I don’t normally blog on Easter, but I read this, and had to sound off
This time, when Captain Phillips jumped overboad, the Navy was ready.  Three pirates are now chum, and Captain Phillips is free.

An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, the ship’s owner said and a U.S. official said.A senior U.S. intelligence official said a pirate who had been involved in negotiations to free Capt. Richard Phillips but who was not on the lifeboat was in custody.

His crew was duly happy:

When Phillips’ crew heard the news aboard their ship in the port of Mombasa, they placed an American flag over the rail of the top of the Maersk Alabama and whistled and pumped their fists in the air. Crew fired a bright red flare into the sky from the ship.

Thank God and the US Navy.  And God Bless America.

NOTE: There are two kinds of people in the world who still know Morse Code; old sailors, and Special Forces signal operators (and, I guess, Navy signalmen, now that I think about it…OK.  Three kinds of people in the world who still know Morse Code, as well as people who took their ham radio license before about 1997…Four kinds of people who still know Morse Code…)

OK.  From the top; here’s a fearless prediction: five’ll get you ten when this story is finally told, it’ll involve someone surreptitiously signalling to Phillips “let’s do a mulligan on that whole ‘jumping from the boat’ thing; we’ll be ready this time”.

Just a prediction. Not putting any money on it.

Obama reaches out to ‘Moderate’ Pirates:

For too long, America has been too dismissive of the proud culture and invaluable contributions of the Pirate Community. Whether it is their pioneering work with prosthetics, husbandry of tropical birds or fanciful fashion sense, America owes a deep debt to Pirates.

The past eight years have shown a failure to appreciate the historic role of these noble seafarers. Instead of celebrating their entreprenuerial spirit and seeking to partner with them to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

Oh, of course it’s satire.

As far as you know, anyway.

President Obama declined to comment about the ongoing hostage crisis in the Indian Ocean:

Obama was asked to comment on the situation several times by reporters at a White House event on refinancing for homeowners. Obama, however, stuck closely to the script and replied that he wanted to remain focused on housing.

Teleprompters can only react so fast.

It’s apparently above their pay grade.

…to exclaim “America.  F**k yeah! (with emphasis joyously, flagrantly and thankfully added):

The US crew of a ship hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia has retaken control of the vessel, according to Pentagon sources.

Unnamed US defence officials said one pirate had been captured by the 20-strong crew of the Maersk Alabama, seized earlier in the Indian Ocean.
But the vessel’s Danish owners, Maersk, said they could not confirm that the vessel had been retaken.

It was the sixth ship seized off Somalia in recent days.

It is reportedly the first time in 200 years that a US-flagged vessel has been seized by pirates.

And hopefully the last.

Note to the world’s scumbags; we don’t even need a military to kick your thieving asses.

God bless America.

Somali pirates have presented President Obama with a shining chance for reaching out:

Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 21 crew members aboard, a diplomat and a U.S. Navy spokesman said.The Kenya-based diplomat identified the vessel as the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama and said all the crew members are American. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

After the Abdullah flap last week, if I were the leader of the Somali pirates I’d quickly publicize that it’s proper protocol for a head of state to kiss a pirate’ bare butt, and see what happens.

Short-sell the Afghani.

President Obama the foreign policy naif is talking “Exit Strategies” again:

“There’s got to be an exit strategy,” Mr Obama said in an interview with the CBS “60 Minutes” programme on Sunday. “There’s got to be a sense that this is not a perpetual drift.”

Mr Obama’s comments come as his administration prepares to roll out its new strategy for Afghanistan amid rising insurgent violence that has called into question the viability of a seven-year-old US-led effort to create a functioning democracy.

There is no such thing as an “exit strategy”  There is only winning, or accepting defeat.

Afghanistan, to the lefties, has always been “the good war”.

As I noted a couple of years ago, the left really has only two templates for “good wars”:

1. Vietnam – a war that was a disaster for the nation (to say nothing of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians), but a boon to the Dems, giving them a ready-made popular movement, a unifying theme, and (at the time) immense popular traction.
2. World War II – America’s last socialist war; the last war we will ever have have (God willing) that was fought by the entire country; a war that actually worked the way the New Deal was supposed to have worked, with an all-wise, all-knowing government mobilizing all of this nation’s people and means of production (via a central plan) toward a common goal.

