Month: June 2009

THIRD Update [2009-6-2 6:12:53 by Steven D]: Oui has a diary which references blog posts and news articles indicating the shooter had recently been to Yemen and had been under investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force since his return from there. In Yemen he had been arrested for using a fake Somali passport. After reading what OUi posted it does appear this was a terrorist incident by an American citizen with possible associations to a Tennessee mosque with an extremist ideology.

Here is the link to the ABC story claiming the shooter had been to Yemen and was under investigation by the FBI.

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SECOND Update [2009-6-1 23:8:59 by Steven D]: More details from CNN regarding the shooter’s motive:

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — a 24-year-old Little Rock resident formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe — faces a first-degree murder charge and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act, Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said. The terrorist counts stem from the shots fired at an occupied building.

While authorities continued to investigate a motive, Thomas said Muhammad is a Muslim convert and, based on preliminary interviews with him, investigators believe there were “political and religious motives” in the shooting.

The suspect’s name is spelled differently in the above story. In addition there are no named sources in the CNN report, so take that as you will.

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Update [2009-6-1 23:0:49 by Steven D]: A Little Rock Police Lieutenant is now claiming that Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad (spelling corrected from below), the suspected shooter of two soldiers in Little Rock, Arkansas today shot the two soldiers because he was opposed to the US military.

“This individual appears to have been upset with the military, the Army in particular, and that’s why he did what he did,” Little Rock Police Lt. Terry Hastings said in a phone interview with USA TODAY. “He has converted to (Islam) here in the past few years. To be honest, we’re not completely clear on what he was upset about. He had never been in the military.”

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A soldier was killed in Little Rock, Arkansas, by a lone gunman outside a military recruiting station. Another was wounded. The local TV News station, KATV 7 likely has the most current information:

Police say the incident occurred around 10:15 a.m. at a U.S. Army Navy Career Center inside the Ashley Square Shopping Center at 9112 North Rodney Parham Road. According to Lt. Terry Hastings with the Little Rock Police Department, two enlisted soldiers standing outside the office were hit when an unidentified suspect drove up and began shooting.

The murdered man was a 23-year-old named William Long. Our condolences to his family and to the family of the wounded soldier, Quenton Ezeagwula. Further details about the shooting foillow:

Police are trying to determine a motive in the shooting. Hastings said he did not know whether the recruiting office was specifically targeted by the attacker or randomly chosen.

The FBI (web) (web) has opened an investigation into the incident, said Steven Frazier, spokesman for the agency’s Little Rock office. “Based on what we find, we will determine whether there is any federal jurisdiction to prosecute,” he said.

According to Army Lt. Col. Thomas F. Artis, Long and Ezeagwula were not recruiters, but part of a recruiting program called “Hometown Recruiting Assistance.” Artis says recruiters use soldiers to tell their stories and talk to potential recruits while they are visiting or based back in their home region.

The KATV website has a picture of an African American male in custody though he is not specifically identified as the suspect in the shooting. Video of a witness being interviewed can be seen at this link. The press conference of the Little Rock Police Chief can be viewed here:

The suspected gunman apparently goes by more than one name, one of which was identified by the Police Chief Stuart Thomas as “Abdullah Akeemuhajeed Muhammad” (sp?) “Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad” and the other as “Carlos Bledsoe” (sp?). Until the motive of the gun man and his identity become known I think it would be reckless to make any assumptions about why these soldiers were shot. We can all of us, however, regardless of political convictions, express our regrets and outrage at this heinous act of violence. Nothing justifies the shooting of these young men.

I wonder if Mitt Romney knows how boring and unoriginal he is.

The problem with the nomination of Clarence Thomas, aside from the whole Anita Hill angle, was that he had very little relevant experience to be a Supreme Court judge. In the 1970’s, he had served as an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri for a few years, had been an attorney for Monsanto for three years, and was a legislative assistant to Sen. John Danforth for a while. In the 1980’s, he joined the Reagan administration as the Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights, and then served as Chairman of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In March 1990, he began serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He had only been a judge for 19 months when he was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

It was rather obvious that the Poppy Bush administration wanted to appoint someone black to replace Thurgood Marshall (who had argued the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case for the NAACP). But, it was also obvious that they were picking Thomas because he was anomalously conservative for a black man. There were many more qualified black judges than Clarence Thomas.

