It is commonly asserted that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. The lack of further mass terrorism is often used to bolster the case that domestic intelligence and law enforcement have been doing their jobs effectively.

The latter assertion is undoubtedly true. Presumably any number of would-be shaheeds and mujahideen have been rounded up, arrested, surveilled, interfered with, deported, denied entry, and otherwise prevented from carrying out their deadly intentions here in the USA.

There may well have been a failed attempt at a terrorist attack in Norman, Oklahoma on October 1st of this year, when Joel Hinrichs committed explosive suicide. OU, the FBI, and the major media have all declared the case closed, but I’m not so sure.

However, it has become clear that there was a successful Islamist terrorist attack in the United States during the fall of 2002. I refer, of course, to the shooting spree of the “Beltway Snipers”, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, which killed ten people and wounded three more. For three weeks in October of 2002 they terrorized Maryland, Washington D.C., and Virginia, and mesmerized the local and national media.

My earlier report on Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Virginia cites a Defense Watch article in 2002 detailing the connections between John Muhammad and the terrorist organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra. There are some indications that he took time off during his spree to hole up in a safe house at the Red House, Virginia compound for a little R&R.

Given Muhammad’s stated sympathy with Osama bin Laden, the jihad-related documents possessed by Lee Malvo, and Muhammad’s connection with Jamaat ul-Fuqra, it becomes clear that this was a domestic terrorist operation carried out by Islamists, in association with a known terrorist organization. Not only that, the leader of this terrorist organization is associated with Al Qaeda, appears to be complicit in the murder of Daniel Pearl, and has connections with Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI.

This is rich loam indeed, in which the seeds of paranoia can be planted to grow luxuriant vines of conspiracy theories. The customary government phrase — “no known connection with terrorist organizations” — begins to look a little shopworn at this point, doesn’t it?

Look at it from the point of view of the Great Islamic Jihad: the Beltway Sniper operation was an easy, low-budget way to strike fear into the hearts of millions ordinary Americans and cause the retail economy of the Nation’s Capital to grind to a near-halt.

Beat-up old car: $1200
Welding, etc., to convert it into a killing machine: $300
Stolen high-powered rifle and ammo: $0
Sandwiches and soda pop for 3 weeks: $350
American citizens cowering beneath their beds: PRICELESS

 
(Baron Bodissey is indisposed, so Glenn Reynolds has borrowed his nic and is guest-blogging here at Gates of Vienna.)

Nanotechnology.

Indeed.

Heh.

Read the whole thing.

A polyglot collection of essays this week at the Watcher’s Council.

In first place for Council members was The Glittering Eye’s A sketch history of U. S. military bases in the Middle East: the Overthrow of Mossadegh

At the end of World War II the United States was left with something like 15 military bases in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite this military presence the United States was apparently not regarded as an occupying power or as a colonizer. Two factors seem to have changed this: the state of Israel and the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953.

This is important not only for its run down on important dates, but for his analyses regarding how we came to be involved in Iran. Definitely a stellar post.

On the non-Council posts, there was a clear first place winner followed by three blogs tying for second place. I’ve not been a member for very long, but I don’t remember such an even-handed breakdown of the count before.

First place went to Iraq the Model for his take on the historic events that have occurred in his country in the last few years. He wrote his essay on the eve of the election, so he didn’t know how things would turn out:

	Only hours separate us from a major historic day for our nation (too many historic days for Iraq in these two years!). Tomorrow will draw a line that would mark the beginning of a new era in Iraq; a constitutional Iraq will become reality.
	It’s only a beginning since there will be more steps to go but it’s the right beginning because it’s a transition from temporary laws to a permanent-though amendable-constitution on which the people will assume control through their elected representatives and through their own direct votes.
	It is really amazing how things have changed in Iraq; three years ago Saddam “won” 100% of the votes in a pathetic referendum that he designed in order to give legitimacy to his reign while yesterday even security detainees were allowed to express their opinion on the constitution through voting and the government and parliament are almost begging the 15 million plus voters to say ‘yes’! And although many signs indicate that the document is on its way to be ratified, no one can say it is until the people decide which checkbox to tic tomorrow. Some people would say “Is that all you won, after more than two years of war and violence? That’s only one basic right” well, that is the point; we’ve secured one key right that can help us secure the rest.

It is fitting that he ends with a prayer and a blessing:

Tomorrow will be another day for Iraqi bravery. May God protect you my people…you have suffered so much and you will still be suffering for some time but I am sure the future will be bright. God bless you my people and all the freedom lovers who keep sacrificing to make this world a better place.

And then there are three second place winners.

The first in line is The Quando Blog’s “Steps to Limited Government.” He says there are three steps to halting the current mess, then enumerates and explains them. The first is transparency, the second is some kind of price mechanism, and the third is consequences. From his blog to God’s ears, please.

The next second place tie is Armies of Liberation’s “Chemical Weapons, Drug Smuggling, and Other Crimes of the Yemeni Dictator.”
Why does he bring up Yemini now? Here’s why:

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is scheduled to visit the United States in November for a round of meetings with President Bush and other high ranking US officials. As the representative of the Yemeni people, Saleh deserves a great deal of respect and hospitality. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that the regime, under the total domination of President Saleh, is engaged in a wide variety of criminal activities to the detriment of regional stability and the Yemeni people themselves.

As he points out in his summary:

Yemeni civil society has been fighting for years for democracy and against extremist ideologies. Numerous Yemenis have detailed, workable, concrete solutions to the myriad of issues facing Yemen. The international community can trust in the capacity of the Yemeni people to craft a workable state out of the ruins left by Saleh. And it should look beyond the comfortable familiarity of a manageable tyranny to see that the citizens of Yemen, more than any other aggrieved party, are the primary victims of President Saleh.

Well, let’s see how the Bush administration approaches this, shall we? The national mood regarding Bush’s decisions of late will make this meeting one to watch….by the way, this post is worth visiting just for his footnotes.

The last of the second place winners was redstate.org’s interview with Andrew Bostum, M.D.

