Crazed wingers hoping Osama bin Laden can save America
... by attacking us, preferably with a "major weapon." Seriously. You know, when you get called out by people at the Free Republic and Little Green Footballs, you know you're on the wrong track. Here's crazy Glenn Beck and his Fox News guest, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit (seriously...) and self-described "lifelong Republican," Michael Sheuer, who appears to have been driven mad by the revocation of Bush-era rendition, torture and domestic spying policies. (And note how Beck does his best to channel Osama's thoughts):
As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, the guy who wrote this idiotic piece in D Magazine (a magazine which hosts a slathering, groupie-ish George W. Bush love letters page, works for CBS Sports, which is to say he works for CBS News. Per Politico's Glenn Thrush:
Even if this was off the cuff, it's not going to go over well with the sports bosses at CBS.
The network's golf analyst, David Feherty, writing a column in D Magazine about the George and Laura Bush moving to the Dallas area, says U.S. soldiers would shoot Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid:
"From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this, though: despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death."
By the way, how can it be "off the cuff" when a guy took the time to write it, spell check it, presumably read it over, and send it to an editor, who presumably read it, approved it, and posted it on the magazine's website? Come on, Glenn... In any case, the unbelievable piece of right wing scholarship was caught by Media Matters, which is bad news since Media Matters rarely just reports and then leaves stuff alone. They follow up. Just ask Don Imus. In short, the commentary has very likely put Mr. Feherty's future at CBS in doubt.
Feherty is the same genius who last week thought it would be a hoot to ask Tiger Woods if he "felt like a loser." Not exactly the way to get ahead at CBS, I'm thinking. ABC, maybe...
Seven years into the so-called "war on terror," it's becoming increasingly clear that the best defense America may have against the Bush administration, and its authoritarian, almost congenital abuses of government power, is the very military it has pressed onto the front lines of the global battlefield. Case in point, the apparent ending to the saga of Salim Hamdan, convicted, not of being a terrorist, but of being the wrong guy's driver. His sentence was passed down by a military panel late this afternoon:
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military jury sentenced Osama bin Laden's former driver to 5 1/2 years in prison for aiding terrorism Thursday, making him eligible for release in just six months, despite prosecutors' pleas to give him no less than 30 years.
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had faced a maximum sentence of life behind bars, gets credit for five years already served at Guantanamo Bay. He thanked the jurors for the sentence and repeated an apology for having served bin Laden.
"I would like to apologize one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me," Hamdan told the panel of six U.S. military officers, hand-picked by the Pentagon for the first U.S. war crimes trial in a half century.
The military tribunal, which Hamdan and his attorneys helped to bring about for himself and others, by successfully arguing to the Supreme Court that so-called "enemy combatants," a term simply made up by the Bush administration, were not beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions, or of the Constitution.
The military jury and judge had already decided that Hamdan should receive credit for the five years he has already been locked away in the Bush administration's special brand of limbo, and the judge had urged the panel to consider Hamdan's low level status in the Bin Laden organization, and the fact that he is the sole supporter of his family. The military panel resisted the Pentagon prosecutor's demand that they "make an example of him."
Hamdan, who was likely tortured while in American custody at Gitmo, can still appeal to a U.S. court. Which begs the question: what's the point of these "military tribunals" if the same kind of justice meted out to domestic terror suspects like Jose Padilla -- who got a longer sentence than Hamdan: 17 years from an old fashioned American jury, despite having no contact whatsoever with Bin Laden -- winds up being dished out there?
The difference? In a real courtroom, Hamdan would have walked on the heresay, the secret testimony, and the torture alone. Driver or no driver.
The Pentagon is seeking a 30 year to life sentence for Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, after he was convicted on one of five terrorism counts in the Bush administration's kangaroo court (which thankfully was tempered by the general good sense of the U.S. military officers on the "jury.")
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A Pentagon prosecutor Thursday cast Osama bin Laden's driver as ''a hardened al Qaeda member'' and asked the six-member U.S. military jury who convicted him of terrorism to lock him up for 30 years, if not for life.
''Once you see your boss killing people, you leave. You get another job. Period,'' prosecutor John Murphy told jurors assigned to start deliberating his punishment later in the day.
Defense attorneys countered that the appropriate penalty was 45 months imprisonment, effectively seeking time served.
