Author: GI JANE

This particular stop on their world tour got them ousted:

Pakistan authorities today ordered the deportation of the leader of the feminist U.S. antiwar group Code Pink, who was in Lahore to join protests against the emergency rule imposed by President Pervez Musharraf, according to a spokeswoman for the group.

Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the group, said she was arrested at a student demonstration by agents of the Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence and detained for about four hours before being released with orders to leave the country tomorrow morning.

“I’m OK — a little shaken up,” Ms. Benjamin told The Washington Times by telephone from her hotel in Lahore. “They mistreated us.”

Ms. Benjamin said she feared for her life as the agents held her at gunpoint in a car speeding through the city to the police station.

“I thought I was going to die in the car,” she said. “They totally terrorized us.”

Pakistani authorities also detained and then ordered the deportation of Tighe Barry, a longtime Code Pink activist who was participating with the student rally outside the Lahore Press Club.

Pakistan officials told Ms. Benjamin that she was being deported because she took part in an illegal demonstration, she said.

“It’s a sad state of affairs when the Pakistani government, a government that is trying to portray itself to the West as democratic, tries to harass and deport U.S. human rights activists,” Ms. Benjamin said at the press club before her arrest. “If they do this to us, who have the protection of being U.S. citizens, imagine what they do to their own citizens.”

Link: http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071204/NATION/112040100/1001

Aw, the widdle Code Pinky gal was aaaaaaall shaken up over being arrested because she protested in a foreign country. The funny thing is, this idiot believes she is protected in a hostile foreign environment because she’s a American citizen. Aside from that, if she really wants to prove how concerned she is over ‘human rights’, she and her Code Pink moonbats need to put Saudi Arabia on their itinerary. The way women are treated and abused in that country would keep her ‘terrorized’ for a long time….if she lived long enough.

If anyone really believes the cock and bull assumption in the latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran’s nuclear weapon potential, think again.  Ahmadinejad is one of the most duplicitous, lying, brutal, terrorist dictators in the Middle East, and all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe that he’s given up on developing nukes?   

If you buy that shit, I’ve got a bridge on the corner of East Erie and Broadway in my hometown for sale….cheap.

A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of the U.S. intelligence community, Newsmax has learned.

Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.

Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Washington has fallen for “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers posing as senior diplomats in Europe.

……The National Intelligence Council, which produced the NIE, is chaired by Thomas Fingar, “a State Department intelligence analyst with no known overseas experience who briefly headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research……

Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues……

In March 2007, Fingar fired his top Cuba and Venezuela analyst, Norman Bailey, after he warned of the growing alliance between Castro and Chavez.

Bailey’s departure from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was applauded by the Cuban government news service Granma, who called Bailey “a patent relic of the Reagan regime.” And Fingar was just one of a coterie of State Department officials brought over to ODNI by the first director, career State Department official John Negroponte.

Collaborating with Fingar on the Iran estimate, released on Monday, were Kenneth Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, and Vann H. Van Diepen, the National Intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.

“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for “Shadow Warriors.”

“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.

Kenneth Brill, also a career foreign service officer, had been the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2003-2004 before he was forced into retirement.

……“While in Vienna, Brill consistently failed to confront Iran once its clandestine nuclear weapons program was exposed in February 2003, and had to be woken up with the bureaucratic equivalent of a cattle prod to deliver a single speech condemning Iran’s eighteen year history of nuclear cheating.”

Negroponte rehabilitated Brill and brought the man who single-handedly failed to object to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and put him in charge of counter-proliferation efforts for the entire intelligence community.

Christian Westermann, another favorite of Senate Democrats in the Bolton confirmation hearings, was among the career State Department analysts tapped by Fingar and Brill.

As a State Department intelligence analyst, Westermann had missed the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba, and played into the hands of Castro apologist Sen. Christopher Dodd, D, Conn., by continuing to use impeached intelligence reports on Cuba that had been written by self-avowed Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes.

“After failing to recognize the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba and Cuba’s cooperation with Iran, Westermann was promoted to become national intelligence officer for biological weapons,” I wrote.

“Let’s hope a walk-in defector from Iranian intelligence doesn’t tell us that Iran has given biological weapons to terrorists to attack new York or Chicago,” I added, “because Westermann will certainly object that the source of that information was not reliable — at least, until Americans start dying.”

