"A nation's best defense is an educated citizenry" - Thomas Jefferson ------- Our enemy is coming again and we must be prepared ... our worst must be better than their best! – The Center for Strategic Information Application (CSIA) provides focused news - occasional analysis and interpretation ---- Recommended searches "absolutely" -"must read" - "troubling" - "9/11" - "jihad" - "sharia" - "Federal Reserve" - "Sibel".
The FBI unit tasked with tracking threats from weapons of mass destruction suffers from several operational problems, the Justice Department's top watchdog said in a report Monday, one week after federal authorities charged three people with WMD-related offenses.
Inspector General Glenn Fine, in an audit, reported that many inside the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Coordinator Program were not able to identify "the top specific WMD threats and vulnerabilities that faced their particular field division."
The audit said the FBI also had not established adequate training programs to educate its analysts on the subject or established "specific qualifications" that the WMD coordinators should have. ....
WASHINGTON — U.S. servicemembers who suffer up to three mild traumatic brain injuries or concussions during a deployment — typically from roadside bombs — could be pulled out of combat for the duration of their tour, according to a policy being pushed by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mullen has spoken out more in the last year about the risks of mild TBI caused by roadside bombs, often invoking a story of a young soldier who endured 30 blasts and is now suffering significant brain damage. ....
It is unprecedented in American counterterrorism annals: in one day, the nation was dealing with three separate jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside the homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of terror attempts breached the crossing line of U.S. national security.
This past week, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American jihadists: Michael C. Finton, a 29-year-old man who wished to follow the steps of American-born Taliban John Walker Lindh, was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb inside a van outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois. Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian national, was arrested after placing what he believed was a bomb at a downtown Dallas skyscraper. But perhaps the most troubling case is of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi, who set up shop in suburban Denver, scouting the Web and visiting beauty supply stores in a hunt for chemicals needed to build bombs for al Qaeda. Sources called the alleged plot one of the most significant terror threats to the U.S. since 9/11. Add to the list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Daniel Patrick “Saifullah” Boyd, which was planning on attacking civilian and military targets across the country.
The immediate question being raised by an increasingly worried public regarding all of these terror cases is: are they all connected? While law enforcement and certainly judicial authorities proceed in a bottom up reasoning – that is, to build the case for a global connection between all what is happening with the help of legal evidence – analysts in the field of counterterrorism and conflict are already realizing the meaning of what is happening inside America.
In my book Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006), I clearly projected that jihadists, individuals and cells will be mushrooming and expanding inside the United States within few years from that writing and that they would do precisely what they are trying to do now. I also projected how large a group they will become with time. It was a simple deduction: if the government doesn’t counter this ideological growth, jihadists will keep coming. And in fact, they are coming, spreading crossing the barriers of ethnicities, races, nationalities and geographical frontiers. The jihadists are committed to harming the U.S., and are now based inside our borders by the hundreds. When I suggested this fact on CNN in 2006, and reiterated it on Oprah Winfrey’s show so that the public would realize what is to come, I raised a few eyebrows. Now, unfortunately, we are discovering the cells of jihadism in our cities and little towns and sadly, the expectation is that we will see more. We may not be able to stop them all from reaching their goals.
The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt, the Illinois case, and the previous cases of the shooting of a soldier in Arkansas, the New York cells, Georgia’s young jihadists (all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network). If anything gives us the genome of what is morphing inside the country – a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force – the jihadi ideology. We must find out who is propagating the doctrines of jihadism: who is funding it; who is protecting the indoctrination operation which leads naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign linked jihad, lone wolves or packs of jihadist terrorists. That is the real question: where is the factory?
What should the U.S. government do?It must first face the threat and lead the nation against it. This is not a matter of just local police or law enforcement efforts. President Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties must give this spreading plague a top priority. For if one of these groups is successful, our national economy will crumble again, or at least will be wounded even more severely – not to mention the human consequences of terror. Americans are watching these terror plots being revealed with great concern. They expect their elected officials to address these fears before the worst happens.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr Walid Phares is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad. He is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He also serves as a Co-Secretary General of the Trans Atlantic Legislative Group on Counterterrorism.