The same jury on Wednesday convicted Salim Hamdan, 40, of Yemen on five counts of providing material support for terrorism, which the trial judge consolidated into one.
It rejected more serious charges of conspiracy.
The sentence would seem in some ways to be a moot point, since the Bush administration intended to hold Hamdan indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" even if he had been acquitted of all charges. In addition, his conviction was obtained using heresay evidence, secret testimony, and possibly even statements derived from torture.
Hamdan, a Yemeni, was convicted by the six Pentagon-appointed jurors at the Guantanamo Bay trial of aiding terrorism by chauffeuring bin Laden around Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. But Hamdan said he merely had a "relationship of respect" with bin Laden, as would any other employee.
"It's true there are work opportunities in Yemen, but not at the level I needed after I got married and not to the level of ambitions that I had in my future," he said, reading in Arabic from a prepared statement.
The five-man, one-woman jury found Hamdan guilty of aiding terrorism but acquitted him of conspiracy Wednesday at the first US war crimes trial since World War II.
Under tribunal rules, the jury imposes the sentence, not the judge. Their verdict does not have to be unanimous, and a review by a Pentagon legal official can reduce the sentence but not increase it.
The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, told jurors they could impose any sentence from life in prison to no punishment. He instructed jurors to take into account the nearly seven years Hamdan has spent in confinement and that he is the sole supporter of his wife and two children.
Allred, who has described Hamdan as a "small player," previously ruled he should receive five years of credit for time served at Guantanamo Bay since the Pentagon decided to charge him.
The tribunals' chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, had said prosecutors would take the acquittal into account when recommending a sentence. But prosecutor John Murphy on Thursday urged the jury to make an example of Hamdan with a penalty of 30 years to life.
"You have found him guilty of offenses that have made our world extremely unsafe and dangerous," Murphy said. "The government asks you to deliver a sentence that will absolutely keep our society safe from him."
Defence attorneys urged leniency, reminding jurors that Hamdan was not convicted of any role al-Qaida's attacks. A psychiatrist hired by the defense told jurors that Hamdan has the potential to be rehabilitated.
"It is important the world recognize that this is justice and not revenge," said Charles Swift, one of Hamdan's civilian attorneys.
The verdict will be appealed automatically to a special military court in Washington. Hamdan can then appeal to U.S. civilian courts as well.
Defence lawyers say Hamdan's rights were denied by an unfair process, hastily patched together after Supreme Court rulings that previous tribunal systems violated U.S. and international law.
"The problem is the law was specifically written after the fact to target Mr. Hamdan," Swift said.
On the 7th anniversary of that notorious August 6th Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States," (which Dubya ignored cuz he was busy clearin' brush...) the Bush administration's Constitution skirting military tribunals claim their first victim. So what victory have the Bushies won for the Global War on Terror? They've convicted Bin Laden's driver ... of being Bin Laden's driver:
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's former driver was convicted of supporting terrorism in the first U.S. military war-crimes trial of a terror suspect captured after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Salim Hamdan was found guilty of providing material support to al-Qaeda by serving as bin Laden's driver and body guard, Army Colonel Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, said in Washington after the verdict was announced at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The jury of six military officers cleared Hamdan of conspiring with bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda operatives to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Keck said.
And despite the failure to convict him of anything more serious than driving, the U.S. can now incarcerate Hamdan (whose name was made famous in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld cast that established a basic right to a trial for detainees ... fancy that ...) for the rest of his life.
A conviction means ``now we will have an appeal'' to test the validity of the crime of providing material support to terrorists, which is ``a new made-up offense that didn't exist when he committed it,'' said John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, New Hampshire.
A decision on that issue ``will be important because lots of people will be charged with it,'' Hutson said.
The jury cleared Hamdan of specific accusations that he transported SA-7 surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan to be used by al-Qaeda to attack U.S. forces, according to verdict details described in a telephone interview by Air Force Major Gail Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay.
Life Term
The charges carry a possible term of life imprisonment.
The charge of providing material support to terrorism accused Hamdan of serving as bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan, ``knowing that by providing said service or transportation he was directly facilitating communication and planning used for acts of terrorism.''
Ah, American jurisprudence! Fort it's next trick, maybe the Bush administration could put the late Bruce Ivins on trial posthumously for material support to the FBI in closing the anthrax case which they haven't got the goods to prove...
Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.
The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.
But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.
And:
The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.
Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.
