Scoopster News

WAR ON JIHAD: Iraq criticises UK rescue operation.

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq denounced British forces on Tuesday over a dramatic rescue of two undercover soldiers that could stoke hostility to the army in increasingly volatile southern Iraq. [Editor: Reuter's exaggerates, an Iraqi spokesman deemed it 'unfortunate'.]

British troops used an armoured fighting vehicle on Monday to burst into an Iraqi jail in search of soldiers held by police in Basra. The British commander said he learnt they had been handed to militia and ordered their rescue from a nearby house.

"It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their forces the way it happened," Haider al-Ebadi, an adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, told a news conference in Baghdad.

British forces said the soldiers were in danger.

"From an early stage I had good reason to believe the lives of the two soldiers were at risk," Brigadier John Lorimer, the British commander in Basra, said in a statement.

WAR ON JIHAD: Basra Violence reveals Breakdown of Law.

British Soldier, engulfed in flames, escapes his tank while attacked by an Iraqi mob.

Disturbing footage coming out of Basra in the British-occupied zone of southern Iraq points to a breakdown in the rule of law in that city.

Recently, the relatively quite southern zone has seen an upsurge in violence.  An Al-Qaida group operating in the area has referred to the British soldiers as "crusaders". With an al-Qaida presence and bomb material coming in from neighboring Iran, Iraq is clearly the frontline in the War on Terror (War on Jihad). It is no longer tenable for partisan pundits to claim that Iraq is somehow disconnected from the War on Terror.

Senior British sources have commented in recent weeks that they have not excluded the possibility of a rise in violence in southern Iraq during the campaigning for the constitutional referendum.

They will now be trying to ascertain whether recent attacks are the start of that trouble. They are also concerned that the insurgents may be changing their tactics.

Better explosives and detonators are thought to have been coming over the border from neighboring Iran.They are not just enabling more numerous attacks, but also ensuring greater effectiveness.

British forces have been used to patrolling Basra without helmets, projecting an image of friendliness, believing that will win over the local population. Surely, this 'kindler gentler' waging of war favored by Tony Blair's New Labour government must end given the mob attacks on British patrols.

Earlier, two white Britons wearing Arab clothing shot at an Iraqi Police group in Basra.  It is suspected that the Britons are special forces officers on a covert operation.  London-based Iraq watchers have confirmed that the Iraqi security forces in Basra have been infiltrated by Ba'athist elements, supportive of Sadaam Hussein, and by agents of the Shia Mehdi Army, loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.  It is possible that the British operatives may have pinpointed insurgents within the Iraqi police force.

Reports from the ground are conflicting, but the two Britons were arrested and detained by the Iraqi police in Basra.  While the British Ministry of Defence claims that negotiations secured the transfer of the British citizens to UK custody, eyewitness accounts state that several British tanks attacked the Iraqi police station and bulldozed a wall in order to rescue them. 

The viciousness of the Shi'ite mobs rioting upon news of the arrest of the two Britons coupled with the Basra Governor's hostility and lack of cooperation with the British Army points to a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Coalition and the local Iraqi authorities in southern Iraq. This disturbing development shows that the Coalition cannot rely on the Iraqi security forces in the foreseeable future. 

Perhaps the best Exit Strategy is for the United Kingdom and the United States to crush the insurgency and then get out.  It would behoove the supporters of the Coalition operation in Iraq to now drop the "nation-building" rhetoric.

In other developments:

• Iraq's Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, tells the UK's Independent newspaper that large-scale corruption in Iraq's ministries, particularly the defence ministry, has led to the theft of more than $1bn;
• The Iraqi government says a nephew of Saddam Hussein, Ayman Sabawi, has been sentenced to life in prison for funding Iraq's insurgency;
• Al-Qaida says it was behind the 7 July bombings in London, in which 52 people were killed.

9/11: LEST WE FORGET: ITV News to honour Rescorla

Many of our readers will know the story of Lt Col Rick Rescorla, the British-American dual citizen who dedicated his life to serving the US.  He is credited with saving nearly 3,000 lives on 9/11 as the Chief of Security for Morgan Stanley at WTC.

We recommend OurWayofLife Blog for a fitting post on Rescorla.

ITV, the UK's largest commercial news outlet, is tonight airing a documentary about Rescorla entitled as "The Man Who Predicted 9/11"  on Britain's Channel Four:

The story of Rick Rescorla, the British security chief of Morgan Stanley's offices in the World Trade Centre in New York. After realising a terrorist attack using planes was a possibility, he made sure his co-workers were prepared for the eventuality. His foresight would ultimately save 2,700 lives when his nightmare scenario became a reality on 9/11

The California Legion Post 149 pays tribute online to Rescorla, flying both Old Glory and the Union Jack in his honor, calling him "An American Hero."  Indeed, during the evacuation of WTC, the English-born Rescorla lead his colleagues in singing "God Bless America" (as well as traditional 'Cornish' folk songs from his English county of birth).

