Let us pray for Eowyn's husband, James.
As all my regular readers know, Eowyn is an integral part of Giovanni’s World, and a good friend to all of us here.
And as she is someone close to us, I would like to ask everyone to say a prayer for her and her husband tonight. Eowyn’s husband was taken to the ER this morning, and is having health problems.
Gio-
I don’t know how I missed hearing about this, but it’s probably good that I did miss it because I’m not sure what my immediate reaction would have been. I’m going to bet that nobody can show me exactly where in the Bible it makes the claim that ‘being gay is a gift from God’.
Preachers like these tend to scare me…
This girl of 12 years of age has more intelligence than millions of 
the leftists in this country. Maybe, just maybe, our youth have a chance of saving this country. We need to pray for them hard!
To feel this girls sense of intelligence, and her being morally anchored, you really need to watch and listen to the video of her. Just click on the link below.
Gio-
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
For video of this girl’s speech:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89135
12-year-old steals day with pro-life speech
Teachers threaten disqualification, but girl chooses to speak against abortion
Posted: February 16, 2009
8:36 pm Eastern
By Chelsea Schilling
2009 WorldNetDaily
Despite facing threats of disqualification, a 12-year-old girl took first place in a speech contest when she eloquently argued for the rights of unborn children after an offended judge quit.
“What if I told you that right now, someone was choosing if you were going to live or die?” the seventh-grader begins in a video recording of her speech on YouTube. “What if I told you that this choice wasn’t based on what you could or couldn’t do, what you’d done in the past or what you would do in the future? And what if I told you, you could do nothing about it?”
The girl, a student at a Toronto school identified only as “Lia,” continued:
“Fellow students and teachers, thousands of children are right now in that very situation. Someone is choosing without even knowing them whether they are going to live or die.
“That someone is their mother. And that choice is abortion.”
But what made the 12-year-old choose to speak about abortion?
“It was really a family thing,” her mother explained on the blog Moral Outcry. “I saw Lou [Engle] speak at a conference several years ago. I came back to my family with the Life Bands, and we all wore them, made our covenant, and prayed the prayer for abortion to end. We were invited to participate in a ‘Life Tape Siege.’ Once my kids heard of this invitation, they all agreed: ‘We have to do that!’ Since then, Lia’s passion for seeing abortion end has continued.”
Despite Lia’s enthusiasm for her topic, her teacher “strongly encouraged” her to select a different one for her class presentation or she would be considered ineligible for an upcoming speech contest.
“[S]everal teachers discouraged her from picking the topic of abortion; she was told it was ‘too big,’ ‘too mature’ and ‘too controversial,’” her mother wrote. “She was also told that if she went ahead with that topic, she would not be allowed to continue on in the speech competition.”
Lia’s mother continued, “Initially, I tried helping her find other topics to speak on, but, in the end, she was adamant. She just felt she wanted to continue with the topic of abortion. So she forfeited her chance to compete in order to speak on something she was passionate about.”
Lia’s teacher was so impressed by the speech that she allowed her student to advance as the winner. Lia presented her speech to judges in front of her entire school on Feb. 10.
The school principal and teachers called Lia’s presentation the “obvious winner” but the judges suddenly disqualified her the following day “because of the topic and her position on abortion,” her mother said.
Lia’s father later revealed that the judges had a “big disagreement.” One was offended by the speech and voluntarily stepped down while the others reversed their earlier decision declaring her the winner.
Now Lia plans to take her message of life to a regional speech competition, and more than 100,000 visitors have viewed her presentation online.
“Why do we think that just because a fetus can’t talk or do what we do, it isn’t a human being yet?” She asks in the video. “Some babies are born after only five months. Is this baby not human?
“We would never say that. Yet abortions are performed on 5-month-old fetuses all the time. Or do we only call them humans if they’re wanted?”
She continues, “No, fetuses are definitely humans knit together in their mother’s womb by their wonderful Creator who knows them all by name.”
I’m not shocked by much anymore thanks to the left always 
pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable by moral people. This one however is different. The idea that this pastor would even be arrested for what he was doing is mind boggling. Warning… short rant coming!
Let’s say your house is on fire. You barely escape with your life, but suddenly you realized you left your baby in the house. A Fireman over-hears you and grabs your arm saying “don’t worry I’ll get your baby” and he rushes into the burning inferno to save your childs life. What do you do now?
A. Do you let him go and say a prayer for both he and your child.
B. Ask that the Fireman be arrested?
Now read below and you will understand.
Gio-
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=418990
Pro-life pastor prepares for sentencing
Charlie Butts – OneNewsNow – 2/15/2009 4:10:00 AM
An Oakland, California, pastor could face jail time for expressing his pro-life views.
Pastor Walter Hoye ran into trouble with an abortion clinic while doing an informational picket. Dennis Howard, leader of The Movement for a Better America, believes Hoye is innocent.
“His approach was simply to carry a sign that said ‘Jesus Loves You. Can We Help?’ and offering those who wanted it some information about alternatives to abortion,” Howard explains.
A complaint was filed and Hoye was found guilty in spite of proof to the contrary. “There was a video taken of him doing this, and it shows that he was not harassing anybody,” Howard points out. “In fact, he was being harassed by escorts from the abortion clinic.”
Pastor Hoye faces up to two years in jail and a $4,000 fine. Howard is calling Christians into action. “We feel that pro-life organizations around the country ought to take up this man’s cause and pray and fast between now and February 19,” he concludes.
That is when Hoye is due to be sentenced.
First, Hugo Chavez. Next stop, Obama?
~Eowyn
Proof that Hugo is evil.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g-XT1LHvGnHwytS8tnBmfnd_BcqgD96CEU7G0
Chavez wins vote to scrap term limits in Venezuela
By NIKO PRICE Feb 16, 2009
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) President Hugo Chavez won a referendum to eliminate term limits Sunday and vowed to remain in power for at least another decade to complete his socialist revolution. Opponents accepted defeat but said Chavez is becoming a dictator.
Fireworks exploded in the sky and caravans of supporters celebrated in the streets, waving red flags and honking horns. Thousands of people gathered outside Miraflores Palace, where the former paratroop commander appeared on a balcony to sing the national anthem and address the crowd.
“Those who voted ‘yes’ today voted for socialism, for revolution,” Chavez said. He called the victory which allows all public officials to run for re-election indefinitely a mandate to speed his transformation of Venezuela into a socialist state.
