Friday, August 13, 2010

$2.2 million ≠ 27 years any way you look at it...“What I really need to do is to make them pay for what they done to me.”

Source: New York Times

Cleared, and Pondering the Value of 27 Years
HOUSTON — Since a judge let him out of prison for a rape that prosecutors now say he did not commit, Michael A. Green has had trouble sleeping.
Late at night, he walks the neat, quiet sidewalks in the neighborhood where he is staying with an aunt, chain-smoking cigarettes, his mind spinning furiously with questions about why he was convicted 27 years ago and how to spend what is left of his life.
He also ponders, he says, whether to take a $2.2 million compensation payment from the State of Texas or file a civil lawsuit in the hope of exposing the truth about the investigation that led to his incarceration. To receive the compensation, he must waive the right to sue.
“What I really need to do is to make them pay for what they done to me,” he says. “Two-point-two million dollars is nothing when it comes to 27 years of my life, which I spent with mental torture and physical abuse.”
Mr. Green, 45, was set free by a state judge two weeks ago after DNA tests on the rape victim’s clothing proved that he could not have been responsible for the crime. His exoneration was the work of a new unit in the Harris County district attorney’s office dedicated to reviewing claims of innocence.
The story of Mr. Green’s nightmarish imprisonment — and how a prosecutor, Alicia O’Neill, eventually unearthed biological evidence that led to the real culprits — throws a harsh spotlight on an uncomfortable reality in American justice: the identification of a suspect in a lineup or in an array of photos is not always reliable.
More than three-quarters of the 258 people exonerated by DNA tests in the last decade were convicted on the strength of eyewitness identifications, according to the Innocence Project, the Manhattan-based organization dedicated to freeing innocent prisoners.
In Texas, the problem is even more acute: identifications by eyewitnesses played a pivotal role in 80 percent of the 40 people who have been exonerated with DNA evidence.
Some states, among them North Carolina and Ohio, have passed legislation changing the way lineups are conducted to reduce the possibility of an error, but similar bills in dozens of other states, including Texas, have failed in the face of stiff opposition from prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, defense lawyers say.
In 1983, Mr. Green was a high school dropout who slept late every day, played video games at an arcade in the afternoons and stole cars at night to make money. “Life was one big party,” he recalled.
He was walking home on April 18, 1983, the night a white woman was abducted and raped in his neighborhood by four black men in a stolen Camaro. He was one of several young men stopped by the police, but the victim could not identify him.
A week later, however, he was arrested after stealing a car and smashing it up. Detectives showed the victim Mr. Green’s mug shot, along with several other photos, and she said he might be one of her attackers. Later the same day, she picked him out of a lineup of five men.
He heard her scream from behind the mirrored glass when it was his turn to step forward in the lineup. He began cursing and yelling at the police.
“I got so mad, because I recognized it was a setup,” he said. “Then one of the police said: ‘I don’t know what you are mad about. I didn’t rape her. You did.’ ”
Mr. Green spit in the officer’s face, the first of many defiant acts.
A few days later, he turned down an offer from a prosecutor to plead guilty and serve five years for the rape, Mr. Green said. He recalls the trial as a surreal experience. It was the victim’s word against his. On the stand, she pointed him out again. He told the jury that he was innocent, but they did not believe him.
At 18 years old, he was sentenced to 75 years.
In prison, he fought nearly every day with other inmates at the Ferguson Unit, in Midway, where he earned the nickname “Two-Gun” for his boxing skills. He was filled with rage, he said, and fought often with the guards, too, earning vicious reprisals. In 1985, he was placed in a segregated unit for unruly and dangerous prisoners, mostly gang members. “I was considered one of the bad boys,” he said.
In 1986, a white inmate tried to stab him, but wounded a guard instead. Mr. Green said the attacker, who belonged to a white supremacist gang, had wanted to kill him because he had allegedly raped a white woman.
Confined alone in a cell for all but two hours a day, he would ruminate endlessly about his trial, he said. “I lay back and thought over and over and over again, why did they find me guilty?” he said. In the late 1980s, he began to request books from the law library, looking for a way to overturn the conviction.
But he lost every appeal, and a public defender told him in 1988 that his case was hopeless, given the vehemence of the victim’s testimony. He saw no glimmer of hope until 2001, when Texas passed a statute granting inmates the right to request DNA tests on old evidence under certain conditions.
He wrote the motion himself on a typewriter in his cell and sent it to the trial judge in July 2005. The judge assigned a public defender to handle the request, but the motion languished for three years in a backlog of requests before the Harris County district attorney’s office.
Then in 2008, Patricia Lykos, a former judge and police officer, was elected district attorney, and one of her first acts was to reverse the office’s longstanding reluctance to admit mistakes. She assigned two assistant district attorneys and an investigator to do nothing but comb through about 185 cases involving requests for DNA tests as well as about 75 other innocence claims. So far, the unit’s work has led to the release of three men, including Mr. Green.
Ms. Lykos has been pushing for a new regional crime lab to help expedite the cases. Not only were innocent men imprisoned, she said, but the victims were denied justice and the actual culprits remained free to commit other crimes. “Whenever you have an innocent person convicted, you have a triple tragedy,” she said.
Ms. O’Neill immediately zeroed in on Mr. Green’s tale as one of the few in the stack of cases in which DNA testing could make a difference. “It was just a perfect case to see what the science had to say,” Ms. O’Neill said.
The trouble was that the county clerk said the records showed the evidence in the case had been destroyed, a standard practice for old investigations in which there are no pending appeals. But Ms. O’Neill kept searching, and it turned out one box of evidence had been preserved by mistake, and inside were the victim’s jeans. There were 32 semen stains on the denim.
It took a year and a half for a state crime laboratory to untangle the DNA markers on the jeans, but when it was done, Ms. O’Neill and her colleague, Baldwin Chin, had hit pay dirt. Two of the profiles found on the pants matched those of men who had been arrested for other crimes — Michael A. Smith, who was in prison, and David Elder, who was on parole. What is more, none of the three profiles matched Mr. Green’s genetic code.
Under questioning, Mr. Elder named two other people involved in the rape, writing the names on the back of a business card. One of the men, Lawrence Mosley, was serving time in Amarillo for another crime, and he confirmed that the fourth person was Timothy Washington. None of the four will be charged in the rape because the statute of limitations has expired, prosecutors said.
But the new evidence was enough to persuade a judge to release Mr. Green on $500 bond while the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals considers a final ruling on his innocence.
“It’s what you go to law school for,” Ms. O’Neill said of the moment Mr. Green walked out of jail.
Mr. Green, in the meantime, said the experience of freedom had “been a trip.” Just stepping in a grocery store or shopping for clothing at a mall overwhelms his senses, he said.
But the best years of his life are lost forever, he says. He wonders what happened to his girlfriend, whom he lost contact with after being sent to prison. He breaks down when talking about his mother’s death in 2006 and how he missed the funeral.
Then he pulls himself together. He has been offered a job as a paralegal with the Innocence Project of Texas, he says, and will dedicate his time to “getting more innocent dudes out.”

