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11. september 2005
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The terrorists got perfect timing for a threatening video handed to the ABC News in Pakistan today, making specific threats against Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.
ABC News reported that the man is believed to be Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American from California purported to be an al-Qaida member and wanted by the FBI. The CIA said Sunday it was aware of the report but had no immediate comment about the tape's authenticity.
Counterterror officials believe Gadahn also may be the person on a 75-minute video given to ABC News last year in Pakistan.
The tape was aired on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The man on the tape, wearing a black turban with most of his face covered, calls the attacks of four years ago "blessed events" before making a threat against the U.S.
"Yesterday, London and Madrid. Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Allah willing. And this time, don't count on us demonstrating restraint and compassion," the man says during the 11-minute tape.
Pakistan's security services say they have no knowledge of whether Gadahn is in the country.
10:24:48 PM 
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Jack Kelly writes, against conventional wisdom, that the federal response to the Katrina disaster was not at all slow.
Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.
After summarising the enormous relief effort and the logistical challenges involved, Kelly quotes a blogger who chides the mainstream media for its ignorance and dishonesty.
Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:
"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.
"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.
"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.
"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."
"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.
Kelly concludes:
Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.
The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.
Most people wouldn't know, would they?
10:08:21 PM
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Alvaro R. Morales Villa of New Orleans personally experienced the anxious wait, the storm, the calm, the second part of the storm, the false sense of relief amid destruction, the flooding, the looting and mindless destruction, the incoming aid and the lying mainstream media. He has documented it all in this great series of photographs with comments. This is the real story you shouldn't miss.
Hat tip to my friend Terry.
Update: Morales' gallery is now here.
8:06:37 PM
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Mark Steyn is a pessimist on this day.
On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost. When the media look at those Bush approval ratings -- currently hovering around 40 percent -- they carelessly assume the 60 percent is some unified Kerry-Hillary-Cindy bloc. It's not. It undoubtedly includes people who are enthusiastic for whacking America's enemies, but who don't quite get the point of this somewhat desultory listless phase. If the "war" is now a push for democratization and liberalization in Middle East dictatorships, that's a worthy cause but not one sufficiently primal to keep the attention of the American people. You'd have had the same problem in the Second World War if four years after Pearl Harbor we were postponing D-Day in order to nation-build in the Solomon Islands.
Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. To those on the right who scoffed that you can't declare war on a technique, I pointed out that Britain's Royal Navy fought wars against slavery and piracy and were largely successful. Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had. [...]
Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper. [...]
So four years on we're winning in the Middle East and Central Asia, floundering in Europe and North America.
Can half the nation still win the war if the second half is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to the whole project?
7:14:14 PM
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Four minutes of silence and a solemn ceremony of remembrance of the victims marks four years since the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center twin towers in New York.
In New Orleans, New York police volunteering to aid the hurricane victims had their own short ceremony before they went back to work.
7:03:52 PM
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Tony Blair's advisers tells him to give in to Islamic anti-Semitism.
Advisers appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims.
They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.
The draft proposals have been prepared by committees appointed by Blair to tackle extremism. He has promised to respond to the plans, but the threat to the Holocaust Day has provoked a fierce backlash from the Jewish community.
Holocaust Day was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler. It is marked each year on January 27.
If a Holocaust memorial is offensive to Muslims, that is an obvious symptom of the same problem that leads to widespread Islamist terrorism, and abandoning it would certainly not help. The antisemittism of so many Muslims is naively excused, when the same mentality among Europeans is rightfully regarded as a throwback to the sentiments that caused the Holocaust in the first place.
I think and hope this suggestion is dead in the water to begin with, but that it is seriously suggested tells us that these Muslim advisers are totally tone-deaf to the sentiments of the society they live in.
4:20:35 PM
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Raymond Kristiansen, from Bergen and Norway, made the front page of the BBC News Technology section yesterday.
Raymond is vlogging, as video blogging is called (doesn't a 'vlog' sound like Dracula's blog or something?) now during the election campaign. He is an active member of the youth wing of Norway's Liberal Party (which I will probably vote for, btw), and blogs and campaigns in Norwegian here.
The election is on Monday, and while opinion polls have mostly given a non-socialist lead over the last days, it is really too close to call. There are also some interesting scenarios where the Coastal Party (started by whalers!) or the communist party will hold the deciding vote in a split parliament.
Opinion polls also say that a near-unprecedented number of people will vote in the election. Fully 91 percent of those polled in the latest opinion poll (which incidentally had a slim socialist majority) say they "definitely" will vote. In 2001, the election participation was 75.5 percent, an absolute post WWII-low. This time, it will certainly be higher, if not in the 90s.
3:04:57 AM
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Sweden has a lot of radical feminists, the 70s marxist relic who talk about the 'patriarchy' without blushing, and they have substantial political power, even the fringe part that condems men as "animals" or "walking dildos", or believe a satanist male pedophile conspiracy is secretly running the country. Now they want more power, and to that end they have founded the Feminist Initiative, a political party intended to run for parliament. On the programme we find not only old socialist ideas like the 6-hour work day, but also the abolition of marriage.
FI founder and board member, Tiina Rosenberg, told the paper that the group wants to create "a modern concept which does not favour and promote couples and heterosexual norms".
"The history of marriage is not about love and living together, it's about ownership," she added.
One example of people who would benefit from such a proposal, according to FI, is a divorced couple who have new partners and everybody wants to take financial responsibility for the children.
But Rosenberg, a professor in gender studies at Stockholm University, also suggested that the notion of couples is, as far as the Feminist Initiative is concerned, outdated.
"In a free country you can't stick your nose into who people choose to have sex with," she told SvD.
However, Tiina Rosenberg made it clear that that does not mean that anything goes in FI's Brave New World:
"A man who lives with eight women in a patriarchal structure, where the man decides and the women obey - that's not what we're aiming for," said Rosenberg.
The party also wants to copy Norway's ridiculous law that forces gender quotes on the boards of privately owned companies.
2:12:09 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2005; 12:24:17.
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