PrairiePundit

Cuba jams signals into Iran Shortly after major combat in Iraq ended, Cuba started making noise in leftist media in Europe like they were next on the list of countries to be liberated. For the most part the US ignored Cuba, other than making complaints about the county's horrible human rights record. That may change. Cuba for some reason has been blocking the signal of Iranian programers who are trying to get the news into the country of mad mullahs. "...Iran itself can't block the programming because the signals must be jammed over the Atlantic Ocean, where the satellites are positioned. "U.S. officials believe Iran contracted with Cuba to do the job this month, on the eve of the four-year anniversary of large-scale student protests, 'to block the flow of news in a period of time when they obviously thought they were going to lose control of their own people,' Tomlinson said. "He said an interference signal jamming the satellites h...

Dems try to discredit US The Dems try to quantify a threat. "...concludes that 'Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States.' Interesting word, 'imminent.' It also appears in the DNC ad and increasingly in press commentary. "The word does appear once in the president's State of the Union. To wit, 'Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent.' He rejected this: 'Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.' The whole thrust of the policy of pre-emption, after all, is that in a world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer wait until a threat is imminent. A madman like Saddam heading a nation-state is itself an intolerable threat." My take: Why Are the Democrats This Stupid? Merv Benson - Washington, Texas What is really odd about the Nigerian forged documents is that the forgeries were know...

Niger forgery story timeline The first story about the forgeries was on March 8 in the Toronto Globe and Mail. "Jeff Shallot of the Toronto Globe and Mail cites U.N. sources in reporting IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei's conclusion that "Secret documents detailing attempts by Iraq to buy uranium for nuclear warheads from Niger are forgeries. …' Shallot hypothesizes a con man, who sold them to an Italian intelligence agent, and then "passed [them] on to French authorities.' Shallot continues: "There is no evidence that the forgeries were part of a dirty tricks operation by the United States or any other government to discredit Iraq, even though U.S. and British officials said the documents supported their case against the Baghdad regime."

UK poll shows voters favor education vouchers and private medical care Voters in the UK want the governmentr to give them the money spent on education so they can use it to select schools for their children. They also favor a medical insurance system using private health care providers like the US system. Apparently the back logs of socialism have changed opinions on medicine. "...Significantly, the poll finds that support for radical solutions is strongest among younger voters and among those on lower incomes, while opposition comes from older, well-off voters usually identified with the so-called "decision-making" classes. "On health, the voters surveyed by ICM on behalf of Reform were asked if they would consider a 'new approach' to the NHS, under which all adults would take out private insurance in exchange for a tax cut to cover the cost. The Government would pay the premiums for those on low incomes. "Of those polled, 46 per cent...

Right of return not that important to Palestinians A mob attacked a polling organization in Palestine which had discovered that by a five to one margins, Palestinians would prefer to settle in Palestinian territory rather than Israel. "...Only 10 per cent of the refugees chose Israel, even if they were allowed to live there with Palestinian citizenship; 54 per cent opted for the Palestinian state; 17 per cent for Jordan or Lebanon, and 2 per cent for other countries. Another 13 per cent rejected all these options, preferring to sit it out and wait for Israel to disappear, while 2 per cent didn't know."

Al Qaeda claims credit for Iraq attacks In an attempt to bolster flagging support for the US war in Iraq, al Qaeda claimed it, not Baathist remnants, was responsible for the attacks in Iraq. "'I swear by God no one from his (Saddam Hussein) followers carried out any jihad operations like he claims ... they (attacks) are a result of our brothers in jihad,' said the unidentified voice on the tape which was broadcast by Dubai-based Al Arabiya television."

US raids target Baathist In an attempt to preempt Iraqi attackers, the US has launched raids against areas where Baathist holdouts have been hiding. "...Military officials, citing intelligence reports based on information from Iraqi informants and other sources, said they are bracing for a potential increase in violence because several anniversaries formerly celebrated as national holidays occur this week: the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy on July 14, 1968; Hussein's rise to the presidency on July 16, 1979; and a coup by the Baath Party on July 17, 1968."

The Dem's civil war The DLC and the Democrat wing of the Democrat party are at war. "...The DLC, to be sure, does not seem terribly bothered. The group has openly attacked Dean’s followers, circulating a memo in May, reprised in an L.A. Times op-ed on July 3. 'The fact is,' the op-ed sneered, 'the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,' as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean likes to call it, is an aberration, a modern-day version of the old McGovern wing of the party, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home.'"

Islam's civil war Jim Hoagland discusses why they hate them. "...That is the question to ask in the wake of the slaughter of 53 people by Islamic suicide attackers in a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan, on July 4. "This was no isolated local atrocity, no jihad against Zionist oppressors, no blow delivered by the underdog against American crusaders. These victims were poor Shiite Muslims. As with the bombs set off in Saudi Arabia and Morocco a few weeks ago, this assault in southwestern Pakistan involved Muslims killing Muslims in the name of religion. It was part and parcel of an expanding civil war within Islam that is being fought across an extended region vital to U.S. interests."