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Can a flag weep? ...one flag can


Source: Essays Of Robert G. Davis
Can a Flag Weep?
When I was a boy it was still close to the war. There was a proud reverence for the men in my town who had been to Omaha Beach, Iwo Jima, Midway, Normandy, Bataan, and the scores of other places we had never heard of; and didn't know existed--at least not until we heard the fellows talk about them at the drug store or ball park, domino hall, or family reunions. These men were my heroes, of course. They held a sacred place of respect in my heart.

I thought they had been to the most exotic places in the world; seen things that no one else in my county could have even imagined, and brought back stories that a boy like me could listen to for a lifetime. I grinned when they laughed, and I felt bad when they cried. And yes, they showed me that it was okay for men to cry. And that men could cry for the gentlest of reasons, or weep over some secret memory held close to their heart. Some of them knew pain--great pain. Some of them remembered too much, and it was hard for them. I felt a sadness for them.

But I admired them deeply. I wanted to be like them. They were my ideal of how one should be an American. They were almost a fraternity in themselves. I heard them joke to each other about which branch of the service was best; and I'm not sure some of their stories were always the whole truth. In fact, I suspicious that they could be a little "windy" at times. Maybe their memories relaxed with years. It seemed their stories got a little bigger each time they told them. But I loved to hear them tell them. They had experienced things which went far beyond what we learned about our country in books, or in school.

These wonderful men taught me that being an American was more than just feeling safe and watching parades, and eating hot dogs and skinny-dipping in farm ponds; or going to the baseball game on Saturday nights, or showing livestock at the county fair. These fellows understood. Above everything else, they were deeply patriotic men. And I knew how important that ideal was to them.

You see, I was a trumpet player--and even by the time I got to junior high, I was a good one. These fellows invited me to travel with them throughout the county whenever they needed help in burying a fallen comrade. I played taps. They shot their guns in ritual salute. And they solemnly folded the flag which had been draped over their brother's coffin and handed it to his family. And I knew that his spirit had not died with him. They would keep it alive every time they marched with that flag, every time they displayed it at their own homes, every time they folded it in tribute to another brother. Every time they felt their faith in our democracy needed to be exemplified, the flag was somehow there.

That was a long time ago. Then, not so long ago, I saw people burning that same flag at a demonstration in Washington DC to make a point about something. It was their right to do that, of course; a right ironically given them by the freedom that same flag had secured for them long before they were even born.

I wondered what my heroes (now gone themselves) would think. Can a flag weep? Do we still care enough?

And for a moment--just a fleeting moment--I remember back across the decades to a young lad who, a long time ago in the first grade, always ran the last few blocks to school in the morning. And when his teacher asked why he did so, he gave this simple answer: "Mrs. Huffer, when I pledge allegiance to the flag I can feel my heart."
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With all do respect for Mr. Davis' wonderful essay I would like to answer the question, "Can a flag weep?"
 
~ Norman E. Hooben
 

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Alarming News...another reason why Obama has to go... (US School Children Told to Stop Singing National Anthem at Lincoln Memorial)

If you don't think this following news item is cause for alarm you can't be much of an American...and not to be much of an American is like not being an American at all. ~ Norman E. Hooben
Source: Scared Monkeys


US School Children Told to Stop Singing National Anthem at Lincoln Memorial … They Did Any How!

WELCOME TO TODAY’S HEROES AND A BRIGHT LIGHT FOR THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERCA!
What, there is no Freedom of Speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC?
Thank you to these Patriotic school kids who would not be deterred from knowing what is right … Watch the VIDEO below and know that there is HOPE for the future!
What has this country come to when it is considered a crime and civil disobedience if school children sing the United States National Anthem at the Lincoln Memorial? Congratulation to the school kids for standing their ground and doing the right thing in singing the national anthem in the United States of America and damn where they felt like it.

