Thursday, November 27, 2008

Witnesses describe Mumbai attackers' arrival by sea

Eyewitnesses have provided accounts of how the gunmen involved in yesterday's Mumbai massacre landed undetected in the heart of the port city's bustling downtown area.

At least some of the terrorists, said to be in their early twenties and armed with AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades, landed on the coast of Mumbai's commercial and entertainment neighbourhood in light and fast Gemini boats, powered by small outboard motors.

These inflatable dinghies, according to Indian navy sources quoted by the Headlines Today TV news channel, were launched from a larger vessel, the MV Alfa, which arrived near Mumbai sometime yesterday and anchored offshore a distance from India's financial capital.

According to TV reports, the navy seized one Gemini craft laden with ammunition, as well as satellite phone, which could give vital clues about the attackers.

The navy, the news channel reported, became suspicious of the ship only on intercepting wireless communications in the region after the lethal assault began around 9.40pm (4.10pm GMT) last night.

By this time the vessel had left the vicinity of Mumbai. When first reported by the news channel today, the MV Alfa was said to be off the Gujarat coast and heading towards Pakistan. The navy was reported to be in pursuit of the ship, although this could not be independently verified.

Indian TV news channels provided eyewitness accounts from people who saw the armed attackers land in Mumbai.

"It was around 9.15 last night when I saw a speedboat with eight men on board come close to the shore," a man told Times Now TV today. The man appeared to be a resident of the Colaba fishermen's village, minutes away from the Taj Mahal, one of two luxury hotels in Mumbai taken over by the terrorists.

"Six young men with large bags came ashore, after which the two who remained in the boat started the outboard motor again and sped off," he added. "They were fair, chikna (well-off) and looked around 20, 22, 25 years old. They said they were students. When we tried to find out what they were doing, they spoke very aggressively, and I got scared."

Two boys and an older woman from the same neighbourhood spoke to CNN-IBN. "When we tried to talk to them, they rudely said, 'What do you want? Do your own work', and walked away," the two boys said. "They were carrying large bags – one bag was orange coloured."

"They told me that they had come by sea from Kerala," the older woman added.

The Leopold Cafe, popular with foreign backpackers, which was the first target of the terrorist strike, is also located close to the Colaba fishermen's village, as is Nariman House, which was taken over by the gunmen and the first three floors of which are occupied by Israeli tourists.

"There is no question that the armed men who landed in south Mumbai in the Gemini boats came from a larger boat anchored off shore," said retired Rear Admiral Raja Menon, a strategic affairs expert. "The larger boat left without waiting for the men to return. The armed men were on a one-way ticket."

Red Alert: Possible Geopolitical Consequences of the Mumbai Attacks

from Stratfor

Summary

If the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai were carried out by Islamist militants as it appears, the Indian government will have little choice, politically speaking, but to blame them on Pakistan. That will in turn spark a crisis between the two nuclear rivals that will draw the United States into the fray.

Analysis

At this point the situation on the ground in Mumbai remains unclear following the militant attacks of Nov. 26. But in order to understand the geopolitical significance of what is going on, it is necessary to begin looking beyond this event at what will follow. Though the situation is still in motion, the likely consequences of the attack are less murky.

We will begin by assuming that the attackers are Islamist militant groups operating in India, possibly with some level of outside support from Pakistan. We can also see quite clearly that this was a carefully planned, well-executed attack.

Given this, the Indian government has two choices. First, it can simply say that the perpetrators are a domestic group. In that case, it will be held accountable for a failure of enormous proportions in security and law enforcement. It will be charged with being unable to protect the public. On the other hand, it can link the attack to an outside power: Pakistan. In that case it can hold a nation-state responsible for the attack, and can use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism. Politically this is a much preferable outcome for the Indian government, and so it is the most likely course of action. This is not to say that there are no outside powers involved — simply that, regardless of the ground truth, the Indian government will claim there were.

That, in turn, will plunge India and Pakistan into the worst crisis they have had since 2002. If the Pakistanis are understood to be responsible for the attack, then the Indians must hold them responsible, and that means they will have to take action in retaliation — otherwise, the Indian government’s domestic credibility will plunge. The shape of the crisis, then, will consist of demands that the Pakistanis take immediate steps to suppress Islamist radicals across the board, but particularly in Kashmir. New Delhi will demand that this action be immediate and public. This demand will come parallel to U.S. demands for the same actions, and threats by incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to force greater cooperation from Pakistan.

If that happens, Pakistan will find itself in a nutcracker. On the one side, the Indians will be threatening action — deliberately vague but menacing — along with the Americans. This will be even more intense if it turns out, as currently seems likely, that Americans and Europeans were being held hostage (or worse) in the two hotels that were attacked. If the attacks are traced to Pakistan, American demands will escalate well in advance of inauguration day.

There is a precedent for this. In 2002 there was an attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi by Islamist militants linked to Pakistan. A near-nuclear confrontation took place between India and Pakistan, in which the United States brokered a stand-down in return for intensified Pakistani pressure on the Islamists. The crisis helped redefine the Pakistani position on Islamist radicals in Pakistan.

In the current iteration, the demands will be even more intense. The Indians and Americans will have a joint interest in forcing the Pakistani government to act decisively and immediately. The Pakistani government has warned that such pressure could destabilize Pakistan. The Indians will not be in a position to moderate their position, and the Americans will see the situation as an opportunity to extract major concessions. Thus the crisis will directly intersect U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan.

It is not clear the degree to which the Pakistani government can control the situation. But the Indians will have no choice but to be assertive, and the United States will move along the same line. Whether it is the current government in India that reacts, or one that succeeds doesn’t matter. Either way, India is under enormous pressure to respond. Therefore the events point to a serious crisis not simply between Pakistan and India, but within Pakistan as well, with the government caught between foreign powers and domestic realities. Given the circumstances, massive destabilization is possible — never a good thing with a nuclear power.

This is thinking far ahead of the curve, and is based on an assumption of the truth of something we don’t know for certain yet, which is that the attackers were Muslims and that the Pakistanis will not be able to demonstrate categorically that they weren’t involved. Since we suspect they were Muslims, and since we doubt the Pakistanis can be categorical and convincing enough to thwart Indian demands, we suspect that we will be deep into a crisis within the next few days, very shortly after the situation on the ground clarifies itself.

Socialist Republic

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:

To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.

Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.

We are all Keynesians now.

Thus, we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion "stimulus package" Obama wants by inauguration to "jolt this economy back into shape" and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.

These come on top of Bush $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 billion to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140-billion-and-counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.

Now much of this overlaps, and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion.

How would this stack up historically?

A deficit of $1.4 trillion would be 10 percent of gross domestic product, dwarfing the postwar record 6 percent run by Ronald Reagan in the Jimmy Carter recession.

