[Rhodes22-list] DOD PULLS PLUG ON TALON DATABASE (politcal)

[Brad Haslett]

Michael,

I understand why programs like this are so controversial because they've
been abused so many times in the past.  But, people tend to forget that
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and FDR incarcerated
American Japanese and controlled the press during WW2.   Desperate times
call for desperate measures.  What we've seen under Bush 43 has been pretty
mild.  Frankly, I think about 3/4ths of the shit we go through at the
airport is unnecessary because we as a country are so PC we won't actually
do the things that are known to work.  Then again, I don't have a choice but
to recognize that there is still a war against terror - I get to read about
the attempted attacks and probes that never make the press. We are not going
to sit down with these people and have a nice chat about our differences.
Bush will be gone soon enough and Iraq will be settled one way or the
other.  Strap on folks!  This is going to be a long ride.  Read it for
yourself.  Here's Dr. Hanson's review of a new book of what the evil-doers
have to say in their own words.

Brad

---------------------------

*August 19, 2007**
**In Their Own Words**
Newly translated writings of the al Qaeda leadership.*
by Bruce Thornton
*Private Papers*

*The Al Qaeda Reader<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038551655X?ie=UTF8&tag=privatepapers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=038551655X>,
ed. Raymond Ibrahim, Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson, Doubleday.*

*G*iven that war, as both Sun Tzu and Mohammed preached, is deception, it
behooves us to understand accurately the enemy's motivations and not be
fooled by his deceiving propaganda. Yet in the current war against Islamic
jihad, the West has stubbornly refused to take seriously what the jihadists
tell us, believing instead what Thucydides called the "pretexts" with which
an enemy rationalizes his aggression. Osama bin Laden and his theorist Aymin
al Zawahiri in particular have provided us with numerous texts outlining the
Islamic foundations of their war against the West. A few of these
pronouncements and manifestoes have long been available, but now thanks to
Raymond Ibrahim's *The Al Qaeda
Reader<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038551655X?ie=UTF8&tag=privatepapers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=038551655X>
*, writings previously unavailable in English can be studied and analyzed.
Such study will provide powerful evidence that contrary to the deceptions of
apologists and the naïve delusions of some Westerners, the bases of the
jihadists' actions lie squarely within Islamic tradition, not in the alleged
Western crimes against Islam.

Fluent in Arabic and trained as a historian in the ancient Middle East,
Ibrahim is currently a technician in the Library of Congress' Near East
Section, where he discovered al Qaeda documents that had not been translated
into English. He has organized these writings into two sections: theology,
writings intended for fellow Muslims that ground al Qaeda's war against the
West in the traditional Islamic doctrine of jihad; and propaganda, writings
meant for Westerners that cast bin Laden's war as a just response to the
depredations of Western powers.

*T*he documents in the first section make a sustained, coherent argument for
offensive jihad based on the Koran, the Hadith (the traditions of the words
and deeds of Mohammed), and the Ulema (past and present scholars of Islam).
Indeed, as Ibrahim notes, "Zawahiri's writings especially are grounded in
Islam's roots of jurisprudence; in fact, of the many thousands of words
translated here from his three treatises, well more than half are direct
quotations from the Koran the Sunna [words, habits, and practices] of
Mohammed, and the consensus and conclusions of the Ulema." This extensive
grounding weakens the "highjacking" charge apologists use to explain Islamic
jihad. On the contrary, al Qaeda's arguments are unexceptionally traditional
— which is why, of course, millions of Muslims accept them.