Not only did the school kids sing, but others visiting the Lincoln Memorial as well
A news flash to the DC idiots who made any such law and the fool police oofficer trying to enforce Fascism … Patriotism is not a demonstration!
A group of high school students attending a conservative leadership conference in Washington, D.C. said they were ordered by a security guard to stop singing the national anthem during a June 25 visit to the Lincoln Memorial.
“They told them to stop singing,” said Evan Gassman, a spokesman for the Young America’s Foundation. “I was taken aback. You wouldn’t expect a display of national patriotism to be censored.”
Talk about one opf the most ignorant, lack of common sense PC nonsense that might have ever been made. The singing of the American National Anthem is considered a demonstration. WHAT!!! It must remain neutral, neutral to what? Is the national anthem at a US President’s memorial going to offend some one?
U.S. Park Police confirmed that the students were in violation of federal law and their impromptu performance constituted a demonstration in an area that must remain “completely content neutral.”
“The area they were standing in and singing is an area that is restricted for this type of activity,” said Sgt. David Schlosser. “The United States Park Police is absolutely content-neutral when it comes to any sort of demonstrations in these areas.”
Get this, in some idiots infinite wisdom it is deemed ok to do what these patriotic school children were doing 25 steps away. UNREAL! KUDOS to the school kids for standing their ground, not moving an inch and continuing to sing.
Schlosser said the students would have been in compliance had they moved approximately 25 steps from where they were standing.
“It’s not the content of their activity – that being the national anthem – it’s the location,” he said. “A couple steps and it would have been no problem whatsoever.”
Instead of doing as they were instructed, Gassman said the students resumed the song – an impromptu form of civil disobedience.
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 Fox News Video

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Are you ready for Islam...or will it be Baha'u'llah? (side note: Hey Massachusetts did you see what Kerry is doing? [see below])

Update: Racism will always be with us as long as there are people like Ema Nymton.  Ema Nymton cannot be objective for Ema cannot think beyond the racial blockade that clouds all rational thought.  When someone eats rat poison they can survive if they get their stomach pumped early enough...if not they may die.  Ema is close to being brain dead...Is there such a thing as a brain pump? ~ private note to the coward that leaves illogical assumptions in the comment section that I refuse to acknowledge. - Norman E. Hooben
 
Sometime ago Dr. Danielle Allen, Phd, in a Washington Post article tried to debunk Obama's Muslim religion an assertion that ultimately proved otherwise; there is no question that Obama is a Muslim (Obama's Alinsky type counterpoints have also proved fruitless. Actions speak louder than words.)  The mention of Dr. Allen here is to debunk the assertion that she is a "genius":
"Allen has two doctorates, one in classics from Cambridge University and the other in government from Harvard University; she won a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award at 29. Last year she joined the faculty of the institute, the only African American and one of a handful of women at the elite research center, where she works alongside groundbreaking physicists, mathematicians and social scientists. 
Already an expert on the mechanics of politics...."
And as the last line begins, she is also an expert on the mechanics of politics.  Just goes to show you that no matter how many letters you have after your name the so-called experts are totally wrong...you paid what for that degree?
Now I didn't start out wanting to chastise Dr. Allen but the following article more than substantiates the fact that Obama is attempting to impose his Muslim beliefs onto the rest of us...whether we like it or not! ~ Norman E. Hooben

From Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs we have:


Obama's State Department Bankrolls Ground Zero Imam Rauf's Middle East Fundraising Tour: "US Muslim Engagement"

Back in June of 2009, I did a series of posts on Obama's adoption of the US Muslim Engagement, which was, in effect, a charter for dhimmitude. I don't think people understood the implications of the directive at the time, but it has become increasingly clear in the ensuing year.
Obama's speech to the Muslim world, the redirection of NASA to promote the Muslim world, the creation of a new office at the State Department that is responsible for outreach with Muslims around the world  to“engage with Muslims around the world on a people-to-people and organizational level" -- all that is just the tip of the iceberg. It is systemic throughout all government agencies, and the American people are very much in the dark as to how much their taxpayer dollars are going overseas to fund jihad under the guise of "youth" programs, "interfaith" groups and organizations (though the faith only goes one way) and those notorious "Islamic charities."
Yesterday, we learned that the dishonest Imam Rauf was in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar for Ground Zero mosque money here. He was not accompanied by his waiter. Today we learn that he was traveling on your dime.
Rauf's trip to Muslim countries that are rife with jihad, jiyza and delusions of a global Islamic state was disturbing enough on its face, but worse still is that fact that the feds are financing his trip. Terror-tied Rauf is comfortably ensconced in the bosom of the Obama State Department (check this out). The New York Post elaborates:
The imam behind a plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero is set to depart on a multi-country jaunt to the Middle East funded by the State Department -- raising concerns that taxpayers may be helping him with the controversial project's $100 million fund-raising goal.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is taking the publicly funded trip to foster "greater understanding" about Islam and Muslim communities in the United States, the State Department confirmed yesterday.
"He is a distinguished Muslim cleric," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, when asked about the journey, reportedly to include stops in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar.
What exactly defines a "distinguished Muslim cleric?" Rauf helped finance terrorists in Turkey, blames the US and the West for Islamic terrorism, declares Islamic terrorism was caused by “humiliating” and “ignoring” Muslim World, supports Hamas, expouses "religious dialogue" in the English press but tells the Arabic press,"I don't believe in religious dialogue".....and so on.
"I think we are in the process of arranging for him to travel as part of this program, and it is to foster a greater understanding about the region around the world among Muslim-majority communities," P.J. Crowley added.
Crowley said no fund-raising for the mosque and cultural center during the trip would be permitted. "That would not be something he could do as part of our program," he said.
Abdul Rauf said funds for the center will come from Muslims and members of his congregation.
But a London-based Arabic-language newspaper that interviewed Abdul Rauf reported that he says he also will collect money from Muslim and Arab nations around the world -- raising the possibility his goodwill mission could help him build contacts in oil-rich states.
But understand -- this is no accident. This is the implementation of the US MUSLIM ENGAGEMENT -- Changing the Course." Read it. It's the Obama blueprint.
This is all part of a much larger plan that subjugates the US to Islamic sharia.
The document is deeply informed by the objectives of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC is made up of 57 Muslim-majority nations. Because of Saudi Arabia and its proxies, the Muslim Brotherhood has become the most powerful force in the Conference. The US Muslim Engagement is the charter for  our dhimmitude. It's the basis for John Kerry's hearing taqiyya last year, which resulted in yesterday's announced legislation by Kerry, to bring Muslim workers to America. It is a sweeping campaign by operatives like Fareed Zakaria, aided by his propaganda on how we have to accept Islamic governments and shariah.
A communiqué issued after a summit in Mecca declared:
"The Conference underlined the need to collectively endeavor to reflect the noble Islamic values, counter Islamophobia, defamation of Islam and its values and desecration of Islamic holy sites, and to effectively coordinate with States as well as regional and international institutions and organizations to urge them to criminalize this phenomenon as a form of racism."
Underwritten largely by George Soros' and other left-wing foundations, Changing Course seems to reflect predominantly the recommendations of groups the government has established are Muslim Brotherhood fronts, such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Both are represented in the Engagement Project's "Leadership Group." Accordingly, its book calls for:
* "engagement with groups that have clearly demonstrated a commitment to nonviolent participation in politics" (read: the Brotherhood);
* "not equat[ing] reform with secularism, nor...assum[ing] that reformers who advocate some form of Shariah as the basis for the rule of law will inevitably abuse human rights or adopt anti-American policies";
* "not supply[ing] additional ammunition to extremists by linking the term ‘Islam' or key tenets of the religion of Islam with the actions of extremist or terrorist groups";
* Launching "an education program comparable in scale" to "the more than $7 billion" invested in the "post-Sputnik U.S. commitment to math and science education" to "education on Islam and Muslims, sustained over a decade or more, focused on teacher training and curriculum in middle and high schools, and colleges."
Take a look at page 80 of the US Muslim Engagement Project, aggressively promoted by the Obama administration:

