AP is making a big deal about President Obama’s interview last night on Al-Arabiya, the Arab news network, his first since his Inauguration. The headline is supposed to be big news;
The New York Times calls it a “new tone” in Mideast relations;
Well, it’s such a simple solution to the Mideast problem, why didn’t Bush think of that? Actually he did. Although the Bush era speech has been scrubbed from the White House website (the speech is supposed to be at this URL; www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html), through the magic of cached webpages, I found the speech he made on Sept. 20, 2001 when he told the Arab world that Islam is not our enemy;
So what’s new? Obama juxtaposed a word or two, but it ends up having the same meaning. Is this what change is? Obama recycling Bush speeches only this time the media fawns over virtually the same words?
Category: Terror War
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Jimmy Carter; still clueless after all these years
Curt at Flopping Aces has a video of perennial dipshit Jimmy Carter on the Today Show this morning. Just when you think the branch this fruit is hanging from can’t droop any lower, down he goes;
I draw your attention to this exchange;
VIEIRA: Do you believe that Hamas can be trusted?
CARTER: Yes, I do. I think they can, because of their own self- interest, not because they’re benevolent, or kind, or that sort of thing. But yes, I do. I think they can. And they’ve never betrayed any commitment that they’ve made to me, or publicly, as a matter of fact. …
VIEIRA: But Hamas has said its goal is to destroy Israel. How can you involve them in a peace process when they said their goal is to destroy Israel? They don’t recognize Israel.
CARTER: I’m not here to defend Hamas….
Then what the hell is he doing? He claims there was “no serious rocket fire” during the 2008 cease fire – well, unless you count those three thousand rockets they fired into Irsael. Just because Hamas haven’t fired any rockets at Jimmy Carter personally, I guess he feels that makes them trustworthy.
I’m glad to see that Carter is willing to goof up any Presidential administration, that he’s a nonpartisan fly in everyone’s ointment. I wonder how he explains away his one term presidency to himself.
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Gitmo alum get promotions after release
The Australian ABC News is reporting that two Gitmo alum have started their climb up the al Qaeda corporate ladder;
One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official said.
Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner number 333.
Of course, taking their talking points from Amnesty International, they blame their detainment for their life of crime;
“By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for,” al-Shihri was quoted as saying.
Al-Shiri was transferred from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia in 2007, the US counter-terrorism official said.
I wonder if our buddy Chris Arendt, of the Emo Brotherhood wing of the Iraq Veterans Against the War was BFF with these two while he was handing out toilet paper in Gitmo.
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Gitmo on Conemaugh
Well it’s a done deal, Obama has ordered Guantanamo closed in a year. Yeah, well, you know, he’s going to take this record to the polls with him in four years – that is if the polls are still standing. Obama moved swiftly to silence his nutroots and moonbats;
The new executive orders came a day after Obama began moving swiftly — on his first full day in office — to roll back eight years of his predecessor’s policies, ordering tough new ethics rules, meeting with top generals about speeding the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and gathering his senior economic advisers in a push for a massive spending bill to create jobs.
The orders include an immediate case-by-case review of the 245 detainees remaining at Guantanamo, as well as the application of new rules governing the treatment and interrogation of prisoners, including compliance with international treaties that the Bush administration deemed inapplicable to suspects in terrorism cases.
So what are they going to do with those Guantanamo detainees? John Murtha said he’ll take ’em;
Murtha only has a minimum security prison in his district. But he says he’d have no reservations about holding detainees there in a maximum security prison.
“Sure, I’d take ’em,” said Murtha, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. “They’re no more dangerous in my district than in Guantanamo.”
Besides, Murtha never goes to his district, he’s in DC. I hear his district is full of dumbass racist rednecks, anyway – they’ll never notice a few extra Ay-rabs wandering the streets. Especially if Obama will build him a brand spankin’ new prison. Murtha might visit occasionally to partake of a naked pyramid or two.
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Hamas belatedly announces ceasefire
Last night I wrote that the Israelis announced their intention to enact a unilateral ceasefire dependent upon Hamas’ ability to keep their rockets on the ground. Well, Hamas announced their own ceasefire this morning (from BBC);
“We… announce a ceasefire of our factions in the Gaza Strip and we stress that our demand is the withdrawal of the enemy forces from the Gaza Strip within a week, along with the opening of all the crossings for the entry of humanitarian aid, food and other necessities for our people in the Gaza Strip.”
After losing about a thousand of their jihadists, they sound like they’re in a position to make demands, don’t they? Here’s the full text of the statement. BBC adds this comment;
Many people are hoping that a ceasefire will last, but no-one on either side of the border will be surprised if the fighting starts up again, our correspondent adds.
Yeah, no kidding. We can probably expect lots of Hamas rocket rangers to not get the word, or even care that there’s a ceasefire. After all they fired off 3000 rockets during the last six-month ceasefire. In fact, Times Online reports that Hamas fired off five rockets into Israel after the Israelis announced their unilateral ceasefire;
The strategy appeared to be working when Hamas sent at least five rockets towards Sderot and said that it would not stop fighting until all Israeli troops had left Gaza. Israeli aircraft swiftly destroyed the rocket-launching site.
AFP reports that a summit hosted by Egypt is scheduled to begin this week;
Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Jordan will be represented at the meeting in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, an Egyptian government official, who requested anonymity, told AFP.
In Paris, the office of French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he will co-chair the summit along with his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, who has sought to broker an end to the fighting under a truce plan.