In these writings addressed to fellow Muslims, bin Laden and Zawahiri argue
against the notion of "moderate" Islam; the compatibility of Sharia (laws
governing Islamic society) with democracy; the idea of accommodation with
the enemy; and the prohibition against killing women and children. In other
words, they meticulously attack as distortions of Islam all the popular
assertions about Islam's nature promulgated by apologists, Westernized
Muslims, and even many Christians. As bin Laden himself writes in "Moderate
Islam Is a Prostration to the West" — a letter written to the Saudi
theologians who in 2002 publicly advocated coexistence with the West — such
moderation necessitates the adoption of Western values: "They [the Saudi
theologians] first acknowledge their [Westerners'] values and ideologies in
their entirety, while shying away from evoking the truth valued by the
Religion [Islam] and its foundations." Even the notion of "co-existence" is
a Western idea contrary to Islam: "As if one of the foundations of our
religion is how to coexist with infidels!" Quite the contrary: the
traditions and foundations of Islam urge believers to "wage war against the
infidels and the hypocrites, and be ruthless against them" (Koran 66:9), a
verse Zawahiri quotes along with the commentary of al Qurtubi, 13th-century
author of a 20-volume exegesis of the Koran: "There is but one theme — and
that is zeal for the religion of Allah. He commands the waging of Jihad
against the infidel by use of sword, sound sermons, and the summons to
Allah."

So too with other Western notions such as tolerance and "dialogue," which
bin Laden correctly asserts are "built on Western conceptions, which
themselves rest upon the most loathsome, secular principles." Indeed, bin
Laden has a strong case, for he appeals for evidence to the life and
practices of Mohammed and his companions — along with the Koran the Muslim's
guide to every aspect of life — and asks sarcastically, "What evidence is
there for Muslims for this [dialogue and shared understanding]? What did the
Prophet, the companions after him, and the righteous forebears do? Did they
wage jihad against the infidels, attacking them all over the earth, in order
to place them under the suzerainty of Islam in great humility and
submission? Or did they send messages to discover 'shared understandings'
between themselves and the infidels in order that they may reach an
understanding whereby universal peace, security, and natural relations would
spread — in such a satanic manner as this?"

History shows that bin Laden has the better understanding of Islam than do
Western apologists; as Ibrahim summarizes the argument, "'radical' Islam *is
* Islam — without exception." In this same vein, Zawahiri argues in his
"Loyalty and Enmity" that the only relationship one can have with the
infidel is enmity. Zawahiri buttresses this argument with numerous
quotations from Islamic theology, the most important coming from the Koran
60:4: "'We disown you and the idols which you worship besides Allah. We
renounce you: enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in
Allah alone.'" On this authority comes the necessity to wage jihad against
the infidel.

*P*erhaps the most important document in Ibrahim's collection is Zawahiri's
"Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents." For years, we have been
told that terrorism is un-Islamic because Islam forbids suicide and the
killing of non-combatants. Zawahiri, however, teases out from Islamic
tradition a perfectly rational and coherent argument in support of terrorism
and suicide bombings.

Zawahiri starts by repeating Islam's acceptance of deception in war as
justified, thus legitimizing suicide bombings, which are deceptive by
nature. Next, he builds his argument on selected hadiths, which as Ibrahim
notes requires some interpretive stretching. Zawahiri gets around this
difficulty by resorting to analogy, "a legitimate tool of Islamic
jurisprudence," as Ibrahim reminds us. Zawahiri focuses on intention, why
the Muslim kills himself, not who kills him: "Thus the deciding factor in
all these situations is one and the same: the intention — is it to service
Islam [martyrdom] or is it out of depression and [despair]?" As for killing
women and children, Mohammed himself provides a precedent during the siege
of Ta'if, where he used catapults. The Prophet's response to the question of
killing women and children, which of course catapult missiles would do
perforce, was "They [women and children] are from among them [infidels]."
Again, the ultimate intention is the key: referring to al Shafi' and the
Hanbalis, two schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Zawahiri argues that it is
permissible "to bombard the idolators even if Muslims and those who are
cautioned against killing are intermingled with them as long as there is a
need or an obligation for Muslims to do so, or if not striking leads to a
delay of the jihad."