Heck of a job, Bushie. The piece goes on to describe bitter turf battles between the White House and CIA over how to conduct the hunt for bin Laden, and the supposedly cowboy-led Bush administration's reticence to launch actual raids, which would logically yield the best results. It's almost as if they don't want to a) offend Pervez Musharraf, or worse, b) find Osama bin Laden...
Do you really believe that this is Osama bin Laden? It's supposed to be bin Laden in a new video designed to scare you Republican. But does it really look like him?
Here's a two-shot with another, relatively recent supposed picture of Bin Laden:
So is it Bin Laden? it sure as hell doesn't look like him to me... What about this one? Does ths, younger Bin Laden. look like the new, dyed beard guy?
Today's theme: three things that start with the letter "O" ...
Thing 1 that starts with "O": Osama bin Laden! Supposedly, he's back, and advertising a new video release, timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary of 9/11. Yeah, right. Like he hasn't been dead for like, 12 years... So I wonder how long it will take for that video to wind up in a Rudy Giuliani commercial? ... or a Bush administration secret briefing to select members of Congress on a brand new warrentless surveillance program? And which way will the media go on the story: "Bin Laden still free after six years" ... or ... "Terror threat still acute! Vote Republican!"
Thing 2 that starts with "O": Osama bin Laden! ... but not the real one. This time it's an Australian comedian dressed like bin Laden who managed to get past President Bush's crack security team during Bush's visit to an economic summit in Australia. So let me get this straight: we're facing a dire ongoing threat of terrorism from al-Qaida, which is led by Osama bin Laden, but the threat hasn't prompted the POTUS' security team to protect him from Osama ... in a motorcade? Well that's interesting.
Thing #3 that starts with "O": Oprah! ... and another: "Obama!" (hey, that's FOUR things that start with "O"...) Apparently, the queen of all media, is taking her endorsement of Barack Obama a step further. Maybe, two steps. First she's throwing a major fundraiser for him -- star studded and priced at $2,300 a ticket. And second, she may actually be taking a larger role in his campaign. CNN has it this way:
It remains to be seen if the popular talk show host's role may go beyond raising money from her Hollywood friends, but the prospect of seeing Winfrey in campaign commercials or on the stump is already causing widespread speculation on the effect she may have. Watch how Winfrey could boost Obama
"I think what Oprah can do is potentially bring out the congregants of the church of Oprah," Marty Kaplan, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, tells CNN. "She is a charismatic leader of a lay congregation."
"People buy books when she tells them to. They will watch her shows, and buy her magazines when she asks them to," Kaplan added. "So the question is, are enough of them willing to follow her lead not with a consumer good, but with a ballot cast?"
Moreover, Kaplan says, Winfrey's core audience is women, and her endorsement could help Obama compete with his chief presidential rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, for women's votes.
"One of his campaign officials in California told me Oprah is everything," Kaplan added. "So they have high hopes for the endorsement."
Obama and Winfrey's close relationship may also increase the chance she will be willing to take a visible role in the campaign.
"They met way back here in Chicago in the African-American social circuit back in, I believe, either the late 1990s or around 2000 when he was running for Congress," David Mendell, an Obama biographer tells CNN.
Could this be a threat to Hillary? Time will tell.
The Siniora government unleashes its military on a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. And of coure, the U.S. media immediately claims that the group they're fighting is al-Qaida.
Fatah al-Islam, a group accused of links to al-Qaeda and Syria, has threatened to widen its campaign if troops do not stop the shelling.
A spokesman for the group, Abu Salim, told French news agency AFP: "The army is not only opening fire on us, it is shelling blindly.
"If this continues, we will carry the battle outside the city of Tripoli."
So who is Fatah al-Islam? According to Reuters:
- The faction emerged in November when it split from Fatah al-Intifada (Fatah Uprising), a Syrian-backed Palestinian group. Fatah al-Islam had some 200 fighters at the time, based in Nahr al-Bared camp. Security sources have said militants from other Palestinian camps have joined the group since then and have been trained at the camp.
- The Lebanese government links Fatah al-Islam to Syrian intelligence. Syria and Fatah al-Islam deny any links to each other. The government says four Syrian members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to bombing two buses in February in a Christian area near Beirut. Three people were killed in the attacks.
