Fausta's Blog

Yes, the mastermind of the first attack (in 1993) on the World Trade Center; that Blind Sheik.

I sincerely hope this is not true:
Mastermind of World Trade Center bombing to be “transferred” to Egypt?

Roger Kimball posts:

I thought a line had been crossed when sheriffs showed up at midnight to bundle away a man who had made an anti-Islamic  movie that embarrassed the President. Then there was the murder of our Ambassador and three other Americans in Libya: the administration’ response: blame Romney, apologize for the “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

Will there ever be a last straw for the MSM that is acting as Obama’s press corps? Is there anything Obama could do that would make them say “Enough!” and stand up for America? What would it take?  How about this: the announcement that the Obama administration is considering transferring the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, to Egypt “for humanitarian and health reasons.” Incredulous?  Then you underestimate the Islamophilc nature of the Obama administration.

The Blaze has the breaking story: “The U.S. State Department is currently in negotiations with the Egyptian government for the transfer of custody of Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as “the Blind Sheikh,” for humanitarian and health reasons, a source close to the the Obama administration toldThe Blaze.”

This isn’t a “release, the Department of Justice told The Blaze,Oh, no: merely a transfer the the Muslim Brotherhood controlled country where the Sheikh is regarded as a hero.

Here’s more:

 The Blind Sheikh is currently serving a life sentence in American prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but the newly-elected Islamist government in Egypt has been actively petitioning his release.  Many have pinpointed a cause of last week‘s unrest in in the country to be protests over the Blind Sheikh’s release – not an anti-Islam YouTube video.

Andrew McCarthy was the Blind Sheik’s prosecutor. It took years and millions of dollars to put the Blind Sheik behind bars. Read about it in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.

If the Obama administration releases the Blind Sheik, they must be counting on the electorate’s ignorance, and, as Roger Kimball’s commenter Jeff P put it,

If this is true, then it means that Obama is so confident of victory in November that nothing, not even brazen appeasement, will change the result.

Related:
Today’s the 225th anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution. Obama’s DOJ Can’t Say Criticizing Religion Will Remain Legal. Watch:

UPDATE:
Dan Riehlhas more,

In neighboring Egypt, birthplace of the ‘Blind Sheikh’ of aforementioned “Brigades of the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman” fame, similar recent calls for violence on his behalf were the calling card to the storming of the American embassy in Cairo as well. The ‘dots,’ again courtesy of the Washington Times.

• “There had been a sit-in in support of the “Blind Sheikh” outside the embassy for 18 months.”
• “On July 27, the sheikh’s son Abdallah Abdel Rahman threatened to organize a blockade of the embassy and to detain the Americans inside unless his father was released.”
• “Two days later, then-president-elect Mohammed Morsi vowed publicly to work to free the sheikh, and it will be at the top of his agenda in future meetings with President Obama.” (WSJ)
• “On Aug. 30, Jamaa Islamiya, the terrorist group formerly led by the Blind Sheikh, announced that the embassy sit-in was being turned into an active protest.” (USA Today via Gateway Pundit)
• “On Sept. 4, the Egyptian General Intelligence Service warned all Egyptian securityagencies of planned attacks against the embassy by a group called Global Jihad, which has been active in the Sinai.” (Jerusalem Post)
• “On Sept. 7, an Islamist named Nasser Al-Qaeda posted a statement on the Jihadi chat group Shumoukh Al-Islam that the U.S. embassy in Cairo should be burned down and everyone inside killed or taken hostage in order to bring pressure to bear to release the Blind Sheikh.” (MEMRI)
• “On the day before the embassy assault, several other jihadist groups with ties to al Qaeda – including Islamic Jihad, the Sunni Group and Jamaa Islamiya – echoed this threat and called for the release of the Blind Sheikh and all detainees in all U.S. detention facilities including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” (PJ Media)

Linked by Phinneas. Thanks!

Venezuela Frees U.S. Ship And Crew After Smuggling Investigation

Venezuelan authorities this morning released the U.S.-flagged cargo ship Ocean Atlas from two weeks of detention on suspicion of arms trafficking.