Dr. Bostom is a physician specializing in Epidemiology. Since 1997 he has been part of the full-time medical faculty at one of the two major teaching hospital affiliates of Brown University. His current research focuses on the relationship between kidney and cardiovascular disease. Bostom is also the editor of the newly-released book, “The Legacy of Jihad”…

Dr Bostom relates the etiology of his new book:

September 11, 2001 shocked me out of the complete absorption in my career in medicine and an accompanying uninformed complacency about world affairs. I grew up in New York City, spending the first 34 years of my life there, and the wife of one of our nephrology fellowship trainees barely made it out of the second World Trade Center tower before it collapsed. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had very little context for me, so I set out to learn about Islam, reading voraciously. Starting with the writings of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito (how naïve and ironic it seems in retrospect!), I became thoroughly dissatisfied, in short order, with the entire genre of thinly veiled, treacly apologetics, sadly characteristic of modern popular and “academic” works on Islam. So I began what has become a ceaseless endeavor to educate myself, making liberal use of the vast research resources of the Brown University system. Learned, patient mentors, in particular Bat Ye’or and Ibn Warraq, facilitated my efforts. They encouraged me to complete what became The Legacy of Jihad, sharing the view, expressed so appositely by the prominent Middle East Studies Professor, Dr. Raphael Israeli, that the book filled a “yawning gap” in the literature on jihad. That is why in one rather large volume I combined a comprehensive analysis of both jihad theory and practice, the latter being a detailed survey of the brutal way jihad campaigns have always been waged — using a physician’s favorite learning and teaching tool, the mnemonic, in this case “MPED” — massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation.

Remember that: M.E.P.D. Nothing like medical training to give you the ability to be succinct.

Lots more at The Watchers’ Blog. Go here: The Watcher of Weasels and enjoy the riches.

Or: I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Blow Your Blog Down
 
Interesting fault lines developing. On one side of the divide are the blogs that want the questions about the OU detonation on October 1st to simply go away, thank-you-very-much. The matter has been settled and anyone jejune or tacky enough to persist needs to calm down, quit with the paranoia and get on with life.

Cathy Young reports on the Wall Street Journal’s take on this story:

On October 13, The Wall Street Journal published an article debunking the alleged terrorist angle and taking the bloggers to the woodshed for spreading hysteria about the story. Some of the Journal‘s targets respond[ed]….[you’ll have to go to her post to get the elided links]… trying to debunk the debunking and gamely attempting to keep the story alive. Malkin, Powerline, and The Jawa Report claim that the blogs have not made any assertions, merely asked questions. First of all, that’s a common, and rather poor, excuse for irresponsible speculation. If a prominent left-wing blog ran an item titled, “Did George W. Bush know in advance about the 9/11 attacks?”, I doubt that Malkin & Co. would consider the question mark to be much of an attenuating circumstance.

Umm…where to start here? Ms. Young found the WSJ “debunking” convincing, but others didn’t. And who gets to judge what constitutes “irresponsible” or “speculation”? As for the reductio ad absurdum re: George Bush, well… is that not what left-wing bloggers have been claiming all along? They can preach to the choir; it’s okay. Bushitler will survive, as will right wing blogs. But here we are, “gamely attempting” to keep the story alive.

Then Ms. Young sets the ground rules:

This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about good MSM vs. bad blogs. Certainly, there have been cases in which the mainstream media have peddled bogus news and hysteria; and certainly, there have been cases in which the MSM got it wrong and the blogs got it right (most notably “Rathergate,” a.k.a. Memogate or Typewritergate). What’s more, this is not an issue of “citizen journalists” without professional credentials: Malkin is a professional journalist. And finally, the responsibility for the hysteria over the Oklahoma “suicide bombing” does not rest entirely with the blogs: a lot of the false rumors were fanned by the local TV stations (though it’s not clear to what extent their coverage was blog-driven). At best, the mainstream media and the blogs can complement each other’s strengths, with professional journalists gathering the news and bloggers subjecting their reports to fact-checking and critical analysis. In this case, what looks like sloppy and hysterical reporting by the local mainstream media fed sloppy and hysterical coverage by blogs. And vice versa.

Got that? A tu quoque here for MSM and bloggers. Level playing field when it comes to sins and such.

Well, here’s my “game attempt” — one which I will continue as long as the reasonable questions are dismissed, derided, attacked with ad hominem remarks, and otherwise sneered upon, one I will continue until it becomes apparent that the stone wall erected by our government is permanent and impenetrable. For that, I do not need the imprimatur of the Wall Street Journal.

First point for tackiness: how can these bloggers be so uncaring? I mean, think of the parents and what they’re having to endure in the face of these endless questions and hypotheses. Not a bad point, but hardly salient. Maybe some parents prefer to have it all go away. However, when my daughter died a few years ago under questionable circumstances, “leave it alone” was not a direction I considered. A parent wants to know everything, including what might have led her child to be in the vicinity of a large amount of unstable explosives. Reassuring phone calls from the FBI or no, as a parent I would be neither comforted nor reassured with a suicide note read to me over the phone two days later by an FBI agent who says he saw it on my son’s computer screen.

Ms Young agrees with the idea that asking these questions is a smear on the family. She quotes with approval blogger Caerdroia:

[N]o matter what else, Joe [Hinrichs] has a family and friends who are very badly affected by Joe’s death. In the absence of good evidence, isn’t it a bit better to wait to pronounce from on high, so as not to unfairly smear a possible innocent and his family? Otherwise, just how are conservatives any better morally, any less conspiracy-addled freaks, than the D[emocratic] U[nderground] moonbats?

More ad hominem attacks. More tu quoque equations. So asking questions is a “smear”? Does this man always wait for someone to “pronounce from on high” before he permits himself an opinion? Who ever said conservatives are morally better than people they disagree with politically? Is this kind of talk not a bit over the top emotionally? Oops. Those are questions.

Were I a dad, I’d be down in Norman asking around, even if the FBI and the president of OU wanted me to stop. Hell, as a parent paying ransom amounts of tuition to this place of higher learning, I’d be demanding answers. Call it Cindy Sheehan mode.

Second tacky and naive point: bloggers who “cry wolf,” which is Ms. Young’s term for those who are not satisfied with what’s been put on the table for consideration. The metaphorical allusion escapes me here. Wasn’t that fairy tale about little boys who lie? Wasn’t the moral supposed to be that one avoids lying in order to be believed when (as Robert Hunter put it) “the real true action comes around the curve”? Does the “cry wolf” epithet mean that once the FBI and school authorities have spoken — declaring this simply a suicide — then any further questions are an example of bad blogging? Are we thus liars like the little boy in the story? That’s a question, because I don’t understand what “crying wolf” means, and I’ll continue to ask questions, as tacky and jejune as that may be.

Third tacky and paranoid point: How silly of us to wonder about this man’s association with Islamist terrorism. Honestly, now, aren’t we just the spinsters hoping the bad man really is under the bed?

By October 5, the alarm was in full swing: Hinrichs had reportedly tried to purchase a large quantity of the explosive ammonium nitrate; he had allegedly converted to Islam and belonged to a mosque that may have had terrorist ties and may have been attended earlier by “20th hijacker” Zacharias Moussaoui; he may have had radical Islamic literature and a one-way airplane ticket to Algeria in his apartment; he may have attempted to enter the crowded stadium twice before he blew himself up.

