Mumbai Massacre

MSNBC is reporting that only 3 Americans have been injured in the Mumbai attacks; yet, yesterday evening, CNN was reporting that Americans and Britons were being targeted by terrorists. Odd mismatch, in my opinion.

We have to be very careful when watching news organizations as the constant stream of half-information and misinformation can confuse even them.

82 Tourists Murdered in India

Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station in coordinated attacks across India's financial capital Wednesday night, killing at least 82 people and taking Westerners hostage, police said. A group of suspected Muslim militants claimed responsibility.

Terrorist's House Must Be Destroyed

Hours after three people were killed when a terrorist in a bulldozer went on a rampage in downtown Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the attacker's east Jerusalem home must be destroyed.

Olmert held consultations in his office following the attack and Jerusalem officials said that the prime minister was expected to discuss the possibility of destroying the terrorist's home with Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann. He is also set to discuss taking away National Insurance Institute (NII) rights from the terrorist's family.

Following the attack, US President George W. Bush phoned Olmert and offered his condolences to the Israeli people.

Olmert received news of the attack while in the Knesset plenum. Incidentally, the Knesset approved the first reading of a bill to take away rights and even Israeli citizenship from terrorist's families.

Hamas: "A Natural Reaction To The Daily Aggression Against Our People"

MSNBC reports:

JERUSALEM - A Palestinian man plowed an enormous construction vehicle into cars, buses and pedestrians on a busy street Wednesday, killing at least three people and injuring at least 45 before he was shot dead by an off-duty soldier.

Traffic was halted and hundreds of people fled in panic through the streets in the heart of downtown Jerusalem as medics treated the injured.

Three Palestinian militant groups took responsibility for the attack, but Israeli police referred to the attacker as a "terrorist" acting on his own.

The attack took place in front of a building housing the offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets. A TV camera captured the huge front loader crushing a vehicle and an off-duty soldier killing the perpetrator by shooting him in the head several times at point-blank range as onlookers screamed.

A half-dozen cars were flattened and others were overturned by the Caterpillar vehicle. A bus was overturned and another bus was heavily damaged. Israel's national rescue service confirmed three deaths, and the bodies lay motionless on the ground covered in plastic.

A woman sprinkled water over a baby's bloodied face, a rescue worker stroked the hair of a dazed elderly pedestrian and a loved one raised the bleeding leg of a woman sitting outside the overturned bus.

"I saw the bulldozer smash the car with its shovel. He smashed the guy sitting in the driver's seat," said Yaakov Ashkenazi, an 18-year-old seminary student.

The attack occurred in an area where Jerusalem is building a new train system. The project has turned many parts of the city into a construction zone.

Wednesday's attack represented a departure from militants' previous methods, which were mostly suicide bombings and shootings.

The three organizations that took responsibility for the attack included the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, which is affiliated with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The other two are the Galilee Freedom Battalion, which is suspected of being affiliated with Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a fringe left-wing militant group.

The Hamas militant group, which runs the Gaza Strip and is currently maintaining a fragile cease-fire with Israel, said it did not carry out the attack but nevertheless praised it.

"We consider it as a natural reaction to the daily aggression and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank and all over the occupied lands," said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.

A Nation of Terrorists?

My daughter called me from Chicago early this afternoon and told me that while walking in the downtown area near Union Station, she walked into a rally protesting the United States' support of Kosovo's declaration of independence. She said the banners proclaimed that the United States is a nation of terrorists.

Feeling a bit alarmed, I suggested that she "get out of there."

She laughed into her cell phone, and agreed.

Heavy Terrorist Losses in Northern Iraq

Turkey said its ground forces had crossed the border [into Northern Iraq] to tackle [Kurdish] rebels late on Thursday after an air and artillery bombardment.

PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the offensive is limited in scale and troops will return as soon as possible.

The UN secretary general and the US have urged Turkey to show restraint in the offensive [against the PKK.]

A Turkish army statement said: "It has been understood from preliminary information that the terrorists have suffered heavy losses under long-range weapons fire and air strikes."