This comes as a relief to Intermarine, the owner of the ship, as well as for the 15-man all-American crew who had been stuck in limbosince August 29 when Venezuelan customs officials discovered a handful of weapons on board.

Babalu has been following the story.

Meanwhile, the “mercenary” (if he exists) remains in custody. No details have been released other than what Chavez claimed last month.

Cross-posted in the Green Room.

Exactly a week ago Hugo Chávez was saying that an American “mercenary” was arrested and was being interrogated in Venezuela.

Many (myself included) took it as one of Hugo’s many tall tales, particularly since – after saying that the man is a Hispanic Marine – Hugo added this detail,

The president said the man was carrying a U.S. passport with entrance and exit stamps from countries including Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya

Hugo also now says the man’s passport had a stamp from Jordan, too.

Jordan, Libya, whatever.

Now the latest on the mysterious Marine story is this,

U.S. officials will be allowed access on Wednesday to an American citizen arrested in Venezuela on suspicion of being a mercenary

Clearly implying a plot was afoot less than two months before a presidential election, the socialist leader has said the man was detained entering illegally from Colombia a week ago and sought to destroy some coordinates in a notebook at the time.
…
CONCILIATORY CHAVEZ

Chavez was conciliatory in his latest comments.

“Of course we are going to collaborate with the U.S. government, and I hope they will collaborate with us. The signs we have received, (Foreign Minister) Nicolas (Maduro) tells me, are positive,” he said.

Don’t get too excited over that “conciliatory” thing:

El Nuevo Herald has documents showing that Chavez will send out a militia of 2,000 to “patrol and control” electrical power installations during the upcoming election. Chavez insists that the USA is plotting with the opposition to disrupt the electoral process, after which he says the USA will invade Venezuela.

As if that’s not nuts enough, one of the documents states that the plot

“is organized in the United States of North [sic] America with the support of the Venezuelan extreme right and transnational businesses, and with the technical support of Corpolec (state agency that took over all the electrical suppliers in the country) specialists, both active and retired, which support it.”

And then people wonder why I don’t read fiction anymore.

Far-fetched and downright delusional as all this sounds, it’s worth noting that the militia’s allegiance is to Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution, unlike the Army, whose allegiance is to Venezuela. Chavez, as long-time readers of this blog know, has committed to creating a militia 1,000,000 strong, while embarking in an armaments race with the help of the Russians.

Cross-posted in The Green Room.

Michael Malone, Eagle Scout and author of Four Percent: The Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life, writes about A Century of Eagle Scouts
The Eagles’ service project is the single greatest youth-service initiative in history, and one that has touched every community in America in an important way.

Out of the more than 115 million boys who have passed through the Boy Scouts of America in the last 102 years, approximately two million have become Eagle Scouts, a 2% rate that has climbed to about 4% of all scouts in recent years. Some may have excelled in outdoor challenges and troop leadership, or while earning merit badges for oceanography and entrepreneurship. Yet all have been changed by the experience of what has been come to be called “the Ph.D. of Boyhood.” And these Eagles in turn have changed the face of American culture in ways both obvious and unexpected.

Many went on to notable careers and distinguished service to the country. The list of famous Eagles over the last century includes movie and television stars, six Medal of Honor recipients, Nobel Prize winners, novelists, a number of astronauts (including most Shuttle astronauts), Tuskegee airmen and Japanese-American internees, congressmen, senators and governors, an endless number of corporate CEOs and university presidents, a U.S. president (Gerald Ford), and the first man to walk on the moon (Neil Armstrong). But there are other, perhaps less obvious, Eagles as well: sexologist Alfred Kinsley, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Washington’s disgraced ex-mayor Marion Barry.

Two summers ago, during the BSA centennial parade in Washington, D.C., the adult Eagle contingent of official marchers featured a diplomat, a journalist, military officers, a bomb-demolition expert, doctors and a department-store Santa Claus. Despite what you might think, America’s Eagles are spread across the political spectrum. They include individuals across all races (scouting was officially integrated from the start) who hold beliefs as diverse as other Americans. What they have in common is that they chose a life of achievement and assumed leadership roles at a very young age.