Tacky, tacky. Bruising ourselves jumping to conclusions. It’s no wonder bloggers are so out of the mainstream. But it gets worse:

As it turns out, the only truth in all this is that Hinrichs had, indeed, inquired about buying ammonium nitrate at a local store two days before his suicide, and had given evasive and suspect answers about why he needed it. Because of a tip about this attempted purchase, he had come to the attention of the FBI, which became involved in investigating the suicide. The other claims were a lot of rumor-mongering and speculation, all firmly denied by both the FBI and the university authorities and often based on laughably far-fetched “clues” (Hinrichs had a Pakistani roommate; he lived — gasp! — within a block of the mosque; he even — wait until you hear this one! — grew a beard!).

Madam, you’re behind on the speculation: his — gasp!— beard was shaved off several days before his backpack detonated. There’s the latest speculation, aided by the description of the clerk from whom he tried to buy the two hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate. Would you like to know what suicidal/homicidal Islamist terrorists do before they detonate themselves? They shave off their beards. Did you know that? Is that little piece of the mosaic important? I don’t know — maybe he just decided on a whim to shave off the hair he’d worn on his face for years (or as his father said, “since as long as I can remember”). Setting aside the significance of Joel Hinrichs’ action here, we have nonetheless established a similarity between his behavior and that of Islamist terrorists: shave the beard, Omar. Just one small clue which may or may not mean anything.

Another tacky and unreasonably persistent question: where is Hinrichs’ roommate now? Does anyone know? Why hasn’t the media interviewed him? Usually in these sensational cases, the media crawls out of the woodwork, pushing microphones in front of people and asking them, “How did you feel when you learned your roommate killed himself?” So where are the microphones? Why not here, why not now? Do you suppose the roommate may no longer be available to talk to? There was that one-way ticket to Algeria in their apartment; do you wonder if he got on the bus, Gus, and kept going? Just asking. No one is answering, though.

And speaking of roommate behavior, why was the roommate at a party that evening when he was picked up for questioning by the FBI? Is that a cultural thing, maybe? Your roommate kills himself and you need a little break? When my son’s good friend killed himself in his room last year, his friends, roommates, dorm mates, his girlfriend etc., were all invited into one place to talk — and there were lots of college administrators, counselors, etc., in attendance. But there were also police questions to be answered.

So. These are some of the queries the “cry wolf” bloggers have presented. The good bloggers, though, they quickly ascertained that it was not a story worth paying attention to:

The news that the FBI was investigating the case of a man blowing himself up on a major university campus undoubtedly merited some attention. However, the reasonable bloggers quickly realized there was no “there” there.

And exactly how “quickly” was this realization accomplished? Oh, about a week or so.

At Instapundit.com on October 6, Glenn Reynolds linked to a couple of blogposts discussing the allegedly suspicious details of the story, but later updated the post to include a link to an excellent post at Caerdroia debunking most of the claims. After that, he didn’t touch the story again, except to link to a cautious post by CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs saying that the national media needed to look into the story.

Notice the wording: “he didn’t touch the story again.” Why not? What’s the harm in touching it, in walking around it, in inspecting it to see if there were any holes in it? As for the “excellent post at Caerdroia”… as I’ve said several times now, this blogger ought to have recused himself from commenting on Mr. Hinrichs’ motives or lack of them. Mr. Hinrichs was a member of Caerdroia’s fraternity. This link, however tenuous, puts in question Caerdroia’s ability to be objective about Mr. Hinrichs’ motives or associations. Beyond the deep shock that would occur when one’s fraternity brother dies — never mind that he does so during the detonation of some explosives near the stadium at a football game — what could Caerdroia bring to the conversation other than a desire that it just stop? Can’t blame him there; I’d feel the same way… but I wouldn’t expect people to see me as objective in my assessment, either.

The next comparison is telling:

By contrast, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and The Jawa Report flogged the story relentlessly, picking up every sensational detail and railing against the “mainstream media” for ignoring and covering up the story.

You see, don’t you, that they not only “flogged,” they “flogged relentlessly.” They didn’t object to the lack of mainstream media coverage, they “railed against” it. Tacky of them. But not nearly so tacky as the clichés which Ms. Young used to beat them over the head for their refusal to be “reasonable bloggers.”

The questions the bad bloggers have may never be answered. The FBI can stonewall for another generation. And the connections between OU’s president and the intelligence network in this country may continue to be ignored. But we’ll still be paying attention. And asking our tacky, bad blogger questions. Yes, we have no sense of shame: that’s why we’re bloggers and not, say, journalists.

At Daily Pundit, Bill Quick asks some tacky questions indeed. After going through the derisive essay from Wall Street Journal article that Ms. Young cited, Mr.Quick uses this part of their “debunking” to ask his questions:

	To that unsettling set of facts, blogs and local Oklahoma TV stations added several apparent inaccuracies, including: that Mr. Hinrichs was a Muslim and visited the mosque frequently; that he tried to enter the stadium twice but was rebuffed; that he had a one-way airplane ticket to Algeria; that there were nails in the bomb and that Islamic extremist literature was found in his apartment.
	None of these claims are true: Mr. Hinrichs’ family, university officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation say Mr. Hinrichs suffered from depression, and the explosion was an isolated event.

Well, says Mr. Quick, he sure has some questions:

None of which claims are true? 1.   Are suicides committed by bombs common? 2.   Are suicides by bombs committed in public near a crowded event? 3.   Did Hinrichs not have a Pakistani room-mate? 4.   Did they not share an apartment one block from the Norman mosque? 5.   Was that not the mosque attended by Zacarias Moussaoui? 6.   Did Hinrichs not visit the feed store and inquire about purchasing a large amount of ammonium nitrate? 7.   Did an off-duty Norman police officer not overhear this conversation, and not run a check on his license plate?(Side question: How would running a license plate check remove any cause for alarm about somebody trying to purchase a large amount of ammonium nitrate?) 8.   It has definitely been established, then, that Hinrichs was not a Muslim, and had no inclinations in that direction? 9 .  It has been established that Hinrichs never visited the Norman mosque? 10.   It has been established that no Islamic literature was found in his apartment? 11.   It has been established that the Algerian ticket (never claimed for Hinrichs, by the way, but for his room-mate) did not exist, and had no connection with the incident? (Side question: How did the FBI happen to come across this ticket, then? Did they search every international student apartment in Norman?)