“Today we opened wide the gates of the future,” he said. “In 2012 there will be presidential elections, and unless God decides otherwise, unless the people decide otherwise, this soldier is already a candidate.”
With 94 percent of the vote counted, 54 percent had voted for the constitutional amendment, National Electoral Council chief Tibisay Lucena said. Forty-six percent had voted against it, a trend she called irreversible. She said turnout was 67 percent.
At their campaign headquarters, Chavez opponents hugged one another, and some cried. Several opposition leaders said they wouldn’t contest the vote.
“We’re democrats. We accept the results,” said opposition leader Omar Barboza.
But they said the results were skewed by Chavez’s broad use of state resources to get out the vote, through a battery of state-run news media, pressure on 2 million public employees and frequent presidential speeches which all television stations are required to air.
Opponents say Chavez already has far too much power, with the courts, the legislature and the election council all under his influence. Removing the 12-year presidential term limit, they say, makes him unstoppable.
“Effectively this will become a dictatorship,” Barboza told The Associated Press. “It’s control of all the powers, lack of separation of powers, unscrupulous use of state resources, persecution of adversaries.”
Voters on both sides said the referendum was crucial to the future of Venezuela, a deeply polarized country where Chavez has spent a tumultuous decade in power channeling tremendous oil wealth into combating gaping social inequality.
Chavez supporters say their president has given poor Venezuelans cheap food, free education and quality health care, and empowered them with a discourse of class struggle after decades of U.S.-backed governments that favored the rich.
“This victory saved the revolution,” said Gonzalo Mosqueda, a 60-year-old shopkeeper, sipping rum from a plastic cup outside the palace. “Without it everything would be at risk all the social programs, and everything he has done for the poor.”
Chavez took office in 1999 and won support for a new constitution the same year that allowed the president to serve two six-year terms, barring him from the 2012 elections. Sunday’s vote was his second attempt to change that; voters rejected a broader referendum in December 2007.
Venezuela’s leftist allies in Latin America have followed the model. Ecuador pushed through a new constitution in September and Bolivia did so in January. Both loosened rules on presidential re-election. Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinistas also plan to propose an amendment that would let Daniel Ortega run for another consecutive term.
Associated Press writers Fabiola Sanchez and Christopher Toothaker contributed to this report.
Now you know why I live in the South!
Gio-
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
For map of US states & religion, & Gallup poll table, go to http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89029
Where does your state rank in religious belief?
Gallup poll reveals ‘Bible Belt‘ for real
————————————————————
Posted: February 15, 2009
4:39 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
2009 WorldNetDaily
A recent poll of more than 350,000 Americans on the importance of religion revealed that the nation is separated into enclaves of widely divergent viewpoints on faith, with some states and regions clearly religious and others significantly secular.
Gallup conducted a telephone poll of 355,334 U.S. adults, asking the question, “Is religion an important part of your daily life?”
As one might suspect, states from the “Bible Belt” scored the highest, with 85 percent of Mississippians and 79 percent of Tennesseeans, for example, answering yes.
The poll also revealed, however, that in addition to the Bible Belt, the U.S. also has a pair of “secular strips.”
The New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine scored the lowest in the nation, with only 42 percent of Vermont residents or less than half the percentage of those in Mississippi answering yes.
The other “secular strip” can be found in the West, where Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Nevada all scored in the bottom 10 states for affirming religion’s importance in daily life.
Get Ray Comfort’s latest book, “You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but You Can’t Make Him Think” signed by the author exclusively from WND Books!
Across the country’s entirety, 65 percent of the respondents affirmed that religion is an important part of their lives.
Gallup’s map of the nation, based on a state-by-state breakdown of responses to the poll question, can be seen below:
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, theorizes in a Christian Post column on the reason for the startling disparity between the beliefs of religious Southerners and the more secular Northeasterners.
“New England certainly did not start as a secular experiment, but it entered the twentieth century already showing signs of deep secularization,” Mohler writes. “The influence of liberal theology in the region, the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, and the leading edge of urbanization and industrialization certainly contributed to the pattern.”
Regarding the South, Mohler postulates, the region’s history and culture also play a role.
“The responses from the Bible Belt surely include those generated by cultural Christianity,” Mohler writes. “In the South, being ‘raised right’ includes knowing how you are supposed to respond to a question like that posed by Gallup.”
The Gallup poll comes just one month after the organization also asked a smaller sample of Americans, “At the present time, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence?”
Just over two-thirds of respondents thought it was losing its influence, the third highest percentage in Gallup’s 50-year history of asking the question.
As recently as 2002, 71 percent of Americans thought the opposite that religion was increasing in influence meaning opinion on the issue has undergone a complete reversal in the last seven years.
My first shot at this organization started back on 1/30/2009 with Big Trouble Ahead, and then a follow-up with The Great American Con-Job on the very next day. I’m taking another crack at them because something worthwhile is coming from both of these postings and I want to keep prompting reactions to it. First a little background then I will explain…
One of my readers, Jen I think, sent me the link to an organization called BornAgainAmerican which is a newly created, supposedly, pro-American organization by none other than Mr. TV himself, Norman Lear. When you go to the link you are immediately captured by the start of a music-video. The music-video is very well done. The tune is very catchy, the words are inspiring, the people in the video are very sincere, and all throughout you feel a sense of pride and patriotism. By the end of the video you are moved to sign up and ask… “What can I do for my country“?
In case you are wondering, every bit of that last paragraph is true.
Ok, so what? Right? Well, shortly after both of my original postings made the rounds on the net, I started to get reactions to it. A few people actually came here and made some ugly comments about this site because they thought (rightly so) that I was disparaging BAA and their patriotic goals. Then a few of my regular readers, and myself, set them straight about how insidious the BAA site was and something magical happened.
Surprisingly, they took a few minutes to take another look/listen, read my two postings concerning the BAA site, and the site’s Founder, Norman Lear. Each of them shortly thereafter apologized to me, my readers, and I guess my site in general. I must stop here just for a moment to respectfully accept their gracious apologies!
Anyway, the lightbulb went off in their heads, and I’m guessing they felt a little silly because they had been sucked-in by the moving BAA video. Which is very understandable.
