GOP Leaders Seek Probe of Berger Papers

GOP Leaders Seek Probe of Berger Papers Oct 11 2:25 PM US/Eastern   By ERICA WERNER Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON     A group of House Republicans called Wednesday for a congressional investigation into the improper handling of classified documents by President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger. Berger admitted last year that he deliberately took classified documents out of the National Archives in 2003 and destroyed some of them at his office. He pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and was fined $50,000. Ten lawmakers led by House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., and Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., released a letter calling for the House Government Reform Committee to investigate. They asked the committee to determine whether any documents were missing from Clinton administration terrorism records, to review security measures for classified documents and to seek testimony from Berger. Hunter’s spokesman, Joe Kasper, said the Justice Department had asked Congress to hold off on any oversight until the legal case concluded. “It’s important that the House conduct its own review to ensure there is a clear understanding of the facts, and sensitive and highly classified security information is not potentially compromised in the future,” Kasper said. Berger’s lawyer, Lanny Breuer, did not immediately return a call for comment. A spokesman for the Government Reform Committee said the panel was reviewing the letter. At issue is a strange sequence of events in which Berger admitted to sneaking classified documents out of the National Archives in his suit, later destroying some of them and then lying about it. The Bush administration disclosed the investigation in July 2004, just days before the Sept. 11 commission issued its final report. During Berger’s sentencing hearing Breuer characterized Berger as eager to get the facts of the Sept. 11 attacks right when he took the material, which contained information relating to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration.

 

U.S. brings first treason case in over 50 years

 By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A California-born convert to Islam, accused of making a series of al Qaeda propaganda videos, became on Wednesday the first American charged with treason since the World War Two era, U.S. Justice Department officials said.

Fugitive Adam Gadahn, 28, who is believed to be in Pakistan, was accused of treason, which carries a maximum punishment of death, and providing material support to al Qaeda, they said.

According to the charges, Gadahn appeared in five videos broadcast between October 2004 and September 11, 2006, giving al Qaeda “aid and comfort … with the intent to betray the United States.”

“Gadahn gave himself to our enemies in al Qaeda for the purpose of being a central part of their propaganda machine,” Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told a news conference.

“By making this choice, we believe Gadahn committed treason — perhaps the most serious offense for which any person can be tried under our Constitution,” he said.

McNulty acknowledged that Gadahn appeared to be involved only in propaganda for the Islamic militant group, not in planning any attacks.

Gadahn converted to Islam from a Jewish-Christian family when he was 17 and a few years later moved to Pakistan. He was previously known as Adam Pearlman and grew up on a goat ranch outside Los Angeles.

The charges were contained in an indictment handed up in a federal court in California by a grand jury. The evidence against him in the indictment consisted entirely of the videos.

The FBI has been seeking to question Gadahn since May 2004. The FBI added him on Wednesday to its list of the most wanted terrorists and a U.S. State Department program offered up to a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

In Los Angeles, Gadahn’s aunt, Nancy Pearlman, declined to comment, saying, “We are not giving any interviews.”

There were a number of treason cases after World War Two, including a trial in 1952, legal experts said. In one of the cases, an American woman, known as “Tokyo Rose,” was convicted of treason and later pardoned. She died in Chicago last month.

Justice Department officials denied the case was timed to deflect attention from the fallout over lewd computer messages sent by a former Republican congressman to young male aides, a scandal that may help Democrats seize control of Congress in the November 7 elections.

BLOOD RUNNING IN THE STREETS

In the first video in October 2004, right before the presidential election, Gadahn announced he had joined al Qaeda and said that “the streets of America shall run red with blood,” according to the indictment.

In another video in September 2005, around the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Gadahn referred to “the blessed raids on New York and Washington,” the indictment said.

He referred to more recent attacks in London and Madrid and stated, “Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Allah willing,” according to the indictment.

It said he appeared earlier this past summer in a video that also contained statements from the top al Qaeda leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

In a video broadcast on September 2, Gadahn encouraged American soldiers to “escape from the unbelieving Army and join the winning side.”

In a video released on or about the fifth anniversary of the attacks, he praised the pilots who took control of the planes on September 11 and referred to the United States as “enemy soil,” according to the indictment.

(Additional reporting by Rick Cowan)

AP Exclusive: Reid Got $1M in Land Sale

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061011/D8KMO6NG0.html

Turning Red: Immigrants Tip the Balance in Belgian Local Elections

By Paul Belien

Created 2006-10-09 10:50

In last March’s local elections in the Netherlands the immigrant vote tipped the balance in favour of the Socialists. The same phenomenon marked yesterday’s local elections in Belgium’s major cities. In Antwerp the Socialists became the largest party. They jumped from 19.5% to 35.3% of the votes, winning 22 of the 55 seats in the municipal council – a gain of ten seats. Seven of the Socialist councillors, almost one third of the total, are Muslim immigrants: Fatma Akbas, Karim Bachar, Ouardia El Taghdouini, Youssef Slassi, Fauzaya Talhaoui, Güler Turan, and Sener Ugurlu. Six of the seven are new in politics.