Mr. Quick has some other things to say about the “investigation” of the detonation of explosives on October 1st outside the stadium at OU. I will let his last comment stand in for the thoughts of all the bad bloggers, the ones crying wolf out there:

Pompous journalistic commentators who ignore all these legitimate, unanswered questions in order to simply bloviate about supposed blog errors are worse than useless. Where is the official, complete FBI report? I want to see it. I want these questions answered, not ignored. Maybe “real” journalists think the story is complete, but that is why much of America thinks “real” journalists are about as trustworthy as used car salesmen.

Mr. Quick is a guard dog. We need more of them.

 
My appearance on the show was from 3pm to 4pm. It went well, though it was gruelling. We had a long conversation and several callers. Thanks to Jesse Clark for showing up as one of the callers! Another interesting caller was a former law-enforcement guy.

When we get the recording (they’re supposed to snail-mail me a CD), we will transcribe it and then post a transcript, if possible.

I can definitely recommend Heads Up America and Ken Bagwell on WZNN, for those of you in the listening area or with access to the streaming audio.

I will be appearing on a talk radio show this Friday, Oct. 21st, at 3:00 PM EDT. The program is Heads Up America hosted by Ken Bagwell on Supertalk Radio WZNN AM 1350 in the Asheville, NC area. The listening area covers western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.

The station also has streaming audio.

I will be discussing Jamaat ul-Fuqra and other topics related to the Great Islamic Jihad. I invite readers to kibitz — if you have any suggestions, by all means put them in the comments. I’ll look at everything before I go on the air and keep it in mind.

 
An email from a reader (I’ve made some slight changes to protect his identity):

	I’ve been trying to find your email ever since you posted this story and people started to talk about it.
	So here’s an experience to relate. Several years ago my friend moved to the Catskill region in upstate New York. People began to tell him there was a Muslim community “over the hill” and hours after 9/11, the locals surrounded this community in their pickup trucks with rifles drawn. He was told the FBI knew about this place and that it was populated by ex-cons and they were linked to a murder in Seattle.
	Time passed. A couple months ago he had occasion to speak with a neighbor and mentioned this community in order to learn a bit more about it. She said “They’re just like us. They left the city to find peace. They live very simply. Of course there’s been some trouble with the kids bringing knives to school and such but they’re just normal people.”
	When he told me this, I wondered what kind of normal people let their kids take knives to school. This all fell into place last week when I read your article. This barbed wired enclosed compound is not literally over the hill from my friend, it’s in a nearby town. And the town is — survey says! — Hancock, NY.
	So there you have it. I’m told this area is quite rural, it’s so near nowhere (except NYC is less than two hundred miles away). One does have to admire the local residents for knowing exactly where to look when the time comes. Still there they are. Nesting comfortably awaiting their call to…

No word as to whether the children sent to school (with knives) included any girls.

They’re just like us. They left the city to find peace.

Oh, if only…

 
Jesse Clark keeps his own blog at World War IV Daily, but in yesterday’s post on Jamaat al-Fuqra in South Carolina he left a comment that deserves to be reproduced here in its entirety.

	Dymphna, I certainly understand where you’re coming from, and I’m just as cynical about the MSM as the next guy. Do I think the media will someday pick up the JF story? Yes. But only after JF pulls off some high-profile attack inside this country and a lot of people die. In other words: The MSM won’t care until it’s too late.
	As for the source of my optimism, let me put it this way:
	I am a college student seeking a future career in counterterrorism. I have many, many months left before I graduate and go off into whatever field I decide is the best way to combat this ever-growing evil. But the war isn’t waiting for me to graduate. Everyday the enemy grows stronger and I grow increasingly frustrated in my own inability to combat it.
	When I first stumbled upon your blog and the your post concerning Jamaat ul-Fuqra on October 10th, I was compelled to push this effort further. In the past 10 days, our knowledge of this organization has multiplied exponentially. We, as a community of bloggers, are rapidly uncovering the details on what could possibly be the most complex and deeply-rooted domestic terror group in this country.
	Chances are, none of us have formal CT training. We are all different in age, race, location and historical background. But we love this country, and the thought of people living inside it who seek to tear it apart through violence is disgusting to us. And as Baron demonstrated with his investigation of the JF compound in Red House, a little bit of research, a digital camera, and a whole lot of guts can make a huge impact. It doesn’t take much.
	Counterterrorism is not a government responsibility. A group of individuals armed only with internet access and the will to defend this country can put the spotlight on an organization like JF and demand action, just a like Montana mother-of-four who knows Arabic can run an online sting operation on a Washington US Army soldier attempting to sell information to al-Qaeda.
	Slowly but surely, the word will spread, and opportunities like Baron’s radio gig will make it happen faster. Will our voices be heard by the people in charge? I can’t say for sure, but I’ll be damned if I don’t scream my lungs out anyway because so long as I have one shred of influence, I will not let a group like JF eat away at this country. I will not let more people die in more terrorist attacks on this country.
	And that is what my optimism comes from:
	The fact I am not powerless to fight terrorism. The fact that I don’t have to sit back and watch the war unfold in front of my eyes without being able to do something about it. The fact that I can sit in my history class with a wireless-enabled laptop computer as my weapon and engage the enemy on the front lines.
	Let freedom ring.

The following quote was lifted from Tendentious when he had his back turned. It serves as a holding space for the vehicle that will shortly park here.

Meanwhile, consider the Prime Minister’s words carefully as you brush your teeth tonight. He means you and me — for sure he wasn’t talking to himself.

	If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world – [and] to the world – for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in… not only is that morally bankrupt but it’s also ineffective.
	… fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most [are] weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.
	By John Howard

 
The Politics of CP is at it again. Taking to heart my injunction to turn on the light, he has done an investigation of Jamaat ul-Fuqra in York County, SC, using open source materials on the internet:

	By now I’ve posted information related to three of the known compounds of al-Fuqra, but as I noted from the NW3C report there are numerous other “suspected” compounds and training grounds. So, to see what I could find, I picked one from the list and started searching. Next contestant – York County, SC. It’s amazing what you can find out through a little Googling.
	A search of islamicvalley.com, a reference for mosque and Islamic school locations, turned up a mosque at this location known as the Masjid al-Fatimah [423 Flintlock Drive, York, SC 29745; Phone – (803) 684-4986]. A geographic search of this location using Google Earth revealed a rural location, some four miles from the city boundaries. I then looked closer and noticed that Flintlock Drive intersected with another road interestingly named – Islamville Way. Bingo. (I’ll get to maps later in the post).
	I then checked whitepages.com (a useful site, by the way) and did a reverse address search on the “mosque” address. It turned up two names, but I haven’t found any other information re: who they are. Then, I reverse searched Islamville Way. It turned up ten names and one business. Again, I don’t know anything further about these individuals.
	A business, Al-Oasis Tech Care, is listed as having the same address as Karima Sabur and Bilal Shabazz. An internet search revealed the company is listed as an appliance installation and repair contractor. Two other locations were found for this company as well.