'The Fox' Is Killed

..."The Fox" (or) Mugniyah, who by the mid-1980s was being hunted by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies for his role in a string of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings, would choose a different safe house—and a different persona—for each encounter. Sometimes he would show up wearing a Western-style business suit, other times a simple pair of blue jeans, but never a uniform that would betray him as one of the guerrilla force's most prominent tacticians. "It wasn't just plastic surgery," says Mohammad Yassin, a Palestinian leader in Lebanon who met frequently with Mugniyah during the 1980s and 1990s. "It was masks, it was mustaches, it was hair." Sometimes the militant would playfully pinch his own cheek, signaling that it was really him. Such meetings continued, intermittently, for nearly 20 years. Then, one day in the late 1990s, according to Yassin, "he just disappeared completely."

Somebody found Mugniyah last Tuesday night, as he pulled open the door of his black Mitsubishi Pajero in a wealthy suburb of Damascus. The force of a powerful car bomb flung his body into the lobby of a nearby apartment complex, severing his limbs and showering the street with glass. "The brother commander Hajj Imad Mugniyah became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis," the Hizbullah-controlled Manar TV station reported on Wednesday morning. Israeli officials issued something of a nondenial denial: "Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said. "We have nothing further to add." The truth is, it may never be known who pressed the detonator; by the time of his death Mugniyah had collected many enemies. The FBI had placed Mugniyah on its 25 Most Wanted list after the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, offering a $5 million bounty for his capture. "There are many intel agencies who had a score to settle with this guy—including the U.S.," says Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad official. "This guy had it coming to him."

Online Questions for Al-Qaida Reveal Terrorists Frustrated and Wanting More Terror Against the U.S.

Judging by hundreds of questions submitted online to al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, it seems the terror network's self-proclaimed supporters are as much in the dark about the its operations and plans as Western analysts and intelligence agencies.

Al Qaeda's No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri...was supposedly taking questions via the Internet.

Among their concerns: Where will it strike next? Does it control small militant groups in the Mideast and Europe? Why hasn't it hit America again?

Al Qaeda's media arm, Al-Sahab, announced last month that Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would take questions from the public in an "online interview."

More than 900 entries, some with multiple questions, were posted on a militant Web site before the January 16 deadline...
...The vast majority of questioners, identified only by their computer usernames, appeared to be supporters of al Qaeda or the jihadi cause, often expressing praise for "our beloved sheik" and "the lion of jihad, Sheik Osama."

Many appeared frustrated that al Qaeda is not doing more.

"When we will see the men of al Qaeda waging holy war in Palestine? Because frankly our situation has become very bad," wrote one, with the username "Seeking the Path."

"As for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," he asked, "are there efforts to revive jihadi action there after the blows that hurt us?"

Another, signed "Osama the Lion," asked: "Why doesn't al Qaeda open a front in Egypt, where there are wide opportunities and fertile ground for drawing in mujahedeen?"

Another, called "Knight of Islam," asked, "We are awaiting a strike against American soil. Why has that not been done? Why are the Jews in the world not struck?"

Former Congressman Indicted for Conspiracy to Support Terrorists

LARA JAKES JORDAN (AP) writes:

WASHINGTON - A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.
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Mark Deli Siljander, a Michigan Republican when he was in the House, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

Elaborate and Secret Detentions in Pakistan

International / Asia Pacific
Picture of Secret Detentions Emerges in Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: December 19, 2007
Pakistani intelligence agencies have released nearly 100 suspected terrorists in an apparent effort to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system.

Rantings of Matthew Murray

Matthew Murray reportedly ranted prior to his attacks in Colorado at Youth With A Mission in Denver and New Life Church in Colorado Springs:

"You Christians brought this on yourselves," Murray reportedly wrote on a website for people who have left Pentecostal and fundamentalist religious organisations, shortly before the second of his two attacks.

"I'm coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. ... God, I can't wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don't care if I live or die in the shoot-out.

"All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

Source: KUSA TV

Matthew Murray, in these writings, sounds like a terrorist to me, a person motivated by hatred of others' religious beliefs. Someone who has decided that he has a right, perhaps even a responsibility to set himself above others. He sounds like someone who has put himself in the place of God, deciding who has the right to live and who must die.

Flash and Aftermath of Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima

ACLU Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition

Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition (12/6/2005)

Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where -- in the CIA's view -- federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone. Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism have been transported to detention and interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere. In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt."