The Gist

I Knew Things Had Grown Too Quiet....

Here we go again, perhaps:

Last update - 11:46 30/10/2009
Lebanon warns UN: Israel planning to attack us

Lebanon's ambassador to the United Nations has warned that Israel is exhibiting signs of an imminent attack on his country, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayyat reported on Friday.

Ambassador Noaf Salaam sent missives to the United Nations secretary general and to the Security Council condemning Israel's recent artillery fire on the village of Houla, the site where a Katyusha rocket was fired at the Upper Galilee last week.

Salaam called the artillery fire a clear violation of Lebanon's sovereignty as well as of UN Resolution 1701, which saw a truce between Israel and Lebanon following the 2006 war.

According to Al-Hayyat, Salaam described in his missive repeated Israeli threats against the Lebanese government and citizens, an expression he believes signals Israeli plans for to attack.

Salaam also said that the Israeli decision to bomb Lebanese territory following every Katyusha attack delayed and prevented Lebanese forces from investigating the rocket attacks.

Lebanese troops found and dismantled four rockets ready for launching near the border with Israel last Wednesday, a day after the Katyusha was launched from the southern village.

The Katyusha fire was the first such incident since last month, and the ninth since the Second Lebanon War.

The attack drew a rapid response from Israeli artillery in a brief flare-up across the border. Neither the rocket nor the artillery caused casualties.

I hope the ambassador is wrong on this -- but, of course, he's in a position to know, having been there before....

Impossible, You Say?

From the Asia Times:

Helicopter rumors refuse to die

MAZAR-E-SHARIF - Persistent accounts of Western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taliban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

"Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taliban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams," he said. "They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army."

This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taliban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.

Helicopters are almost exclusively the domains of foreign forces in Afghanistan; the international military controls the air space and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.

"Our fight against the Taliban is nonsense," said the soldier from Shahin Corps. "Our foreigner 'friends' are friendlier to the opposition."

For months or even years, rumors have been circulating in Afghanistan that the Taliban are being financed or even directly supported militarily by the foreign forces.

In part it stems from an inability to believe that major foreign armies cannot defeat a ragtag bunch of insurgents; in addition, Afghanistan has been a center of foreign intrigue for so long that belief in plots comes naturally to many war-weary Afghans.

The international troops hotly deny that they are supporting the insurgents.

"This entire business with the helicopters is just a rumor," said Brigadier General Juergen Setzer, recently appointed commander for the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, in the north. "It has no basis in reality, according to our investigations."

The general added that ISAF-North had overall control of the air space in the northern region.

But the persistent rumors that foreign helicopters have been sighted assisting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan were given an unexpected boost in mid-October by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who told the media that his administration was investigating similar reports that "unknown" helicopters were ferrying the insurgents from Helmand province in the south to Baghlan, Kunduz and Samangan provinces in the north.

...

[Emphasis mine.]

A slight leak in the script, apparently.

We'll need to send mind-control specialists to Eastasia on the next available flight....

It's a Living....

Where I grew up it was fresh deer on the hood.

Yikes!

Only in Maui you can see people catching sharks and bringing them to the nearest supermarket to "make a few bucks " like this! Not that in Maui there are that many sharks or many problems with them tho, some people were fishing when apparently the shark got stuck it the nets. They got the shark at Kanaha beach park and after following them I took the picture while they were about to park at Star Market in Kahului, a few miles away from the beach.

It's a living... apparently....

Public Enemy #1

Amazing that this is available:

Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI:

Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations with "High Value Detainee # 1" in 2004

Washington, D.C., July 1, 2009 - FBI special agents carried out 20 formal interviews and at least 5 "casual conversations" with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003, according to secret FBI reports released as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive and posted today on the Web at www.nsarchive.org.

Saddam denied any connections to the "zealot" Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the "fanatic" Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport.