The self-declared “islamophobic” and Flemish-secessionist Vlaams Belang [Flemish Interest], which until yesterday was Antwerp’s largest party, gained a few extra votes, winning 33.5% of the vote (33.0% last time). Its number of seats remains steady at 20. Antwerp politics is now defined by a polarization between Socialists and the VB. Apart from the VB all parties lost heavily to the Socialists (-7.3% for the Liberals and -6.4% for the Greens). The only party able to avoid being swallowed by the Socialists are the Christian-Democrats. They won 11.2% of the votes, adding an extra 0.1%, and kept their six seats. The Christian-Democrats, too, had put forward immigrant candidates. Two of their elected candidates, one third of the total, are Muslims: Nahima Lanjri and Ergün Top.

The VB also stagnated in other cities with large numbers of immigrants, such as Brussels, Ghent and Mechelen. After the 2000 local elections, in which the VB gained considerably, the Belgian regime extended the vote to immigrants for municipal elections and passed the so-called “Quick Citizenship Bill.” The latter grants hassle-free Belgian citizenship virtually upon demand to every individual who has lived in the country for three (in some cases only two) years, which enfranchises them in the general elections, too (voting is compulsory in Belgium). These measures were introduced with the specific intent of countering the VB.

As Leona Detiège, the then Socialist Antwerp mayor, told Knack Magazine on 13 September 2000: “The Vlaams Blok [as the Vlaams Belang was called at the time] is currently overrepresented because the immigrants are not allowed to vote.” And as Johan Leman, the then director of the Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), a government agency working for the Belgian Prime Minister, announced in the newspaper De Standaard on 15 January 2000: “What will ‘our own people’ still mean fifteen years from now? We will get so many new Belgians that this slogan becomes meaningless. The Vlaams Blok is a thing of the past.” Meanwhile six of Leman’s fifteen years have passed…

Ironically, as I pointed out earlier, in their efforts to counter the indigenous “racists” and “fascists” of the VB, the Socialists and Christian-Democrats do not hesitate to put far-right Muslim candidates on their electoral lists. Some of them, such a Murat Denizli, a member of the Turkish racist and fascist organization Grey Wolves which assassinates Socialist councilors at home, have now become Socialist councilors in Belgium (Mr Denizli was elected for the Parti Socialiste in the Brussels borough of Schaarbeek).

On 10 September I wrote that European politics will swing dramatically to the Left in the coming decades, owing to the growing influence of an immigrant vote eager to retain and expand the welfare benefits. Another trend, however, is also visible.

While yesterday’s elections saw the VB stagnate in the cities the party won massively in the smaller towns and villages. This is likely to continue. While Europe’s cities and major towns turn Muslim and red, the countryside will remain indigenous and will become ever more “islamophobic” and hostile to the cities. The indigenous Europeans – at least if they can afford it – are moving out of the cities (indeed, they are fleeing them). As Filip Dewinter, the VB leader in Antwerp, said in an interview last month: “I am a realist. The number of potential voters for our party is declining year by year [in Antwerp, which has 460,000 inhabitants]. Currently a quarter of the population are immigrants. These people do not vote for us. Every year 4,000 indigenous Antwerpians move out and 5,000 immigrants move in.”

The former city dwellers have moved to suburbia, where towns such as Schoten saw their percentage of VB voters rise yesterday from 24.5 to 34.7%, and to rural districts such as Mol, which saw the VB grow from 13.1 to 21.9%.

France is Almost Finished — 2003 article even more true in 2006

France is Almost Finished
By Guy Milliere
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 10, 2003

Little by little, the French government tries to change its behavior. The smell of Allied victory wafting out of Bhagdad maybe? You can expect Chirac and Villepin to say: we have always loved the United States.  We are your friends, no hard feelings…  I just hope nobody will believe it in the United States. If within a few days, Chirac and Villepin say this, think about it: it’s ALL about the money. They want to try to keep some of their Iraqi contracts intact. They want the United States to go back to the United Nations where they can again paralyze you with their vetoes and their
counter-proposals.

I’m sorry to say it, but nothing good for the U.S. can come from France now.

Some day in the future this may change, but the French will have to learn their lessons the hard  way.  They have to feel the pain, unlike the citizens of Poland.  The Polish see what they owe to the United States.  A little more than ten years ago, they were under the rule of a communist dictatorship and they remember it is thanks to the United States that they were freed from that nightmare.  The French people will have to see what a nightmare looks like before you can take their apologies seriously.

