09/07/06 - Des groupes nazis infiltrent l'armée américaine

Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts
NYT 07/07/06

" A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."

A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.

The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance policy and strictly enforce it.

The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.

The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq..."


Le rapport du Southern Poverty Law Center : 

Racist extremists active in U.S. military
SPLC urges Rumsfeld to adopt zero-tolerance policy


09/07/06 - Encore de drôles de terroristes pour un projet d'attentat dans un tunnel de New York !

Recent Arrests in Terror Plots Yield Debate on Pre-emptive Action by Government
NYT 09/07/06

"In Miami last month and now in New York, terror cases have unfolded in which suspects have been apprehended before they lined up the intended weapons and the necessary financing or figured out other central details necessary to carry out their plots.

For officials in Washington, it is a demonstration of the much-needed emphasis in this post-9/11 era for pre-emptive arrests.

"We don't wait until someone has lit the fuse to step in," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday at a news conference about the New York plot.

But the Miami and New York cases are inspiring a new round of skepticism from some lawyers who are openly questioning whether the government, in its zeal to stop terrorism, is forgetting an element central to any case: the actual intent to commit a crime.

But the Miami and New York cases are inspiring a new round of skepticism from some lawyers who are openly questioning whether the government, in its zeal to stop terrorism, is forgetting an element central to any case: the actual intent to commit a crime..."


Sources say no serious plot for NYC, just hate chatter
The Raw Story 07/07/06

"One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

Two other intelligence officials with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred--and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain..."


FBI: Three held in New York tunnel plot
CNN 07/07/06

"U.S. and international authorities disrupted a plot by eight terrorists to blow up a commuter train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan, the FBI announced Friday..."


Lire également, Read also :

No Bond For 'Liberty City 7' Alleged Terrorists
FBI Put Itself On Terror Group Hit List - Witness
CBS 06/07/06

"...Earlier in the day, the FBI admitted that two people working for the agency planted the idea of blowing up government buildings, including and FBI office in Miami, with members of an alleged South Florida terror group known as the Liberty City 7. The testimony came during efforts by attorneys for the alleged terrorists to get their clients released from custody until their trial on terrorism charges..."


09/07/06 - Dixit un panel d'experts, les Etats-Unis ont perdu la guerre contre la terreur

The Terrorism Index
By FOREIGN POLICY & The Center For American Progress

"Is the United States winning the war on terror? Not according to more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy hands. They see a national security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to protect the public from the next attack..."

".... The experts also said that recent reforms of the national security apparatus have done little to make Americans safer. Asked about recent efforts to reform America’s intelligence community, for instance, more than half of the index’s experts said that creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has had no positive impact in the war against terror. "Intelligence reform so far has been largely limited to structural reorganization that in most cases produced new levels of bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratic system," says index participant Bill Gertz, a journalist who has covered the intelligence community for more than 20 years.

The index’s experts were similarly critical of most of the policy initiatives put forward by the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush since September 11. Eighty-one percent, for instance, believe the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, negatively affects the war on terror. The index’s experts also disapprove of how America is handling its relations with European allies, how it is confronting threatening regimes in North Korea and Iran, how it is controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and its dealings with failing states, to name just a few. "We are losing the war on terror because we are treating the symptoms and not the cause," says index participant Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "[O]ur insistence that Islamic fundamentalist ideology has replaced communist ideology as the chief enemy of our time ... feeds al Qaeda’s vision of the world."..."


09/07/06 - Corée du Nord, les néocons furieux contre Bush

Kim's Choice--and Bush's
What price will the North Korean dictator pay?
by William Kristol, Weekly Standard, 07/17/2006,

"...The red lines, pink lines, and mauve lines of U.S. foreign policy seem increasingly to be written in erasable ink. What was "unacceptable" to President Bush a week ago (a North Korean missile launch) has been accepted. In retrospect, according to a draft Security Council resolution, the missile launch turns out merely to have been "regrettable." Our assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Christopher Hill, visited China at the end of last week, where he was rebuffed by Beijing on sanctions for Pyongyang. He settled for an agreement that we should all return to the six-party talks.

China, it bears emphasizing, has refused to use its leverage to change Pyongyang's behavior (North Korea continues to function only because China provides most of its energy). Yet President Bush praised China last Friday as "a good partner to have at the table with us." Japan, with a ringside seat for the missile launches, looks on in horror, seemingly alone in actually being provoked by the North Korean "provocation."

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, at the center of our global war against jihadist terrorists, Iran, perhaps the prime state sponsor of terror, is sitting pretty. The pursuit of nuclear weapons by the clerical regime in Iran has also been deemed "unacceptable" by the president. Yet, as the Iranian regime has resumed uranium enrichment, threatened to obliterate other nations, and scorned offers to negotiate, it has been rewarded with gestures by us that certainly seem to be concessions. Now, watching North Korea, the mullahs must be feeling even less intimidated. And despite Syrian and Iranian complicity in killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq--detailed by our generals--neither has paid a price.

The one "red line" the president seems to be holding to is that we will not cut and run in Iraq. But even there, there seems to be no interest in rethinking a counter-insurgency strategy (or nonstrategy) that is not working. Indeed, the president took pains at his press conference Friday to reiterate that he would not insist on changes: "General Casey will make the decisions as to how many troops we have there. . . . I told him this, I said, 'You decide, General.'" So we have a Rumsfeld-Casey decision to plan for a not-too-embarrassing withdrawal from Iraq, rather than a Bush decision to insist on a strategy for victory in Iraq.

But hey, we're in sync with the EU-3 and the U.N.-192. And our secretary of state--really, the whole State Department--is more popular abroad than ever. Too bad the cost has been so high: a decline in the president's credibility around the world and sinking support for his foreign policy at home.

A few weeks ago, Michael Rubin lamented in this magazine that Bush's second term foreign policy had taken a Clintonian turn. But to be Clintonian in a post-9/11 world is to invite even more danger than Clinton's policies did in the 1990s. The real choice isn't Kim Jong Il's. It's President Bush's."


Bush says focusing on diplomacy with N. Korea
Reuters 07/07/06

"President George W. Bush on Friday defended the U.S. approach to dealing with North Korea, saying diplomacy is slow and will take more time, and he sidestepped a question about using military force..."


09/07/06 - Guerres secrètes contre la Corée du Nord

West mounts 'secret war' to keep nuclear North Korea in check
The Sunday Times July 09, 2006

" A PROGRAMME of covert action against nuclear and missile traffic to North Korea and Iran is to be intensified after last week’s missile tests by the North Korean regime.

Intelligence agencies, navies and air forces from at least 13 nations are quietly co-operating in a "secret war" against Pyongyang and Tehran.

It has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, US agents prowling the waterfronts in Taiwan, multinational naval and air surveillance missions out of Singapore, investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau and a fleet of planes and ships eavesdropping on the "hermit kingdom" in the waters north of Japan.

Few details filter out from western officials about the programme, which has operated since 2003, or about the American financial sanctions that accompany it.

But together they have tightened a noose around Kim Jong-il’s bankrupt, hungry nation.

"Diplomacy alone has not worked, military action is not on the table and so you’ll see a persistent increase in this kind of pressure," said a senior western official..."