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Terrorist in a bootleg T-shirt
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Arriving at JFK from Dubai recently, I was stopped at customs by an officer from the Department of Homeland Security and directed to a drab backroom filled with Arabs, South Asians and Africans. I wasn’t surprised, really, having just spent six months working and traveling in the Islamic world — Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and Pakistan. If ever there were a DHS red-flag candidate,
I was it, and I assumed this was just protocol.
Four of those months were in Pakistan, and I had just spent a week with a journalist friend going to different madrasas, including one Islamic school visited by one of the bombers in the July 2005 attacks in London. Possibly I caught their attention by poking around the Karachi Marriott’s parking lot, across from the U.S. consulate, where a suicide bomber’s attack had killed a U.S. diplomat just two months before.
How about the hundreds of phone calls I made from Pakistan to friends and family back home that inevitably mentioned the Taliban’s resurgence and criticized President Bush. Was I wiretapped? Certainly Homeland Security, whose stated mission is to “lead the unified national effort to secure America … prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation,” had detained me for such a reason.
Or maybe officers had questions about the Jamaat-ud-Dawa rally I’d witnessed in Kashmir. The group was protesting against the United States because it recently had been added to the State Department’s list of groups designated as terrorist organizations. Then there was Lebanon, where I’d traveled deep into the Hezbollah-held south.
If only.
No, these frontline warriors in the global war on terrorism at Homeland Security had far more pressing issues to question me about. “Why did you infringe on the Boston Celtics’ copyright in Boston in 2003?” asked my case officer, Malik — ironically a Pakistani — from behind his high desk. Uh, because I used to sell T-shirts outside sporting events, I said, wondering what this had to do with national security.
Ever wonder what happens when you dump a bucket of liquid nitrogen into a swimming pool?
Victory: The Week in Pictures
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June 11-18, 2006
Fisting and God’s Will
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The sex act called fisting is a source of confusion and misconceptions for many Christians. This is unfortunate, because it means that many Christian men and women are depriving themselves of what could be the most spiritual sexual experience of their lives. Like anal sex and BDSM, fisting is often mistakenly associated with the gay community or is considered a sex act too extreme to be appropriate for Christian couples. Not only are these views incorrect, but fisting actually has a scriptural precedent, as we will show.
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Broken Windows Theory
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed.
The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months.
To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and
it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time.– Frederick Brooks Jr., “The Mythical Man Month”
Soccer
US rejected Iranian overtures in 2003
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Officials in US President George W. Bush’s administration turned down a 2003 Iranian offer to begin talks with the US, recognize Israel, and end support of Palestinian terror organizations, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The proposal, which arrived via fax along with a letter of authentication by a Swiss ambassador, was ignored. Reports have circulated in the past that Iran had extended its hand to the US, but the document itself was only recently obtained by the Post - reportedly from Iranian sources - and confirmed as genuine by both American and Iranian officials.
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The document details Iran’s aims: ending sanctions, development of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and a recognition of its “legitimate security interests.” Iran also agreed to discuss a number of US demands: full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, “decisive action” on terrorism, coordinated efforts in Iraq, cessation of “material support” for terror organizations, and accepting the 2002 Saudi solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ending terrorism? What were they thinking… Iran clearly has no clue what the US administration wants…
Then and now
CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, interview with Tony Snow, June 18, 2006
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BLITZER: Let’s move on and talk about some other issues. I know your time is limited. Afghanistan. Is the Taliban making a serious comeback right now?
SNOW: I think what the Taliban is doing — and it’s predictable — is that they are trying to test in the south, where the U.S. forces are handing over to NATO…But A, it’s predictable, and B, in the encounters, as you know, the Taliban fighters have overwhelmingly been losing. Now, I think it is predictable… you can expect there to be pushback by the Taliban.
Take a guess who didn’t predict this at all:
President’s Remarks in “Focus on Education with President Bush” Event, September 27, 2004:
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And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free. (Applause.) In other words when you say something as President you better make it clear so everybody understands what you’re saying, and you better mean what you say.
The resurgence of the Taliban was not predicted by this administration. It is a consequence of shifting resources to Iraq before the mission in Afghanistan was completed.
Illegal Hiring Is Rarely Penalized
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The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.
Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
And as a result, they have a great “campaign issue”.
‘Wash Post’ Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship
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The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked “sensitive,” that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, “the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees.”
This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, “the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees’ constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.”
It’s actually far worse than that, as the details published below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women’s rights, and “ethnic cleansing.”
A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from “AMEmbassy Baghdad” on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad — the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.
Bill Gates to leave Microsoft in 2008
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And tomorrow, he will take over my city.
A visit to Budapest, showing of in a former communist country, telling the world - We gave freedom to these people, we will give freedom to Iraq too.
Almost wish he would disappear mid-transit.
(Mainly because the city will be closed, blocked, and generally our life disturbed to a degree it wasn’t when Putin was here. And he will give a speech, and remember to our revolution of ‘56 - when the US did not help, though he was asked to -, and generally prancing around. No, I don’t really like him. And, our politicians will be nodding and glowing, and generally make an ass of themselves to show how good boys there are….. broaf….)