Bewailing the "Reagan deficits" has been a staple of Democratic oratory. This will stop. But the politics of this is not the point, the policy is.

Consider what we are about to do. Bush in 2008 spent 21 percent of GDP. States, counties and cities spent another 12 percent. Thus, one third of GDP is spent by government at all levels. Obama and Co. propose to raise that by another 10 percent of GDP. We may soon be north of 40 percent of gross domestic product controlled and spent by government.

That is Eurosocialism.

And where, exactly, are we going to get the money?

Americans save nothing. We spend more than we earn. Thus the levels of consumer debt, credit card debt, auto debt and mortgage debt. U.S. foreign-exchange reserves amount to a piddling $73 billion.

The only nation with the kind of cash on hand we need now -- if we don't print the money and invite another gigantic bubble -- is China, with its $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.

Will Beijing lend back the dollars it has piled up by selling to us?

China certainly has an incentive to keep Americans spending. For our purchases of Chinese-made goods have often been responsible for 100 percent of China's growth. China does not want to kill the American goose that lays those golden eggs -- until the goose can't lay any more eggs. Then they won't need the goose.

But should China decide to lend us the money, what will Beijing demand in interest rates and assurances that we will not default. After all, the U.S. debt is 70 percent of GDP, our savings rate is near zero, and our merchandise trade deficit is still running at 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP.

Unlike the 1950s, we are today dependent on foreigners for two-thirds of our oil and for much of our manufactured goods -- toys, TVs, radios, cameras, cars, shoes, clothes, bikes, motorcycles -- and for the $700 billion to $800 billion we borrow each year to pay for these imports.

With U.S. homeowners, consumers, companies and banks now going bust, why must the nation borrow trillions more to bail them out? So we can maintain our status and standard of living as the last superpower.

Bush and Obama are competing to shovel out trillions of dollars, so we can return to the good times of yesterday.

But wasn't yesterday the root cause of today? Didn't saving nothing and spending more than we earn, purchasing what we cannot afford in cars, consumer goods and houses, buying far more from abroad than we sell abroad -- didn't that cause this crisis and crash?

A family man in America's condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his wastrel ways and start anew.

Is it different for a nation?

Yet we seem to believe we can borrow and spend our way out of a swamp of unpayable debt into which borrowing and spending have plunged us.

We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.

What would the Founding Fathers think of us now?

How our hospitals unleashed a MRSA epidemic

By Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong

Year after year, the number of victims climbed. But even as casualties mounted — as the germ grew stronger and spread inside hospitals — the toll remained hidden from the public, and hospitals ignored simple steps to control the threat.

Over the past decade, the number of Washington hospital patients infected with a frightening, antibiotic-resistant germ called MRSA has skyrocketed from 141 a year to 4,723.

These numbers don't appear in public documents. Washington regulators don't track the germ or its victims, and Washington hospitals do not have to reveal infection rates.

The Seattle Times analyzed millions of computerized hospital records, death certificates and other documents to track the swath of one of the nation's most widespread, and preventable, epidemics.

In its investigation — the first comprehensive accounting of MRSA cases in Washington hospitals — The Times gained access to state files that revealed 672 previously undisclosed deaths attributable to the infection.

MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is spread by touch or contact. It can slip into breaks in the skin as tiny as a mosquito bite.

Six out of seven people infected with MRSA contract it at a health-care facility.

Many people first learned about the germ last fall when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set off a media frenzy with its announcement that invasive MRSA infections claim at least 18,000 lives a year, more than AIDS.

But MRSA has been quietly killing for decades. And all along, there has been a simple diagnostic test that could have saved countless lives. This quick and painless test, which costs about $20, lets hospitals know who's infected or a carrier. Once identified, people with the germ can be isolated from other patients and treated.

Federal veterans hospitals screen all patients for MRSA, which has reduced their cases to near zero. Yet not a single community hospital in Washington screens every patient for the pathogen.

Many hospital officials say widespread screening is unnecessary and too burdensome. They say broad infection-control measures, such as washing hands and wearing protective garments, can thwart MRSA's spread.

But Washington hospitals violate these fundamental safety measures time and again, state and federal inspection reports reveal, from the Tacoma surgeon who refused to wear a mask during surgery to a Spokane blood technician who carelessly brushed her contaminated hands against supplies destined for other patients.

At Harborview Medical Center in the early 1980s, 17 people died during a MRSA outbreak fueled by the failure of the state's premier trauma center to isolate all infected patients immediately. But to this day, according to confidential records obtained by The Times, Harborview still rooms some MRSA patients with those who don't have the germ.

Meanwhile, MRSA is infecting and killing more people this year than ever before.

Crippled for life

In October 2005, Joyce Allen went in for open-heart surgery at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma. Doctors told her to expect a quick recovery. But during the operation, MRSA slipped into her chest.

Doctors had cut through her sternum, a flat bone that binds the rib cage and protects the heart. When they fused the sternum back together, the contagion was entombed inside.

The blood-rich bone marrow was a perfect hiding spot. Within a week, the germ pushed into her arteries and crept into vital organs.

Physicians resorted to their most powerful antibiotic — vancomycin — known as the "drug of last resort." For six weeks, twice a day, Allen received intravenous infusions. A suction system sealed her chest and drained away toxic fluid.

"The pain was excruciating. I wanted to die, it hurt so bad," Allen says.

Antibiotics failed to conquer the infection. By April 2006, as Allen hovered near death, surgeons made the decision they had dreaded: Cut out the sternum.

They sheared away 6 inches of bone with a diamond-coated blade. Then they severed her abdominal muscles near the groin, and stretched the flaps tight across her chest, to shield her heart.

Allen, 57, is crippled for life. She measures each day by the level of pain. On her worst days, she's unable to pick up her small grandson.

"This germ destroyed my life," she says.

Disabled, she gave up her customer-service job at a Tacoma cabinet company. She now lives in a trailer in Spanaway, surviving on $877 a month in government benefits.

Nobody knows how the germ got into St. Joseph's operating room.

Allen says her surgeon was devastated by the infection. Hospital officials suggested that she might have carried the pathogen into the facility, on her skin.

If that were so, screening likely would have detected the germ and allowed doctors to eradicate it beforehand.

Cardiac patients like Allen are among the most vulnerable to MRSA infections and often face prolonged and expensive recoveries, medical research shows.

But St. Joseph didn't test her for MRSA, according to medical records. When it comes to most cardiac patients, the hospital still doesn't. On Friday, it said that policy is under review.

Most aren't tested

Who gets tested for MRSA, and who does not, is a medical game of chance.

Washington hospitals make their own rules. There are no federal or state mandates for screening.

The result is a haphazard array of infection-control policies that often fail to protect the most vulnerable patients, according to a Times survey of the state's 25 largest hospitals.

MRSA infections often strike critically ill patients or those with weakened immune systems — patients typically treated in a hospital's intensive-care unit.