My son is an Eagle Scout, and has taught me the value of perseverance and being goal-oriented at a young age. It takes a (young) man of character to become an Eagle.

To all Eagle Scouts, who have 100 million hours of service to their communities, my heartfelt thanks.

Cross-posted in The Green Room.

Chris Edwards, writing on We Can Cut Government: Canada Did, brings up a very important point,

THE FEDERALISM ADVANTAGE

One of Canada’s strengths is that it is a decentralized federation. The provinces compete with each other over fiscal and economic matters, and they have wide latitude to pursue different policies. Federalism has allowed for healthy policy diversity in Canada, and it has promoted government restraint.

Government spending has become much more centralized in the United States than it has in Canada. In the United States, 71 percent of total government spending is federal and 29 percent is state-local. In Canada it’s the reverse — 38 percent is federal and 62 percent is provincial-local.

The federalism difference between the countries is striking with regards to K-12 education. While federal control over U.S. schools has increased in recent decades, Canada has no federal department of education. School funding is left to the provinces, which seems to work: Canadian school kids routinely score higher on international comparison tests than do U.S. kids.

The countries also differ with regards to the amount of top-down control exerted on subnational governments through federal aid programs. The United States has a complex array of more than 1,000 aid-to-state programs for such things as highways and education. Each of these aid programs comes with a pile of regulations that micromanage state and local affairs.

By contrast, Canada mainly has just three large aid programs for provincial governments, and they are structured as fixed block grants. It is true, however, that one of these grants helps to fund the universal health care system, which is a big exception to the country’s generally decentralized policy approach. Nonetheless, having just a few large block grants is superior to the U.S. system of a vast number of grants, each with separate rules and regulations.

A final federalism advantage in Canada is that provincial and local taxes are not deductible on federal individual tax returns. That structure promotes vigorous tax competition between the provinces. In the United States, state and local income and property taxes are deductible on federal income tax returns, which has the effect of blunting competition by essentially subsidizing hightax states and cities.

Go read the whole article.

With gratitude to all of those who have sacrificed for our freedoms,

Written by Canadian army officer and physician John McCrae after he had witnessed the horrific carnage at Ypres, the poem begins with the words, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row.”

It concludes with a message from the honored dead: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields.”

Nearly a bloody century later, Americans have infinitely more reasons to remember and to be thankful for all who have since died in the defense of liberty.

A beautiful tradition, revived.

KimberlinFiles.Org

Blogger Aaron Walker and his wife lost their full-time jobs as a result of Brett Kimberlin’s attacks. Robert Stacy McCain lost his home. Others are suffering professionally and personally in unimaginable ways.

The National Bloggers Club has created this special initiative, which enables supporters to make financial donations to a relief fund as a show of support.

Stacy McCain has been forced into hiding because of threats on his person and his family; here are his Kimberlin files,

This story is not about Mandy Nagy or Seth Allen or Patrick Freyor Aaron Worthing or anyone else that has been targeted, smeared, blamed, accused or harassed in the past several months.

Convicted Bomber Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, Ron Brynaert, and Their Campaign of Political Terrorism

All American Blogger has Who Is Brett Kimberlin, Why You Need To Know and The Biggest Linkaround EVAH!

Last, but not least, read Breitbart.com’s history of the Speedway Bomber.

UPDATE:
John Hawkins interviewed Robert Stacy McCain About Brett Kimberlin

Arthur Brooks’s new book, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise deals with “entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and upward mobility”. Today he has an article in the Wall Street Journal,
America and the Value of ‘Earned Success’
‘We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being.’

Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.

This means, policy-wise,

All surveys show that most Americans still embrace our free enterprise system—today. The crucial test is whether the country is willing to support the hard work and policy reforms that will sustain it.

As Elizabeth Foley says,

Earned success is indeed, as Brooks points out, the heart of American exceptionalism, and it leads to individual happiness in a way that handouts never can.

Go read the whole thing. The book is also available on Kindle.