Something even my readers don’t even know about (until now), is the emails I have received concerning BAA, accusing me of all sorts of stupid things, none of which is true of course, although my wife has called me a jerk from time to time.
Finally we get to the crux of why I’m writing this post and why I’m going to stay on top of this nasty little anti-American organization called BornAgainAmerican. Many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of Americans are going to be invited to join this organization thinking they are a patriotic group and will start some sort of pro-American movement that they can proudly be a part of. When in fact, the group uses fake patriotism and religion, to rail against real patriotism and religion. Yes, you read that correctly… this group is using religion to push religion aside in this country. The biggest problem as I see it is this, most of the people who sign up and send them money have no idea they are being taken for short ride off a long Marxist cliff. My story related above concerning the apologies is more than enough proof that what BAA is doing works, so something has to be done.
If any of you are experts at getting high rankings on the internet, I would appreciate your help in getting this story out across the World Wide Web. Actually, any of you who care to, can help just by linking to the BAA stories when you are visiting other sites or when emailing others. We may not shut them down, but we can help educate others, and in the process show people how sneaky these Marxist bastards can be. This may then slow them down a bit.
Happy hunting!
Gio-
P.S. Using http://alphainventions.com/ to increase traffic. It better work!
So were the Jihadists sitting around a campfire debating World
Jihad this!
Peace when they accidently caught the woods on fire? Yes, I know that was a pathetic joke, but the ‘religion of peace’ does that to me.
Gio-
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
Jihadists celebrating Victoria fires; taking joy in the scenes
By Eleni Hale
Sunday Herald Sun
February 15, 2009
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25056815-1243,00.html
JIHADISTS are celebrating the worst tragedy in Victoria’s history.
Terror watchdogs said fundamentalists had blogged on websites across the globe, applauding the lives lost and destruction in the Victoria fires.
Senior analyst at SITE Intelligence Group Adam Raisman said they were posting pictures of burnt homes and devastated victims and “taking joy in the scenes”, the Sunday Herald Sun reports.
One jihadist wrote: “It would be an act of revenge for Australian’s participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Bushfires victims said they were stunned.
“We’re minding our own business and trying to cope with all this and they are celebrating our suffering,” said Denise McCann who lost her home in the Kinglake blaze.
Regional Islamic Council vice-president Dr Ameer Ali said the comments did not represent the wider Muslim community.
“They have no idea what they are talking about,” he said.
In a Comrade Obama administration, the message will be… “Control the message”!
Gio-
Official 'Press Pet' Exterminator
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
Press Pets
“Chicago Sun-Times writer Carol Marin mildly complained that President Obama never goes before the press without having a list of pre-approved journalists upon whom he’ll call during a press conference. She offhandedly quipped that in the press corps, ‘most of us don’t even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who’ve been advised they will be called upon that day.’ I wonder if this same ‘free press’ would have meekly allowed president Bush get away with treating the press in such a way? Or would they have raised a hue and cry that would have deafened the world?”
newsbusters.org
I’ve had a very good day today, and even for Sunday it’s been very busy around here. So busy, that I was not going to post anything until tomorrow morning. However, a slight disagreement between a friend and I led me to what I’m about to share. Just so you know, the subject below has nothing to do with our argument, I just happened to run into this as I was looking for something else to show him.
I have heard about revisionist history for many years, and the idea that people change history, as it is written, for their own agendas, is pretty sickening to me. When I run into something like this I feel it’s our duty to pass on to the next generation that not everything is as others would have you believe.
For instance, thanks to the Internet, we now have open source information generating sites, the most infamous at the moment is wikipedia. For the un-knowing, wiki is a piece of crap. Tell your children and grandchildren to never use wiki as a reliable source of information. In fact, anything wiki should be avoided.
Below is what I ran into. I will leave the URL to the site, post the question asked, and the answer given. After this little exercise, I would be interested in seeing how long it takes someone to figure out what’s missing in the info given. And no, this is not a trick question.
Have fun…
Question: Why was Japan defeated in World War 2?
Answer: Japan was defeated because that country lacked the resources to fight a prolonged war with their primary opponent – the USA.
Japan’s plan was to occupy a large buffer zone in east Asia and the Pacific. They would then fall back into this buffer area, using island bases for mutual support to try and wear down the counterattacking Americans. At the same time they hoped to build up large stockpiles of vital materials taken from occupied areas, since Japan had little commodity production domestically.
Both plans failed. The USA adopted tactics that allowed them to isolate the various key Japanese fortress islands. Once the USA had advanced through a few of these islands the home islands of Japan came under bomber attack. The USA also ran a very successful submarine campaign against the Japanese merchant marine which prevented the Japanese from importing oil, food, timber, and other commodities.
Near the end of the war Japan still had large and effective armies in SE Asia and China, since these were largely supplied from local sources. But in Japan itself the USA airforces rained supreme and the USA Navy had destroyed all the main Japanese surface fleet. Japans position was thus untenable and they surrendered.
——————
The country of Mexico is about to collapse, (that’s not me saying this, just ask the Pentagon) then the drug cartels will run the country. This of course will lead to incredible panic among the citizens and the first place they will head is NORTH. What will happen after that gets pretty ugly, but it’s safe to say that we won’t just be up against little old Jose and his worn out revolver, we will be up against modern day weaponry, and lots of it.
Gio-
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
If Violence Escalates in Mexico, Texas Officials Plan to Be Ready
Thursday, February 12, 2009
By Joshua Rhett Miller
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,491964,00.html
As drug cartels continue to terrorize Mexico, Texas officials are 
planning for the worst-case scenario: how to respond if the violence spills over the border, and what to do if thousands of Mexicans seek refuge in the United States.
Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said a multi-agency contingency plan is being developed, and it will focus primarily on law enforcement issues, including how to handle an influx of Mexicans fleeing violence.
“At this point, what we’re focusing on is spillover violence,” Cesinger told FOXNews.com Thursday. “The immediate concern, if any, would be that.”
More than 5,300 people were killed in Mexico last year in connection to criminal activity, and some experts predict things will get worse. Along with Pakistan, Mexico was identified in a Department of Defense report last year as a country that could destabilize rapidly.
If that were to happen, officials are concerned that the drug violence could cross the Rio Grande into southern Texas.
Cesinger said the plan currently does not address a potential flood of refugees, though “It may be something that comes into consideration.”