But Swedish Medical Center in Seattle doesn't routinely screen patients in its ICU. Instead, it screens patients having elective surgery.

Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane does test ICU patients — but not those seeking elective surgery.

The University of Washington Medical Center tests only premature babies.

Valley Medical Center in Renton doesn't routinely screen any patient group.

The bottom line is that most Washington patients don't get tested.

Whether to test, and whom to test, are at the core of a bitter national debate within the U.S. health care system.

Those who oppose testing all patients often argue that it undermines patient safety to dedicate limited resources to just one germ.

The reality, they say, is that hospitals often lack the staff, lab resources or space to ramp up existing testing programs or isolate large numbers of patients.

Swedish Medical Center would be hard-pressed to screen its 41,000-plus admissions each year, officials said. Harborview Medical Center, the state's most crowded hospital, doesn't have enough private rooms to isolate every patient, officials said.

Some hospitals fear lawsuits. If they screened every patient, results would show who already had the germ upon admission — and who picked it up while in the hospital. Patients could then blame the hospital for their infections.

Federally funded researchers called MRSA a possible epidemic in the early 1980s, following a series of outbreaks in large hospitals nationally. Yet most Washington hospitals began limited screening only within the past three years, The Times found.

"Many hospitals have ignored MRSA for decades," said Dr. William Jarvis, who retired in 2003 from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he was once acting director.

MRSA can cause painful and treatable skin lesions or slip into the blood. About 1 percent of infections prove fatal, while many others result in crippling injuries.

No one knows how many people carry the germ on their skin. Nationally, medical researchers have estimated that it's 1 or 2 percent of the general population. Washington hospitals that have initiated selective screening have discovered significantly higher levels — up to 11 percent.

Some surgeons around Seattle so dread the pathogen that they order tests when hospitals won't.

MRSA cases hidden

To control an infection, health officials need to know where it's been. They need counts, patterns, examples. But in Washington, MRSA's tracks have largely been obscured.

The state Department of Health asks physicians or medical examiners filling out death-certificate forms to give not only the primary cause of death, but the "chain of events" — the "diseases, injuries, or complications" — that contributed. Without such detail, these forms, when compiled in a database, may miss signs of emerging threats to public health.

But omissions undercut these certificates' value.

In 2005, Brenda L. Smith, 47, of Puyallup, died at Swedish Medical Center/Providence in Seattle. For "final anatomical diagnosis," her autopsy lists, at the top, MRSA pneumonia. But her death certificate — which relied on the autopsy report — says only pneumonia, with no mention of MRSA.

That same year, Willie Pompey, of Everett, died at age 58. His death certificate lists kidney failure, but does not account for an underlying reason. Pompey received a kidney transplant in 2002 at Virginia Mason Medical Center, but, because of a post-surgical MRSA infection, his body rejected the new organ. On his death certificate, MRSA is nowhere to be found.

How many examples are there like this? It's impossible to say. Finding them requires working backward — as The Times had to do — scouring lawsuits or other documents for indications of someone with MRSA, then comparing them against the public health records to see what, if anything, is missing.

A Bainbridge Island plaintiffs' lawyer, Christopher Otorowski, believes doctors may sometimes omit MRSA from death certificates because the infection is typically picked up in a hospital.

"Unless MRSA is the primary, explanatory cause of the death, I would think the physicians are going to be reluctant to put MRSA on the death certificate because it might implicate the hospital," he says.

For years, the state health department released a database of death certificates that is used by academics, journalists and others to report on public-health issues. But the state excluded a key component, a field that included doctors' notes that expanded on factors contributing to the person's death. The Times discovered the omission this year and insisted upon a complete database.

This new database links 672 deaths to MRSA between 2003 and 2006. The old database didn't attribute a single death to the germ. It couldn't have. The state relies on a standardized coding system, used internationally, that has more than 13,000 diagnosis codes — but not a single one for MRSA.

To gauge the prevalence of MRSA, The Times also analyzed a second database, which compiles diagnoses and billing records for patients discharged from Washington hospitals. The state uses this data, which has no individual names, to identify health trends and to analyze costs.

But as with the death certificates, this data set proved incomplete. The Times found dozens of examples where alternative records showed a patient had been treated for MRSA, while the billing database made no mention of it.

Because of these holes, the number of MRSA cases and deaths generated by the newspaper's analysis amounts to a minimum count, not a complete one.

Nationally, exact numbers are not available either, leaving public-health officials to estimate or extrapolate the scope of the epidemic.

Repeat offenders

To impede MRSA and other infectious germs, Washington hospitals typically rely on basic strategies — washing hands, isolating patients, sterilizing equipment.

But most of the state's 25 largest hospitals have been cited for unsanitary conditions or failure to adhere to fundamental safety standards, state and federal regulatory reports since 2005 show.

Last year, at Spokane's Holy Family Hospital, state Department of Health inspectors discovered the following:

A nurse entered Room 520 and dropped two packets of pills on the floor. Instead of throwing them out, she scooped up the packets and put them in a paper medication cup. She then pried the pills from the packets, dumped them into the contaminated cup and handed it to the patient.

An hour later, in a different room with an infectious patient, a staff member began to leave without washing hands. A second staffer tried to leave without discarding a contaminated gown. Both were headed for public areas of the hospital before state inspectors stopped them.

That afternoon, inspectors watched a phlebotomist draw blood from an infectious patient. Afterward, she brushed her gloved hands against items in a nearby supply cart — supplies destined for other patients.

In all, the four-day inspection cited seven staff members for violating basic infection-control standards, state records show.

Physicians can be the most lackadaisical about infection control.

In April 2006, doctors at the UW Medical Center carried personal items from home into sterile operating rooms and dropped them on the floor. These items included backpacks and satchels, made of porous materials friendly to germs. Hospital administrators told inspectors this was "common practice."

In November 2006, a physician at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma removed his surgical mask during an operation. He had complained it was uncomfortable. Hospital officials told inspectors the physician was a "repeat" violator and had been warned before to keep his mouth and nose covered.

In hospitals, the most common violation is the failure to wash hands upon entering or leaving a patient's room.

In the worst cases, as few as 40 percent of staff members comply with hand-washing standards. Doctors are the worst offenders, according to confidential hospital records reviewed by The Times.

Even the best hospitals typically boast no better than 90 percent compliance — which means one out of 10 practitioners may have contaminated hands.

Hospitals remedied all violations spotted during the inspections, records show.

But these violations were all the more brazen because hospital officials — benefiting from a new law — knew the exact day that state inspectors were coming.

No surprise inspections

In the past, the state health department conducted surprise inspections to ensure that hospitals adhered to health and safety codes, from patient care to building maintenance.

But in 2002, the Washington State Hospital Association issued a 28-page report: "How Regulations are Overwhelming Washington Hospitals." In it, hospital administrators claimed surprise inspections disrupted patient care.