Sputnik2

Spudnik2j

SPUTNIK!? Vis a vis Islam?
Note the reduction of the rejection rates for applicants from Muslim countries. 
Visa1

And then we have this from ResistNet.com

Kerry introduces legislation to bring Muslim workers to America
On the verge of a double-dip recession, unemployment at rarely seen levels, Islamic terrorism at record high levels, and Democrats want to bring workers from Muslim countries to the U.S.? Moreover, they want to send Americans into countries likely hostile to Americans and ruled by sharia law. Taxation for Islamization. via Daily Times – Kerry pushes US-Muslim nation exchanges.

WASHINGTON: US Senator and chairman of Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, appealed on Tuesday for cementing US ties with the Muslim world with a two-way exchange of professionals like teachers, city planners, and public health workers.

Public health workers? Does Obamacare require importing Muslim health workers? As was heard in this post.

Kerry introduced a bill calling for a three-year pilot programme to draw such workers from Muslim-majority countries to be picked by the US State Department. “This legislation is designed to help build professional capacity, strengthen civil society, and improve ties between the United States and Muslim-majority countries,” he said in a statement. These citizens picked would be 21-40 years old and could also come from civil society, including journalists, leaders of religious-based organisations, or employees of nonprofit organisations, Kerry’s office said in a statement.

More: Kerry to create new professional exchange program with Muslim world

This pilot program would allow young American professionals to spend six months overseas experiencing a new culture in Muslim countries while gaining new work experiences. And it would allow citizens of those countries to spend six months in the United States, where they will gain valuable work skills and see what life in America is all about. In a small but significant way, both journeys will help to lay the groundwork for improved relations going forward.

More:

The International Professional Exchange Act of 2010…

Under the proposed legislation, the US Secretary of State is authorised to establish a three year pilot program to help build professional capacity and contribute professional skills to local communities through a two-way exchange of fellows between the United States and select Muslim-majority countries.

The program does not exclude non-Muslims from participating in the exchange.

How considerate. Dhimmis. The only thing Muslim countries do for America is build mosques to spread sharia law. (If anyone finds a link to the act please share in the comments).

Update, link to bill found, it’s as bad as imagined. Thanks to the Blogmocracy for the link:

(2) FELLOW- The term ‘fellow’ means a college-educated professional who–

(A) is between 21 and 40 years of age; and

(B) has been selected to participate in the Program.

(3) FELLOWSHIP- The term ‘fellowship’ means the vehicle through which inbound and outbound fellows participate in the Program.

(4) INBOUND FELLOW- The term ‘inbound fellow’ means a fellow who is coming to the United States from a Muslim-majority country.

(5) MUSLIM-MAJORITY COUNTRY- The term ‘Muslim-majority country’ means–

(A) a country that is a Member State of the Organization of the Islamic Conference; and

(B) the Republic of Kosovo.

(6) OUTBOUND FELLOW- The term ‘outbound fellow’ means a fellow who is going to a Muslim-majority country from the United States.

(7) PROGRAM- The term ‘Program’ means the 3-year International Professional Exchange Pilot Program established under this Act.

SEC. 5. INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONAL EXCHANGE PILOT PROGRAM.

(a) Authorization- The Secretary of State is authorized to establish a 3-year international professional exchange pilot program for–

(1) young professionals in the United States to live and work in a Muslim-majority country; and

(2) young professionals in Muslim-majority countries to live and work in the United States.

Islamization. College educated Muslims between 21-40, that’s the profile of most Islamic terrorists too.
_______________________
And whether you like it or not...the UN will attempt to impose Baha'u'llah (this ought to scare the pants off of all the Christians and Jews)
The following is sanctioned by the United Nations (it's all part of the New World Order...that we the people did not order).