Of course, one led to the other; World War II, fought by immense levies of draftees (backed, in the US’ case, by immense firepower and industrial and herculean ogistic capability) slamming into other such levies in epic battles, was exactly the wrong model for fighting in Vietnam; winning over the “hearts and minds” of a people indisposed to take either side without any overarching reason (i.e., their and their families’ survival) isn’t well served by carpet-bombing and “search and destroy” patrols by foreign troops who don’t want to be there, who don’t speak the language, who only want to vaporize anything that might prevent them from getting the hell out of there.

Vaporizing Germans and Japanese and going home worked in WWII,where the battle for the German and Japanese heart and mind was an entirely separate operation from the battle to destroy their governments; it worked incredibly badly in a war where we had to do a sales job as well as win a battle, since locals were all nominally part of the “friendly” government, albeit riven with guerrillas, to begin with.
All the lessons we needed to win in Vietnam – and later, Iraq – were found in the Philippines, about a century ago.  Of course, the Philippines and Iraq were two wars the liberals hate.

But Afghanistan was a war that most (not all) liberals supported; even Bruce Springsteen, of all people, supported President Bush’s effort (and caught a lot of flak from, believe it or not, the left). And so with a new liberal President, they’re more or less obliged to try to win this thing.

And, as Michael Yon notes, while Iraq is swerving toward a success (that Obama seems determined to scupper), TAfghanistan is shaping up very badly at the moment:

Today we have an American President and Secretary of Defense who have essentially kicked, prodded and begged our allies to get more serious about Afghanistan, but mostly to no avail. And so 17,000 more American troops are kissing their loved ones goodbye, many of them for the last time in their lives, and heading into Afghanistan. Per capita combat deaths probably will be higher in Afghanistan this year than for any year in Iraq. The situation is very serious for the relatively few soldiers fighting there. Some are in combat every day and night.The AfPak war began more than seven years ago. It is fair to ask why are we sending more U.S. troops today. After all, we’ve had plenty of time to build an army and police. If drive-by journalists listen to some of the commanders on the ground, they might come back with reports that all is okay, and that the Afghan army is coming along nicely, and that certain writers are exaggerating. I’ve had those same briefings from commanders. Just as in 2004 Iraq, I believe that Americans and Europeans have been deceived by their governments.

Yon – a former “Green Beret” – notes what Robert Kaplan noticed in the book Imperial Grunts; we’re fighting the wrong war in Afghanistan, and ignoring the lessons of good ocunterinsurgency:

I’ve asked many key officers why we are not using our Special Forces (specifically Green Berets) in a more robust fashion to train Afghan forces. The stock answers coming from the Green Beret world – from ranking officers anyway – is that they are taking a serious role in training Afghan forces. But the words are inconsistent with my observations. The reality is that the Green Berets – the only outfit in the U.S. military who are so excellently suited to put the Afghan army into hyperdrive – are mostly operating with small groups of Afghans doing what appears to be Colorado mule deer hunts in the mountains of Afghanistan. Special Forces A-teams are particularly well suited to train large numbers of people, but are not doing so.

What we are doing is sending tens of thousands more regular troops to stomp about a country that,quite legitimately, might be getting tired of seeing us around.

Read the whole thing.

The Coalition currently has about half the combat troops, and 1/3 of the overall troops, in Iraq as at the beginning of the Surge.  The discrepancy is due to so many of the remaining troops being in support units – logistics, transportation, intelligence, signals and other specialties where the Iraqi military is lagging while building combat units.

Looks like President Obama is having the planned impact in reversing Bush Administration policy in country!

Or…not:

The cycle of coalition reductions is still based on the brief by General Petraeus to the US House and Senate on Sept. 11, 2007. Just replace the word “overwatch” with “training” on the briefing slide. Each six months (March and September), military planners determine the next reductions. The commanders have just announced the reduction from 15 to 12 combat brigades. In September, they will probably announce the further reduction to 10. Next March, they will be looking at reducing to seven “training” brigades by September of 2010. In September 2010, they will be looking at reducing to five “training” brigades. In March 2011, they will be looking at the removal of the final five “training” brigades.

I’ve noticed a lot of Dems claiming credit for the downsizing for Obama for the downsizing of the force in Iraq.

