Detroit Free-Press, 29 Jan 10: Saying that informants are an important tool, the special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI office told a Dearborn audience today that the case of a Muslim cleric who died in a shootout with federal agents ended tragically, but that his agents followed proper protocol. “We did what we had to do,” said Andrew Arena, head of the FBI office in Detroit.
Over the past year, there has been growing concern among Muslims about the use of undercover sources in their mosques and communities. Informants were used in the case of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a Muslim leader from Detroit who died Oct. 28 after a shootout in Dearborn with FBI agents seeking to arrest him and others on suspicion of dealing with stolen goods. The FBI has said Abdullah opened fire on agents.
“I’m a Catholic, born and raised Roman Catholic,” Arena told the largely Muslim crowd in Dearborn. “If a Catholic priest is standing on the pulpit, saying, give money to the Irish Republican Army to kill British soldiers and throw them out of Northern Ireland, we have a right, a duty, a responsibility” to investigate. But people who preach their religion peacefully will not be targeted. . . .
. . . . Arena said that using informants are “the bread and butter of what we do in law enforcement.” But he said the FBI doesn’t put them in places because of religion. “We don’t target religions…we can’t do it,” because of guidelines. At the same time, he added, “bad people can’t hide behind religion.” . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 362–Informant Development for Law Enforcement Officers to Fight Terrorism
AP, 29 Jan 10: A powerful hard-line Iranian cleric on Friday called for the execution of more opposition activists to silence anti-government protests, praising the hanging a day earlier of two men caught up in the leadership’s postelection crackdown.
Speaking in a Friday prayer sermon, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the wave of street demonstrations sparked by the disputed June presidential election would not have lasted until now if protesters had been executed early on. “Whatever we suffered was because of our weakness. How many did the judiciary execute on July 9?” he said, referring to one of the particularly large protest days. “We showed weakness, so then we had Ashoura,” he said, referring to a major protest on Dec. 27. “If you show weakness now, the future will be worse … There is no room for Islamic mercy.”
Iran’s judiciary is stepping up death sentences as the leadership intensifies its campaign to eliminate the challenge from the pro-reform opposition movement. Authorities announced Thursday that nine people accused of involvement in protests have been sentenced to death – including five who allegedly had a role in the Dec. 27 protests, which saw a particularly violent clampdown.
Iran’s top prosecutor said a new group of protesters and others would soon be brought to trial. The two men executed Thursday were arrested before the June 12 election on charges of belonging to an armed group aiming to topple the government. But authorities lumped them in with opposition activists arrested during the postelection crackdown.
In his sermon, aired live on state radio, Jannati thanked Iran’s judiciary chief, Sadeq Larijani, for Thursday’s executions and urged more, saying: “Stand up courageously for the sake of God, the same way you executed these two persons very quickly.” Jannati cited verses from the Quran, Islam’s holy book, that he said show Islam permits rulers to kill their opponents, including “hypocrites, those with evil intentions and those who spread rumors.” . . . .
New York Times, 29 Jan 10: The nation’s main counterterrorism center is creating new teams of specialists to pursue clues of emerging terrorist plots as part of a rapid buildup that will sharply increase its analyst corps, perhaps by hundreds of people over the next year, intelligence officials said Friday.
The action by the National Counterterrorism Center is one of the furthest reaching by the government so far to address the failings of several federal agencies in the case of a 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with boarding a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into his underwear. A White House review this month found that no one in the government’s vast intelligence system had sole responsibility for detecting and piecing together disparate threat information, telltale signs that could have prevented the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding the plane.
In response, the counterterrorism center in the past several days has picked more than three dozen of its most capable analysts from across its ranks to form what it calls pursuit teams to focus on threats from Yemen and other offshoots of Al Qaeda that could imperil the United States, officials said. . . .
Daily Telegraph, 28 Jan 10: There is nothing hyperbolic in stating that a trial which has just started in Holland will have unparalleled significance for the future of Europe. It is not just about whether our culture will survive, but whether we are even allowed to state the fact that it is being threatened. . . . The Dutch courts charge that Wilders ‘on multiple occasions, at least once, (each time) in public, orally, in writing or through images, intentionally offended a group of people, i.e. Muslims, based on their religion’.
I’m sorry? Whoa there, just a minute. The man’s on trial because he ‘offended a group of people’? I get offended by all sorts of people. I get offended by very fat people. I get offended by very thick people. I get offended by very sensitive people. I get offended by the crazy car-crash of vowels in Dutch verbs. But I don’t try to press charges. Yet, crazily, this is exactly what is going on now in a Dutch courtroom. If found guilty of this Alice-in-Wonderland accusation of ‘offending a group of people’, Wilders faces up to two years in prison.
If anyone doubts the surreal nature of the proceedings now going on they should simply look through the summons which is available in an English translation here. It shows that Wilders is on trial for his film Fitna. And for various things he has said in articles and interviews in the Dutch press. . . . Parts of Fitna – which is a compilation of documentary footage – are very disturbing. And very offensive indeed. The clips of Muslim clerics calling for the murder of infidels. Very offensive. The clips of Muslims holding banners saying ‘God bless Hitler’. Very offensive. The clip of a three-year-old Muslim girl indoctrinated and brain-washed to describe Jews as ‘Apes and Pigs’. Very offensive. The passage of the Koran, Surah 47, verse 4: ‘Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; At length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them.’ Very offensive.