Be patient, the nightmare is almost upon us.

Economically speaking, France is decaying, full speed. Unemployment is officially around ten per cent. If you add the people who have never worked and so are not counted for the statistics, and also add the students who study nothing  useful, the right number would be way above fifteen per cent. Growth rate is now officially around one per cent, and it includes government activities: if the government component was not included, it would be easy to see that France is in depression.  Her population is growing old, and no money is available to take care of the large number of senior citizens in the years to come. The greater part of  young people are Muslim, not integrated with French society, and almost illiterate.

In fact, the only things that are growing in France right now are crime and Islamism. Some readers have been amazed by the fact that teenaged girls and young women in many city districts have to wear the Islamic veil if they do not want to be harassed, but it gets worse. A few weeks ago, a young Arab burnt a teenaged girl alive in the suburbs of Paris. He was convicted of murder, but he became a hero and an example for other young Arabs living in the same kind of areas.  Two month ago, ten Arab men who raped another teenaged girl in another district were convicted and condemned to spend five years in jail. Yes, just five years. Their families left the court of justice shouting to the journalists it was unfair and they would look out for revenge. Eight days later, the court was burnt down during the night. The teenaged girl and her family have had to leave Paris, and hide in another part of the country.

I have written columns in the French press concerning what’s happening.  The response has been death threats, with color pictures of slit throats, anti-Semitic insults. There were Muslims in France thirty years ago, but they were not like the Muslims of today.  They were moderate, they did not feel they could wield decisive political power in France, they did not think they were at war against western civilization.  Now it’s clear that they think they are at war.  Very few people are in jail  in France (France does not have enough jails), but more than sixty per cent of the convicts are Muslims, and Islamist imams visit them on a weekly basis. My wife was born in a Muslim family.  She’s not a Muslim anymore, and because she left Islam, she risks being killed if she says it  openly.  My wife’s mother is still Muslim, but she is a moderate, and she’s afraid to be considered  a traitor by the much more radical Muslims that are spreading throughout France.

Within twenty years, Muslims will be a majority in France.  And if nothing changes, they will be radical Muslims.

The French government takes care of the present: it knows it cannot take care of the future because there is no future. The French government acts like a traitor to its old allies for many reasons: because it has no principles, because it needs money, but especially because it is afraid of bloody riots.  France is not a sovereign nation anymore: it’s partly ruled by the mob, partly ruled from the outside by corrupting Muslim tyrants. But don’t worry, France also has no importance anymore: it can still bark, but it’s bite is more like a nip.

France is almost finished. The nightmare is almost here.  France has to know the horrors of the nightmare if you want her to have a chance to wake up.  Sure, you may find some exceptions to the rule.  France has some decent  intellectuals: but they have about the same access to the mainstream media that dissenters  had in the Soviet Union twenty years ago. France has bold politicians: one, maybe  two if I want to be extremely generous. France still has genuine journalists:  you could count them on the fingers of one hand.  For the next years, come to France if you want, visit old monuments, but do not expect to be understood or appreciated by the locals. Behave as you would in a third  world country; soon France will be a third world country. Perhaps it will wake up  with a start, but who knows?  Right now, if you read the polls, only 53% of the  French hope the U.S. army will defeat Saddam: the rest hope the United States will be defeated and Saddam will win…

Do you really want France to have a word to say in the re-building of Iraq after Saddam is defeated?

The Islam Conundrum — The 21st century world is not willing to surrender to the clearly failed and failing Islamic experiment, simply because of the claim that it is the one and only true religion of Allah.