“Worst-case scenario, Mexico becomes the Western hemisphere’s equivalent of Somalia, with mass violence, mass chaos,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “That would clearly require a military response from the United States.”
Carpenter, who recently authored a study entitled “Troubled Neighbor: Mexico’s Drug Violence Poses a Threat to the United States,” said Mexican government could collapse, although it’s unlikely.
“That’s still a relative longshot, but it’s not out of the question,” Carpenter said. “It’s obviously prudent for all of the states along the U.S.-Mexican border and the military to consider that possibility and not get blindsided should it happen.”
Some lawmakers in Texas have begun questioning how to deal with a potentially massive influx of Mexican citizens.
“Do you strengthen the borders so people cannot get in by the thousands every day, or do you create detention centers where people are held until their status is determined?” asked state Sen. Dan Patrick. “This is a potential refugee problem…”
“Let’s pray that this does not develop in Mexico,” Patrick told FOXNews.com. “However, when you hear the president of the United States cast dire warnings on our country, that even our financial system could collapse, it makes you think. If the United States can face catastrophe, obviously Mexico could as well.
“We have to seriously consider that as a remote possibility, so therefore, we need to have a plan.”
Patrick called upon Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McGraw to present a comprehensive plan to the state’s Legislature.
McGraw, who reportedly told lawmakers at a recent border security meeting that fears of Mexico’s collapse were “well-grounded,” was unavailable to comment Thursday, Cesinger said.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff indicated last month that the continuing violence has prompted plans for civilian and military law enforcement should it spread into the United States.
Chertoff said the plan calls for armored vehicles, aircraft and teams of personnel along border hotspots. Military forces, however, would be summoned only if civilian agencies like the Border Patrol were unable to control the violence, the New York Times reported.
DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department began developing the plan last summer to address a “broad spectrum of contingencies that could occur” if the violence escalates.
“This violence is happening because the [Felipe] Calderon administration is doing the right thing by cracking down on powerful drug cartels,” Kudwa said in a statement. “The cartels are, predictably, fighting back to protect their lucrative criminal livelihood. This plan doesnt change or otherwise supersede existing authorities; it plans for how a number of government organizations would respond and coordinate if local resources were to be overwhelmed.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is “continuing to develop that plan,” Kudwa said Thursday.
Meanwhile, Tim Irwin, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said he was unaware of any plans in Texas to prepare for an influx of Mexicans seeking refuge. Theoretically, Irwin said, a Mexican citizen could go to a border crossing and seek asylum based on fears of returning home amid the ongoing drug wars.
“It’s a valid claim to make, but you’d need to back that up,” Irwin said. “That would start the process.”
Irwin said the individual would be initially detained and given a “credible fear interview” to determine if his or her concerns are valid. If so, they could be eventually be released into the United States.
But Carpenter said the worst-case scenario a “sudden surge” of up to 1 million refugees in addition to the hundreds of thousands who enter illegally each year would be daunting.
“That would be very difficult to handle,” Carpenter told FOXNews.com. “I suspect what’d you see fairly soon is an attempt to seal the border as much as possible. That would probably be the initial response, along with the building of additional facilities [to detain the Mexican refugees]. But nobody wants to see that happen.”
Just a subtle reminder: This man is NOT to be trusted on making any decisions for the good of this country. Even his advisors want him to fill the role of a Dictator.
Advisers: Obama To Step Up Pressure On Republicans
Advisers: Obama To Step Up Pressure On Republicans
Advisers: Obama To Step Up Pressure On Republicans
Advisers: Obama To Step Up Pressure On Republicans
U.S. President Barack Obama plans to travel and campaign more to pressure Republicans in Congress rather than trying to win their loyalty, sources say. Click here for complete story.
Gio-
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2008/05/government_surveillance_homeland_security_main_core_01-print.php
The Last Roundup
Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham May 15, 2009 Radar Magazine.
(Submitted by West coast editor Eowyn)
In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and thenWhite House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital stairs to beat them there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men. “There”he pointed weakly to Comey”is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House”without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he testified.
What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.
Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.”
Few Americansprofessional journalists includedknow anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forcesand effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad” could be a trigger.
Let’s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blastsay, a suitcase nukein New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a “parallel government” that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.
Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency’s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americanseveryone from infants to the elderlybe held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of “militants” and “American negroes,” who were to be held at “assembly centers or relocation camps.” In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Rootthen a subsidiary of Halliburtonwas handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Just what those “new programs” might be is not specified.
In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people whofor a tremendously broad set of reasonshave been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance stateas seems to be the case with Main Coreeven sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.
Another well-informed sourcea former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence communitysays this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with “social network analysis” and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
“The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,” he says. “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.” An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that “it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.”
A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as “warrantless wiretapping.”
In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.” Authorities employ “sophisticated software programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.” In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it’s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. “The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. “Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.”
The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local “intelligence” reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; “commercial databases”; and unidentified “private sector entities.” Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used “to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.” Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, “What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be.” A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: “Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that ‘Main Core’ database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project.”
If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. “If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues”the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws”so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.” Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. “It’s clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.” Giraldi continues, “I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasonsquite likely including the two of us.”
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: “In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers”the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example”if Congress doesn’t explicitly prohibit it. It’s really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so.” Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court “when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president’s ‘enemies list.’ That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it iseven in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor.”
The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey’s suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: “Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway.”
But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. “The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable,” the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won’t prevent terrorist conspiracies. “Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,” Jonas tells Radar, “there is not enough volume to create precise predictions.”
The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to “accumulate the names, identities, and activities” of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding “security index,” according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by “the National Military Establishment.” By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included “professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” to unnamed “subversive elements.” This same FBI “security index” was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).
FEMA, howeverthen known as the Federal Preparedness Agencyalready had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford’s character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency’s secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator’s findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers “can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers”a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather’s databases were run “without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate.”
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a “secret contingency plan,”code-named REX 84which called “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments.” The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.
North’s program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. “I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution,” Brooks said. “I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked.” Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, “That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individualsprisoners, for exampleby pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, “Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.” Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, “The gloves seemed to come off.” What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, “How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?” Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the “classified annexes” of the Bush administration’s Continuity of Government program. DeFazio’s interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are “extra-constitutional or unconstitutional.” Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: “Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right.”
Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an “enemy combatant” forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrectionsas permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident.”