How many chances has Iran had? How many deadlines has it ignored in the past? There's nothing to suggest this time will be different, and deadlines seem to be in plentiful supply -- certainly more so than backbones. "Iran given one last chance to talk on nuclear programme," by Richard Spencer and Alex Spillius for the Telegraph, September 29:
Afghanistan's Taliban-led insurgency is so heavily funded by foreign donations that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to obstruct the group's money supply, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
The Obama administration said the group's single largest source of funding comes from foreign donations -- not drugs like opium -- according to the newspaper.
The CIA reportedly estimates that the Taliban received $106 billion in foreign money last year alone -- making it difficult for intelligence officials to track the terrorist group's money flow.
United Nations' Taliban and Al Qaeda Monitoring Team Coordinator Richard Barrett, told the Washington Post that Taliban supporters have grown much more skillful at masking their donations. ....
(Analyst's note: Could this be one of the ways the FBI caught the latest jihadis that were in the news last week? Hmmmm)
from National Terror Alert
Last week I received an email from someone asking why the FBI and DHS aren’t using data-mining more extensively to look for activities that might preclude an act of terrorism. They apparently are, and while I understand the privacy concerns, given last weeks events it’s probably a good thing. It sounds cliche, but if you’re not doing anything wrong, you probably don’t have much to worry about.
From Wired.com
A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.
Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.
But the proposal has long been criticized by privacy groups as ineffective and invasive. Critics say the new documents show that the government is proceeding with the plan in private, and without sufficient oversight.
Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” is garnering a lot of media attention and plenty of media praise. In his interviews he reveals his strategy to destroy capitalism and insert socialism. He uses techniques right out of the pages of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. He takes the resentment of the corruption and failures related to Wall Street this past year as a platform to push for radical change.
As Alinsky wrote, the organizer
“must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.”
Moore takes this public anger at Wall Street corruption and jumps the shark to say that the culprit of this evil greed is capitalism itself. For Moore capitalism = greed. Here is one exchange he had on primetime television with Jay Leno:
LENO: Well, it’s interesting in the film. You say capitalism is evil. I think greed is evil, but I think capitalism is OK as long as you, I mean, moderation in all things. I mean, uh, explain.
MOORE: Yeah, well, capitalism, capitalism is actually legalized greed.
Michael Moore, like Alinsky taught, believes that the end goal is “the radicalization of the middle class”. To get to that goal the organizer must learn “to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.” Use whatever language works and make sure it centers around morality. Moore has chosen two ways of doing that. Instead of calling for socialism by name, he calls for democracy. And to convince people of the morality of it, Moore manipulates the teachings of Jesus in a way that makes Jesus sound like a socialist (without using that word of course). So Moore’s plan of attack is to turn socialism into simply democracy and the values of Jesus.
Instead of Christianity being the enemy of the left — Alinsky understood that would turn people off as we see with Bill Maher’s work — Moore decides to pervert Christianity as a tool for socialistic propaganda. It’s been tried many times before, but not so often with film.
Here is Moore on Larry King on Wednesday giving his not-so new economic theology:
In this clip notice how he calls capitalism a system that is both “anti-democracy” and also something Jesus would not approve of. Moore says we aren’t a democracy, because we can vote. We are only a democracy and a Judeo-Christian nation if “we come up with a new economic order that is fair”. Of course, all this is a coded and homogenized way of slipping in socialism.
Here is Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
Notice on left-wing Olbermann he drops almost all pretense that he cares so much about democracy or Christianity (because the regular middle-class that he wishes to radicalize doesn’t watch Olbermann). It’s all anti-Reagan, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-conservative courts. He even says at the end of the interview that the goal is to see the “people revolting”!
Back on Leno, Moore was talking about democracy and morality:
MOORE: No, not right. It’s wrong. Some things are just wrong. And this capitalist economic system that we have, it might have been right at one point, it’s not right now. And I don’t think we’re ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So we need to come up with something new to replace it. And I’m not talking about… This isn’t a debate between capitalism versus socialism.
LENO: Right.
MOORE: I’m actually suggesting go back to our roots of this country, democracy. What if we had an economy that you and I had a say in? Right now, we all don’t have much of a say in this economy. What if we applied our democratic principles and said, ‘We, the people, have a right to determine how this economy is run.’