The former Iraqi leader, when asked about his accomplishments, listed social progress for the people of Iraq, a temporary truce with the Kurds in the early 1970s, the nationalization of Iraq’s oil in 1972, support for the Arab side during the 1973 Middle East war with Israel, and after that, for the remaining 30 years of his rule, simple survival – through a devastating eight year war with Iran that he had launched, and a 12-year sanctions regime imposed on his people after another war that he began. During the interviews he repeatedly contests FBI evidence and the neutrality of his interlocutors – which one of them finds ironic, given the record of peremptory Iraqi justice under Saddam’s governance. He selectively outlines recent Iraqi history and acknowledges some mistakes, including the destruction without U.N. supervision or verification of some of Iraq’s WMD arsenal left over from the 1980s.

During the interviews Saddam refutes some examples of what he views as myths, like his purported use of body doubles. Instead he says that to evade his enemies he never used the telephone and traveled constantly from one dwelling to another (he describes the farm where he was captured in a “spider hole” as the same place where he took refuge after a failed 1959 coup attempt.)

He takes personal responsibility for ordering the launching of SCUD missiles against Israeli targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, because he blamed Israel and its influence in the U.S. for “all the problems of the Arabs”, but denies that his purpose was to draw that country into the conflict and to divide Washington from its Arab allies. He provides details on the lead-up to the war, reporting that during a January 1991 meeting former Secretary of State James Baker told Saddam’s foreign minister that if Iraq did not comply with U.S. conditions “we’ll take you back to the pre-industrial stage.”

Saddam’s historical recollections include his ascendancy within the Ba’athist party in 1968 and 1969; his disappointment after the Iran-Iraq war with Arab governments for their lack of gratitude for Iraq’s “saving all of the Arab world” from occupation by Iran; details about the 1991 Persian Gulf war; and the post-war Shi’a uprising in Iraq’s south, which he characterizes as “treachery” instigated by Iran.

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public.

The interviews and conversations were led by George L. Piro, one of an exceedingly small number of FBI agents who spoke Arabic. The agency expected that Saddam would feel rapport with Piro and develop a sense of dependency. During the interviews Piro hears Saddam out but is often openly skeptical of the former leader’s recollections. The agent does, however, assert with confidence that the U.S. side had information that Iraq was maintaining or developing a WMD capability and cites “evidence” of continuing contact between Iran and al-Qaeda, seemingly implying an operational relationship.

Saddam does not provide comfort to his interlocutors on these matters, refuting any notion of collaboration with al-Qaeda, or of a remaining WMD capacity, and in reality the charges, meant to win public support for the invasion of Iraq, were collapsing while the interviews were underway. Investigators from the CIA, operating freely in occupied Iraq, failed to uncover any credible supporting evidence for the U.S. claims, and ultimately President Bush himself acknowledged that “most of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.”

One of the last interviews in the series ends on a valedictory note, after Piro listens to a poem that Saddam had written. The former president of Iraq is “done,” Piro says, “his life is nearing its end,” and other detainees are blaming him for all of Iraq’s many mistakes. Saddam is fatalistic and acknowledges reality. His interviews with Piro ended soon thereafter, and on December 30, 2006, he was hanged, amid the taunts of the political enemies who carried out his execution.

Click the link above to read the documents.

Off to Jail, Do-Gooders

The beat goes on:

Despite No Links to Violence, Founders of Muslim Charity Sentenced to Lengthy Terms for Donations to Needy Palestinians in Occupied Territories

Five founders of the Holy Land Foundation, once the nation’s
largest Muslim charity, have received prison terms of up to sixty-five years on charges of supporting the Palestinian group Hamas. The five were never accused of supporting violence and were convicted for funding charities that aided needy Palestinians. The government’s case relied on Israeli intelligence as well as disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by the FBI over a span of fifteen years.

Apparently the Crusades continue unabated.

Sick and Wrong

Apparently, this is real -- some sort of public-access programming from an unknown U.S. city... NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.