Let’s do try to keep things straight, here.

Here’s some change for you; Obama has appointed Chaz Freeman, noted CAIR/HAMAS/House of Saud/Fatah upsucker, to head the National Intelligence Council.

Melanie Phillips in the UK Spectator breaks down Freeman’s history, and concludes:

If he is appointed to this new intelligence role, Freeman will shape the intelligence assessments that will tell America, among other things, what threats are posed to America and the free world by the Iranian regime. We already saw, with the misleading and manipulatively spun NIE two years ago which facilitated the demonstrably false conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the bomb – a conclusion almost immediately disproved by further intelligence but which was used to head off action against Iran – how such politicised intel can be used to thwart attempts to stop the Iranian bomb.

With such viciously prejudiced views and such an intimate association with the principal force behind the Sunni division of the Islamic jihad, can anyone apart from the west’s gloating Jew-haters doubt that the appointment by America’s 44^th President of Chas W Freeman as chairman of the NIC would be a stunning coup as a weapon in the armoury of the enemies of the Jewish people and the free world?

This will give moral relativism a bad name.

As I noted earlier, free-lance journalist, former NPR reporter/Miss North Dakota/Fargo North alum Roxana Saberi is being held incommunicado in Iran.

Ed at Hot Air notes:

This puts Barack Obama’s “smart power” foreign policy to the test. If Saberi’s case gets a lot of attention, the State Department will feel the pressure to get her released. This happened a few times during the Bush administration, which succeeded in all but one case to gain the release of arrested Americans.

Of course, Congress is frequently the engine of the “attention” that needs to be paid.  What is the position of NoDak’s two Senators, arch-liberal Obama supporters Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan?

There was a time we could have counted on Norm Coleman to be a voice for justice in these cases.  God willing, we will again.

Where is Amy Klobuchar, figuratively (and where is Al Franken, literally)?  Do either of our Senators/would-be Senators have the falafel to smack down the mullahs?

Former Miss North Dakota and current freelance journalist Roxana Saberi has been arrested in Iran

Roxana Saberi, 31, has not been heard from since her last call on Feb. 10, her father, Reza, told The Associated Press on Sunday.”We haven’t heard anything,” he said. The family decided to go public, he said, “because we wanted to get some information.”

Officials in Iran have not publicly confirmed the arrest. A duty officer at the U.S. State Department said Sunday officials were looking into an AP request for information on the case.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S.

Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years.

Does this smell as fishy as anything else in the land of the mullahs?

Her father said that in her last phone call, she told him she was arrested after buying a bottle of wine.

“We asked others and they said, `There’s no detention for that.’ So that’s kind of an excuse,” he told the AP.

What will the Obama Administration do?

Given their response to the drug war in Mexico – abrogate the Second Amendment and ban “assault weapons” – the answer seems obvious; impose Sharia in the US.

I’ve been perplexed…

…well, no.  That’s the wrong word.  I’ve seen what I know about the US, and International, left’s antisemitic roots fully validated yet again during and after the latest war in Gaza.

Israel is facing an opponent that uses human lives – non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza – as sacrificial pawns, worth only what their deaths will garner in one-sided international outrage. That outrage comes, naturally, from people who are perfectly fine accepting that the combatants among these same people have been lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians for the previous months on end.

In other words, noncombatant deaths are ammunition in the public opinion war.

But the Jews have been fighting the public opinion war for millenia, notes Rami Kaminski.

It’s only when they started contesting that war that things got bad for ’em:

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel’s defensive military action insist Hamas uses only crude rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminate killing in the name of holy war which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists professed intentions for the infidels.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

What Britain said in 1940: when given a choice between acquiescen\ce to authoritarianism and resistance:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,

Answering the same question today:

Britain’s Home Office, which is responsible for immigration issues…said it “opposes extremism in all its forms” and would work to “stop [the producer of a movie critical of Islam] from coming to our country.”

A time for choosing, indeed.

Five years ago, former Marine General Anthony Zinni became every liberal’s favorite general (also the only general they could name) when he came out against the Bush Administration’s strategery in Iraq.