In Olympia, lawmakers voted unanimously to eliminate surprise inspections starting in July 2004. Today, the Department of Health must provide four weeks' notice — even the exact hour of arrival.

Hospital officials also had complained that some state inspectors were abrupt and unfriendly.

Lawmakers approved a Band-Aid: Hospital officials now can anonymously evaluate state regulators on whether they were polite enough.

The Legislature receives an annual compilation of these critiques. One hospital official wrote that state inspectors could "do a better job of highlighting the positive," instead of just looking for problems.

Washington is the only state that legally empowers hospitals to rate the conduct of regulators, according to the Consumers Union, a nonprofit organization that monitors hospital-related legislation.

"What kind of message does that send?" said Lisa McGiffert, who directs the organization's Stop Hospital Infections project.

Federally commissioned hospital inspectors began surprise inspections in 2004 — the same year Washington eliminated them.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations sets health-care standards and certifies hospitals to receive federal funding, such as Medicare. For decades, the commission had provided at least a month's notice before inspections.

But dozens of hospitals exploited the advance notice to temporarily hire more staff, cart in rental medical equipment — which was returned when inspectors left — and conduct dramatic makeovers with fresh sheets and pillows, according to inspector general reports at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Responding to public criticism, the commission stopped giving notice.

In some Washington hospitals, makeovers now take place just before state inspections, three registered nurses told The Times. The hospitals beef up staffs during planned inspections and, in some cases, have hired extra cleaners to disinfect beds and equipment, the nurses said.

The state hospital association recognizes "more needs to be done" to combat MRSA and is pushing to standardize patient-isolation procedures and increase hand-hygiene compliance, association president Leo Greenawalt said.

"My doctor was stunned"

When Chuck Velte first saw the woman at a flower show — sitting in a wheelchair, her right leg missing at the knee — he tried not to stare.

It was the spring of 2006, and Velte had knee surgery pending. He couldn't help but wonder: What happened to the woman's leg?

So he asked.

"She said that her knee was infected after routine surgery. She called the germ MRSA. I'd never heard of it," says Velte, who's now 64.

"I looked at her missing leg and was scared: This could be me."

Velte asked medical practitioners at Valley Orthopedic Associates in Renton about the germ's threat. He says they told him: Don't worry. This infection targets people with weak immune systems, and you're healthy.

Velte was unconvinced. A former senior analyst at Boeing, he launched into research. He learned patients could infect themselves if dormant MRSA germs were on their skin. The bacterium could drop into a wound during surgery and touch off numerous complications, even death.

Velte didn't know it, but at least 66 patients who underwent joint surgery the year before suffered amputation of legs, arms or fingers after contracting MRSA, a Times analysis of Washington hospital-billing records shows. For the past decade, the number of such patients stands at 512.

But Velte's research also turned up a simple safeguard: a nasal swab test that can detect if someone's a carrier.

Velte demanded to be screened. Doctors questioned its need, but sent him to a laboratory at Valley Medical Center in Renton, where the surgery was scheduled.

"I get there, and my knees are killing me, and the lab guys said they don't do a MRSA test. They told me to go home," Velte says.

Velte hobbled to the hospital's executive offices and plopped in a chair. "I want to see the highest-ranking person here," he recalls saying. "I'm not leaving here until I get a MRSA test."

An apologetic administrator arranged for a test. Results arrived four days later.

"I tested positive for MRSA," Velte says. "My doctor was stunned. He said that if he had operated, it could have been catastrophic."

To get rid of the germ, Velte scrubbed himself with over-the-counter soap containing chlorhexidine, an antibacterial chemical. He also wiped his house down with bacteria-killing bleach.

He was screened for MRSA again, was cleared and underwent surgery. It was successful.

A year later, MRSA invaded Velte's life again.

His 92-year-old mother, Rita, lived at a nursing home in Eau Claire, Wis. Last fall, Velte learned she had a festering wound, resembling a giant boil, on her buttocks. He demanded a MRSA test.

"After what I'd been through, I knew it was a possibility," he says.

A lab report confirmed his suspicions. His mother was infected with invasive MRSA, the worst kind. Within two days, she was gripped by pneumonia, followed by sepsis — blood poisoning — which reached into every vital organ, medical records show.

She suffered a fatal heart attack on Nov. 1 — less than two weeks after she was diagnosed with the germ.

Yet, MRSA did not appear on her death certificate. The official causes of death were heart attack, pneumonia and sepsis.

Velte says he demanded a correction — the truth. After reviewing medical records, the certifying doctor added MRSA.

"I wonder," Velte says, "how many people die of MRSA and nobody ever knows."

Executive Order from Republican President #16

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.


In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

Windfall Tax on Retirement Income

(Compiler's note: If you do agree that it is the right thing to do just send me and additional $250 -- or more -- of your retirement money a month as I am poor and could use it to purchase more tacos, whiskey, drugs, lotto tickets, and new car. )


Adding a tax to your retirement is simply another way of saying to the American people, you're so darn stupid that we're going to keep doing this until we drain every cent from you. That's what the Speaker of the House is saying. Read below...............

Nancy Pelosi
wants a Windfall Tax on Retirement Income. In other words tax what you have made by investing toward your retirement. This woman is a nut case! You aren't going to believe this.

Madam speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to put a Windfall Tax on all stock market profits (including Retirement fund, 401K and Mutual Funds! Alas , it is true - all to help the 12 Million Illegal Immigrants and other unemployed Minorities!

This woman is frightening.
She quotes...' We need to work toward the goal of equalizing income, (didn't Marx say something like this), in our country and at the same time limiting the amount the rich can invest.' (I am not rich, are you?)

When asked how these new tax dollars would be spent, she replied:
'We need to raise the standard of living of our poor, unemployed and minorities. For example, we have an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in our country who need our help along with millions of unemployed minorities. Stock market windfall profit taxes could go a long way to guarantee these people the standard of living they would like to have as 'Americans'.

(Read that quote again and again and let it sink in. 'Lower your retirement, give it to others who have not worked as you have for it'.)

Share this with your friends. I just did!! This lady is out of her mind and she is the speaker of the house!


Fred on Everything

from Fred on Everything

Air Power

OK, today I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about air power. You will never need to read anything else. These revelations will provide blinding insight into our current wars. Here we go. Hold on.

The key: Air power is really good for things it is really good for, but works lousily for things it doesn’t work well for. (If “lousily” wasn’t a word, it is now.)

The foregoing is genius incarnate, and would revolutionize military thinking if the Air Force understood it, which it doesn’t. As is usual with our late-simian species, the fly-guys' motivations are instinctual and emotional, with reason a pretext slathered on afterwards and accountability a no-show.