Read the whole thing. He has maps, GIS, property-ownership information, and much more.

The Politics of CP has noted previously that all his material is drawn from open sources:

This research has been drawn from open sources and is intended for informational purposes only. I in no way advocate or condone any action taken in response to this information, unless taken legally and/or by the proper authorities.

I concur. Shining the light means spreading the information, just as we find it. It doesn’t mean jumping to conclusions or becoming a torchlight-and-pitchfork mob.

These people are our neighbors, and we need to get to know them.

 
Commenter DP111 has left us a link to Patrick Briley’s account of the Oklahoma University explosion. Mr. Briley has information that I’ve not seen elsewhere. If anyone can answer some of the questions that arise from this information, it would shed light on a very dark subject.

Mr. Briley says:

Hinrichs dropped out of OU after 2002. From 2003 until he re-enrolled at OU in the spring of 2005, the whereabouts of Joel Hinrichs is still unaccounted for by the FBI according to news reports by KWTV.

Questions:
Does anyone know how old Mr. Hinrichs was?
What year was he in when he left school in 2002?
What year of college was he in when he re-entered OU in 2005?
To which graduating class did he belong?

Mr. Briley, an independent investigator who has researched the Oklahoma City bombings, has other information, not all of it of equal value. For example, he says:

After he returned Hinrichs registered his car for only nine months until February 2006.

This time frame isn’t unusual. Lots of people don’t pay a full year’s car insurance, particularly students.

Then Mr. Briley asks, without any back-up evidence—

During the time he was unaccounted for at OU, was Hinrichs being recruited, indoctrinated and taught about explosives by Islamic terrorists in US or foreign training camps?

Questions:
How would we go about finding out that information?
Given what we know now about the extent of US jihad-training camps, how unreasonable is Mr. Briley’s query?

Further, Mr. Briley repeats information that originally made reasonable people wonder what was going on:

When he returned to OU in spring 2005 Hinrichs suddenly took on Pakistani [name redacted] and other Islamic students as his roommates, started visiting the OU mosque, and grew a full beard, the symbol of new Islamic convert.

The beard can’t be denied, nor can the roommate. But the mosque says Hinrichs was not a visitor. How reliable is the mosque?

Then it gets interesting:

On the night of Hinrichs’ death, the FBI picked up and interrogated [name redacted] and OU Arabic instructor Hossam Barakat who were attending a party together.

Is this true? Your roommate blows himself up and you go to a party? Say what?

	But after the Parkview apartments were cleared of explosives [roommate] was allowed to return to the apartment he shared with Hinrichs. Barakat was also released.
	KWTV did a follow up story at 6 pm on October 5, 2005 revealing that [roommate] had a one-way ticket for Algeria that had been purchased shortly before the bombing of Hinrichs at OU. Within hours of the story the FBI contacted KWTV and told the station they were headed in the wrong direction and KWTV management decided did not to re-air the broadcast at 10 pm.
	By October 7, 2005 the FBI was back on the phone telling KWTV to back away from reporting stories of the involvement of the Norman Islamic mosque and Hinrichs’ Pakistani roommate [name redacted]. Yet the FBI also told KWTV that the FBI had lost track of [roommate]!

Questions:
Does that mean [roommate] used his one way ticket and went to Algeria?
If so, how difficult is that to check?

Mr. Briley’s delving gets too interesting for comfort at this point. Remember Hinrichs’ address was the Parkview Apartments. Well, guess who some of the previous tenants had been?

9/11 hijackers Al Shehhi, Al Hazmi, AlAttas as well as Zacharias Moussaoui and FBI informant Melvin Lattimore (his Muslim name is Menepta) all stayed in the Parkview apartments and had been in the Norman mosque across the street.

Mt. Briley says the FBI was aware of this when they pressured KWTV’s investigation.

Here is another tidbit from Mr. Briley, demonstrating that OU has a history of terrorist-like students:

In the fall of 2001 the FBI also investigated and the DOJ tried to prosecute an OU Pakistani student Haider who attended the Norman mosque. Haidar had sent anthrax threats to a woman and claimed allegiance to Bin Laden. During the incident Haidar was given a job at the Parkview apartments by OU President David Boren.

It’s getting murkier by the moment, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not over:

Boren was Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and was extremely close to CIA director George Tenet. Boren and Tenet were eating breakfast together on the morning of 9/11. OU had a sudden visit on August 2001 by Boren’s close friend and CIA agent David Edger. Edger had been tracking Atta, Alshehhi and fellow 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah in Germany for over three years. Jarrah’s ticket on the PA flight was purchased at OU’s library while Edger was at OU.

Do you have the stomach for more? Here’s my last snip, though certainly not the last of Mr. Briley’s information — e.g., CAIR connections, who owns and controls the mosque in Norman, the FBI connections there, the pressure on local media to lay off, etc., ad nauseam. The clip:

I reported on September 20, 2005 before the OU bombing on the sudden DOJ dispatch of and swearing in of John Richter as “acting” US attorney for Western Oklahoma on September 6, 2005 New Police State Terror Pretext Mission for DOJ Official? Richter had recently served as the assistant Attorney General for the DOJ Criminal division. Richter is an expert on using wiretaps in terrorism cases. The DOJ sent Richter to OK because the FBI and DOJ had learned of a new terror threat emanating out of Oklahoma and likely from the previous hot bed of Islamic terrorism, the Norman mosque and Parkview apartments.

That could be coincidence, I guess, but Mr. Richter was sent out there only a few weeks after they’d sworn in another guy.

Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the accuracy of all this information, but the connections Mr. Briley draws are disturbing. We haven’t even begun to list all of them here, and suggest you read his full accounts. Like others, we feel browbeaten if we bring up questions which no officials are willing to answer truthfully and fully. How can we trust officials who perform the usual — and by now very tiresome — “nothing to see here, move along” routine?

If anybody can refute Mr. Briley’s assertions, bring, as they say, it on.

Wallo World deserved his first place for this post, Controversy, Christians, and Condemnation. Elegant and diffident at the same time — not an easy combination to carry off (though James Madison certainly managed to do so in a different arena) — his meander through this thicket is well worth your time..

For me, at least, the real issue in that walk is this. God meets us where we are at the moment of salvation. He doesn’t necessarily expect or desire us to stay there. It becomes a question of whether we are overcoming temptation and growing in a relationship with Christ, or if we’re just paying lip service to our faith while we go about our merry way doing whatever feels good at the moment.