Baha'u'llah: Promised One of All Ages

Baha’u’llah announced in 1863 that He is God's Messenger for this age. His teachings and sacred writings are the basis of the Baha'i Faith.
Baha'u'llah claimed that His Divine Mission is to bring about the spiritual rebirth and the unity of mankind. He promised that this would lead to the establishment of permanent world peace and to the Kingdom of God on Earth. Baha'u'llah has attracted millions of adherents from every part of the globe; He has provided laws and teachings on how to realize His vision; and His followers are laboring everywhere to bring it about.  ...Read full article here
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Pres. Obama marks Ramadan with White House 'Iftar' ...just another anti-Christian ceremony


President Obama joined dozens of American Muslim leaders and foreign dignitaries at the White House on Sept. 1 to commemorate the sacred month of Ramadan with an "Iftar" dinner, or meal that breaks the day-long Ramadan fast.
Muslims around the world observe the month-long fast by abstaining from food and drink from dawn to dusk and increasing charitable giving.
At the dinner, Pres. Obama described Ramadan as "a time of service and support for those in need. And it is also a time for family and friends to come together in a celebration of their faith, their communities, and the common humanity that all of us share."
He also praised the contributions of American Muslims.
"Indeed, the contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country," he said. "Above all, they are successful parents, good neighbors, and active citizens."
Also present at the dinner was Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, Sec. of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Attorney General Eric Holder and members of Congress including Muslim congressional representatives Andre Carson of Indiana and Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Democratic Party leaders Rep. John Conyers of Michigan and Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey.
Posted  September 8, 2009
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Footnote: Where Obama and all of his followers Are Wrong
If one attempted to stir a container of gasoline with a lighted match all rational people would avoid such a maneuver to avoid the disastrous outcome.  And with the lit match identified as either Christianity or Islam the above procedure could be accomplished if someone simply blew out the match...  Is the lit match Christian or Islam? ...one way or another the match will have to be blown out.  Is this what is meant by, "East is east and west is west and never the two shall meet."? ~ N. E. Hooben
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.



Excuse Me While I Interrupt This Program

“An Attempt To Replace The State”: Mexico’s President Joins Me In My Call To View Mexico As In The Throes Of An Insurgency, Not A Drug War
Posted By Pat Dollard.

554175831

Why should this concern you? Because this Iraq-style insurgency has crossed the border, and started here…and, as you will see below, the U.S. Drug Intelligence Center, an arm of the NIS, describes Mexico’s insurgents as “The single greatest threat to the United States”

Excuse me while I interrupt this program! The single greatest threat to the United States is Barack Husein Obama followed by the 111th Congress. Now back to the regularly scheduled program. ~ Norman E. Hooben

Los Angeles Times:

Reporting from Mexico City —

Nearly four years after President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown against drug traffickers, the cartels are smuggling more narcotics into the United States, amassing bigger fortunes and extending their dominion at home with such savagery that swaths of Mexico are now in effect without authority.

The groups also are expanding their ambitions far beyond the drug trade, transforming themselves into broad criminal empires deeply involved in migrant smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in contraband such as pirated DVDs.

Undeterred by the 80,000 troops and federal police officers arrayed against them, gunmen frequently take on Mexican forces in the open. Operatives of one group, the Zetas, did so in northern Mexico this spring when they blockaded army garrisons. In June a group believed to be linked to another organization, La Familia, ambushed federal police in the western state of Michoacan, killing 12 officers in early morning light.

Since Calderon announced the offensive when he took office in December 2006, more than 28,000 people have been killed. Most of them have been traffickers, dealers and associates. But innocent civilians account for a growing portion.

Billions of dollars have been spent on the anti-drug effort with the enthusiastic backing of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Calderon and his administration say one reason progress is proving so difficult is that the problem festered far too long. They have predicted that the violence will subside by the end of the year.

But statistics, intelligence reports and interviews with Mexican and U.S. authorities over the last six months make it clear that the effort has failed to dismantle the networks or significantly slow the flow of drugs.

Scarcely a decade after Mexico took a giant step toward genuine multiparty democracy, traffickers may now pose a long-term danger to its stability. Rising chaos “requires us to change our view of the problem, that it is no longer a matter of organized crime but rather of the loss of the state,” the leading newspaper El Universal said in an editorial in June.

Calderon himself acknowledged the threat last week in comments at a national security conference: “This criminal behavior is what has changed, and become a challenge to the state, an attempt to replace the state.”

Mexican traffickers have increased their shipments of several types of narcotics north across the border, becoming titans of an industry that by some estimates earns $39 billion a year, equivalent to almost 20% of the government’s annual budget..

They have muscled aside competitors to gain control over shipments of most types of illegal drugs in the hemisphere: marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

And they are becoming increasingly important producers, a shift from an earlier age when Mexican gangs served chiefly as smugglers for South American producers. Marijuana and poppy fields have flourished for decades in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, but now production has expanded into states from Chihuahua in the north to Oaxaca in the south. Some of the world’s largest meth labs have been uncovered in Michoacan.

The Zetas and La Familia have grown into trafficking powerhouses since Calderon became president. They have altered the playing field by employing methods once unthinkable, such as beheading or dismembering rivals and then displaying the remains in squares, on street corners and in other public places.

Trafficking groups flex their muscles by hanging threatening banners from bridges, stringing up corpses or parking buses across key streets to paralyze traffic, actions that appear increasingly aimed at cowing the populace.

Drug gangs armed with military-class weapons smuggled from the United States or, as The Times has reported, left over from U.S.-backed wars in Central America now threaten or hold sway over vital industrial cities such as Monterrey. On July 15, traffickers hit another chilling milestone by detonating a car bomb in an attack on federal police officers in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city.

The cartels have diversified, grafting human trafficking onto their drug-smuggling routes, and padding their income with kidnapping, extortion and the movement of a wide range of contraband, including fake luxury products and exotic animals.

In large parts of Calderon’s home state of Michoacan, criminal groups charge businessmen to operate, essentially usurping the government’s role as tax collector. The same phenomenon occurs in states such as Tamaulipas and Coahuila on the Texas border.

