War on Terror: May 2007 Archives

The Judge Report passes along this news item:

Democrat John Edwards Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a "global War on Terror," calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

Mr. Going's response: A photo he took of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. And video of John "F-Troop" Edwards on the O'Reilly Factor from October 2001. In response to O'Reilly's question about how Democrats would respond if the war widens to "maybe Libya, maybe Syria, maybe the Sudan, maybe even Iraq," Edwards pledged that Democrats would be "united with the President throughout this war on terrorism."

Meanwhile, former Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Calvey is happy that Congress has voted to feed him and his colleagues in Iraq for a few more months:

Very decent of Congress to let us serving here in Iraq have bread and bullets, don't you think?

Looks like the Democrats in Congress are not so principled about the war as they previously claimed.

If they really think the war is immoral, then why cave in on the war funding bill?

The answer is that for many of them, this is all a big political game.

More Edwards:

SATIRE: Scrappleface reports on Edwards' plan for Universal Hair Care.

NOT SATIRE: Edwards denies involvement in $400 haircut: “Other people arrange these things, and I wasn’t personally involved in it.”

Joel Henry Hinrichs III, the OU student who blew himself up outside a packed football stadium on Oct. 1, 2005, was apparently not the only one in his family with violent tendencies. From the Nov. 23, 2006, Colorado Springs Gazette:

Thomas Carlisle Hinrichs, a 25-year-old Pikes Peak Community College student, says he thinks federal officers have harassed him since the Oct. 1, 2005, suicide of his brother, Joel, according to court documents.

He allegedly considered waiting at the FBI office to ambush an agent and also thought about killing his father and high school principal.

Hinrichs was arrested Nov. 15 at Pikes Peak Community College's Rampart Range campus with a Romanian-made assault rifle, bulletproof vest, military helmet, hunting knife and ammunition in the trunk of his car, according to Colorado Springs police.

The arrest came after his father, Joel Henry Hinrichs Jr., told police that Thomas had assaulted him and that he feared his son, whose mental health had deteriorated in the past year, would kill him.

This is not a new story, but I don't remember reading about it at the time. Big hat tip to Tulsa Chiggers for catching it.

Julia Gorin has been keeping a close eye on the story of the Fort Dix Six, the young Muslim Albanian men who were plotting an attack on the New Jersey army base. She has also been reminding her readers of some forgotten and unpleasant realities about U. S. support for a Muslim terrorist organization with ties to Osama Bin Laden.

It's not Julia's usual stock in trade, and here's how she explains her interest:

People often ask me how a comedian embarked on a Balkans-watching odyssey. When I woke up on March 24th to hear that the United States of America was dropping bombs on Europe on behalf of Muslims claiming oppression — in order to keep the conflict from spreading — it struck me as funnier than any joke I could write. When you help Muslims with their wars, it doesn’t keep the conflict from spreading. It spreads Islam. And it spreads to you.

Her sketch of the history of American involvement in Yugoslavia (from the same entry) deserves to be quoted at length:

I am sorry to report that, while Bill Clinton delivered the death blows to Yugoslavia, we started on this path with George Bush Sr., whose ambassador Warren Zimmerman flew to Sarajevo in 1992 to advise Izetbegovic to remove his signature from the Lisbon Agreement that all three parties signed precisely to avoid the civil wars that ensued. Zimmerman assured Izetbegovic that the U.S. would have his back if he wanted an independent Muslim Bosnia.

The rape, slaughter and dismemberment of Yugoslavia was a bipartisan enterprise from Day One, and it remains so. What makes the Clinton administration’s role more nefarious is that the first Bush administration was still operating on a Cold War mentality, in which any vestige of Communism was still a target — and Yugoslavia stayed fatally comfortable with the apparatchik system too long. Meanwhile, Islam wasn’t yet known to be the biggest international threat.

By 1999, however, the Islamic threat was a known entity and there were already two international warrants out for Osama bin Laden, including for the bombing of the U.S. embassiess in Africa. This is also why reasonable comparisons between our unholy alliance in Kosovo and our 1980s alliance in Afghanistan fall short. The Soviet Union was in fact an enemy and an international menace; the Serbs aren’t and never were — but Islamic terrorism was and is.

