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12. september 2006
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Syria's security services have apparently repelled an armed attack on the US embassy in Damascus:
A bomb attack on the US embassy in Damascus has been foiled by local security forces, Syrian officials say.
Attackers tried to drive two cars at the embassy compound but three men were killed by guards and a fourth was captured, the interior minister said.
One car bomb went off but a second failed, he told Syrian state TV, adding that it was being examined for clues.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington appreciated Syria's efforts to protect the embassy.
More details:
Armed Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in a brazen attack Tuesday, the government said. Four people were killed, including three of the assailants. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but an al-Qaida offshoot group was suspected,Syria's ambassador to the United States said.
No Americans were hurt in the attack, in which the militants used automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives.
The al-Qaida offshoot group, called Jund al-Sham, has been blamed for several attacks in Syria in recent years, the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, said in comments to CNN.
One Syrian policeman was apparently killed in the attack [correction: or three, see below].
Update: David Schenker is not convinced all details are correct.
At present, it’s unclear as to whether these reports are entirely true. Indeed, according to some eyewitness reports, four armed men attacked the embassy with automatic weapons and grenades, and one of the men blew himself up with an explosive belt, igniting a nearby car. Two of the remaining attackers were killed and one was injured and detained by Syrian authorities. Several Syrian civilians were wounded and three Syrian security officers were killed. No US embassy personnel were reported killed or wounded.
The quickly foiled attack would be very convenient for a Syrian regime hard pressed by the US over the Hariri killing, the Hezbollah support and for allowing Jihadis to infiltrate Iraq.
Update 2: Walid Phares openly states that the Assad regime both allowed the attack and staged the protection.
The strategic objective of the Assad regime today is to deter Washington from further pressures against Syria, in the form of the Hariri investigation, the US pressure through the Security Council to deploy forces along the borders with Lebanon and the American ongoing support to the anti-Syrian Government in Beirut. Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis is in dire need to "contain" Washington's pressures and gain time, as much possible of time. Why would they need time? Because they have to rearm Hezbollah, crumble the Lebanese Government, and face off with UN pressures on the nuclear.
To obtain this result, Phares argues, the Assad regime orchestrated the whole event.
Certainly plausible, but requires a bit of evidence. Sometimes convenient coincidences happen.
4:50:12 PM 
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I have earlier posted about the now quite famous Newsweek article from April 1975 titled "The Cooling World." Climate alarmists allege that the "global cooling" scare of the 1970s was really minuscule. Well, with new technology comes new opportunities. Google News Archive, while still only indexing a fraction of newspaper articles in the pre-electronic era, actually finds quite a few articles on global cooling from the 1970s. Here are quotations from a few of them:
"Is The Ice Coming? Apropos of the weather we have been having, scientists claim a new Ice Age is in the making. A record-setting winter season which has upset plans and people with its degree of severity has touched off speculation based on present data. SCIENTISTS KNOW that over the last 30 years the temperature of the world has dropped by one-third to one-half a degree Centigrade. Such a 'small dip doesn't seem like any- thing to get overly excited about except when it is noted that a temperature drop of only four or five degrees years ago brought on the Ice Age. Some scientists contend the global cooling trend is directly related to air pollution. If pollution is allowed to continue at its present pace, an Ice Age climate is predicted in 240 years." (The Daily Times, January 29, 1970)
"Some say this may already be happening. It could come from any of these causes, or some of them, or none. Scientific opinions differ and solid information is scarce. But whatever its cause, many of the scientists who concern themselves with studying the earth's climate balance and the glaciers that once covered much of the Northern Hemisphere are no longer asking whether another great glaciation is on the way; they are asking rather: When? And why? What, if anything, we ought to be doing about it. And what signals from the past we ought to be learning to read so we can at least anticipate what is to come. The threat, according to scientists from a score of institutions who gathered at Brown University in Providence, R.I., recently to share information on "The End of the Present is not that miles-thick ice sheets are about to come sweeping down out of the north, returning us instantaneously to an ice-age climate. It is rather that there are already signs the earth is cooling in a cycle similar to those that heralded earlier great glaciations." (The Iowa City Press-Citizen on Saturday, April 14, 1973)
"Climate specialists said a global cooling trend has lowered the earth's temperature 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1945 and may spread drought conditions through the semi arid regions'of Asia and South America. The warning flags of inevitable crisis are up." (The Lethbridge Herald on Thursday, June 13, 1974)
"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. [...] Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth." ("Another Ice Age?" in Time Magazine, Jun 24, 1974)
"Their sophistcated technique showed that the sulfur in the SST exhausts would double the dust layer in the stratosphere and block enough sunlight to reduce the average global temperature by 0.5 degrees centigrade. This would take the world back to the colder climates of the late 19th or even colder if a global cooling process is already occurring naturally, as some climatologists believe." (The Oakland Tribune, May 12, 1975)
"Some scientists theorize that the freakish weather of recent years is the product of a global cooling trend that began in the 1940s. Advocates of this theory predict that the worldwide temperature drop could usher in a "Little Ice Age" similar to the one that lasted roughly from 1600 to 1850. A CIA report supporting the global-cooling thesis was released last month." (The Kennebec Journal on Friday, June 18, 1976)
"Ice Age doomsayers note evidence that average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped 1° Celsius during the 1950s and 1960s. Kukla found that the average snow and ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere increased sharply in 1971 compared with the years between 1967 and '70. It reached a peak in '72 and '73 and then retreated about halfway back to what it had been in the late '60s. Now, says Kukla, satellite studies indicate that the snow and ice cover last fall increased again to about the level of '71. German Oceanographer Martin Rodewald has noticed a slow, general cooling of the waters of the North Atlantic and North Pacific and an air-temperature drop in the Arctic regions over Canada and Russia." (Time Magazine, Jan. 31, 1977)
Naturally climatologists being wrong then doesn't prove they are wrong now. In fact, neither are wrong on some basic details. They were certainly experiencing cooling in the decades up to the 1970s, and we are experiencing the opposite today. The causes and mechanisms, on the other hand, were not well understood by the climate experts then, and I am not entirely convinced it is understood today either. Whether those who extrapolate current trends to extremes today are more correct than their colleagues back in the 70s remains to be seen. As I've said repeatedly, so far in human history betting against doomsayers has been safe every time.
7:41:30 AM
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As I've mentioned on this blog a few times, I grew up in the Jehovah's Witnesses, and was a very active participant in the movement's activities until I, somewhat late I admit at around age 25, grew up and left the religion entirely. As part of this belated maturing process, I became very interested in and fascinated by the whole phenomenon of religion generally, Christianity somewhat more specificially and of course the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
I studied comparative religion, also called history of religion, at the University of Bergen, which has a very fine department dedicated to this topic, and eventually wrote my master thesis on what I consider the pivotal and crucial developments within the sect. This, I think, is the point when a sect based on the ideas and charisma of the founder, Charles Taze Russell, is taken over by a successor who is able to transform loyalty to an individual into loyalty to a movement or organisation. In the case of what became the Jehovah's Witnesses, those people who wake you up with a door-call at 10AM Sunday morning, the successor was 'Judge' Joseph Franklin Rutherford, in every way a very fascinating character.
The MA thesis, kindly put online by Skepsis, the Norwegian version of CSICOP, has the snappy title The Successor Problem: A focused biography of Joseph Rutherford, 2nd leader for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1916-1942.
The article is certainly a longer read than my regular blog postings, and even most articles I link, but I think you'd find it an fascinating look at religion-making in action, a process that shares something with laws and sausages.
3:00:23 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2006; 03:10:26.
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