger Support. So if you are not happy about the way Blogger.com is misidentifying Gates of Vienna and other blogs as spam, you can still let them know what you think.
Keep the pressure on Blogger.com to do something to safeguard their blogging system against being hijacked by the same “bury brigade” that has rendered Digg.com all but useless! And for what to do about THAT, see How to Bury Digg.com.
According to the June 21 article by the Banja Luka daily Fokus, titled “Albanian Mafia Bought Ahtisaari,” German Federal Intelligence Service BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has recently sent a report to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon revealing that Albanian separatists and terrorists in Serbian Kosovo-Metohija province have literally purchased Ahtisaari’s plan which suggests independence for the Serbian province and its severing from Serbia.
German Secret Service has found that 2 million Euros (2.68 million USD) have been transfered directly to Ahtisaari’s personal bank account, and that amounts of multi-million Euros were given to the UN envoy in cash on at least two occasions, totaling up to 40 million Euros (over 53 million U.S. dollars).
Oh, and by the way, KFOR NATO troops are involved:
On the last day of February, at 11:47 p.m., German Secret Service agents made a note about the arrival of the KFOR (NATO troops stationed in Serbian Kosovo province, Kosovo FORce) jeep which brought two young women over, followed by Boria’s bodyguard. The girls were in Ahtisaari’s quarters until 5:17 a.m., when they were driven away by the same vehicle.
This is particularly awkward now, because GWB has been making a big push to turn over control of Kosovo to Albanian Muslim narcoterrorists, which is not only insane, but also violates the treaty that the U.S. signed at the end of the Kosovo War. (See Updated: Was GWB’s wristwatch stolen while he was meeting a crowd in Albania? and How the U.S. and NATO were duped in the Balkans.) The only thing that can be said for GWB in this regard is that his Democrat opponents would have tried to do the same thing even sooner.
Okay, so I’m old. This huge UN Albanian-narcoterrorist bribery scandal reminded me of a long trail of other scandals: Libyagate (starring Billy Carter), Abscam, Iran arms-for-hostages, BCCI, UN oil-for-food, and now, Bill and Hillary cashing in from Qatar, and the Bush family’s close ties to the Bin Ladin Group. (Yes, THAT Bin Ladin Group; they’ve altered the English-language spelling, but yes, they are OBL’s relatives!) To put icing on the cake, there’s Venezuela, with Chavez’ ominously cozy relationship with Ahmadinejad, Iran’s nuclear neo-Nazi.
So what made me think of all these other scandals? What common thread has linked every major scandal of the western world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
They’re are all about foreign money from Muslim sources being used to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the UN. It’s as simple as that.
In the U.S., this money has bought politicians wholesale on both sides of the aisle. The corruption is so pervasive that it’s not even about partisan politics; it’s about the blindly selfish, and in fact treasonous, pursuit of power and wealth. The funding is not only coming from Muslim petrodollars, but also from Albanian crime syndicate money (from drug-running, arms-smuggling, slave-trading, and wholesale looting), Taliban opium money, diverted foreign aid, you name it.
What to do? Many people won’t want to hear the answer, but that isn’t my problem. I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em, and I don’t care whether anybody likes it or not.
We can’t afford to keep doing business with our enemies. Our enemies include every Islamist and every jihadist-sympathizer on the planet, and every government that openly or covertly promotes jihadism. Yes, that adds up to an awful lot of people. Our foes have already chosen that path. Our failure to acknowledge it will not make them go away. They see it as a war of extermination against us, and we have no choice but to defeat them.
What does “not doing business with the enemy” mean in practice?
This means we have to bite the bullet and achieve complete energy independence as soon as possible, and by every means available.
This means building clean-coal and nuclear power plants, wind farms, synfuel facilities, you name it. We need to stop putting roadblocks in the way of everyone who is trying to help achieve energy independence. For example, when a reputable electric power company wants to build a new clean-coal plant or a nuke plant, making use of resources that the U.S. has in abundance, the authorities should let them proceed as soon as a good plan is in place. And we should go ahead and drill for oil in uninhabitable wilderness regions.
This means we must finally debunk all of this propaganda that blames us - and our desire to maintain a standard of living compatible with civilized life - for “global warming.” Is Mars also warming up because we’ve been driving too many SUVs on the red planet? Claiming that there is a “scientific consensus” on behalf of one’s political agenda does not mean that there actually is one! The people who started up this propaganda evidently hate people in general, and modern civilization in particular. More to the point, their political manipulations play into the hands of our foreign enemies. The only way to deal with them is to refute them once and for all, and then never listen to any of them ever again.
This means we stop making alliances with, and stop giving aid to, any Muslim nation, entity, or faction. It means we never again use U.S. military power to fight a war on behalf of Muslims under any circumstances whatsoever - no matter how much they flood the airwaves with fauxtography and stage elaborate hoaxes to play themselves up as the victims of whomever they want the U.S. to punish - and no matter how much they are paying our politicians under the table.
This means that we must stop educating and hiring aliens, including de facto enemy aliens, in preference to our own citizens. That would be an inexcusable outrage during peacetime, and it’s criminally insane when we are at war. It’s time to stop bringing in any foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries or regions, particularly in the fields of engineering and IT. It’s time to drastically scale back the student visa program, and to eliminate the thoroughly corrupt H-1b program entirely. We’ve been shutting out loyal, qualified, experienced, and hard-working Americans from jobs, and turning over large portions of America’s technical infrastructure to foreign nationals whose loyalty is clearly elsewhere.
None of these things are impossible, or even all that difficult, to do. It’s all a matter of growing up, facing facts, and seeing the world and its inhabitants as they are, not as we wish they would be. If we refuse to face facts, that will not stop the facts from facing us.
Rolling updates on the Ahtisaari bribery allegations:
Article in Serbian-language paper “Fokus”, Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia
(posted in original article 6/25/07): Albanska mafija kupila Ahtisarija
Since publication of the Focus report and this opinon based on that report, new information suggests that the intelligence report the Bosnian Serb news agency Focus claims was filed at the UN apparently was never received by the UN.
Since the alleged report is the only piece of evidence provided in support of the claims by Focus, the claims in the Focus story - and the opinion below based on that, may be false. Please check back later for an update.
1389’s comment (added 6/28/07):
I remain convinced that there is an extremely high probability that this story is true. To begin with, the story comports with everything that has been going on in Kosovo since 1999. Moreover, the UN has an interest in attempting to bury an embarrassing story by having some unnamed individual claim that the UN never received such a document.
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no denials of culpability or involvement on the part of Ahtisaari, the Albanians, or anyone else. Nor has there been any official denial issued by any named individual or department at the UN.
I must point out that the failure to deny wrongdoing is tantamount to an admission of culpability. As someone who has neither accepted nor offered bribes, if some newspaper had accused me of such a thing, not only would I have denied it loudly and without delay, but I would have immediately contacted an attorney to talk about filing a suit for defamation.
The data collected by the GIS for South-Eastern Europe was published in the GIS Defense and Foreign Affairs section in the form of analysis which President of the American Council for Kosovo-Metohija Jim Jatras on Tuesday presented at a news conference in Belgrade. (added 7/10/07)