Now, it is chic among Military Reformers and other fern-bar Clausewitzes to say wisely that air power is impotent and useless and accomplishes nothing. This is not true. In its own kind of war, it works splendidly. Often it is the only thing that could. Anyone who thinks that airplanes are pointless gewgaws should talk, say, to Japanese survivors of the Coral Sea and Midway, or of Yamato’s death run.

See, what airplanes are good at is blowing up expensive, visible, identifiable things, to include other airplanes. An aircraft carrier in the open Pacific fits the bill nicely. You can’t hide aircraft carriers very well. They don’t look like anything else. Even a Marine pilot would never mistake one for an olive orchard, or the cathedral at Chartres, or the Gobi Desert. They just don’t look the same. With enough bombing runs, an airplane can hit a carrier, which reduces the number of enemies instead of increasing it.

What air power isn’t good at is fighting guerrillas and insurgents, especially in populated areas. Why? Lots of reasons. First, pilots have no idea what they are bombing. They are flying at three hundred miles an hour over countries, often obscured by trees, in which everybody looks exactly like everybody else. So they guess, or bomb where the intelligence children tell them are terrorists. (That was almost a sentence.)

Now, the word “intelligence” sounds much better than “bureaucratized clandestine confusion,” which is more accurate. The intelligence agencies have enshrouded themselves in an aura of inexorable usually fatal infallibility. (“My name is Bond…Fred Bond.”) This is good PR. It is little else.

These are the same intelligence agencies, remember, that didn’t know where the Japanese fleet was in 1941 despite rumblings of war, agencies that were taken by surprise by the North Korean attack in 1950, and then by the Chinese entry into that war, that didn’t anticipate the behavior of the Vietnamese in that war, despite Bernard Fall’s books and the highly documented experience of the French. When the military made a well-executed raid into Hanoi to free American prisoners at Son Tay, the intel people hadn’t noticed that the prisoners had been moved. They were surprised when the Berlin Wall went up, and when it came down. They failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Their reason for existence was to know about the Soviet Union.) They missed on 9/11. Earlier, when the Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it was because the spooks didn’t know where the embassy was that day. (Granted, embassies are hard to locate. They roll about on wheels, creep down alleys at night, and wear dark-colored clothing, that sort of thing.) The intel weenies also didn’t foresee the behavior of either Iraqis or Afghans, despite great archives of historical evidence (unless you think the US knew about these upcoming messes and invaded anyway). And so on.

These are the geniuses picking targets. You see the problem.

Now, we read a lot of PR about “surgical strikes” and “precision weapons.” Think carefully about this. Intel says a terrorist leader of indescribable potency is in a house in a flimsily constructed suburb. The Air Force then makes a surgical strike with a five-hundred-pound bomb, taking out half a block. Pretty surgical, that. Perhaps it was the right block—it is possible—but still kills seventy-five people. The male relatives of the dead then join the insurgency. Ray-rah air power. The Air Force can’t afford to understand this, as then it would have to find a day job.

So why does the Air Force engage in counterproductive tactics with totally inappropriate airplanes? Because it’s the only kind of airplanes it has. Why? Because fast, screaming, roaring, flashy zoom-buggies with lots of screens and switches and rockets are fun. Never, ever underestimate fun as a driver of military policy. A hot fighter is the world’s pizzazziest, priciest, swooshiest video game, an air-borne dirt bike with all the fixin’s. Really. You may think I’m trying to be snotty and clever. Think again. (All right, I’m trying to be snotty and clever, but what I’m saying is still true.)

Do you think I spent thirty years covering the military because I wanted to butcher puzzled third-world illiterates tending goats? No. It was fun. Low-level pop-and-drops in an F-16 out of Shaw AFB, F-15 air-to-air against Guard A-7s over Holloman, bomb runs at four hundred feet over hazy Wyoming badlands like the doorway to hell in a B-52—god, what a freaking trip, far better than growing up. Snazzy mask and helmet, five-g turns with your face flowing back behind your ears, world going inverted, burners kicking in…Hoo-ah!

It’s not called a joy stick for nothing.

And jet jocks get paid to do this. Whether it serves a practical purpose doesn’t matter. Not with rides like those. If you think these things don’t matter, you are out of your mind.

However, the glory days are coming to a close. Fighter guys are now in the position of cavalry in 1914, addicted to the Noble Horse but, in an age of machine guns, wire entanglements, and massed artillery, as viable as slide rules in Santa Clara. The reason is the armed drone, the Predator being a good example. These things now have the range, optronics, data links, and so on to carry serious missiles to hit the wrong targets and piss off entire populations as well as real horses—fighter planes, I meant to say—can. They are lots cheaper than piloted whiz-gizmos, and a bloodless unaccountable CIA geek in Colorado or wherever can fly them. Same stupid effect, but none of the fun. Call it anti-chivalry. Death by nerds without souls.

In a century we’ve gone from Baron von Richthofen to a dinosaur eyeing a thin crust of ice forming on his swamp and thinking, “This can’t be good.”

See? Now you understand air power.

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More Fred http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

.... One story says that Americans owe some bizarre sum on the credit card and god knows how much on the McMansion and on the five-hundred horsepower riding mower with a mini-combine, backhoe attachment, and satellite GPS for mowing the half acre. I think I’m supposed to feel sorry for them. Actually I think they are a persuasive argument for eugenics.

I don’t get it. What is wrong with these idiots? Debt is easy to avoid. Herewith some blinding wisdom: If you can’t pay for it, don’t buy it. You saw it here first, a percipient contribution to economic theory. Works like a charm, too. Or how about this? Don’t buy more house than you can live in. Move over, Keynes, Ricardo, here I come.

Another story is about how banks are all unhappy because they’ve got bad loans. A probing question if I may (characteristic of this column): Who made the bad loans? Permit me another searing insight. If you lend money to people who can’t pay it back, they won’t. I know, I know, a difficult concept. Not something a Wall Street banker would know.

Thank god America isn’t a third-world country. In Mexico, the radio station of the local university, and other commie fronts, grouse about la impunidad, impunity, meaning that high-ranking criminals never get punished. You know, like the GQ-cover psychopaths who brought about the savings-and-loan scandal, or Milken, Boesky, and Levine, or Enron, and now the impoverishment of half the planet. But what can you expect? Mexico is a very corrupt country.

What I think is, we need a mass hanging. But no. The culprits will just reshuffle into the administration of Precedent O’Bama and remain attached, tick-like, to the withering federal dugs. The rats in the rafters may not be savory, but they look out for each other.

But on to matters of more import than whether we have anything to eat. I read that the world has gone euphoric over Precedent O’Bama. Simultaneously, O’Bama wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. I’ll give euphoria two more weeks. His chief virtues are that he isn’t Bush and isn’t McCain. When you have to choose between two candidates of whom each is worse than the other, you can bet life ain’t gonna be ham hocks and home fries.

Next, I see that the military has bombed another wedding in Afghanistan, killing forty-one. I guess it’s because civilians are easier to kill. They don’t hide very well. Usually they are unarmed.