It’s nice that they’re all going through the motions, but actually, by killing 1200 Hamas fighters, Israel has done more for peace in the region than all of the governments of the world.
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Israel vows ceasefire; Hamas not so much
The Washington Post reports that Israel may declare a unilateral ceasfire in Gaza;
Olmert said Israeli troops would hold their fire starting at 2 a.m. local time Sunday but would remain in Gaza indefinitely. He said a withdrawal would depend on whether Hamas would also stop fighting and launching rockets into southern Israel.
“If they stop firing, we will consider leaving Gaza at a time that is suitable to us,” he said in a televised address to the Israeli public.
Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? All Hamas has to do is stop firing missiles like the 3000 they fired during the 6-month ceasefire. So Hamas, after being battered and bloodied for the last few weeks should jump at it, right? Well, those fun-loving, cazy dudes at Hamas don’t;
Prior to the cease-fire announcement, Hamas leaders said the Islamist movement would continue to fight until Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and ended its 18-month economic blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Hamas sounds like they have the upper hand, don’t they? Osama Hamdan, Hamas’ representative to Syria, from his suite in the Damascus Ramada, moving aside the veils of the 72 virgins in his bed (OK, I made that up) was characteristically (for a coward not anywhere near the fighting) defiant (Times Online).
Israeli sources said the ceasefire would make Hamas responsible for any fresh clashes. But Hamas was not a party to the deal and Osama Hamdan, a top official based in Lebanon, said after Mr Olmert’s announcement that the group would continue to attack Israeli forces.
So, let’s see how long Hamas can keep their rockets in their collective pocket. Odds are they’ll provoke another offensive by Israel and given a complete pass from the “industrialized” countries because Hamas wasn’t “a party to the deal”.
Gabriel Malor at AoSHQ quotes Juan Cole threatening that Israel shouldn’t cause the media to show dead Palestinian children during the Inauguration and ruin it for everyone. Don Surber writes that Isreal just ran out of targets.
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I challenge you to find a bigger DouChe’ than IVAW’s Chris Arendt [TSO]
I challenge you to find a bigger douche than Christopher Arendt, 1/119th Field Artillery, Charlotte, Michigan. He had already made my radar last week as I read this P.O.S. book, Winter Soldier, when he had this comment about his service at Gitmo:
I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without ever having made many decisions.
Here is Specialist Arendt. He looks like one of the Emo kids from South Park. For Chris, the worst form of torture is having to go a week without a duck-taped gerbil being inserted into his anus by his boyfriend. (Unfair Arendt? Completely baseless? You are G.D. right it is, kind of like accusing your fellow troops of being psychotic.)
SCREEN SHOT: Video here: go over to the BBC and watch this interview.
So what is torture to him?
I’ve heard a lot of speculation as to what torture is. I would like to ask everyone to consider whether living in a cell for five years, away from your family and friends, without ever being given answers as to why you’re there, whether this is torture. Having to ask 19 year old boys who don’t have any idea about the politics of their government why they are detained and the answers that we weren’t able to give- I consider that torture.
OK, at this point, go over to the BBC and watch this interview with him from last Friday.
“they [ members of his unit] are genuinely psychotic.”
The “shaving things into detainees hair” is a new one for him. One has to wonder why a fantastic story like that makes its first appearance in a BBC video and not in his testimony from a year ago. It’s almost as if he forgot it out until now. Or maybe, the harrowing business of running a detention facility caused his mind to block it out. Or maybe, just maybe, the story is sheer bullshit. I’m leaning towards the later of these potential causes of amnesia. According to his testimony in March, the only discussion of shaving heads is this:
After the detainee is taken forcibly from his cell – that’s probably the first time that he’s left his cell in five, six, seven days – the detainees are beaten, pulled out to the back, shaved, all of their hair, their beard, and then taken to wherever they were supposed to go.
Wait, so were their patterns shaved into their hair, or was it all shaved off?
So let’s look at the rest of his testimony. Mind you that Chris was an E4.
“I served on the blocks for two months as a prison guard. My duties were to feed detainees and dispense toilet paper…A consequence of having detainees is that they are human beings and also have stories. [Ed: No shit?] I talked with them about those stories, which led to my being taken off the blocks. I was sent to work in the Detention Operations Center as the escort control for the last eight months of my tour. I managed the movements of every detainee in Camp Delta. I did this on twelve- to fourteen- hour shifts, and rotated with a very small crew of other specialists.”
Let me see if I get this straight. With all the officers, interrogators, OGA groups and NCO’s at Gitmo, they entrusted the running of this camp to a 19 year old Specialist who got shit-canned from his job dispensing toilet paper? Is there anyone reading this now that buys into this? Anyone? Is it more likely that Arendt ran Camp Delta, or that a Yeti and Barbra Streisand spawned Amy Winehouse? I would say that each of those stories is equally believable.
Specialist Chris Arendt, you are the newest member of the Blue Falcons.
I’ve got some calls into various people who served at Gitmo, including a SGM who may have been there at the same time as Chris. If anyone knows ANYONE in the 1/119th Field Artillery, get them to email us. I want to hammer the BBC on this.
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Zombie does SF’s Pro-Hamas event
If you didn’t get enough of the Israel hatred from my post last Saturday, Zombie was at it again in San Francisco chronicling the anti-Israel hatred on the other coast.
Zombie is lucky. Out in San Francisco, the protesters get to make and show their own signs. Here in DC, they have a staging area where they screen the signs. If you don’t have a media-acceptable sign, ANSWER takes it from you and gives you one of theirs;