Of particular interest is Rescorla's prediction of 9/11 which is the central theme of the ITN documentary.  The film "Voice of the Prophet" by Bob Edwards contains an interview with Rick Rescorla made in his office at the WTC in 1998 in which he discussed the plans he had made for a nightmare scenario in which the Twin Towers would be hit by airplanes.

On this the fourth anniversary of 9/11, we believe it is fitting to honor Rick Rescorla as a symbol of Anglo-American solidarity in the face of the Jihadist War on the West.  Unfortunately, Britain's New Labour government did not initially think that Rescorla was eligible for a British Gallantry medal. They yielded under public pressure.

IRAQ PRESIDENT: Saddam should hang '20 Times'.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein has confessed to crimes and should be hanged "20 times", his successor as Iraq's president said on Tuesday while confirming that he will not sign a death warrant himself.

"Saddam deserves a death sentence 20 times a day because he tried to assassinate me 20 times," Jalal Talabani said in a lengthy interview on Iraqiya state television, recalling his own days as a Kurdish rebel leader fighting the Baghdad authorities.

Saddam had confessed to crimes, he said in answer to a question, though it was not clear what details Talabani had of a legal process that is intended to be separate from Iraqi politics.

"There are 100 reasons to sentence Saddam to death," he said, two days after the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government confirmed that the deposed leader will go on trial on October 19, along with several aides, accused of killing 143 Shi'ite villagers after a failed assassination bid at Dujail in 1982.

Last week, Iraq hanged the first three criminals to be sentenced to death since Saddam's overthrow by U.S. forces.

In that case, too, Talabani refused to sign the warrant but handed responsibility to his Shi'ite vice president, Adel Abdel Mehdi. He explained his stance by saying that as leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan he had once signed up his left-wing party to an international ban on capital punishment.

HITTING HOME: British Cop flew to the US to find his son.

'I want my boy out of that Superdome'  Times of London, 3 Sept 2005

A BRITISH police inspector flew out to America yesterday to track down his son who is missing in New Orleans. Inspector Wayne Henry was last night trying to trace Peter, 20, among the tens of thousands of survivors trapped in the city’s Superdome. Four days ago, Peter sent a text message to his family in Epsom, Surrey, saying that he was petrified but alive. On Thursday they received a voice message saying he was experiencing the worst days of his life, but planned to continue his tour. Yesterday Mr Henry, with the Metropolitan Police for nearly thirty years and based in Hammersmith, West London, flew to Houston with photographs of his son. Speaking minutes before he boarded his Heathrow flight, Mr Henry, 48, said: “It is the frustration of being absolutely helpless and not being able to do anything at all to help. I have got to make sure that he is there . . . I need to do it.” The Foreign and Commonwealth Office hotline for concerned relatives is 020-7008 0000. The 24-hour contact number at the Houston British Consulate is 001-713 659 6270.

CNN Watch: Aaron Brown Goofs Again

One would think someone with such a self-generated sense of gravitas as CNN's Aaron Brown would have a better grasp of the English language.  Unfortunately, he can be quite amateurish.  On a 23 August 2005 broadcast of CNN Newsnight, in reference to the Pentagon's mistaken report of Pat Tillman's death, in which they stated he was killed by Taliban insurgents, Brown said that the Army was "gilding the lily".  Brown's style of news delivery is defined by its grandiloquence and dramatic pauses, redolent of an undergraduate reading an essay in a university tutorial.   However, someone at the dizzying heights of CNN journalism should have a grasp of English colloquialisms. 

The CNN transcript refers to "guilding the lily".  The phrase is "gilding the lily" as in layering gold on a lily. The expression is a condensation of Shakespeare's metaphor in King John: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess."  It means, to adorn unnecessarily something already beautiful--i.e., you wouldn't need to add gold to a beautiful lily.

It was an inappropriate use of the phrase, as the US Army did not gild the lily : Pat Tillman's death was not a lily, not a beautiful thing.  It was not an already beautiful thing which had been adorned.  If Brown were trying to say the Army hid an awful fact or glossed over the truth, he should just say so.  His pretentious narration at CNN is not something one would expect at the national level.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Since it was learned that former pro football star Pat Tillman died not from enemy guns in Afghanistan but friendly fire, the Army has denied it ever tried to mislead anyone, the country or Mr. Tillman's family. And from where we sit, no matter the circumstances of his death, the fact that Mr. Tillman gave up millions to join the Army after 9/11 made him a hero by any measure. There was no reason to guild the lily, which is exactly what the Army is suspected of doing by Mr. Tillman's family. They just want the truth. And they want anyone who tried to hide the truth punished. So another investigation has been launched. Here's CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)