I’m not sure that any one of us is in a place to honestly or objectively judge another in that regard, although we can certainly question things that don’t seem consistent with the faith one proclaims. I mean, I’ve had people question my taste in films and my willingness to watch R-rated films. I try and explain my personal perspective – which, on occasion, is as muddled as anybody else’s when we might be torn between what we want and what we should. But there are certainly films that I won’t see precisely because I don’t want to put certain things in my head.

Then, there was a matching theme — a synchronicity, perhaps? — in the non-council winner’s post entitled Legion. The blog, Waiter Rant, is full of good writing; this man knows how to control his material, which makes him a pleasure to read. This particular post is about how the world values —or does not — the marginal people, the crazies. He uses for his story the possessed man in Mark’s gospel. Waiter’s interlocutor is Beth, a fellow waiter at the Bistro where they both work. They’re on a break from work, and have just seen a homeless guy, Claude, go by and it reminds the Waiter of the man in the Gospel story. This leads to a long, discursive dialogue:

	The world places no value in people like Claude and the possessed man,” I say, “What do you think they’re worth?”
	“I don’t know,”
	“To us they’re nothing. But to God they’re everything.”
	Beth is silent.
	“I think God’s sense of economy is very different from our own – so different it’s scary. To him the plight of one vagrant is more important than all the money in the world. And He’ll plunder our treasure to save him.”
	“That would piss people off,” Beth says.
	“You bet it would,” I reply, “But maybe we get pissed because we realize we’ve been investing in the wrong kind of treasure. If we all acted like human beings, if our treasure was compassion, people like Claude might have it a little easier.”

Never was it truer that you should read the whole thing to get the full flavor of the story as it touches on loneliness, the need to be loved here and now, in the flesh, and how we search for it. As an indication of the hot buttons he touches, the post had 256 comments last time I looked.

There are many more posts at this week’s Watcher’s Council. You can pick up the links for the Education Wonk’s disturbing account of a new “game” kids play; Rightwing Nuthouse’s fisk of Dubya’s moves of late; the Glittering Eye’s stare at the Nobel “Peace” Prize; Dr. Sanity’s comparison of the similarities between the jihadists’ strategy and that of the American Left; Polipundit’s dissection of the Meiers’ nomination (makes you wonder whassup here); LaShawn Barber’s excellent essay on how wealth insulates the rich from the vicissitudes the rest of us have to bear…

Do yourself a favor and go there. He has all the links to the posts above.

 
The Syrians seem to have a gift for clumsy executions. One can surmise it’s because they don’t really care what anyone else believes as long as the target is taken out. Otherwise, what are we to think? That they’re terminally stupid?

First Syria put out the word that Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan had committed suicide in his office last week. Of course, no one believed it, nor were we really expected to. A man doesn’t commit suicide by shooting himself several times, especially not this man.

But just in case we didn’t get it, they got out the ol’ trowel:

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa erred twice in his eulogy of Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan calling the suicide an “assassination.”

Yes, we’re supposed to believe that’s some sort of Freudian slip, aren’t we? Stupid infidels, we’ll fall for anything.

But why trust just one “blunder” — maybe we needed to hear it again?

	Chief public attorney Muhammad al-Louji told a televised news conference in Damascus Thursday that Kanaan shot himself with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Al-Louji said an examination of the body and interviews with witnesses showed “Kanaan placed the tip of the revolver in his mouth and fired it.”
	“The act of killing, pardon, assassination, occurred at his office in the Interior Ministry at 9:15 a.m. Wednesday. He had left 45 minutes earlier, got into his car and drove home. He spent a little time there before returning to the office,” al-Louji said.

However he died, fact is he’s dead. And unmourned. Evidently, Kanaan lived fast and died hard, but he doesn’t seem to have lived by the notion that one ought to leave a beautiful memory. Here’s a snippet from his long, busy life:

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon amid a ferocious civil war between the country’s various communities: Christians, Druzes, Sunnis, Shias and Palestinians. Kanaan manipulated, intimidated or bribed militia leaders to favour Syria and managed to cause the failure of a US-brokered treaty between the Lebanese Government and Israel in 1983. His methods included assassinations, such as that of the Grand Mufti of the Sunnis, Hasan Khalid, in 1989. The large-scale cultivation of the opium poppy in the Bekaa Valley and trafficking heroin abroad made him and his mentors in Damascus extremely wealthy.

Even al Jazeera termed it ‘suicide.’

Oh…in case you’re wondering: the report on the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri is due out soon. Guess who they are probably going to finger? His name starts with “the late…”

Hat tip: Terrorism Unveiled

 
A reader I’ll call Stefanie contacted me after my initial post on Jamaat ul-Fuqra. She has been researching JF for a long time, and was glad to see someone else working on it. She has sent me a wealth of information, with numerous links. I am reproducing a series of her emails below, in the hope that readers will follow the links and start researching this evil group on their own.

Stefanie has not only researched Jamaat ul-Fuqra, she has talked to the FBI and Homeland Security and apprised them of what she has learned. This woman deserves a medal.

I’ve redacted her information to protect her identity. She lives in “Big State” which has a JF compound near “Small Town.” These disguises are not, however, a cover for Virginia; the same thing is happening in other states.