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, “allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all thisfor example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, ‘We have to be cautious.’ The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, ‘You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’”
As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey’s testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an “endemic surveillance society,” alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)
These days, it’s rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. “The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,” Church pointed out in 1975. “And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”
UPDATE: Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, “concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.” (Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of “legal” torture to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.” According to the Associated Press, “Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force.
Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio’s chief of staff, says otherwise. “We will be sending a letter requesting a classified briefing soon,” she told Radar this week.
Here’s a two day old article about a months old attack upon the
This is one of the most dangerous people on earth.
U.S. that the MSM totally ignored – and still is. Odd that it came when Sarah was selected and McCain’s numbers were high. If it weren’t for Rush explaining this 2 weeks ago who would know? Oh, and Hussein’s attack on Rush (and the ”revival” of the ”Fairness” Doctrine) came at the time Rush started explaining this to the public.
Questions: Who has the monetary ability to alter a country’s money market? Who was the largest contributor to the Left’s cause and many organizations? Who’s name begins and ends with an S and sounds like porous?
Add that with the probable help from China, Russia, and Venezuela you have a deliberate attack on the U.S. And hardly anyone knows about it. Well, I (and many others) talked about it when the Fannie/Freddie thing happened – how timely it was and how easy it was to get the situation past the ”tipping point”. But, as usual with the ”Ignorant Masses”, they didn’t care to know or to find out the truth. But Hussein’s speeches were uplifting, weren’t they? Feel that tingle up your leg yet?
-The Doktor
Dok,
Do you think any of our esteemed morons like Barney Fwank may have been complicit in helping put us in this situation?
Gio-
h/t to GiovanniWorld member The Doktor.
LINK
Who Attacked Our Economy? Why Does No One Care?
Diana West
Thursday, February 12, 2009
I want you to read something. It’s a snatch of transcript from a Jan. 27 C-SPANinterview with Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., that has received zero coverage in what we think of as the mainstream media.
To set the C-SPAN scene, Kanjorski is harkening back to the middle of last September, when, as it happens, John McCainwas enjoying his brief lead in the presidential polls and the economy as we knew it was imploding. Here’s what Kanjorski said:
“I was there when the Secretary (of the Treasury Hank Paulson) and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Ben Bernanke) came those days and talked to members of Congress about what was going on. It was about Sept. 15. Here’s the facts, we don’t even talk about these things.
“On Thursday at about 11 o’clock in the morning, the Federal Reservenoticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to the tune of $550 billion, as being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two.
“The Treasury opened up its window to help. It pumped $105 billion into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there, and that’s what actually happened.”
Kanjorksi continued:
“If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2 o’clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy system of the United States and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
“Now we talked at that time about what would happen if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it. And that’s why when they made the point we’ve got to do things quickly, we did.”
These are staggering revelations. (Watch them yourself here.) Given their sudden appearance out of the blue, you have to wonder, first, could they possibly be true? If so, why weren’t we the people told about this $550 billion electronic run on the banks? And why haven’t we heard a word of it since? Even since Kanjorski spoke on C-SPAN last month, there has been scant MSM coverage. The story’s biggest exposure came when Rush Limbaughplayed the audio and analyzed it on the air this week. Otherwise, the story has been little more than blogfodder, appearing at places such as Politico.comand the Economist blog with little comment. Writing at Portfolio.com this week, Felix Salmon quite decisively dismissed the whole story as “fiction.”
Is it? If what Kanjorski says is “fiction,” Americans, particularly Americans in Kanjorski’s 11th district of Pennsylvania, need to know. After all, this isn’t a story that just goes away on its own, particularly not when Paul Kanjorski is chairman of the Capital Markets Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. Of course, incredible as Kanjorski’s revelations were, almost equally incredible was the interviewer’s failure to ask the next obvious question of national interest: Who or what was responsible for that electronic run on the banks “to the tune of $550 billion”?
That’s where Limbaugh went with the story. “Now, let’s assume for a second here that elements of this are true,” Limbaugh said of Kanjorski’s statement. “Let’s assume that there was a $550 billion … electronic run on the banks and money market accounts in one to two hours. The question is who was doing this? Who was withdrawing all this money? And the next question is why? That’s where my mind starts exploding, and this is dangerous to have these explosions going this way. Could it have been George Soros? Could it have been a consortium of countries — Russia, China, Venezuela — countries that are eager to have Barack Obama elected because they know that will make it easier for them to continue their own foreign policies in the world?”
I’ve heard serious people float similar theories regarding financial attacks on our economy emanating from the Middle East, but again, who knows?
One thing we do know is that former President Bush made extremely cryptic public statements regarding the stability of our markets at this time in question last September, statements noted by Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid. These began with a Sept. 18 Bush announcement that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was stepping up its enforcement action “against illegal market manipulation.” As Kincaid wondered, manipulation “by whom or what? The President didn’t say.” On Sept. 19, President Bush further announced that the SEC had “launched rigorous enforcement actions to detect fraud and manipulation in the market. Anyone engaging in illegal financial transactions will be caught and persecuted (sic — good ol’ W.).” Again, what was Bush talking about?
On that same day, Kincaid reports, “the SEC announced a `sweeping expansion of its ongoing investigation into possible market manipulationin the securities of certain financial institutions.’” Why? What was going on? If ever there was a vital, compelling reason for congressional hearings, Kanjorski’s “electronic run on the banks” story is it.
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
You may have heard about this earlier in the week, so I only
I wonder where they get these ideas from?
copied two paragraphs of the story. I actually found this article posted at one of the big liberal blogs. The article being posted there did not surprise me, but the comments sure as hell did.
You won’t believe what some of these turds wrote. Good luck…
Gio-
Man of peace beheads wife
A prominent Buffalo area businessman who founded the BridgesTV network to improve the image of Muslims in the U.S. has been arrested and charged with murdering his estranged wife – by beheading her at his company’s office on Thursday.
Police have charged the husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder in death of Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37.
Now for the comments…
Maybe it was a group of Christians not too keen on watching the spread of Muslim ideals in the US.
Provided he did do it, we are also jumping to the conclusion that his religion has something to do with it.
There are all kinds of wife-murderers. Coincidentally some will be Muslim. Whenever, the guy is Muslim there will be the inevitable slurs about Islam, and this takes the cake
Dude, relax, I’m a minority too. The issue is not that. I am not giving Whites afree pass.