Zawahiri's reasoning in defense of suicide bombing may be ultimately
unconvincing to many Muslims, or unsustainable by more careful exegesis. But
the mere fact that such a case *can* be made — something impossible to do in
the Christian, or Hebraic, or Hindu, or Buddhist traditions — and that
millions of faithful Muslims accept the case, speaks volumes about the
"religion of peace."

*T*he next section of *The Al Qaeda Reader* comprises selections Ibrahim
calls "propaganda," arguments designed for Westerners that exploit all the
self-loathing pathologies of Western intellectuals. Every distortion of
history repeated in thousands of American college classrooms, every lurid
lie peddled by the Chomsky-Moore cult is repeated by bin Laden, the only
difference being a much more explicit indulgence in anti-Semitism. Thus in
"Israel, Oil, and Iraq," Bin Laden really doesn't sound much different from
your typical college professor off on a rant about the
Halliburton-Cheney-Bush-neocon [read Jews] nexus. We hear about the "Jews —
who direct you [Americans] through the lie of 'democracy' to support the
Israelis and their machination and in complete antagonism to our religion,"
which is basically the same argument American academics continually make
about the "Israeli lobby." Bush is castigated in Chomskyean terms for
"concealing his own ambitions and the ambitions of the Zionist lobby in
their desire for oil." Western guilt is massaged by statements like, "He
[Bush] is still following the policy of his ancestors who slew the American
Indians in order to seize their land and wealth" — this coming from a
devotee of the most ruthlessly imperial religion ever. And our old leftist
bogey, the "military-industrial complex," appears when bin Laden tells our
troops, "You are spilling your blood to swell the bank accounts of the White
House gang and their fellow arms dealers and the proprietors of great
companies."

These leftist bromides appear over and over in subsequent speeches and
manifestoes, and testify to bin Laden's shrewd recognition of the West's
Achilles heel: the appeasing proclivities of its elite intellectuals who,
riddled with self-loathing guilt, are incapable of defending their way of
life and its highest goods. So our Saudi millionaire businessman rants on
about "providing business [contracts] for their [the Bush administration]
private corporations," the 2000 presidential election "stolen" by the Bush
clan, the "contracts acquired by large and dubious corporations, such as
Halliburton," and the stupidity of our troops, who "convinced of injustices
and lies of their government . . . fight only for the sake of capitalists,
the lords of usury [code for Jews], and arms and oil dealers — such as that
gang of criminals in the White House." Even the failure to sign the Kyoto
agreement, the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and the supposed
flouting of international law — standard anti-American leftist charges — are
trotted out by bin Laden, who mentions not one of these complaints when
talking to fellow Muslims, for the simple reason that traditional Muslims
care nothing for them. But guilt-ridden, self-loathing Westerners of the
sort currently agitating for withdrawal from Iraq care very much.

*The Al Qaeda Reader*, simply by letting our enemies speak in their own
voices, explodes the popular delusion that Western crimes and policies are
responsible for the "distortion" of Islam that al Qaeda represents. As
Ibrahim writes, "This volume of translations, taken as whole, prove once and
for all that, despite the propaganda of Al Qaeda and its sympathizers,
Radical Islam's war with the West is not finite and limited to political
grievances — real or imagined — but is existential, transcending time and
space and deeply rooted in faith." This means that the fight will be long
and hard, that leaving Iraq or creating a Palestinian state will not buy
peace, and that the side that accurately understands its enemy and has
confidence in its own beliefs will ultimately triumph. Thanks to Raymond
Ibrahim's *The Al Qaeda Reader*, we have the means for achieving that
understanding.
(c)2

On 8/22/07, Michael D. Weisner <mweisner at ebsmed.com> wrothe:
>
> A non-sailing article that may prove interesting for some who are not
> aware of the TALON system.  Of course, following the link below to read the
> story may just place your IP address on the FBI Guardian system.
>
> DOD PULLS PLUG ON TALON DATABASE
> Controversial intell reporting system was under legal fire as a means
> of storing information about domestic critics of Bush policies.
> http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/44903-1.html
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