Leftist magazine The Nation (which has often been a proponent of communism) treats the interview on Leno as one of the greatest moments in television history. They claim if you missed that interview you “missed one of those rare moments when the vast wasteland gives way to an oasis of realism.”
Friday on The View, while talking to middle America once again, Michael Moore actually paraphrased the teachings of Jesus multiple times to help make his case for socialism by another name. He has relabeled an old (and false) economic system to look new. How did he come up with it? Does he have a degree in either economics or seminary? No, Moore was a college drop out with no experience with economics, and his only seminary experience was to join a Catholic Seminary after 8th grade. “He admired the Berrigan brothers [radical anti-Vietnam War Catholic priests Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan] and thought that the priesthood was the way to effect social change,” wroteThe New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar in February 2004. “This resolve lasted only through his first year, though, after the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series for the first time in Moore’s life and the seminary wouldn’t allow him to watch the games.”
Moore offers old wine in new wineskins. There is nothing new in his attack on capitalism and perversion of New Testament scripture to support socialism. It’s been done for decades. Leftists, communists, socialists, and radicals have attempted to use Jesus as a god of their own socialist image. The only thing new is that Moore is using film and popular television interview shows to push his drivel, and he is attaching it to a concept of “democracy” that sounds like good old fashioned socialism.
I would suggest anyone that starts to fall for Moore’s tactics read Poverty and Wealth: Why Socialism Doesn’t Work. In that book, philosophy and theology professor Ronald Nash breaks down all the false arguments of socialism being the economic system of Jesus and the New Testament. He writes,
“Unfortunately, many Christians act as though the only thing that counts is intention. But when good intentions are not wedded to sound theory, especially sound economic theory, good intentions can result in actions that produce consequences directly opposite to those we planned. This is precisely what has happened in the case of the social policies to help the poor adopted in the United States since 1965.”
Nash reveals in his books that people attempting to use Christ for leftist economics have no understanding of basic economics and “use the Bible as a weapon against capitalism.” Some use it to push for a very liberal Democrat form of government, while others “use the Bible to show that God is a Marxist.” And the result has been that such policies meant to help the poor have actually kept them in poverty. Moore, for example, in his interviews uses the idea that our economy is a fixed pie. And the rich take 9 slices and only leave us one. He thinks that isn’t fair. He has a false understanding of free enterprise. In capitalism, that pie exists because of bold free marketeers. And the pie size is not fixed. In fact, the better the entrepreneurs do in creating wealth, the bigger the pie gets for everyone. Moore would rather the government steal the whole pie and then hand it out evenly until there is no more pie left.
Jesus did condemn making wealth your God. And many of the problems we saw in the economy this past year stem from that very problem. However, it is error to then make a jump that Jesus condemned all wealth. He never did. Jesus had great friends and followers who were wealthy (Luke 14:1). He stayed and ate with wealthy people (Luke 11:37). He even was buried in the tomb of a rich man.
Jesus also used parables that told his feelings on wealth. Many of them centered on the call for Christians to use their privately owned wealth as stewards for good things (Luke 12 and 16). He at no times suggests that we give our private wealth to the government, so that they can redistribute it. To make that conclusion from the New Testament is a misrepresentation at best, and in the case of Moore, plain old manipulation.
Moore, we know your strategy. We are calling you out. Instead of making movies trying to convince us all to be radicals like you, why don’t you just share that $50 million plus personal empire you have with the poor of our society. Set an example instead of shoving propaganda.
They say you know you’re over the target when you’re drawing flak.
Last week, the George Soros-funded, self-styled media watchdog group Media Matters for America sent out an urgent fund raising email, which read in part:
The conservative media has a hit list, and, as you know, ACORN is its most recent target. Right-wing talkers like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity aren’t going to give up on their own. That’s why we have to fight them at every turn, exposing the profound hypocrisy and total lack of journalistic standards that define their so-called reporting. We need your support to keep up the fight (…)
In a new study released yesterday, Media Matters for America methodically exposes how both Beck and Hannity have spent years obsessively attacking ACORN under the guise of exposing corruption at an organization that receives government funding. ....
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