……My former colleague from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz, suggests in today’s print edition of the paper that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Alireza Asgari, who defected while in Turkey in February, was the human source whose information led to the NIE”s conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

But intelligence sources in Europe told Newsmax in late September that Asgari’s debriefings on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs were “so dramatic” that they caused French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister to speak out publicly about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

……Ashgari is the highest-level Iranian official to have defected to the West since the Islamic revolution of 1979. His defection set off a panic in Tehran.

As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Asgari had access to highly-classified intelligence information, as well as strategic planning documents, as I reported at the time.

A damage assessment then underway in Tehran was expected to “take months” to complete, so extensive was Asgari’s access to Iran’s nuclear and intelligence secrets.

Asgari had detailed knowledge of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units operating in Iraq and Lebanon because he had trained some of them. He also knew some of the secrets of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, because he had been a top procurement officer and a deputy minister of defense in charge of logistics. But Asgari never had responsibility for nuclear weapons development, and probably did not have access to information about the status of the secret programs being run by the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian sources tell Newsmax.

In an effort to cover up the failure of Iranian counter-intelligence to prevent Asgari’s defection, a Persian language Web site run by the former Revolutioanry Guards Comdr. Gen. Mohsen Rezai claimed in March that Asgari was on a CIA “hit list” of 20 former Revolutionary Guards officers and had been assassinated.

……The NIE opined that the new assessment leads to the policy conclusion that the United States should offer “some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunites,” in order to lock in Iranian good behavior.

This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States. “Those [countries that] assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran’s fast drive toward progress are mistaken,” Ahmadinejad said in Tehran in September at a military parade.

By “progress” Ahmadinejad was referring to Iran’s recently-declared success at enriching uranium.

Link: http://newsmax.com/timmerman/iran_nukes/2007/12/04/54359.html

The fact remains that Iran is still enriching uranium and may very well have a nuclear weapon within the next decade. Between the rigging by leftwing Democrats, questionable sources, and lack of cross checking, you can use this NIE to line your bird cage.

Holy crap, if this keeps up I’ll have to put my ‘Eurotrash’ label on hold.  

Denmark’s centre-right government of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch supporter of President Bush and the War on Terrorhas won a snap election, securing a third consecutive term in office.

His Liberal-Conservative coalition and allies won 90 of the 179 seats in parliament, near complete results show.

The centre-left opposition led by the Social Democrats secured 84 seats.

Mr Rasmussen now faces tough talks on whether to expand the ruling bloc by including a new party led by a Syria-born Palestinian immigrant.

Turnout was higher than in the previous poll, held in 2005, at over 86%.

……The issues of welfare and tax reforms, immigration and the environment led to much campaign wrangling.

But all the main parties seem to agree on the core issues and campaigning has been more about who wields power than any policy change, correspondents say.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7091941.stm

The internal threat posed by Islamic thugs has finally pushed the Danes to take a stand. Maybe they’ve finally tired of death threats against the government and cartoonists, and knives plunged into the chests of film makers.

In further news, Britain and France are vying for ‘America’s best friend’:

Not to be outdone by President Sarkozy’s amorous overture to President Bush in Washington, Prime Minister Brown of Britain has used the first major foreign policy speech of his premiership to insist that Britain is America’s closest ally.

After decades of Anglo-French rivalry, in which France has vehemently deplored the global influence America and Britain have attained and what every president of France since Charles de Gaulle has described as “Anglo-Saxon culture,” Mr. Sarkozy claimed during his visit to Washington last week that France, not Britain, is now America’s best friend and partner.

Mr. Brown, who has been portrayed on both sides of the Atlantic as having distanced himself from America to avoid the charge against his predecessor, Tony Blair, that he was Mr. Bush’s “poodle,” fought back last night, claiming in a speech at a banquet thrown by the lord mayor of the city of London that the French president’s bid to usurp Britain’s traditional place alongside America would not succeed.

“It is no secret that I am a lifelong admirer of America,” Mr. Brown said. And, in a thinly veiled reference to France’s traditional dislike of America and its culture, he added, “I have no truck with anti-Americanism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe, and I believe that our ties with America — founded on values we share — constitute our most important bilateral relationship.”

He welcomed France’s late conversion to the American cause and a similar newfound affection for America expressed by Chancellor Merkel of Germany in her visit to Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, over the weekend.