Blame it on all of the murderous hordes of Christians out there.
Exactly! Beheading is just too, too stereotypical. That’s why I think some conservative group probably framed it up.
All this whining about how he did it is silly.
There should be awareness programs in schools so children can be aware at an early age that this is wrong.
I think he was framed.
This story could be the definition of irony, in the most grizzly of ways.
Islam isn’t so different from Christianity: it means whatever you want it to mean.
This has nothing to do with religious beliefs or teachings
This is an interesting article for any of you that think Islam is a peaceful religion, and the UN is a worthwhile venture.
Gio-
Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote
Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone — and in response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article.
Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments that forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.
I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists — of all stripes — have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” — by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them.
This trend is not confined to the UN. It has spread deep into democratic countries. Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics — Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim — I am accused of “prejudice”, and I am not alone. But my only “prejudice” is in favor of individuals being able to choose to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument.
A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it is not surrounded by an electric fence through which none of us can pass.
That’s why I wrote: “All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him. I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice…. When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.”
An Indian newspaper called The Statesman — one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country — thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested — or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was “prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Prophet” and I should be sent “to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion or religious symbol… He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or its icons on grounds of freedom of speech.”
Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have been charged — in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech — with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”. I am told I too will be arrested if I go to Calcutta.
What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth — especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.
I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want — as long as I too have the right to respond.
It’s worth going through the arguments put forward by the rioting fundamentalists, because they will keep recurring in the twenty-first century as secularism is assaulted again and again. They said I had upset “the harmony” of India, and it could only be restored by my arrest. But this is a lop-sided vision of “harmony”. It would mean that religious fundamentalists are free to say whatever they want — and the rest of us have to shut up and agree.
The protesters said I deliberately set out to “offend” them, and I am supposed to say that, no, no offense was intended. But the honest truth is more complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn’t my goal — but if it is an inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don’t resile from it. Nothing worth saying is inoffensive to everyone.
You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offense. Every day, I am offended — not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad, because I know that the price of taking offense is that I can give it too, if that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protesters propose a lop-sided world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views about women’s rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it — or we are the ones being “insulting.”
It’s also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these protesters, because they too aren’t going away. Already I have had e-mails and bloggers saying I was “asking for it” by writing a “needlessly provocative” article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or kill me for it. Is there equivalence here?
The argument that I was “asking for it” seems a little like saying a woman wearing a short skirt is “asking” to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece at that): “When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he ‘know what he was doing’ and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn’t he been ‘asking for it’?” When fanatics threaten violence against people who simply use words, you should not blame the victim.
These events are also a reminder of why it is so important to try to let the oxygen of rationality into religious debates — and introduce doubt. Voltaire — one of the great anti-clericalists — said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” If you can be made to believe the absurd notion that an invisible deity dictated The Eternal Unchanging Truth to a specific person at a specific time in history and anyone who questions this is Evil, then you can easily be made to demand the death of journalists and free women and homosexuals who question that Truth. But if they have a moment of doubt — if there is a single nagging question at the back of their minds — then they are more likely to hesitate. That’s why these ideas must be challenged at their core, using words and reason.
But the fundamentalists are determined not to allow those rational ideas to be heard — because at some level they know they will persuade for many people, especially children and teenagers in the slow process of being indoctrinated.
If, after all the discussion and all the facts about how contradictory and periodically vile their ‘holy’ texts are, religious people still choose fanatical faith, I passionately defend their right to articulate it. Free speech is for the stupid and the wicked and the wrong — whether it is fanatics or the racist Geert Wilders — just as much as for the rational and the right. All I say is that they do not have the right to force it on other people or silence the other side. In this respect, Wilders resembles the Islamists he professes to despise: he wants to ban the Koran. Fine. Let him make his argument. He discredits himself by speaking such ugly nonsense.
The solution to the problems of free speech — that sometimes people will say terrible things — are always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don’t like what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial.
Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Europe would look like now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live.
You can see this if you compare my experience to that of journalists living under religious-Islamist regimes. Because generations of people sought to create a secular space, when I went to the police, they offered total protection. When they go to the police, they are handed over to the fanatics — or charged for their “crimes.” They are people like Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the young Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death for downloading a report on women’s rights. They are people like the staff of Zanan, one of Iran’s leading reform-minded women’s magazines, who have been told they will be jailed if they carry on publishing. They are people like the 27-year old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman who has been seized, jailed and tortured in Egypt for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah law.
It would be a betrayal of them — and the tens of thousands of journalists like them – to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent — if we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights undefended in the face of violent religious mobs — then many, many more people will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise religion — or lose it.
Before signing off for the night last night, I decided to take a look at what the liberal Cossacks were saying about the passage of the “Stimulus Bill”. I should have been prepared for what I read, but alas I was not. You would have thought the troops were coming home after taking Normandy and the Japanese had just signed an unconditional surrender and handed Japan over to General MacArthur. Then I ran into the article below. 
I will cover the party pukers comments in another post later today, as I wanted to give you an example of what the passage of this bill has spawned from so-called journalists at one of the most liberal of blogs. Believe it or not, this is what the passage of Obama’s destructive bill meant to this particular writer. NOTE: I was going to pick this article apart one false claim at a time, but realized I would be at it all day. I’m sure some of my readers will be more than happy to comment on some of the stupidity contained in this article.
Gio-
President Obama Is Driving Republicans Insane
The historical record of far-right ridiculousness has been well-documented here and throughout the blogosphere.
Who can forget Michelle Malkin’s inspired cheerleader skit? Or when Rush Limbaugh mocked a guy’s Parkinson’s Disease tremors. What about John Boehner’s public sobbing jags? Pat Robertson insisting he could leg-press 2,000 pounds. Sarah Palin’s turkey geeker photo op. George W. Bush telling us that Iraq is a “peeance freeance.” Remember when Bill O’Reilly shouted down the son of a 9/11 victim? Already, we’re talking about a mélange of weirdness and upside-down logic suitable for the ages, and that’s all prior to January 20, 2009.
But I don’t think we ever anticipated that the presidency of Barack Obama would, among other things, send the far-right into a freakazoid display of shockingly deranged conniptions and outright crazy talk — their manic hyperdrive engines, fueled by Rush Limbaugh’s gesticulating arm flab, blasting them out of their political Mos Eisley cantina scene and expelling them a thousand parsecs beyond the zero barrier of insanity.
