The Algerian government has also scored a significant victory against local terrorists, killing Nabil Sahraoui, head of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). Along with him, several other senior terrorists were killed, including Abdi Abdelaziz aka "Okacha the paratrooper" (aka, if I am not too confused, Abderrezak al-Para).
GSPC is an associate of GIA, openly supporting al-Qaeda. The group scored a nice ransom from Germany by kidnapping and releasing Europeanhostages in Sahara last year.
Algerian Islamists have been particularly blood thirsty even by terrorist standards, but have been losing the insurgency against the military government the last two years.
Melanie Phillips chimes in with criticism of the 9/11 commission and in particular the dishonest media reporting. After listing some of the authoritative evidence of contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq, she asks the question the media should have asked:
What is the point of an inquiry into al-Qa'eda that doesn't even consider such evidence?
Bill Clinton's administration was absolutely certain that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qa'eda. It was a given. That is surely why, after September 11, Pentagon officials were obsessed with Iraq. Whether Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was irrelevant; if he was aiding al-Qa'eda's terror, he had to be stopped. But this has been obliterated from the collective memory in order to place the most malign interpretation possible on the motives of the Bush administration.
That's the only game in town. Bush, not Bin Laden, is the enemy. To leftists like Michael Moore, murdering terrorists are revolutionary heroes, and this view is going mainstream with astonishing effect.
Via InstaPundit, Tom Gross exposes the BBC's heavy slant towards Arabs and against Israel in its Middle East coverage. It goes way beyond a slight bias:
Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
Steven Den Beste has received a very important article about terrorism through email, supposedly from a talk given by one Haim Harari. Steven has failed to confirm a source for it, but posted it in his blog with an explanation about its origin.
The article explains very well how Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and everything to do with the repressive regimes and destructive extremist religions in the Muslim world.
The researchers then observed the animals' behavior as they were introduced to a variety of potential partners. They found that meadow voles treated with gene therapy acted more like their prairie vole counterparts--they spent more time huddling near their original companion. According to study co-author Larry J. Young of Emory University, the results provide evidence “in a comparatively simple animal model, that changes in the activity of a single gene profoundly can change a fundamental social behavior of animals within a species.”
If they ever find something like this for humans, men better start watching what women put in their food.
Studies like this one really makes me wonder. How much of what we think is "us" is really just the result of basic chemical processes that would make our behaviour change completely if some random occurrence just increased one of the ingredients or decreased another?
"On Friday, the leader Abdulaziz al-Muqrin was martyred along with three others...in an ambush carried out by the soldiers of the despot (in Saudi Arabia). They opened fire on them in a sudden way which led to their killing," said a statement attributed to al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.
This is actually a serious blow to al-Qaeda in the kingdom, in a religious and ideological sense its most important region, and thus to the whole terrorist network. Al-Muqrin (picture) was also a member of al-Qaeda's top leadership, the Shura Majlis, the board of directors where Bin Laden himself functions as the chairman of the board.
It would be wrong to pretend the death of one individual is a fatal blow to a decentalised terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda, but while it clearly doesn't lack recruits and volunteers in Saudi Arabia, capable leaders and operatives are likely to be few and far between. From all evidence, Al-Muqrin was such a nasty combination of a totally ruthless murderer and a very capable strategist and organisator.
Apparently the early incompetence of Saudi security forces made him too self confident. And those bullet holes could hardly have happened to a nastier guy.
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