This year, traffickers succeeded for the first time in shutting down major operations of Pemex, the state oil company and top source of national income.

Juan Jose Suarez Coppel, Pemex’s general director, acknowledged to a congressional committee that rampant kidnapping of workers forced the closing of oil and liquid gas plants in the Burgos Basin in northeastern Mexico, among the company’s most lucrative installations. Traffickers have been stealing oil for years, but the goal in this case was to halt production and control the region.

The kidnapped workers’ families told The Times that state officials, prosecutors and the army have proved unable or unwilling to help; hope that their relatives will return alive diminishes daily.

The spread of drug-related chaos across Mexico can be roughly gauged by the list of places the State Department says American citizens should avoid.

Two years ago, Americans were cautioned about border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. But a warning issued in May includes highways around Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, as well as the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas along the border, Durango and Sinaloa in the northwest and Michoacan on the Pacific coast.

Gun battles have spilled into the famed resort of Acapulco. The mayor of Cancun, Mexico’s top tourist destination, was arrested in May on drug-trafficking charges in the middle of his campaign for governor of the state of Quintana Roo.

An assessment of the drug threat issued early this year by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center said Mexican drug-trafficking organizations, or DTOs, “continue to represent the single greatest threat to the United States.”

Mexican cartels, with operations in more than 2,500 U.S. cities, are the only ones working in every part of the United States, it said. They have largely displaced Colombian and Italian traffickers.

“The influence of Mexican DTOs, already the dominant wholesale drug traffickers in the United States, is still expanding,” said the report, known formally as the National Drug Threat Assessment.

Cultivation and smuggling of Mexican marijuana had doubled since 2004 to an estimated 23,700 tons, it said. Production of heroin had more than quadrupled by 2008, to an estimated 41.9 tons. A separate State Department report said poppy cultivation doubled again between September 2008 and September 2009 and that cannabis production had reached its highest level since 1992.

Production of methamphetamine is also on the rise, despite the Mexican government’s efforts to crimp the flow of precursor chemicals. Its availability in the United States has hit a five-year high.

The availability of cocaine north of the border has declined, however. The U.S. drug assessment report cited several possible explanations, including major seizures by Mexico. It also cited a drop in production in Colombia and the increasing flow of cocaine to other markets.

Calderon administration officials have cited the data on cocaine as a sign they are winning the war against drug-trafficking groups.

Seizure rates for marijuana and heroin have often been higher under Calderon than under his three predecessors, according to Mexican government statistics. Yet in some cases, the Calderon record is no better, and comparisons are even less favorable when adjusted for the growth in the drug market.

Mexican forces seized 74.2 tons of cocaine during Calderon’s first two years in office. Without a record-setting 25.9-ton seizure in the Pacific port of Manzanillo in November 2007, the total would be about equal to the amount impounded in a similar period under Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, and under Ernesto Zedillo in the mid-1990s. It is far short of the 98.6 tons seized under Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1989 and 1990.

Only two top-ranking cartel leaders have been killed, Arturo Beltran Leyva and Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal. But authorities are arresting more suspects, nearly 78,000 from the start of Calderon’s term to January of this year. Of those, roughly 96% were street dealers, lookouts and other low-level helpers. But only about 2% were charged and convicted of a crime, according to official statistics. The rest remained in jail or were released.

The arrests have been unevenly distributed. Fewer than 1,000 of the 53,000 drug-trafficking arrests studied in a report this year by Edgardo Buscaglia, an international expert on organized crime and a legal scholar at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, involved people working for the Sinaloa cartel, the oldest and mightiest of the narco-empires.

Those figures have led many in Mexico to conclude that Calderon’s government is going easy on the Sinaloa traffickers, whose leader is the country’s most wanted fugitive, billionaire Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman. The motive, this argument goes, would be to reduce violence by allowing one group to essentially win. Calderon has vehemently denied favoritism.

“My government is absolutely determined to continue fighting against criminality without quarter until we put a stop to this common enemy and obtain the Mexico we want,” Calderon said in a paid, two-page message in Mexican newspapers in June.

More recently, officials have countered the idea of favoritism by pointing to the killing July 29 of Coronel, a top figure in the Sinaloa conglomerate.

For now, says Guillermo Valdes, head of the secretive national intelligence agency, Mexicans will have to accept that increasing violence is inevitable.

“We have made progress in deploying forces and in slowing down the operational capacity of organized crime,” he said in a rare public appearance this month. “But we have not achieved the objective of restoring normal living conditions in regions affected by organized crime.”

Officials and institutions remain under threat, particularly poorly protected small town mayors, city council members and police chiefs in the provinces.

A day after Calderon published his defense of his crime strategy, residents in the west-central state of Nayarit were in a near panic. Recent gun battles had left more than 30 dead and rumors circulated on the Internet that schools would be targeted.

It is a threat that would once have sounded preposterous.

No longer. The governor, Ney Gonzalez Sanchez, called an end to the school year three weeks early to prevent what he called a public “psychosis.”

Monday, August 9, 2010

From the mailbox: Wendy C., Teacher, Ambler, Pennsylvania (...she lied!)

Ref: “But I’m not a special interest. I’m a teacher.”

Lie! Teachers are one of the largest special interest groups in the country. The teacher’s union is the most powerful interest group in Pennsylvania. (see below)

Ref: “Right now, my job—along with those of my colleagues—could be in jeopardy.”
That’s your own fault and the fault of local government.
Ref: “Without federal help…” You would be following the Constitution.


Friend --

Right now, my job -- along with those of my colleagues -- could be in jeopardy.

I'm a public school teacher in Philadelphia. And, like most states across the country, Pennsylvania is facing some bad budget shortfalls.