Ian Bremmer posits Five myths about America’s decline

2. America’s economic future is bleak.

Part of the reason the United States is less willing to engage abroad is because it has its hands full with economic concerns at home: spiraling federal debt, high unemployment, lower wages and a growing disparity of wealth.

But while the U.S. economic outlook may not shine as bright as it once did, it is hardly grim. America’s higher education system is unparalleled, with a record 725,000 foreign students enrolled at U.S. universities last year. No country has a greater capacity for technological breakthroughs: The United States is the destination of choice for aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s the research and development center of the world, and Silicon Valley’s start-ups and venture capitalism are exemplary.

On energy, innovation in unconventional oil and gas resources has been the biggest game-changer of the past decade, with U.S.-based companies leading the charge. The United States is now the largest natural gas producer in the world. It is also the world’s largest food exporter, giving America some leverage against food price shocks or shortages.

Demographically, the United States is better off than other large economies. The U.S. population is expected to rise by more than 100 million by 2050, and the labor force should grow by 40 percent. Compare that with Europe, where the population is slated to shrink by as much as 100 million people over the same span, or to China, where the labor force is already contracting.

The immediate problem, however, is the current monetary and economic policy with their disastrous consequences. The ever-shrinking labor force, the real unemployment rate of 11.1%, will not improve as long as the current administration continues its anti-business, government-enlarging policies.

However, go read Five myths about America’s decline.

Activist Chen Guangcheng: Let Me Leave China on Hillary Clinton’s Plane
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast’s Melinda Liu, blind dissident Chen Guangcheng says he’s been abandoned by American officials at a Chinese hospital and begs to leave the country on Hillary Clinton’s plane.

When U.S. officials escorted him out of the U.S. embassy shortly after 3 p.m. Wednesday, Chen thought he’d extracted a promise that at least one of them would stay with him at the hospital, he said. “Many Americans were with me while I checked into the hospital and doctors examined me. Lots of them,” he told me from his hospital bed, where he’s being treated for broken bones in one foot, an injury sustained when he fell after climbing a wall during his daring escape from house arrest late last month. “But when I was brought to the hospital room, they all left. I don’t know where they went.” The ordeal was all the more bewildering because Chen is blind and was hurt during his escape; he needs crutches or a wheelchair to move around.

The hours ticked by, and Chen became more and more agitated. Even though he’d originally told friends and embassy officials that he wished to remain in China, now he wanted to leave. “I hope to seek medical treatment in the U.S. with my family, and then I want to rest,” he said. “As for the future, we’ll deal with that in the future.” At the hospital, Chen’s fears mounted as his wife told him she’d been tied to a chair, beaten, and interrogated by Chinese guards after they learned he had entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing last Friday.

Nick Zahnpoints out,

Congressman Frank Wolf (R–VA) reminds us in his Foreign Policy piece:

During a visit to Asia early in her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton famously said that U.S .concern with human rights issues in China “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.”

It is likely that this prioritization has not been forgotten by China’s leadership.

Doug Mataconis:

one wonders what impact this might have on the Obama Administration internationally and domestically. Frida Ghitis, in an opinion piece at CNN.com, puts it this way:

The Chen case, however, could become iconic. If the Obama administration cannot explain what went wrong, it will have opened itself to criticism from human rights advocates and from Republican rivals, that he badly fumbled.

The Chinese government has demanded an apology from Washington for helping Chen and for interfering in Chinese domestic affairs. But the Obama administration, which claimed it had stayed true to American values in the Chen case, needs to prove that it has the moral strength to stand up for one courageous individual who sought help.

This is not just about Chen. It is about universal principles of human rights, really, and about America’s willingness to defend them on the global stage. The whole world is watching.

We can’t save every political prisoner in China, but when they show up at the doorstep of our Embassy and we let them in things change significantly. If it turns out that we’ve turned Chen and his family back over to the wolves that’s going to be something the Obama Administration will have to answer for at some point.

Doug is an optimist. The media will turn a blind eye on Chen, and the Obama administration will have to answer to no one.

Prior post on Chen here.

UPDATE,
Didn’t take long for the Taiwanese Animation folks to come up with something,