Blair proposes new power to attack rogue states Tony Blair has proposed giving western democracies "the authority to attack any other sovereign country whose ruler is judged to be inflicting unnecessary suffering on his own people." "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." Not surprisingly Herr Schroeder does not like this proposal.

Black helicopter positioned to strike al Qaeda The hunt for the decentralized a; Qaeda operatives goes on. ..."The Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force in the Horn of Africa keeps a fleet of blacked-out helicopters for Special Operations on permanent standby in Djibouti. "They are on a moment's notice to go into action if they get hard intelligence about an al-Qaeda presence there. "The Pentagon has a similar capability at its airbase at Bagram, in Afghanistan...." "...The real war is taking place out of sight, being waged by intelligence officers, satellite analysts, translators, researchers, psychologists and interrogators. "The war on terror is primarily about trying to gather and collate intelligence...."

Saddam Osama connection A Federal appelate judge has been provided documents that tie Saddam to Osama bin Laden. ..."The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.'' "The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein...."

Rocket propelled grenades RPG's should be outlawed in Iraq. They are not a defensive weapons and no citizen should have a right to have one in their possesion. It should be presummed that anyone possessing an RPG is a Baathist terrorist. RPG's apparently are the weapon of choice in attacking convoys of Humvee's They are ineffective against armored vehicles like Bradley's and tanks.

Ground shaken under feet of Iranians Two earthquakes hit southern Iran near Shiraz. ..."Earthquakes are frequent in Iran and about 950 have hit the country since 1991, killing a total of 17,600 people and injuring 53,500, the state news agency Irna reports." Could it be all those Friday prayers asking allah to shaken the ground under the feet of the enemies of Islam?

Islamist arrested in Indonesia Indonesian police "arrested seven suspected members of the southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah and seized a large cache of explosives and weapons from a bomb-making factory, officials and media reports said Friday." "...Police across Southeast Asia have arrested scores of Jemaah Islamiyah operatives over the last year, but several key figures are still believed to remain at large."

Dirty words, clean words Den Beste goves a fasinating account of how words became regarded as "dirty" because of their origon rather than their meaning. "...In modern English when we talk about certain eternal and somewhat rude subjects, there are short words which we think of as being rather vulgar or base, and longer words for the same things which are generally thought of as being more cultured, more acceptable in polite company. It turns out that the short vulgar words almost all come to us from Anglo-Saxon words derived from old German, while the polite words derive from Latin via Norman. This doubled vocabulary happened during the first couple hundred years after the Norman conquest of England, during which period the nobles who ruled England still primarily spoke Norman (a Romance language related to French, from Normandy) while the commoners primarily spoke old English, which was a Germanic language based on the language the Saxons spoke when they had inv...

Krauthammer "Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States ." "...This is the core lunacy of Democratic foreign policy. Either it has no criteria for intervening militarily - after all, if we're going into Liberia, on what grounds are we not going into Congo? - or it has a criterion, and its logic is that the U.S. Army is a missionary service rather than a defender of U.S. interests."

Rice says CIA approved State of Union address "If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president's speech, 'he did not make them known' to Bush or his staff, said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice." ..."The president did not knowingly say anything that we knew to be false," she said. "We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false." "If anyone at the CIA had doubts about the veracity of the uranium-Iraq allegation, Rice said, 'those doubts were not communicated to the president.'"

The uranium non event Liberals seem to think that the use of inaccurate information about Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Niberia is of some importance. It is not. Before the war started the UN inspectors and everyone else agreed that the documents provided to substantiate the claim were forgeries. It is a rewriting of history to claim that the US went to war over bogus intelligence. When the UN disputed the authenticity of the documentation, Condi Rice made it clear that US claims were based on more than just those documents. It is unfortunate that bad intelligence found its way into a State of the Union address. It is ridiculous to suggest that the bad intelligence was the basis for the war, since everyone new this particular intelligence was bad before the first shots were fired.

Jesse Jackson's "diplomatic" mess in Liberia and Sierra Leone The current mess in Liberia and Sierra Leone are the result of Jesse Jackson's attempt to "solve " political problems in the two countries. "...* In May 1999, Jackson "kidnapped" President Laurent Kabbah of Sierra Leone, according to Kabbah advisers I interviewed, and flew him to neighboring Lome, Togo, where Jackson forced him to sign a cease-fire with rebel leader Foday Sankoy. "* That July, under the terms of a powersharing agreement which Jackson helped negotiate and which Kabbah vigorously resisted, Sankoh was released from house arrest, made a vice president in a new national unity government and put in charge of Sierra Leone's diamond mines. "* Sankoh then began smuggling out thousands of diamonds, many of which he sent to Charles Taylor in Liberia in exchange for weapons. Jackson repeatedly raised the issue of the illicit diamond trade and ...