Without federal help, a lot of teachers like me -- as well as other public servants like police officers and firefighters -- will lose their jobs. Maybe you know some of these people. Maybe it's you.

Democrats in Congress are trying to do the right thing, proposing emergency assistance for states to preserve more than 100,000 jobs like mine. They're racing back to the Capitol for an emergency session this week to pass this bill and save these jobs.

But Republicans are standing in the way. Minority Leader John Boehner is calling the bill a "payoff" to "special interests" and attacking every Democrat who is fighting for us.

But I'm not a special interest. I'm a teacher.

Can you join me in telling House Democrats that they have our support as they fight for our jobs?Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- and the entire Democratic Caucus -- have decided to rush back to Washington to make sure that hundreds of thousands of workers like me will get to keep our jobs. In addition, the bill will actually create even more job growth by closing tax loopholes for companies that ship American jobs overseas.

But the Republicans are going to do everything they can to prevent this aid.

Please stand with me, in support of Democratic leaders who are standing up for folks like me:

http://my.barackobama.com/MyJob

Thank you,

Wendy C.
Teacher
Ambler, Pennsylvania


Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee -- 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.


The American people don’t want more Washington ‘stimulus’ spending – especially in the form of a pay-off to union bosses and liberal special interests. This stunning display of tone-deafness comes at the expense of American workers, who will be hit by another job-killing tax hike because Washington Democrats can’t kick their addiction to more government ‘stimulus’ spending. Democrats should be listening to their constituents – who are asking ‘where are the jobs?’ – instead of scampering back to Washington to push through more special interest bailouts and job-killing tax hikes. ~ Congressman John Boehner

LouLou said: Teachers are "special interest". They are a major Democrat voting block. Why don't you check out the problems they are giving the new governor in New Jersey. Governor Christi.

Google: Welcome to StopTeacherStrikesCOMPREHENSIVE REPORT The teachers' union is the most powerful special interest group in Pennsylvania. Read the eye-opening report here. www.stopteacherstrikes.org/ - Cached - SimilarSpecial Interest Groups (SIGs) Special Interest Group Profiles American Federation of Teachers (AFT)











Voting Guidelines: If you vote for Obama you are not a Republican, you are not a Democrat, you ARE a Communist...therefor you are not an American

Pictured below Barack Husein Obama with Communist friends. 
There's a sudden interest in Howard Zinn's affilitation with the Communist Party even though the guy is dead but I would transpose all that curiosity to the one that really matters, Barack Husein Obama.  Intertwined with all of this publicity you should note that Joe McCarthy is exonerated for all his accusations:
Here, then, you have a direct link between Zinn and CPUSA. One of the things you can learn from M. Stanton Evans’ recent book on Joe McCarthy’s investigations, Blacklisted by History, is how deeply the FBI had penetrated CPUSA. One reason that McCarthy’s was sometimes unable to publicly substantiate his accusations was that he relied on secret information passed along by the FBI. McCarthy couldn’t identity the source of his information without compromising the FBI’s investigations, so when his critics tried to make it appear that McCarthy’s suspicions were without merit, McCarthy couldn’t simply say, “Here is the FBI file.” 
Now some of you will probably say that I was too young to understand those McCarthy hearings but I did watch several hours worth at the ripe age of 14 and I distinctly remember taking Joe's side of the story.  Joe was right all along! (That statement clearly reveals my early interest in politics although I was aware at an earlier age. link)  Meanwhile back to Zinn.
I don't expect you to read all the commentary (really, I wish you would) but just enough to make the Obama connection.  Obama as you know, or should have known was (and still is) a member of the Communist front called, "New Party" (see newspaper clipping above).  Howard Zinn was somewhat more visible in Communist circles and supported Obama's run up to the presidency.
The following links should make or brake your affiliation with Barack Husein Obama.  It's not all about Howard Zinn.  Its about the communist influence in America.

1.  Howard Zinn: Communist liar
 

3.  FBI Files Reveal Historian Howard Zinn Lied to Hide CPUSA Membership (recommended)

4.  Communist Party strategist maps out Obama's agenda

5.  Barack Obama's Surrogate Father: Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis...

 Norman E. Hooben - August 9, 2010

Sunday, August 8, 2010

The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. ...Roger G. is still on watch.

Our dear friend Roger Gardner (1936-2009) developed and maintained one of the most respected blog sites of its kind.  RadarSite was named after a real radar site in Labrador...Roger was stationed there sometime during the late 50's and the mission, among other watches, was to keep tabs on Russian aircraft that skirted the North American coastline.  As with many other political decisions Roger's former radar site was decommissioned (closed) for whatever reasons the politicians rendered.  Now that we have weak politicians running the show, the Russians are back up to their old tricks and may be testing our resolve, but I have a feeling that Roger is still on watch (he must have signalled the Canadians). ~ Norman E. Hooben
ps: RadarSite continues to be updated by his friends, check it out http://radarsite.blogspot.com/

The following from: Once Upon A Time In The West

Communist Bloc Military Updates: Canadian fighter jets repel Russian bombers near Labrador coast, Ottawa's DM: Moscow gave no advance notice

This past Wednesday Canadian fighter jets repelled two Russian strategic bombers near the coast of Labrador. "The response as always was a rapid, effective deterrent," explained Canada's Defence Minister Peter MacKay, adding: "They were in the buffer zone. They did not give us any advance notice. We certainly weren't aware of what if any weapons were on board." One senior Canadian official described the attempted Russian incursion as "not the usual s--t."
posted by Perilous Times
_______________
Update...or rather a reminder:
Why did we not pay attention to this (see story below)? (If I simply said,"This is a must read." would you have read it?)  As with all previous warnings by this blog and others, to say to Americans, "Wake up America" is like asking your dog to call you on your cell phone when he's hungry.  The so-called Cold War is not over and sooner or later will become a Hot War in America's backyard if we don't wake up soon. The following was written back in 2006 and should have alerted all Americans...it didn't then, but maybe it will in 2010!  Yes, the Russians are coming in a disguise...as Islam! ~ Norman E. Hooben

Russian Footprints (Source: National Review)What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in Lebanon?
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”
Today’s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general. Israel humiliated Egypt and Syria, whose bellicose governments were being run by Soviet razvedka (Russian for “foreign intelligence”) advisers, whereupon the Kremlin decided to arm Israel’s enemy neighbors, the Palestinians, and draw them into a terrorist war against Israel.