You knew there had to be limits.  Ed Morrissey writes:

When General Anthony Zinni publicly criticized the Iraq War, he became a darling of the Left. Now that the Iraq War has all but ended in victory, he’s apparently dispensable. Zinni had been offered the position of Ambassador to Iraq, accepted it, and had even received a congratulatory phone call from Barack Obama. While he made arrangements to live in Iraq, though, Obama and Hillary Clinton changed their minds — and never bothered to tell him:

And why?

…So what happened to the man Democrats used repeatedly to bolster their efforts to undermine George Bush’s efforts in Iraq? Zinni works for a company that does a lot of business in Iraq, and supposedly the Obama administration worried about how that would look in a confirmation hearing. Another source told FP that the Obama team worried about the optics of sending two former generals as ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously.

However, neither of those explanations make much sense. Given how hard Obama fought to keep Tom Daschle and his $5 million worth of work for the industry he would soon regulate, the Dyncorp position would have been hardly a burp in a Democratic-controlled Senate. Obama’s appointed 12 lobbyists to key positions already, and an ambassadorship even to a key post like Iraq wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. And who cares whether one general or two becomes Ambassador to war theaters?

Rumor also had it that Zinni had his taxes all paid up.

Let me get this straight – Bush was the dumb, fumbly one?

Preserving (also instituting) the constitutional rights of non-American-citizens caught in action against America were a key part of the Obama campaign.
Now that they’re in charge and actually have to deal with terrorists?

Not quite:

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

“controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe”?  Yes – the circles that got President Obama elected, at least in part over the collective vapors because Europe didn’t heart us anymore!

One provision in one of Obama’s orders appears to preserve the CIA’s ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA’s secret prison sites “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

Despite concern about rendition, Obama’s prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the “transitory” technique.

Well, I’m sure Chris Matthews will be all over this one.

Iran will have a nuke this year, says the IISS:

Iran will have enough enriched uranium to make a single nuclear weapon later this year, the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) predicts.

 The think tank’s Mark Fitzpatrick made the announcement at today’s launch of its annual global review of military powers.

During 2009, Iran will probably reach the point at which it has produced the amount of low-enriched uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb.

So was Biden right?  Is President HopeandChange being tested? 

Why would he be tested?  Isn’t the world supposed to like us now?

If stories like this WaPo mash note…

Soon after the November election, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader took stock of America’s new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. “A house Negro,” Ayman al-Zawahiri said…The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

…are true, then stories like this…

 The Taliban have conducted a wave of targeted assassinations against tribal leaders and politicians in Swat. Local, provincial and federal politicians have fled their homes after the Taliban conducted attacks against their homes and murdered their families. Most recently, the leader of a tribal group opposed to the Taliban was murdered and his body was descecrated as a warning to others.

Pakistani forces have been fighting forces aligned with Fazlullah, a radical cleric of the outlawed Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM – the Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Sharia Law) for almost two years.

…should be disappearing from the face of the earth presently.

If Bush “radicalized” Moslems and “caused them to flock to Al Quaeda”, then Obama – the anti-Bush – must perforce reverse the trend. 

Right?

The DC/New York/LA political/media establishment has always hated W. At first it was because he, like Reagan, wasn’t really one of them.  He beat the “smart” guy in 2000.  He cut taxes and (regrettably) triangulated around them on spending.  He beat the “smart” guy Kerry.

But why do they really  hate him?

William McGurn Wthinks he knows why:

Here’s a hint: It’s not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush’s disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

As I wrote a couple of years ago at the dawn of the surge,  the Dems really only have two templates for a “successful” war:  World War II (a big-government war won, to a great extent, by socialist means; universal service, government commanding the means of production, immense control over society) and Vietnam (which was a military defeat for the US, but a political bonanza for them. We’ll come back to that).

Outside those two comfort zones, I’m afraid Democrats don’t know what to make of things.

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it’s easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago — and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn’t he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — the man who will be sworn in as vice president today — didn’t limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president’s people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to “keep it from totally collapsing” until they could “hand it off to the next guy.”
For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was “not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq “lost.” These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

Another problem for the left is that the Vietnam template keeps getting more and more obsolete:

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam — especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.

As with Vietnam, with Iraq the failure of nerve was most clear in Congress. For example, of the five active Democratic senators who sought the nomination, four voted in favor of the Iraqi intervention before discovering their antiwar selves.