Anyway, on BBC World News I saw some gringo colonel, maybe called Greg Julian, explaining that it was the Taliban’s fault when America bombs weddings. Most likely the plane had Taliban pilots. Recruiting is getting difficult, and I guess the Air Force has to take just about anybody.

But it wasn’t the fault of the military. In thirty years of covering the Pentagon, the military never did anything wrong. That’s a pretty good record. I know because they told me.

Anyway, Colonel Julian was impressive. He clearly had the makings of a future chief of staff. He was good-looking, delivered the word from corporate in grammatical English, and had the unnerving wholesomeness of a Christian Boy Scout. Definitely JCS material, depending only on his PowerPoint technique . He explained that the military goes to great lengths to avoid bombing weddings, that wedding-avoidance is practically an obsession, and they would try to keep from doing it too much in the future. I reckon it must have made any survivors feel good.

Funny, I too try to avoid bombing weddings, but I’m a lot more successful at it, despite a much smaller budget.

Now, I don’t want to sound cynical or anything. Still, I’d like to know how the good colonel would look at things if his daughter, if he has one, were having her wedding and kerblooey! Daughter and forty members of the family and close friends suddenly become clotting goo over a fifty-yard radius and the bombers say, “We’re sorry, kind of, but that wedding looked just like a troop concentration.” Troop concentrations always feature a woman in a white dress holding flowers. It’s what they teach at West Point.

Stray memory: I read once that bin Laden said he wanted to suck the US into long drawn-out losing wars to bankrupt the country and end its influence over the Moslem world. I don’t know why I thought of that. I need to focus better. ....

A Question of Manhood – The Continued Relevancy of William Ayers

by Nicholas Guariglia

t has been three weeks since the seemingly inevitable occurred. Sen. Barack Obama is now President-elect Obama. My guy lost. Rather than offer an immediate, blame-all, knee-jerk post-election analysis of "What went wrong," I felt obliged to think it over for a bit — and in the end decided how McCain lost, or how Obama won, was not truly the topic of the hour.
In the aftermath of the election, even Mr. Obama's most ardent critics cannot help but succumb to the natural inclination to "rally around" the incoming administration. While we wish Obama all the luck in the world, we still cringe with hesitation at the unexamined character of the man the country just elected. I raise these doubts, yet again, because one William Ayers has now, unsurprisingly, only after Obama's victory, decided to crawl out of his hole, re-release his book, and do the talk show circuit. Alas, one more time, the implications of what the Ayers-Obama link actually means must be reexamined.
It was not until the final presidential debate that Sen. McCain raised William Ayers' name to Obama himself. Good, I thought, here's another chance for the would-be president to prove to me that his long friendship and association with an unrepentant Pentagon-bomber isn't as big of a deal as I seem to think it is.
Sadly, Mr. Obama took the opportunity to chastise John McCain for talking about Ayers, using an old line every third-grader in the country is familiar with: "I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Sen. McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me." Basically, Barack was rubber, and McCain was glue.
Let's be clear: the William Ayers connection says more about Barack Obama than it says about anyone else on the planet. That's true for one reason only: Obama wanted to become our president and now will become our president. The only thing William Ayers suggests about McCain's campaign is how inept it was in not raising this association — and a dozen others like it — earlier in the race.
President-elect Obama first said Ayers was just a fellow in the neighborhood, then said Ayers did bad things when he was but a child, and then, upon further revelation, Obama finally admitted he served on multiple boards with him. But its okay, Obama swore, because Ayers is now an "education professor" and the two were working on "education."
Overlook for a moment how bizarre and radical the Ayers-Obama education "reform" actually was — so radical Hugo Chávez praised it personally to Ayers during a meeting in Venezuela — and instead focus on Mr. Ayers himself.
Ask yourself: if a man who bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, police stations, declared war against the United States, told children to kill their parents, wanted to bring upon a communist revolution across the country, only to get off on a technicality — and today says he wishes he bombed more — was in your company, would you look him in the eye? Would you shake his hand? Would you launch your career from his living room? Would you serve on multimillion dollar boards with him? Would you keep in frequent and friendly contact with him via phone and e-mail until 2005 — at the least — four years after 9/11, when Ayers asserted he was unrepentant for bombing whom he bombed?
Do you know anyone who would have behaved like that? Do you know anybody like our next president?
On a personal level, if a punk like Ayers requested my services, or wanted to further advance my career, I'd do some serious soul-searching. I don't care if he wanted to begin a joint-venture to help old ladies cross the street. I would very impolitely point my finger in his face, tell him what I thought about him, and walk out of the room — all out of solidarity with the fellow countrymen he bombed and doesn't feel bad about bombing.
That is how most Americans would react. That is how most men — real men, self-confidant and aware of their surroundings — would react.
Which is what manhood boils down to. That's what character is all about. I don't merely dislike Barack Obama's unbelievably Leftist policies. I disrespect his behavior as a man. I consider it unbecoming of a man. In other words, it is unmanly.
We hear much talk about femininity and what contemporary feminism means for this generation of women. I see no such reason why we cannot discuss its logical gender-converse. Barack Obama's personal cowardice and impotence while in the company of bad people undermines what modern masculinity ought to be about. His flippant attitude about these characters, and advantageous use of them to further his ambitions and political career, makes him less of a man than most men I know.
I am in no way suggesting women are to be held to lower expectations. Certain traits are not mutually exclusive to gender. But just as independence is considered an integral part of feminism — but not exclusive to femininity — so too forthrightness, internal self-assuredness, personal courage, and individual autonomy are fundamental principles of masculinity.
This has nothing to with Obama's view on taxes and everything to do with his feeble disposition and fetal-position nature. It has everything to do with his moral fiber, his ethical clarity, and his intellectual strength. It has everything to do with his character and with his manhood.
Manhood is about solidarity, to stick up for your friends, just as patriotism is about solidarity and standing by your countrymen. I know people who get more defensive when you question their favorite sports team than Obama does when someone who has violently attacked Americans requests his hand in friendship.
Manhood is about saying what you believe, regardless of whose listening. It's about telling someone what you think of them, and telling it to them straight. When has President Hope and Dreams ever done this? When did Obama ever stand up to Ayers? To the crook Tony Rezko? To the racist Jeremiah Wright? To the communist Frank Marshall Davis? Has he ever even stood up to someone in his own party?
Allow me to reemphasize: this inquiry has nothing to do with President-elect Obama's view on, say, gun control or bailing out the auto industry. Vice President-elect Joe Biden is nearly as liberal as Obama, but I do not believe Biden would tolerate Soviet proxy Frank Marshall Davis lecturing him about "the American way and all that sh*t." I do not believe Biden would associate with someone who dedicated their book to Bobby Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan — let alone someone who set off explosives at the U.S. Defense Department.
Unlike any other candidate in our history, Mr. Obama became who he is due to a posse of racist preachers, bigot friends, unrepentant ex-domestic terrorists, Marxist father figures, and thug Chicago financial-backers — in essence, bad Americans, and by extension, bad men.
What does this mean? What does this say about Obama as a man?
John McCain struck me, and still strikes me, as the type of friend who would give the shirt off his back for his buddy — because he has already shown he's the type of American who, if pressed, would give the limb off his torso for his countrymen. If he were a young man again, he'd likely be in his familiar corridors and institutions: the Naval Academy, the U.S. military, the war theater of the hour. Like his sons today, he'd be "in the arena."
Barack Obama struck me, and still strikes me, as the type of friend who wouldn't verbally defend your integrity if others were talking poorly about you behind your back — simply because he's shown he is not the type of American who defends his countrymen when others talk about how many Americans they've bombed and declared war against. He strikes me not only as a poor friend — or family member, if you were to ask his mud-hut brother in Nairobi — but a poor leader, a weak individual, and a man of sub-par fortitude.
Mr. Obama recently said he regretted not joining the military, stating he opted not to enlist because we were not at war when he "pondered" the idea. I do not take him at his word. I believe if he could relive his entire life, like McCain, he'd do it the same way all over again; entrenching himself in his familiar corridors, the ultra-Leftist precincts that made him who he is.
How is a McCain supporter, who recognized this disparity of character and maturity months ago, supposed to reconcile this disparity now — in the aftermath of Obama's triumph?
President-elect Obama was elected by a plurality of American voters. He will become the next President of the United States. And yet this wouldn't have been possible had he not first associated with some of the most vehemently racist and radically anti-American elements in American society. Therein rests the sole possible explanation for his unprecedented Leftism: his unexamined past and questionable biography shaped him as a young man.
For the first time in our history, we elected a man we do not really know. At the very least, Obama's supporters should recognize and appreciate the historical nature of this fact alone. Most Americans would have considered Rev. Wright's church too radical for their blood, and left within the first 15 minutes of a racist tirade. Yet Obama calls this church "not particularly controversial" and stayed there for two decades. Most men would have to sit on their hands to avoid strangling a cocky ex-terrorist in their presence, still taunting and bragging about his detonations. Yet Obama calls Mr. Ayers his friend and "mainstream."
This isn't to say Obama agrees with these views. It is to say, however, that he does not consider them beyond the pale. Manhood is about knowing what is and isn't beyond the pale. Manhood is about drawing a line in the sand, and then saying "Don't cross that line" — and meaning it. Where is Barack's line in the sand? I'm not sure where it is, and I'm quite certain most of the country isn't sure either. I respectfully challenge any and all who voted for Mr. Obama to take me up on this proposition.
I believe Barack Obama intends to be decent, and is personally benevolent. He seems like a nice guy, a good father. He himself would never bomb anything, of course, and he himself opposes when domestic terrorists destroy American citizens. But judging from his actions and statements, he does not consider that an unforgivable transgression to the extent that people in my neighborhood would consider it.
In short, our next president is very, very different from everyone I know. Everyone. I do not know a single man that would have behaved like Barack Obama had they been in his shoes. Maybe it's just a Jersey thing, but I simply do not know people like this. The guy's a pushover.
For a male citizen to disrespect his president's manhood is the national equivalent of a son contemptuous of his father's character. I believe Obama loves America — I want to believe that, at least — but all of the empirical evidence suggests he loves this country in a way very unlike the way I love this country. Whether that love is on equal ground or not is a subjective discussion and open to interpretation.
But what is it, other than instinct, that tells me I would unhesitatingly do things for my country and countrymen that Barack Obama would not? Why do I trust the strangers in the grocery store to come to my aid, and to do the right thing, more than I do this unknown product of Chicago?
Facing the reality of an Obama presidency, this is a considerable question that I won't be able to get out of my mind until he proves otherwise.