The Islam Conundrum

Tuesday, 03 October 2006

The dictionary defines religion as, “The expression of man’s belief and reverence for a superhuman power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe.” By this definition Islam qualifies as religion, so do numberless others. A definition this broad is ambiguous and must be further defined with the specific tenets and practices of the belief. Simply because someone or some people say that they believe in a superhuman deity and revere him, the belief is accorded the privileged status of religion? It is generally assumed that religion addresses issues of importance to daily life as well as matters that transcend it. Religion is thought to exercise a civilizing influence by ordering the social life, promoting spirituality, as well as advancing an array of human virtues. Zoroaster, for instance, based his faith on the triad of goodly thoughts, goodly speech and goodly deeds: Moses framed the fundamentals of his faith in the Ten Commandments; and Jesus placed love at the core of his religion Many people adhere to religion for providing them with comfort and a compass in life. It is these assumed benevolent features of religion that confer it special status. Yet concern with religion overreaching has led societies to enact safeguards against that possibility. Some, for instance, feared that Christ was a rebellious Jew aiming to challenge the ruling Romans. Perhaps to assuage this fear, Christ emphatically proclaimed, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” To this day, there are those who still believe that the Christ was a mere social revolutionary. In the case of Islam there is no ambiguity at all. The mosque and the state were one and the same from the very start. During his lifetime, Muhammad embodied in his person all three branches of worldly secular governance—the legislative, the judiciary and the executive—as well as the religious domain. As a messenger of Allah, he transmitted Allah’s laws, adjudicated according to those laws and implemented Allah’s design. He also prescribed a set of religious instructions for the spiritual life of the faithful. After Muhammad, the Islamic rule was continued by Caliphs and Imams. To this day, wherever it is able, Islam governs as the state, either directly as is the case in Saudi Arabia, or indirectly as practiced in places such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. When religion crosses the line that separates it from the state, serious problems present themselves. In the case of Islam, the rule of the people, by the people, for the people is supplanted by the rule of Allah, by the faithful to Allah, for the pleasure of Allah. Other problems arise. Liberty, deeply cherished by democracies, is replaced by submission—unquestioning obedience and adherence to the dictates and precepts of the all-knowing and all-wise Allah. It is this total form of submission that, among other things, prompted the Muslims to systematically burn libraries of the lands they invaded. They justified their action by contending that the Quran, the comprehensive unerring book of Allah, contained all perfect knowledge that humanity needs. To this day, in places where Islam rules many books are banned, newspapers and magazines are systematically either censored or shut down, and other non-print media are methodically blocked. The contempt for free inquiry is encapsulated in the statement of Muhammad, “Al-elmo noghtatan katharoho al-jaheloon”—Knowledge is only one dot, expanded by the ignorant. Once liberty is surrendered for submission, a host of serious consequences present themselves. The individual becomes little more than a passive obedient vessel of Allah and his perspective of himself and life is drastically changes. Once he submits to the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-alls, then he is absolved of the responsibility of having to chart his own way in life. There is considerable allure in submission to a powerful that is willing and able to take care of the person. It is not a bad arrangement. The problem is that all past claimants have invariably been proven as either fraud or failures in honoring their part of the bargain. Islam is no exception. A cursory glance is enough to show the condition of Muhammad’s flock. In spite of huge material wealth, Muslims in the oil-rich countries are imprisoned in the paralyzing mentality of submission and all the terrible ancillaries that go with it. There is no reason to believe that Muslims have inferior intelligence. Their inferior existence is strictly a function of the primitive doctrine of Islam: a doctrine of nihilism, ignorance, and violence that denigrates this life and fixes the starry eye of the faithful on the next life. A case in point is the Islamic madressehs in places like Pakistan. Never mind the girls. Girls are not in the calculus—women are incidental in Islam. Consider the boys. Millions of young boys are enrolled in madressehs—religious boarding schools—learning very little beside memorizing and reciting the Quran. This is a case of total submission: Islam at its best, as championed by the oil-money-flushed Saudi patrons of the Wahabi sect. Sadly enough, instead of Muslims marching out of the suffocating swamps of submission to the meadow of liberty, Allah’s faithful aim to drag the rest of humanity into the deadly Islamic quagmire. Islam may have been an improvement to the life of the savages that roamed the Arabian desserts some 1400 years ago. The 21st century world is not willing to surrender to the clearly failed and failing Islamic experiment, simply because of the claim that it is the one and only true religion of Allah.

AUSTRALIA’S Muslim leaders have been “read the riot act” over the need to denounce any links between Islam and terrorism

Muslims read riot act

Lincoln WrightSeptember 17, 2006 12:00amArticle from: Sunday Herald Sun 

AUSTRALIA’S Muslim leaders have been “read the riot act” over the need to denounce any links between Islam and terrorism. The Howard Government’s multicultural spokesman, Andrew Robb, yesterday told an audience of 100 imams who address Australia’s mosques that these were tough times requiring great personal resolve.
Mr Robb also called on them to shun a victim mentality that branded any criticism as discrimination.

“We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith,” Mr Robb said at the Sydney conference.

“And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem.

“You can’t wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others.

“Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia.”

Mr Robb said unless Muslims took responsibility for their destiny and tackled the causes of terrorism, Australia would become divided.

Mr Robb, the parliamentary secretary for immigration and multicultural affairs, said it was important for migrants to learn English.

“I see as critical the need for imams to have effective English language skills — it is a self-evident truth that a shared language is one of the foundations of national cohesion,” he said.

On the eve of Mr Robb’s release today of a discussion paper on a new citizenship test, the chairman of the Government’s Muslim Reference Group, Dr Ameer Ali, said Opposition Leader Kim Beazley’s idea of a values test was silly, as was the need for a universal English test.

He called for an orientation program for new migrants akin to a university student’s orientation week.