	10/9/05
	I’m excited to read your post on the Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Virginia as I’ve researched the Muslims of the Americas compound here in Big State near Small Town (and Large Military Base). Sheik Gilani and his Al Fuqra jihadis are a shadowy, elusive and horrifying group who seem to operate under the radar. Big State Homeland Security and the FBI know about their compound and are keeping an eye on them. It was interesting to read in Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Levy that Danny Pearl was looking for the sheik in Pakistan.
	10/10/05 5:36 PM
	Baron: Here’s a good link for Al Fuqra below. The Muslims of the Americas used to have a website with pictures of their shrine to Sheik Gilani and a few articles by him. I had captured it with Internet Researcher but it’s on my old hard-drive. I’ll try to find the harddrive or the link to the website for you. I also had electronic files captured on Al Fuqra but that hard drive crashed and I hadn’t backed it up. (Big Lesson!)
	Anyway tonight I’ll research as much as I can for other links. I’m afraid many of them have disappeared from the web. I’ll send you the information by e-mail as I don’t want to identify myself and these links in the comments section. I have presented information about this group and the Al-Qaeda connection in middle Big State to the FBI and Homeland Security and they knew most of what I knew and by the time the meeting was over, they knew everything.
	Thanks for your visit to enemy territory and reporting. I’ve been tempted to visit Small Town and snoop myself.
	Fact Bites on Al-Fuqra.
	10/10/05 8:33 PM
	I found my paper files! Now how much is still up on the web, I don’t know but will find out and pass on to you. Gilani/Jilani, etc. is the imam to watch. He’s always under the radar, but hanging with tyrants, greedy despots, barbarian psychopaths and just plain evil beings who seek to control us by fear, intimidation and death.
	From the horse’s mouth: Holy Islamville.
	10/10/05 9:20 PM
	I’m sure you’ve read 60 Minutes on Gilani but just in case: Sheik Gilani.
	The link for the Big State Newspaper article on the Small Town compound is gone but it was one of those post-9/11-naïve-but-informative pieces and mentioned Daniel Pearl, crimes of arson, racketeering, murder, then interviewed the locals: “they seem warm and compassionate” “We’ve had no trouble with them whatsoever.” Pleasant,” blah, blah. But the MOA turned away the reporter when he questioned them about their crimes.
	[…]
	From a Pakistani paper with a title I can’t type. “Gillani was in the jihadi business for money” by Mubasher Bukhari.
	The Islamic Center here is tied directly to Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn, or Jihadi Central East. Al Farouq sent an imam (American born, schooled in Yemen and Saudi Arabia) down to set up a school for the kids… and teach them the real Islam, and he’s doing it. His running partner from the Muslim Brotherhood is a Ph.D. in Animal Toxicology and has trained in religious studies and is the point man for all the media, he’s the dawa coordinator, who runs around to all the mainstream churches saying they’re wrong, he and his religion are right, the Koran says so and calls us to Islam. Barf. But he has been bested many times. Did they tell him he was going to the buckle on the Bible belt to do his missionary work? I don’t think so.
	Ties Al Fuqra and Al Qaeda into a neat package: Strange Bedfellows.
	10/11/05
	Interesting tie-in, Al-Fuqra and the Brits. Do you know the status of Al-Fuqra in the United States?
	I’ve been interested in this group for years since they’re down the street, so to speak, from us. Seems like Al-Fuqra via Sheik Gilani has always been around the edges of nasty jihadi activity in the U.S. This group is the sheik’s very own army of criminals living among us. No wonder the crime rate has risen.
	From the Anti-Defamation League. Sorry I can’t get the link to work. “Muslims of the Americas: In Their Own Words” “Al-Fuqra Holy Warriors of Terrorism” (pdf) [Note: the links seem to work now – ed.]
	10/12/05
	By the way we’ve just had a new Homeland Security chief appointed who is retired from the FBI, terrorism expert, etc. and I hope he will be better than the last one. Gen. [Redacted] told our State legislators at a committee meeting that there was no sign of Al Qaeda in our state and things were just hunky dory. After seeing a blurb in our newspaper about this, I e-mailed the smartest of our state senators who happened to be head of the of the committee and told him that was a crock and I could prove it. Showed him my paper files and led through the Big State connections right to our city’s doorstep and he asked me to take my files to Homeland Security. HLS agreed with my conclusions and I asked them why they told the public a lie. They didn’t want to worry anyone or stir anything up they said. I told them they had insulted the intelligence and character of our citizens and they ought to be ashamed. So we’ll see what this new guy does.

They didn’t want to worry anyone or stir anything up.

Yes indeed. The regular folks, the poor stupid sheep who comprise the citizenry of the United States of America, are such frail hothouse flowers that they can’t bear to hear disturbing news about murderous thugs in their midst. Best let them go about their business in happy ignorance.

And when their children are taken hostage at school, when their spouses are blown up at work, when their neighbors are beheaded to make jihad videos — why, we’ll call the police and the FBI and Homeland Security, and they’ll find those bad people who did those terrible things, and then we’ll… bring them to justice.

Yeah, right.

The layers of bureaucratic officialdom that smother this country want us all to be good sheep, to stay in the pen and eat the grass and be content, and do what we’re told.

The sheep, though… Every once and a while the sheep stop going “Baa” and start yelling “Bah!” Annie Jacobsen stopped being a sheep when terrorists made a practice run during her airplane flight. She was told to sit down and shut up and let her betters take care of the situation, but she didn’t. Now she’s watching out, just like the rest of us should be.

And what about the Joel Hinrichs incident in Norman, Oklahoma? The FBI says, “Go back to sleep. Nothing going on here. No connection to terrorism. Guy just blew himself up, that’s all.” Baa.

But the sheepdogs look at the same thing and say, “If that’s the case, how did you manage to raid the gathering of Hinrichs’ Muslim friends within minutes after the bomb went off?” Bah!

The sad fact is this: no matter what they’re doing to prevent terrorist attacks, the authorities don’t want us to know what’s going on. For whatever reasons, for sinister conspiratorial reasons (if you’re the paranoid type) or for the normal bureaucratic let’s-screw-everything-up-as-much-as-we-can-and-then-cover-our-asses reasons, they don’t want us to have the information.

But I say: Let the light in. Turn over all the rocks. Expose as much as you can of what’s really going on. The more information we have, the better. And if you’re not happy with what you learn, do what Stefanie did.

To repeat her most important words: “I told them they had insulted the intelligence and character of our citizens and they ought to be ashamed.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Bah!

Update: Papa Bear has sent a correction on the Hinrichs information above:

Regarding the “within minutes”: according to an article posted to freerepublic.com, Hinrichs’ roommate went to a gathering of fellow Muslims around midnight, and he and the others were arrested within minutes of him leaving the apartment, not within minutes of the blast.

 
Saudi Arabia is killing us. Their cynical, intensive, and unrelenting efforts to destroy America has many faces, all of them evil.

The Counterterrorism blog is probably the best place to go for broad, in-depth and judicious information about Saudi Arabia, about the clear and present danger of the Saudi government to our welfare as a country — not to mention the menace it entails for you, personally.

Any serious homeland threats that exist on this continent have Saudi money behind them. To see for yourself, go over to Counterterrorism. You could start almost anywhere, but here’s as good a place as any to begin. Back in August, they asked:

	Who is the New Saudi Ambassador and Why Don’t We Care?
	I have waited in vain for someone in the major media to run something telling the American people who the new Saudi ambassador to the United States–Prince Turki al-Faisal–really is. Yet his naming has passed almost unnoticed and uncommented since it was made last month.
	It is important to understand that Prince Turki not only has ties to U.S. intelligence dating back to the BCCI scandal of the 1980s. But more importantly, he was was head of Saudi intelligence for 24 years, and as such one of the chief propagators of the spread of wahhabism around the world. He also supported radical Islamic and wahhabist causes without hesitation or reserve. He resigned his intelligence position a month before 9-11, and, since 2002 was Saudi ambassador to Great Britain.
	He was one of the primary architects and bagmen for the Saudi funding of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan. He supervised the purchase of some 400 pickup trucks for the Taliban’s final push to victory in 1996, and worked closely with Pakistani intelligence to arm, train and supply the Taliban long after the Taliban took in Osama bin Laden as a special guest. He has helped spread around the world the wildly anti-Jewish hate literature that the Saudi government prints and Saudi intelligence helps distribute. This includes calls to kill all Jews, along with calls to wage war against Christianity. These are not passing references, but the heart of wahhabi teachings, which Prince Turki has overseen and spread.