General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Between 1968 and 1978, when I broke with Communism, the security forces of Romania alone sent two cargo planes full of military goodies every week to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. Since the fall of Communism the East German Stasi archives have revealed that, in 1983 alone, its foreign intelligence service sent $1,877,600 worth of AK-47 ammunition to Lebanon. According to Vaclav Havel, Communist Czechoslovakia shipped 1,000 tons of the odorless explosive Semtex-H (which can’t be detected by sniffer dogs) to Islamic terrorists — enough for 150 years.
The terrorist war per se came into action at the end of 1968, when the KGB transformed airplane hijacking — that weapon of choice for September 11, 2001 — into an instrument of terror. In 1969 alone there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide, carried out by the KGB-financed PLO. In 1971, when I was visiting Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office, he called my attention to a sea of red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on the wall. Each flag represented a captured plane. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,” he claimed.
The political “success” occasioned by hijacking Israeli airplanes prompted the KGB’s 13th Department, known in our intelligence jargon as the “Department for Wet Affairs” (wet being a euphemism for bloody), to expand into organizing “public executions” of Jews in airports, train stations, and other public places. In 1969 Dr. George Habash, a KGB puppet, explained: “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.”
By the end of the 1960s, the KGB was deeply involved in mass terrorism against Jews, carried out by various Palestinian client organizations. Here are some terrorist actions for which the KGB took credit while I was still in Romania: November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.
In 1971, the KGB launched operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at destabilizing Western Europe. The Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and other KGB-sponsored Marxist organizations unleashed a wave of anti-American terrorism that shook Western Europe. Richard Welsh, the CIA station chief in Athens, was shot to death in Greece on December 23, 1975. General Alexander Haig, commander of NATO in Brussels was injured in a bomb attack that damaged his armored Mercedes beyond repair in June 1979. General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, barely survived a rocket attack in September 1981. Alfred Herrhausen, the pro-American chairman of Deutsche Bank, was killed during a grenade attack in November 1989. Hans Neusel, a pro-American state secretary in the West German interior ministry, was wounded during an assassination attempt in July 1990.
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States (emphasis mine Storm'n Norm'n). No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.
According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
The codename of this operation was “SIG” (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments”), and was within my Romanian service’s “sphere of influence,” for it embraced Libya, Lebanon, and Syria. SIG was a large party/state operation. We created joint ventures to build hospitals, houses, and roads in these countries, and there we sent thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world.
In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service, the DIE — along with other East European sister services — to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our “sphere of influence.” Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence  community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world.
In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated “documentary” paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.
We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles. It is hard to say what exactly are the lasting effects of operation SIG. But the cumulative effect of disseminating hundreds of thousands of Protocols in the Islamic world and portraying Israel and the United States as Islam’s deadly enemies was surely not constructive.
Post-Soviet Russia has been transformed in unprecedented ways, but the widely popular belief that the nefarious Soviet legacy was rooted out at the end of the Cold War the same way that Nazism was rooted out with the conclusion of World War II, is not yet correct.

In the 1950s, when I was chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler’s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded, and the Nazis removed from public office. None of these things has happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although the Soviet Union’s Communist regime killed over a hundred million people. Most Soviet institutions have been left in place, having simply been given new names, and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Communist state. In 2000, former officers of the KGB and the Soviet Red Army took over the Kremlin and Russia’s government.
Germany would have never become a democracy with Gestapo and SS officers running the show.
On September 11, 2001, President Vladimir Putin became the first leader of a foreign country to express sympathy to President George W. Bush for what he called “these terrible tragedies of the terrorist attacks.” Soon, however, Putin began moving his country back into the terrorist business. In March 2002, he quietly reinstituted sales of weapons to Iran’s terrorist dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, and engaged Russia in the construction of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor at Bushehr, with a uranium conversion facility able to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Hundreds of Russian technicians also started helping the government of Iran to develop the Shahab-4 missile, with a range of over 1,250 miles, which can carry a nuclear or germ warhead anywhere in the Middle East and Europe.
Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had already announced that nothing could stop his country from building nuclear weapons, and he stated that Israel was a “disgraceful stain [on] the Islamic world” that would be eliminated. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to eradicate Nazism and its anti-Semitic terrorism. Now we are facing Islamic fascism and nuclear anti-Semitic terrorism. The United Nations can offer no hope. It has not yet even been able to define terrorism.
A proverb says that one fire drives out another. The Kremlin may be our best hope. In May 2002, the NATO foreign ministers approved a partnership with Russia, the alliance’s former enemy. The rest of the world said that the Cold War was over and done with. Kaput. Now Russia wants to be admitted to the World Trade Organization. For that to happen, the Kremlin should be firmly told first to get out of the terrorism business.
We should also help the Russians realize that it is in their own interest to make President Ahmadinejad renounce nuclear weapons. He is an unpredictable tyrant who may also consider Russia an enemy at some point in time. “If Iran gets weapons of mass destruction, deliverable by a missile, that’s going to be a problem,” President Bush correctly stated. “That’s going to be a problem for all of us, including Russia.”
Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.