Making Dem leaders look like fools after doubling back on themselves; that is the ultimate crime.

Listening to Bush’s final presser last week, I heard the President talk about the regrets he has over his terms in office.

The big one?  That the intel about the WMD turned out to be wrong.

At the time, I was upset about the Administration’s focus on WMD in “selling” the liberation of Iraq.  There were – as even noted neocons like Nick Lemann in that conservative hothouse the New Yorker noted– four grounds for going to deposing Hussein:

1. Repeated violations of UN resolutions re his nuke program and the no-fly zone.
2. Repeated, horrendous human rights abuses
3. Support for terror (not “Al Quaeda” or “9/11”, but plenty of others)
4. Finally, the WMD.

“Why”, I asked at the time “is the Administration not hitting all four of these justifications equally hard?”  It was one of my big regrets of the Administration.

And yet at almost six years’ remove, it occurs to me that, for purposes of convincing Congress and especially the world at large, that…:

1. Nobody has ever cared about UN resolutions.  None are ever worth the paper they’re printed on (except in the odd case of the occasional government figure who takes the UN seriously – like George HW Bush, who obeyed the UN and didn’t depose Hussein in 1991); who would care?
2. The people of Haditha were guilty of dying while brown.  Western elites don’t generally care about human rights abuses against brown people (at least not those that can’t be used to discredit conservative Western governments – see the 1984 Ethiopian Famine or Abu Ghraib).
3. Hussein mainly supported terror aimed at other Arabs, and at Israel.  Who cared?
4. On the other hand, in 2002 – when the rubble from the World Trade Center had barely stopped smoldering?  The next one could hit Cambridge,Tribeca or Berkeley!

Unfortunate, but understandable under the circumstances.

Bad bugs:  rumors that the military has been targeted by some serious computer viruses are, at least in the UK, paralyzingly true:

The bug has caused havoc for days across all three Armed Forces, with thousands of MoD computers shut down.

But it failed to penetrate top-secret systems, officials said yesterday. Boffins [what’d be called “Twidgies” in the US Navy] at the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham, Gloucs, believe it was caused by an official “syncing” his personal email.

At least 24 Royal Air Force bases and several Royal Navy vessels have “ground to a halt”. The RAF had to cancel training flights and up to 75 per cent of ships were affected, meaning sailors could not get messages home.

On the other hand, Al Quaeda has some even more serious bug problems:

At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages.

The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside.

The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East.

I don’t believe karma, but I think what goes around comes around.

For some reason I don’t feel as safe as before. Since about noon.

Weird.

Those neocons! Condoning torture!

The proposal Obama is considering would require all CIA interrogators to follow conduct outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the officials said. The plans would also have the effect of shutting down secret “black site” prisons around the world where the CIA has questioned terror suspects – with all future interrogations taking place inside American military facilities.However, Obama’s changes may not be absolute. His advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon, the officials said, although the intent is not to use that as an opening for possible use of waterboarding.

Bad torturing neocons!

Damn those accursed neocons for condoning, promoting and outsourcing torture:

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for CIA director, Leon Panetta, served as White House chief of staff during the time the Clinton administration accelerated a practice of kidnapping terrorist suspects and sending them to countries with records of torturing prisoners, human rights organizations and former U.S. officials say.

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will question Mr. Panetta, chief of staff for President Clinton from 1994 to 1997, about what, if any, role he played in shaping the policy known as “extraordinary rendition,” a Republican aide on the committee said. Mr. Panetta’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 27. The aide asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Damn them for inventing the tolerance, practice and export of torture of defenseless, invariably-innocent suspects!

The practice — which involves seizing a terrorist suspect in one country and taking him to another without formal judicial proceedings — also occurred under the administration of President George H.W. Bush and possibly even earlier, said a former senior U.S. official in that administration. However, it took place dozens of times under the Clinton administration and rose dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to human rights organizations and former national security officials.

The issue is particularly relevant given the incoming administration’s pledge to end harsh interrogation practices and what Obama campaign documents referred to as “outsourcing our torture to other countries.”

Damn them all to HELLLLLLL!

Watch and tell me.

Bin Laden sounds off on Gaza…

Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden has issued a new audiotape urging Muslims to launch a jihad, or holy war, to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Because Muslims have taken it so easy on Israel so far.