Just to confirm – I find all these things very offensive. But Wilders didn’t say them. He is being tried for pointing out the fact that some – in some cases many – Muslims do. If there are to be prosecutions they should be of the clerics and leaders who advocate this nightmarish version of Islam. But not of Wilders. . . .
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WE ARE OFFENDED TOO
- We’re offended that almost all of the terrorist attacks in recent years that killed innocent people were done in the name of Islam; that includes plots that were stopped before the attacks took place
- We’re offended that Islamic demonstrators in Western countries hold signs saying, “God Bless Hitler,” “Behead those who insult Islam,” “Islam will dominate the world,” “To Hell with Freedom,” etc
- We’re offended that Islamic fundamentalists hate freedom, liberty and democracy
- We’re offended that Islamists do not believe in the separation of church and state—to them Islam is both religion and state
- We’re offended that Islamists are actively working to replace the US Constitution with the Islamic Sharia Law
- We’re offended that Islamists treat Muslim women as second class property who have no rights
- We’re offended that their Islamic laws would allow them to stone women and gays
- We’re offended that Islamists have massacred moderate Muslims, calling them apostates who deserved to be killed
- We’re offended that Islamists live in the West, taking advantages of all its freedoms, including freedom of speech, but hating the West and wanting to destroy it
- We’re offended that Islamists think that world peace will only happen when the entire world lives under Islam
- We’re offended that Islamists teach their children to hate non-Muslims and encourage their own children to become suicide bombers when they grow up
- We’re offended that Islamic oil money has been funding the Islamic Studies programs in our colleges and universities for nearly 30 years and whose scholars they fund have covered up and denied the growing Islamic Jihad threat, causing the US to be blindsided on 9/11
- We’re offended that Islamists have hateful anti-American literature in US mosques, inciting young men to become jihadists threatening our national security
- We’re offended that Islamists sided with the Nazis during World War II
- We’re offended that Islamists reject the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- We’re offended that Islamists have brutally and barbarically beheaded American citizens
- We’re offended that Islamists have gone into Iraq to cause instability to that new democracy and are killing US soldiers
- We’re offended that Islamists thought 9/11 was a great, happy event and danced in the streets in the Middle East
- We’re offended that Islamists make videos on the internet showing how they killed Americans and saying how much they hate us
- We’re offended that that 13% of American Muslims in a poll said they think suicide bombing is justifiable
- We’re offended that Islamists make Islamic women completely cover themselves in hot, suffocating robes (holdover from the 7th century) that deny the woman’s individuality and humanity and that American feminists say nothing about the horrible treatment of their sisters in the Middle East
- We’re offended that Islamists sued American citizens who were brave enough to speak up when they saw something wrong on an airline flight
- We’re offended that Mohammed Atta and his suicide hijackers shouted the Islamic “God is Great” when they crashed into the Twin Towers, killed thousands of innocent people
- We’re offended that before Islamists go on their terrorist attacks to kill people, they create videos saying they are doing it for Islam and hope their act is pleasing to Allah
- We’re offended that Islamists have cowered moderate Muslims into being too fearful for the lives to speak out against Islamic fundamentalism
- We’re offended that the Islamists have engaged in a long-term, sophisticated denial and deception program against the West and is winning the “War of Ideas” because of the manipulation of the West’s tolerance, justice system, political system, education system and political correctness sensitivities.
- We’re offended that Islamists declared war with us a long time ago and Americans still don’t realize this
- We’re offended that Islamists have stated they would not hesitate to used nuclear or biological weapons against the West
- We’re offended that Americans haven’t learned, haven’t read, and don’t know how great a threat Islamism is to the liberty and security of our country
- We’re offended that there are too many Islamists who desire, plan and act to kill you and that too many people support them. One person who wants to kill you is too many. And remember what a Holocaust survivor said he learned—when someone says they want to kill you, believe them!
CBS News, 29 Jan 10: Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta announced Friday that the CIA is raising language requirements for employees looking to be promoted to the top ranks of the agency, the Senior Intelligence Service. Panetta sent a note to CIA staff saying he expects these high-ranking employees “to lead the way in strengthening this critical expertise.”
“While many senior Agency officers have tested proficient in a foreign language over the course of their careers, some have not kept their skills current,” the CIA said in a release. “Under the new policy, promotions to SIS for most analysts and operations officers will be contingent on demonstrating foreign language competency. If an officer is promoted to SIS and does not meet the foreign language requirement within one year, he or she will return to their previous, lower grade. This is a powerful incentive to maintain and improve skills critical to the Agency’s global mission.” . . .
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta Announces Stronger Language Requirements for Promotion (CIA, 29 Jan 10)
. . . . .The main goals of the five-year initiative—jump-started with funding from Congress—are to:
- Double the number of analysts and collectors who are proficient in a foreign language;
- Expand the number of officers proficient in mission-critical languages such as Arabic, Pushto, and Urdu;
- Transform how the CIA conducts language training; and
- Make language skills an even more important factor in Agency hiring.
The Agency has made major progress already:
- The majority of National Clandestine Service officers in language training are studying mission-critical languages.
- Fifty percent of the most recent graduates of the NCS training program immediately entered language training.
- The Directorate of Intelligence, too, will now send some of its new hires directly to language training.
- New distance-learning tools—a valuable asset for a global workforce—are being deployed.
- In Fiscal Year 2009, the number of Agency officers with foreign language proficiency rose by nine percent, an increase that can be attributed in part to the CIA’s success in recruiting new officers with language skills.