- Fatah al-Islam's leader, Shaker al-Abssi, is a veteran Palestinian guerrilla. He was sentenced to death in Jordan for killing a U.S. diplomat in 2002. The slain leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, received a similar sentence for the same crime.
- Abssi says his group has no organisational links to al Qaeda but agrees with its aim of fighting infidels. Fatah al-Islam statements have appeared on Islamist Web sites known to publish al Qaeda statements.
- Abssi told Reuters in March that his group's main mission was to reform the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon according to Islamic sharia law before confronting Israel.
So they're linked to al-Qaida in goals, and they traffic in the same websites. Does that make them an "al-Qaida linked organization"? In a sense, it doesn't matter, except that it does. The Bush administration's tactic of labeling every militant group as al-Qaida (and every arrested potential domestic terrorist or person with brown skin and criminal intent in the U.S., including American citizens) as well as the media complicity in same, is a dangerous oversimplification of reality. How can you develop good intelligence in the so-called 'war on terror' when you really don't understand who, or how many groups, you're fighting?
Let's go for a pretty trustworthy source: Janes Defence Weekly:
Fatah al-Islam, Lebanon's new jihadists
A new radical Sunni group has emerged in Lebanon. Led by the Palestinian Shakir al-Absi, Fatah al-Islam is based in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli.
Shakir Absi has expressed a militant jihadist ideology with a focus on Israel. He has said his group's objective is to bring religion to the Palestinian cause and that hundreds of potential suicide bombers had prepared themselves to strike Israel.
In an interview with the New York Times on 16 March, Absi confirmed that he once worked as a pilot for Fatah leader Yasser Arafat, then staged attacks on Israel from his own base in Syria. He also admitted working with Zarqawi. He said that after his imprisonment in Syria he broadened his targets to include US citizens. He told the paper: "We have the right to do such acts, for is it not America that comes to our region and kills innocents and children?"
Fatah al-Islam's ambition to attack Israel will remain limited by the Shia group Hizbullah's pervasive control of southern Lebanon. A Sunni jihadist group would stand little chance of launching a cross-border attack into Israel without being spotted by Hizbullah's informers. They would also have little chance of staging a successful attack: after years of confrontation between Hizbullah and the Israeli military, the border zone is probably the toughest insurgent theatre in the world.
So now we see a group whose focus is not jihad against the United States, but rather, war against Israel. In other words, a much more traditional anti-Israeli militant group, comprised, surprise, surprise, of Palestinians.
For a more complex, textured, but very thorough reading of the relationship between Palestinian militants in Lebanon (and Syria) and al-Qaida, you'll want to read this. The start:
Al Jazeera ran on Sept 18 the second part of a documentary by Yusri Fouda on Al Qaeda in "Bilad al Sham". The thesis is that inherently Al-Qaeda has a forward looking plan that was to attack the US, draw America to the Middle East and then fight it (i.e. in Iraq) and then exploit that conflict to get to the Palestinian front using Damascus and Lebanon.
Hm ... part one of mission ... accomplished???
The seminal point the documentary makes is that "the youth are jaded with the corruption in the Arab world and an impotent leadership" so much so, that bright, educated people like Mohammad Atta (this is the documentary's assessment not mine) turn to religion as a means to an end.
In fact the founder of Junood Al Sham is on record saying the only way to fight Israel is to turn to religion and that when you do so as a fighter, you are fearless.
This zealous fervor invariably is the panacea to the "Zionist-American-Western" axis, several of the interviewees hold.
An interesting and worrying dimension to all this was the existing and growing Salafist movement in Lebanon, namely in mountainous areas and even places like Baalbak where one of the 19 hijackers that carried out the Sept.. 11 attacks was from.
The documentary goes on to narrate how Al Qaeda's man in Lebanon was arrested and then 'died' in detention. His supporters claim he was tortured and killed.
Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. "Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn't have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis," he said. "It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can't storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take."
And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.
And yes, it is difficult not to feel Syria's hands these days. Fouad Siniora's government, surrounded in its little "green zone" in central Beirut, is being drained of power. The army is more and more running Lebanon, ever more tested because it, too, of course, contains Lebanon's Sunnis and Shia and Maronites and Druze. What fractures, what greater strains can be put on this little country as Siniora still pleads for a UN tribunal to try those who murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005?
So is it Bin Laden? it sure as hell doesn't look like him to me... What about this one? Does ths, younger Bin Laden. look like the new, dyed beard guy?