As well, while George H. W. Bush bumbled through the confusion that is the Balkans, Bill Clinton knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that his numbers of dead and displaced in Kosovo were a fabrication, but he needed a vanity war in his last two years in office so that the word “Lewinsky” wouldn’t be the last thing associated with his presidency. Outrageously, he, his wife, Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke and other Clintonistas continue, even eight years later, to boastfully lie to Americans that we “prevented a genocide” in Europe with our “successful war” in Kosovo, where not a single American life was lost.

It helps when you’re fighting for the enemy.

Read all of Julia Gorin's May 2007 and April 2007 archives for more on this topic.

MORE: Political correctness almost discouraged the Circuit City clerk from tipping off authorities about the terrorist training video tape he converted for the Fort Dix Six:

When the teen and another employee went into a back room and began the conversion of the tape, they saw a group of bearded men wearing "fundamentalist attire" and shooting "big, f-ing guns," the teen later told co-workers.

Throughout the 90-minute-long tape, above the booming gunfire at a Pennsylvania target range, the jihadists could be heard screaming "God is great!"

The two employees "freaked out," their co-worker recalled.

At first, the teenage clerk didn't know what to do, his pal said.

"Dude, I just saw some really weird s-," he frantically told his co-worker. "I don't know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?"

The fellow employee tried to calm his friend and told him that if what he saw terrified him so much, he should tell the police.

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Karol remembers two of the Fort Dix Six:

When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.

How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother's best friend's mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn't seem the most likely.

They had been in the country illegally for 23 years, and despite numerous traffic citations, they were never detected, much less deported:

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan "Anthony" or "Tony" Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir "Elvis" Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in "sanctuary cites," where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

The source said there is no record of them entering by way of a regular border crossing, so they are investigating whether they were smuggled into the country.

So the folks who swim Rio Bravo near Brownsville aren't just Mexicans on their way to roof houses in Jenks. Some of them are Albanian Muslims from Yugoslavia who wind up living in Brooklyn and plotting attacks on U. S. Army facilities.

Julia Gorin asks why the media -- even right-wing columnists -- are so squeamish about saying that these alleged terrorists are Albanian Muslims, and she answers her own question:

The answer is that the Balkans narrative MUST remain what it is: Serbs=bad. Muslims=victim.

The pro-Muslim mainstream media aside, even conservatives jumped onto the anti-Serb bandwagon starting in the 90s -- because conservatives are often accused of being anti-Muslim. So the one bone they can toss the Muslims is to take the typical bombastic and outraged stance about what was supposedly done to Muslims in the Balkans. (Recall “Hannity & Colmes” condemning the “evil on display” in the widely circulated execution video of six Bosnian fighters by Bosnian-Serb paramilitary. Of course, you won’t recall the far more graphic images of dead Serbs -- for those are never shown.)

Never mind that the aforementioned executions were precipitated by mutilated, burned, decapitated, dismembered Serbs of all ages, whose bodies were stuffed down wells near Srebrenica, the site of “the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.” And that’s not even mentioning the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo for decades, as was reported in The NY Times, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post throughout the 80s.

If you want to know more precisely what these Albanian Muslim illegal immigrants were up to, Michelle Malkin has an excerpt of the complaint against the Fort Dix Six, and a link to a PDF of the full complaint.

UPDATE 5/17/2007: Newsweek reports that the INS knew that the Duka family was here illegally for 16 years and did nothing:

As a result, for nearly two decades, American authorities were aware that members of the family were inside the United States, and that they had probably come here illegally. While the asylum application was under consideration, the government effectively suspended any effort to deport family members as illegal aliens, the source familiar with their immigration history said…

However, another official familiar with the Duka case history said that the family asylum claim got stuck for 16 years at INS because of a bureaucratic paperwork backlog of more than 100,000 asylum applications. The official said asylum claims routinely sat in “filing cabinets” for a decade or more.

(Hat tip: Hot Air.)