Too much?
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the lies or distortions or their utter lack of credibility (zero cred) on broad-ranging issues like, you know, foreign policy and the economy. What we have here is the equivalent level of chaos as, say, the first group therapy scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In other words: a total berserker meltdown.
Seriously, have you ever seen the Republicans more twisted and kerfuffled than they are today? Movie metaphors aside, I’ve been hard pressed to find greater examples of insanity from the far-right than have been exhibited in the past week alone. Here we have a Republican Party that’s been discredited and bloodied, and yet in the face of an enormously popular president who is confounding conventional wisdom while building a working consensus among American voters, the Republicans appear to be reflexively coughing up the most intellectually violent chunks of hooey on record.
They’re screaming about fear-mongering, even though we had eight years of this.
They’re screaming about fiscal responsibility, even though we had eight years of this.
They’re screaming about free speech, even though we had eight years of this and this and this.
They’re honest to God screaming about fascism, even though we had eight years of this and this and this.
Yes, the Republicans have claimed to have “found their voice.” If this is true, then their “voice” sounds exactly like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin, depending on the day.
So what are these voices saying exactly?
For starters, Rush Limbaugh — the de facto leader of the Republican Party — said on his show Tuesday that the entire economic meltdown was actually precipitated by a conspiracy between George Soros and a cabal of billionaire liberals who deliberately sought to sabotage the world economy in order to get Barack Obama elected.
He, of course, has no real evidence for this, other than what the shadow people told him while he was tweaking his TV remotes.
Okay, so I made up the part about the shadow people, but the rest is seriously what Limbaugh was telling his audience of dittoheads yesterday. What Limbaugh doesn’t know, however, is that Soros is actually a hobbit who’s conspiring with Elvis to fake another Moon landing. (Shh!)
Confined to its own phantom zone of crazy, there’s only so much harm this can do. After all, Limbaugh’s puffy melon has been bombarded with a mountain of hillbilly heroin large enough to crush God. But I wish I could report that this was wholly the product of Limbaugh’s condition. It’s also a theory that was repeated by Donald Luskin: a seriously wrongheaded economist and, go figure, former economic adviser to Senator John McCain.
Speaking of John McCain, he was pilfering extra helpings of rich, creamery crazy from Michelle Malkin this week. Senator Coburn and Congressman Boehner were doing it, too. Last month, Malkin nicknamed the president’s recovery bill the “generational theft” bill, arguing that the debt it would create will serve to rob future generations. This, naturally, disregards the nearly doubled national debt and record-breaking deficits created by George W. Bush with programs that, when taken individually, were enthusiastically endorsed by Malkin (Iraq, tax cuts and so on). But there was Senator McCain on Face the Nation on Sunday talking about “generational theft.” Whatever, senator, the fundamentals are strong so what’s does it matter, right?
Meanwhile, Michael Steele, the newly elected head of the RNC and preemptive excuse for the next time a Republican talk radio host blurts out a racist remark, tried to tell a national television viewing audience that the government has never in the history of the United States created a job — only “work.” Yep. Do I really need to outline why this is crazy?
Former White House chief of staff Andy Card, meanwhile, attacked President Obama for violating a totally nonexistent Oval Office dress code. Republican columnist Fred Barnes cited a former Limbaugh producer named Marc Morano as his “scientific” source on global warming. FOX News is reading Republican talking points verbatim and passing them off as news copy — typos and all. And after eight years of the smirking frat boy named George W. Bush, Malkin went so far as to accuse President Obama of being “snippy” during his prime time press conference.
Elsewhere, another far-right blogger is vowing to never again fist-bump with her friends at her tennis club. And when she’s at the grocery store and is confronted by magazines with the president’s face in the checkout line, she turns the magazines backwards. All of them. I’m not making this up.
They have indeed totally lost their shpadoinkle and despite purely involuntary spikes in my blood pressure, it’s so much fun to watch. By successfully debunking their lies, rising above their bait and merely presenting a contrast of character, President Obama is making the Republican A-listers appear small, petty and absolutely befuddled. They’re frantically struggling to figure out how to counterpunch, so they’re grabbing, borrowing or downright plagiarizing ideas from anywhere, irrespective of the general quality of the idea. And if the Republicans are at all interested in continued survival, someone they respect should probably smack their hands and scold: Drop that filthy Limbaugh quote! You don’t know where it’s been!
But if this is their “voice” and they’re satisfied with it, I for one welcome the new Republican “voice” and wish them a hearty and very sincere: Good luck with that.
—————
If any of you can find anything that was not taken out of context by this author, please let me know.
I also found it very interesting that this author assumes an awful lot when it comes to Republicans. Where he makes his biggest mistake is ignoring Conservatives. Right now, most Conservatives could care less about the GOP, Rush is just one example.
Gio-
Need a really good reason to march on our elected officials, here it is in all its Marxist glory.
Make darn sure you listen to the radio conversation at the bottom of this article. When you click on the mp3 link, it will also load as an audio file. It’s slow loading so give at least 30 seconds.
Gio-
The following is the audio from a radio program that examines the possibility that Martial Law and gun confiscation is in the near future for the United States.
You will need an audio/media player, of course, to hear it. And it is lengthy, but well worth your time.
According to the show’s guest, a former law enforcement officer, Martial Law and gun confiscation is not just a possibility. He is convinced that it is definitely on the way, and he claims to have proof of it from the testimony of hundreds of law enforcement and military personnel who attest to it.
The good news is that many of the patriotic lawmen and soldiers will defy orders and refuse to participate in this attack on American citizens. The bad news is that enough of them WILL participate that havoc will be wreaked in the streets.
Could this be true? Has this story been thoroughly verified?
At this point I am not sure. But the audio is worth hearing nonetheless. Something to think about.
Click here for the mp3 audio (H/t to Bob Pooler).
The program begins with a song by Johnny Cash…just keep listening…
Update: The response to this idea has been nothing short of underwhelming. So I have decided to drop any idea I may have had on helping to organize a march.
Gio-
Let’s first congratulate Dok for putting Eowyn’s idea to work in the following graphic…. 
After giving this a lot of thought, I believe I have come up with an idea that would get those that work for us, to take us seriously.
“We the People”, which is an off-shoot of “The Patriotic Resistance”, which is an off-shoot of “Resistnet”, which is an off-shoot of “Grassfire.org”, is planning a march on Washington DC for May 30th, 2009. Unfortunately, they are holding this march on a weekend when nobody will be in DC being it will be held on Memorial Day weekend. I completely endorse what they are doing, and who knows, I may be there, but their timing is off. If you want to impact the dirt-bag politicians (Democrats & Republicans) in DC, you need to march while they are at work in the Capitol. It’s about time they get the fear of God scared into them. They work for us, and it’s time we remind them!
Many marches have been planned for DC but very few had an impact other than a few mentions in the media. So how do we come up with something that has a chance of having an impact. Below I’m going to start a list of ideas that should be included in any planning for a successful march. I would like to have members of Giovanni’sWorld add, or argue against, any or all items on the list. Simply put your ideas in the comments section and I will move them to the list here on the front page.
One last idea before we start on the list. I suggest that we promote marches all on the same day, all across the country. We do this by marching on our State Capitols. Before anyone emails me to ask if I’m having hallucinations, please hear me out.
Since it is our Federal Government that seems determined to destroy our Constitution and bankrupt my Granddaughter’s future, I say we tell the Feds to “F”-off. Basically the very same thing that New Hampshire is trying to do. The only thing I want the federal government to do is…. keep us safe from attack. Other than that, each state decides all other decisions on their own with the input of its citizens. And the only way we can really impress upon our states how serious we are is to march on the state capitol.
Then we have a score of reasons why this might work. First is logistics. Although we could get a sizeable number to show up in DC (I think), not everyone can afford to fly or drive to DC. We could get some staggering numbers if we co-ordinated marches in our respective states on the very same day. Not only would our state legislators get the message, you know damn well they would be getting on the phone to those in DC. Then there is the media to think of. We stand a better chance of getting covered by media if it’s a nationwide event. Marches happen fairly often in DC so it won’t be covered as we would like it to be. Plus, in order to be effective, the march must be held on a legislative work day which means a day during the week. Having co-ordinated marches in each state on a work day will be easier to pull off for those peopletwho will have to take a day off from work. Weekend rallies are a waste of time, IMHO.
Now that you get the idea, which needs refining, let’s start a list. In no particular order…
1. March on a work day.
2. Possibly co-ordinate with a march on DC.
3. Would need state team leaders.
4. Have a unified message.
5. March on all 50 state capitols.
6. Alert media just hours prior to march.
7. Find prominent people in each state willing to give their voice.
8. Use a recognizable logo.
9. Keep the events simple.
10. Encourage people to make their own signs.
11. Strongly suggest what should be on signs.
12. Encourage all participants to leave any, and all weapons at home.
13. Promote this as peaceful march by pissed off Americans.
14. Have our message in stone!
15.
16.
etc…
Ok, now it’s your turn. You can either make suggestions or tell me I’m crazy.
Gio-
Submitted by GW west coast editor Eowyn. 
A video, “Homegrown jihad,” can be viewed on the URL below.
February 9, 2009
35 jihad training compounds on American soil
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/024775.php
Here is a press release from the Christian Action Network: “Never-Before-Revealed Terrorist Training Video Exposes 35 Compounds On American Soil”:
Act like you are his friend. Then kill him. Sheik Muburak Gilani explaining how to kill American infidels
Washington, DCThe American public was never supposed to know. The 2006 Justice Department document that exposes 35 terrorist training compounds in the U.S. was marked Dissemination Restricted to Law Enforcement. All the copies of Sheik Muburak Gilanis terrorist training video, Soldiers of Allah, had been confiscated and sealedall of them, that is, except onethat Christian Action Network now reveals in the documentary Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S.
It seems unfathomablenearly three dozen terrorist training compounds in the U.S. and the FBI, Homeland Security, and State Department are no help at all? But the evidence is irrefutable: as Jamaat ul-Fuqra (known in the U.S. as Muslims of America) leader Sheik Muburak Gilani professes on the Soldiers of Allah video, We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.
The Soldiers of Allah training video teaches American students how to operate AK-47 rifles, rocket launchers, and machine guns; how to kidnap Americans and then kill them; how to conduct sabotage and subversive operations; and how to use mortars and explosives.
With almost 50 terrorist attacks on American soil linked to Jamaat ul-Fuqraranging from bombings to murder to plots to blowing up American landmarkswhat will it take for the government to protect its citizens from self-professed enemies of Americans? They hide across 35 American cities as innocuous-sounding as Hancock, NY; Red House, VA; and Seattle, WA.
The allegations are serious, which is why Christian Action Network took more than two years to research Muslims of Americagoing inside the compounds with their video cameras and questions to confront violence and confirm the truth. Their mission? To make Americans aware of the threats and have Jamaat ul-Fuqra placed on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization Watch List, thereby shutting down the camps in the U.S. run by ul-Fuqra’s front group, Muslims of America.
The State Department issued a statement on January 31, 2002, regarding why the group was no longer recognized as a terrorist organization: Jamaat ul-Fuqra has never been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It was included in several recent annual terrorism reports under other terrorist groups, i.e., groups that had carried out acts of terrorism but that were not formally designated by the Secretary of State. However, because of the groups inactivity during 2000, it was not included in the most recent terrorism report covering that calendar year.
The effect of being removed from terrorist reports? In January 2002 Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later beheaded while attempting to attend an interview with Jamaat ul-Fuqra leader Sheikh Muburak Gilani.
Was this an isolated incident? Hardly. In March 2003, Fuqra and al Qaeda member Iyman Faris pled guilty in federal court to a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, and the list goes on.
According to a 2006 Department of Justice report, Today, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has more than 35 suspected communes and more than 3,000 members spread across the United States, all in support of one goal: the purification of Islam through violence.
In 2005, The Department of Homeland Security predicted that Muslims of America will continue to strike in the United States-yet they are still not listed on the State Departments Foreign Terrorist Organization Watch List. Other predicted possible sponsors of attacks include Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani-based group that has been linked to Muslims of America.
Christian Action Network will show Homegrown Jihad at the Landmark Theater in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2009, at 7:30 pm. There is no charge to attend the viewing. Copies can also be obtained at www.christianaction.org.
If you’re in Washington on the 11th, please go to this, and send us a report!
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