We Have the Pirates – Where is Terry?

by Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman

How many of you remember a comic strip called “Terry and the Pirates?” It was a joy of my childhood. But pirates are really no joking matter today because they are back, bold, and very dangerous.
In 1991, Thai pirates infested the waters between Vietnam and Indonesia, holding hostage nearly 1,000 Thai fishermen and 68 trawlers, collecting ransoms of up to $40,000 for each ship. They raped refugees fleeing Cambodia and Vietnam in small boats and robbed them of the little they had with them. China finally decided to put an end to this and went after the pirates with ferocity. That did the trick.
Now the pirate world is centered in Somalia, a sad failed state that nobody seems to be able to fix. What were once fishermen have taken to piracy on a much greater scale than the Thai pirates. Just this week, they boarded a Saudi oil tanker and are holding its small crew and very valuable cargo for ransom. Although American, Indian, and Russian ships are patrolling the waters there now, they are reluctant to deal with a hostage situation. The pirates are growing bolder, despite one strange setback that I mentioned in a former column: the pirates boarding an Iranian ship and opening the cargo hold – with the result that a number of them sickened and died. Very strange indeed.
The problem with this sort of story is getting verification. I was first tipped off by a blog site in Israel and then by a London Times story; but there were no comments by American or Israeli sources – both with reason for concern. The U.S. is watching Iranian ships for nuclear cargo – and the particular ship in the Times story (whose picture is shown) has a record of fraudulent documents of what they carry. The Israelis have cause for concern because the ship appeared to be heading through the Suez Canal toward them – with what seems to be a radioactive cargo. Verification is tricky, but is growing.
Fox News reported that the cargo ship MV Iran Deyanat, was taken by Somali pirates last month. “As Somali pirates brazenly maintain their standoff with American warships off the coast of Africa, the cargo aboard one Iranian ship they commandeered is raising concerns that it may contain materials that can be used for chemical or biological weapons.”
“The pirates were sickened because of their contact with the seized cargo, according to Hassan Osman, the Somali minister of Minerals and Oil, who met with the pirates to facilitate negotiations.” (A Somali Minister of Minerals and Oil, and this in a country without a government?)
"That ship is unusual," Osman told the Long War Journal, an online news source that covers the War on Terror. "It is not carrying a normal shipment." The pirates reportedly were in talks to sell the ship back to Iran, but the deal fell through when the pirates were poisoned by the cargo, according to Andrew Mwangura, director of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers' Assistance Program. "Yes, some of them have died," he told the Long War Journal. "Our sources say [the ship] contains chemicals, dangerous chemicals."
Iran has called the allegations a "sheer lie," and said that the ship "had no dangerous consignment on board," according to Iranian news source Press TV. Iran says the merchant vessel was shipping iron ore from a port in China to Amsterdam. Considering Iran’s record of truth telling in regard to their nuclear program, it is difficult to believe that iron ore could sicken and kill pirates.
There are two other interesting sources to read about these pirates: The Vancouver Sun, October 27, 2008, confirmed this same story, writing that 16 of the pirates died after opening the hold. The Iranian ship owners (Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps) have offered $200,000 to get the ship back – but the U.S. and Israel are offering $7 million just to examine the ship and find out what China is shipping to Iran. Which deal do you suppose the pirates would take?
On November 18th, Stratfor (Strategic Forecasts), a very reliable analyst of current issues, discussed the ramifications of the Somali pirates plying oil tanker lanes with impunity. If the U.S. fleet cannot put a stop to them, this will be a shameful demonstration of bold crooks outsmarting the world – and worse.

Playing Games at Gitmo

by Michelle Malkin

The human rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility's "cultural adviser," their brains have not been "stimulated" enough. So this Thanksgiving, America is drawing up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the "notoriously Spartan" detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English language lessons and "Game Boy-like" electronic devices.
Next up: Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized.
On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren't the only ones playing games at Gitmo. Some top legal advisers and supporters of Barack Obama, whose name detainees chanted on election night, are now rethinking the president-elect's absolutist campaign position on shutting the center down and flooding our mainland courts with every last enemy combatant designee. Yes, reality bites. And Democrats must now grapple with the very real possibility that an Obama administration could potentially release a Gitmo denizen who would turn around and commit mass terrorist acts on American soil or abroad.
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office -- and they haven't even taken office yet.
While Obama paid lip service to the "Close the Gitmo gulag!" agenda on "60 Minutes" over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information -- information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption.
Listen to relentless Bush critic David Cole, who told The New York Times last week: "You can't be a purist and say there's never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone." Added Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution: "I'm afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things."
Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to The Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, "Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight."
Next thing you know, they'll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees -- funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.
Next thing you know, they'll rediscover the facts that detainees have systematically lied and exaggerated stories about mistreatment at Gitmo, and that interrogators and military personnel have bent over backward to accommodate their personal and religious needs and wants.
Next thing you know, they'll start reminding us that dozens of former Gitmo detainees have been released and recaptured on the battlefield while committing acts of terrorism.
Funny, when President Bush and his homeland security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media and the left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended the administration's counterterrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a "tyrant." And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was labeled a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.
Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of "regaining America's moral stature in the world," as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al-Qaida killers don't strike on American ground again.
Viva la Hope and Change!

HLF Terrorism Case Guilty Verdict Signals a Sea Change

by M. Zuhdi Jasser

With the resounding guilty-on-all-counts verdict against the Holy Land Foundation, the American public has spoken: we will hold everyone accountable for their support of terrorism, whether direct or indirect. Bravo!

U.S. Embassy In Kabul Attacked By Suicide Car Bomber

Intelligence chiefs were expecting Al-Qaeda spectacular

Bombay: a history of violence

Western intelligence services have been expecting an al-Qaeda spectacular terrorist attack in this crucial period between the end of President George Bush’s administration and the succession of Barack Obama.

Signals intelligence “chatter” in recent weeks indicated that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation might be plotting an attack “to grab the headlines” before Mr Obama takes over in the White House on January 20.

British security and intelligence sources said there had been increasing concern, particularly in the United States, that a “terrorist spectacular” was on the cards.

The multiple attacks on Westerners in Bombay last night showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy — picking on vulnerable Western “soft targets” but not in a country where there would be maximum security. The attacks on Western targets in Bali in 2002 when al-Qaeda-linked terrorists planted bombs in tourist-favoured restaurants and clubs was another example where the group switched its resources to achieve maximum impact.

Counter-terrorist experts last night said that India would have been selected for the latest spectacular “probably because that’s where al-Qaeda has sufficient resources to carry out an attack on this scale. They don’t choose for the sake of it, they look to see where they have the greatest capability and then order an attack,” a counter-terror expert told The Times.

The key to this latest attack was the search by the armed terrorists for American and British passport holders. With a reported 40 Britons held hostage, the terrorists have the upper hand. The counter-terrorist sources said targeting Bombay’s most luxurious hotels and a crowded railway station had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation.

Bombay has been targeted before when 180 people died during a bomb attack on the railway station in 2006, but that incident was put down to militants, not al-Qaeda, and the Indian government suspected that the attackers had links to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.

This attack, however, involving the taking of Western hostages made it more likely that the operation’s masterminds were from the core leadership of al-Qaeda, which is based in the lawless tribal regions close to the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

The Americans have been expecting an atrocity partly because of the recent CIA success in eliminating figures in al-Qaeda, using Predator unmanned drones, firing Hellfire missiles at hideouts in the tribal regions of Pakistan. About a dozen al-Qaeda figures have been killed this year.

Although an unknown group claimed responsibility last night, the taking of Western hostages and the deliberate seeking out of American and British citizens indicated a “typical al-Qaeda-style activity”, according to security sources.

Other sources said India was the home of a complicated network of terrorists and it might be too early to jump to the conclusion that it was an al-Qaeda operation. “It seems to be a highly opportunistic attack,” one source said.

However, this is traditionally the way al-Qaeda works. The leadership decides an attack should take place and leaves its franchise operators to decide how best to carry it out. Many of the gunmen appeared to be young but they also seemed confident, suggesting that they were well trained.

As the unprecedented scale of the attacks became clear last night, it looked to be the most co-ordinated terrorist operation since the targeting of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001.

Dozens of gunmen were involved in up to 19 different attacks, although the main focus seemed to be the taking of foreign hostages and detaining them in two of Bombay’s most prestigious hotels.

Judging by the apparent cockiness of at least one of the gunmen caught looking into television cameras, these terrorists were clearly prepared to die for their cause.

Al-Qaeda as an organisation has proved in the past that it has the capability to coordinate multiple attacks. Last night an organisation calling itself Deecan Mujahideen claimed responsibility but, as in the past when unknown groups came forward to admit involvement, the name was neither recognizable nor relevant.The sheer audacity of the terrorists are all familiar elements of al-Qaeda’.

Worst attacks

1979 Militant Islamic students in Iran stormed the US embassy in Tehran, taking 90 hostages. They demanded the extradition of the Shah of Iran from the US, to stand trial in Iran. The hostages were freed in 1981, after 444 days

1993 A car bomb exploded under the World Trade Centre, killing six and injuring more than 1,000. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, had been trained in Afghanistan

1995 Sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo subway kills 12 and injures about 6,000. Shoko Asahara, founder of Aum cult responsible, sentenced to death in 2004

2001 Two aeroplanes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, a third crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Excluding the 19 hijackers, 2,974 people died in the attacks by al-Qaeda

2002 A terrorist attack on the island of Bali killed 202 people. Two bombs ripped through a nightclub area in Kuta district

2004 Ten bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 and leaving 1,800 injured. A group affiliated with al-Qaeda claimed responsibility

2005 Explosions on London’s transport system killed 52 and injured 700