Link: http://www.nysun.com/article/66369

Britain has been a steadfast ally of the United States for decades. Our friendship, inspite of occasional differences, has rarely been strained. France on the other hand, changes its mind as often as it changes governments. Since 1789, it’s had 11 constitutions. Its history is full of Monarchies, and socialist Parliaments flecked with the occasional right/center right influence.

This amusing one-upmanship will probably be short lived.  After seeing the “We stand with you” sign on the German ship just after 9/11 , I remember thinking “that will last about two minutes”.

However, there was a bright spot on the German horizon in the form of Angela Merkel:

Tired of battling disgruntled government officials and voters, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder called for early elections last year. Big mistake. It bounced him out of his position and brought pro-market Merkel, the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, to power. The first female chancellor in Germany’s history, and the first woman to lead Germany since it became a nation-state in 1871, Merkel is a favorite of German business. From humble beginnings as a Lutheran pastor’s daughter in Hamburg, she graduated with a doctorate of physics from the University of Leipzig. Unassuming and diplomatically astute, Merkel was later named secretary-general of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s largest conservative political party, after the Kohl government fell in 1998. Along with her pro-free-market reform agenda, Merkel advocates a strong German-American relationship, evidenced by her support of the proposals to bring Iran to the nuclear negotiating table. Merkel has been overhauling the government’s health care system and cumbersome corporate tax policies. She has also put her strict budgetary imprint on the sprawling European Union budget debates. With her conciliatory powers, Merkel has managed to maintain impressive approval ratings both home and abroad.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/11/06women_Angela-Merkel_34AH.html

Britain, Germany, Denmark, and now France? This is certainly a good trend, but we’ll see if it lasts longer than the proverbial two minutes.

What a shocker. Now, maybe the fabulist/diarist will fade into long-overdue obscurity.   

SHOCK DOCS: THE NEW REPUBLIC ‘SHOCK TROOPS’ STORY COLLAPSES
WED Oct 24 2007 12:29:44 ET

The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC’S “Baghdad Diarist”, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front.

The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp’s diaries were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about the U.S. military in a time of war.

…..THE NEW REPUBLIC has been standing behind the stories from their Baghdad Diarist, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, since questions were first raised about their accuracy over the summer. On August 10, the editors at TNR accused the Army of “stonewalling” their investigation into the stories by preventing them from speaking with Beauchamp. The DRUDGE REPORT has since obtained the transcript of a September 7 call between TNR editor Frank Foer, TNR executive editor Peter Scoblic, and Private Beauchamp. During the call, Beauchamp declines to stand by his stories, telling his editors that “I just want it to end. I’m not going to talk to anyone about anything really.” The editors respond that “we just can’t, in good conscience, continue to defend the piece” without an explanation, but Beauchamp responds only that he “doesn’t care what the public thinks.” The editors then ask Beauchamp to cancel scheduled interviews with the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK.

……The DRUDGE REPORT has also obtained a signed “Memorandum for Record” in which Beauchamp recants his stories and concedes the facts of the Army’s investigation — that his stories contained “gross exaggerations and inaccurate allegations of misconduct” by his fellow soldiers.

……The third document obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT is the Army’s official report on the investigation into the allegations made by Private Beauchamp. The Army concluded that Beauchamp had “completely fabricated” the story of mocking a disfigured woman, that his description of a “Saddam-era dumping ground” was false, and that claims that he and his men had deliberately targeted dogs with their armored vehicles was “completely unfounded.” Further the report stated “that Private Beauchamp desired to use his experiences to enhance his writing and provide legitimacy to his work possibly becoming the next Hemingway.”

The report concludes that “Private Beauchamp takes small bits of truth and twists and exaggerates them into fictional accounts that he puts forth as the whole truth for public consumption.”

Link: http://www.drudgereport.com/flash8.htm

For some reason, the documents containing TNR’s interview with Beauchamp were pulled from Drudge but HotAir.com was able to save them:

The entire story and additional information here.

TNR is still trying to cover their ass.  Admitting they fucked up beyond belief might have saved at least a shred of credibility.  Just reading the interview and Beauchamp’s blithe responses makes me want to vomit.  So far, there’s been a deafening silence on the TNR website. I can hardly wait to read their final sorry-assed excuse.

Jonn added: Michele Malkin has the whole story on the Beauchamp leaked documents in detail and timeline.