So this is what the Saudis send over here?

Notice this crucial term in the passage above: “Wahhabi teachings.” It is the worm in the apple, the virus in the pandemic of Islamofascism:

The West is gearing up to stop the much-feared pandemic of Avian flu at its sources. Two decades ago, it should have done the same to stop the pandemic of Wahhabism and Islamo–Fascism. Our inaction facilitated the funding of terrorism that has killed and maimed many thousands and infected tens of millions around the world.

Last Friday, ABC aired Barbara Walters’ interview with Saudi King Abdullah. Like Dan Rather’s chat with Saddam Hussein, and Duranty’s love affair with Stalin, this incident is disgusting simply because it was permitted to happen, simply because this woman sat down and talked with a representative of the face of evil and then ABC broadcast the results. This quisling of a legacy media journalist deserves nothing but opprobrium for her softball routine with our enemy.

Ms. Walters especially earns our scorn for talking to this scrofulous member of the rotting dynasty of Saud without once letting the word “Wahhabi” pass her lips. Millions have died because of these people, including thousands of Americans, and she accords him respect and gives him a platform from which to lie to the American public. Has she no shame? None. Not a molecule’s worth. Read it and weep that these two reprehensible people were allowed to indulge in mutual masturbation in public:

	WALTERS: Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, is this something that has caused you great grief? Would you like to say anything to the American people about that?
	ABDULLAH: Yes, of course it had, and we were shocked. It has had a negative impact on all Saudis because this is not who we are nor is it what our faith teaches us. We as Arabs are always loyal to our friends and we value such friendships.
	WALTERS: Well, officially our two countries are friends and allies, but unofficially there seems to be some suspicion and even hatred. Why do you think this is?
	ABDULLAH: Yes, the Saudi people have some disagreements with the United States, in particular when it comes to the issue of the Palestinian question, the war in Afghanistan and the war with Iraq, and I believe this may have influenced the opinion of the Saudi public towards the United States … What we ask for is that justice and equity prevail among all of the ethnic groups in Iraq. We believe that all Iraq is one country in which all Iraqis live in peace and justice. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until today has not interfered in Iraq’s affairs. We have not done so because we don’t want to open ourselves up to charges or accusations that we are … that we have a hand in the disintegration of … of Iraq. We also have been accused in the past of having a hand in what happened in Iraq, in particular with regards to terrorism and the violence, and we are innocent of these charges. And we have remained neutral in spite of the injustices that we see currently going on.
	WALTERS: Let’s talk about Iran … Iran has become more powerful as a result of the turmoil in Iraq. Do you see that as a concern for Saudi Arabia?
	ABDULLAH: The questioner is often times more knowledgeable than the questionee.
	WALTERS: (Laughs) So, you are not worried about Iran becoming more powerful?
	ABDULLAH: Iran is a friendly country. Iran is a Muslim country. We hope that Iran will not become an obstacle to peace and security in Iraq. This is what we hope for and this is what we believe the Iraqi people hope for.
	ABDULLAH: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, like other countries in the region, rejects the acquisition of nuclear weapons by anyone, especially nuclear weapons in the Middle East region. We hope that such weapons will be banned or eliminated from the region by every country in the region.

**Gag** This disgusting exchange is truly Orwellian. One hopes that these two eventually come to reside as neighbors in the same Circle in Dante’s inferno. Surely some set-aside exists there for Royal Suck-Ups like Walters?

But finally, the giant wheels of bureaucracy are beginning to creakily move toward doing something about this Faustian bargain our country has made with the Saudis. In September, the GAO published their Report to Congressional Requesters. According to Information on U.S.Agencies’ Efforts to Address Islamic Extremism (GAO-05-852):

A number of sources have reported that Saudi private entities and individuals, as well as sources from other countries, are allegedly financing or supporting Islamic extremism. However, U.S. agencies are still examining Saudi Arabia’s relationship, and that of other sources in other countries, to Islamic extremism. For example, in July 2005, a Treasury official testified before Congress that Saudi Arabia-based and -funded organizations remain a key source for the promotion of ideologies used by terrorists and violent extremists around the world to justify their agenda. In addition, according to State’s 2005 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, Saudi donors and unregulated charities have been a major source of financing to extremist and terrorist groups over the past 25 years. In July 2003, a former State Department official testified before Congress that a Saudi-based charity, al Haramain Islamic Foundation, had allegedly financed assistance to the Egyptian terrorist group Gamma al Islamia. In May 2004, the same former State official also testified that some half dozen of the most visible charities, including two of Saudi Arabia’s largest, the International Islamic Relief Organization and the World Muslim League, have been linked to supporting Islamic terrorist organizations globally. In addition, a former Treasury official identified Wa’el Hamza Julaidan as a senior figure in the Saudi charitable community who provided financial and other support to several terrorist groups affiliated with al Qaeda operating primarily in the Balkans.

Despite the tip-toe through the tulips in the preceding verbiage, things are looking up. The Counterterrorism Blog pointed out that while this report was ignored by the MSM, its cautious conclusions have provided a good vantage point from which to fire the opening salvoes :

October 11, 2005

NOTICE OF COMMITTEE HEARING

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing on
“Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?”
for Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 9:30 a.m. in Room 226
of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

By order of the Chairman

As the CT blog notes:

The broad title of the hearing gives the Judiciary Committee an unlimited number of bases upon which to challenge King Abdullah’s claims. Here’s a short list of potential targets based on past CT Blog posts: the presence of a “Hamas command in Saudi Arabia” – the open solicitation of terrorist funds on Saudi TV by the secretary-general of the Saudi government’s Muslim World League Koran Memorization Commission – the probable involvement of Saudi-based charities in the Bali bombings in 2002 and two weeks ago – the connections that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, now held in northern Virginia in connection with terrorism-related charges, developed in Saudi Arabia – the long commitment of the current Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. to radical Islamic and wahhabist causes, including his role as Saudi “bagman” (Doug Farah’s term) for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan – and the role of Saudi citizens and Saudi embassy officials in the U.S. in disseminating hateful anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda thoughout Islamic schools and mosques in the U.S. (go to the link above to pull the links they have on this information)

The Counterterrorism blog deserves accolades for providing this information. It is the business of the rest of us to disseminate what they find, and to do so as often and as broadly as possible.

Maybe now, twenty years too late, we can begin to break the bond with the devil. This is one case where “better late than never” applies absolutely.

Faster and louder, please.