It’s clear that the Obama administration wanted to pick a woman to be on the Court because it currently has 8 men and 1 woman. It’s also clear that the Obama administration had an interest in nominating the first Latino Justice. From that standpoint, there are some similarities with Thomas. In both cases, elements of race and life-story played a part in the selection process. But Sonia Sotomayor is about as qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice as it is possible to be. There may be other judges who are more qualified in some objective sense, but it’s doubtful if there are any Latinas who are more qualified. Moreover, she wasn’t selected primarily because of her ideology, as Thomas clearly was. Sotomayor fits several needs/desires at once without sacrificing anything in terms of quality. That’s why she is not a token candidate in the Clarence Thomas mold.

But, don’t tell that to Debbie Schlussel:

Our President chose this chick because like, J-Lo, she’s a Puerto Ricana from South Bronx who went from rags to semi-riches. And that’s it. That’s the whole reason. What a joke. Guess I’m gonna have to refer to her as “Justice J-Lo,” once she gets confirmed by the Democrat dominated Senate. After all, neither J-Lo or So-So have set any remarkable legal precedent in their lives. Neither have achieved legal greatness, and one of ‘em is about to become a legal Supreme.

Here’s a few other ideas for why Obama might have picked her. He could relate to the fact that her father died when she was nine years old and was absent from her upbringing thereafter. He could relate to her educational experience because they both got into Ivy League schools (Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are both Princeton alums) and both earned Ivy League law degrees, despite being racial minorities from humble beginnings. He, coming from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, could relate to someone that calls Greenwich Village home. In other words, Sonia Sotomayor has a tremendous amount in common with President Obama. He just might have picked for that reason.

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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

President Obama will be delivering a big speech in Cairo this week. It will address U.S. relations with the broader Muslim world. What kind of message do you think he should focus on?

Bill O’Reilly had nothing to do with the fact that Dr. Tiller was murdered. Really. That’s what the right wing blogs are saying. Because after all, he was a “baby killer.”

The problem, of course, is that Tiller was in fact a baby killer. Though that certainly doesn’t justify his murder, there’s no denying that Tiller was a controversial figure. And, frankly, O’Reilly’s rhetoric aimed at Tiller (not to mention that of Tiller’s other critics among the pro-life crowd) wasn’t any worse than some of the Bush=Hitler nonsense we’ve been hearing from the left over the past eight years.

I remember when Markos Zuniga, proprietor of the biggest liberal blog on the planet Daily Kos, said “screw them” in response to some American security contractors being murdered in Iraq and drug through the streets. That’s much worse than anything O’Reilly said about Tiller, and yet Kos is still a member in good standing of the mainstream liberal community. And what if George W. Bush were to be assassinated tomorrow. Could we blame the folks at MoveOn.org and Michael Moore for whipping up so much hatred for him?

That wouldn’t be fair. And neither is blaming O’Reilly for Tiller.

This is the same nonsense we saw after Oklahoma City when the Clintons were trying to pin McVeigh on conservative talk radio. It’s not about truth or any sense of responsibility. It’s about leveraging a tragedy to silence dissent and advance a political agenda.

It’s sickening.

Well it is sickening. Here’s O’Reilly on Tiller, btw.

Some of the things O’Reilly has said of Tiller, according to Salon:

* He “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.”

* He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,”

* a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida

* “This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union”

* “operating a death mill”

* “has blood on his hands”

* “executing babies about to be born”

And now, for comparison’s sake, here are the alleged rants of Scott Roeder, the man charged with Dr. Tiller’s murder:

In recent years, someone using the name Scott Roeder has posted anti-Tiller comments on various Internet sites. One post, dated Sept. 3, 2007 and placed on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called chargetiller.com, said that Tiller needed to be “stopped.”

“It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the ‘lawlessness’ which is spoken of in the Bible,” it said. “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

On May 19, 2007, a Scott Roeder commented on an invitation by Operation Rescue to join an event being held May 17-20 in Wichita, “the ‘Nation’s Abortion Capital,’ to pray for an end to George R. Tiller’s late-term abortion business and for all pre-born babies everywhere to once again come under the protection of law.”

The post said: “Bless everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.”

Yeah, no connection whatsoever. O’Reilly actually sounds worse. But I’m sure tonight he will play the “victim card” and bitch and moan about how the godless liberal media is out to get him.

Oh, and for the record, despite all the so-called liberal hate, I know of not one single “conservative” who was murdered or assassinated for their political beliefs by “liberal nutjobs” over the eight years of George W. Bush’s term in office. However, the list of liberals or presumed liberals or just people unfortunate enough to be in a government building who have been murdered by right wing ideologues is rather extensive.

And I know of no one on the left with the comparable celebrity or audience of conservative talk show hosts, TV personalities and pundits who have consistently “joked” (and sometimes not joked) about the hoped for murder of their political opposites like OReilly, Hannity, Coulter, Savage and Limbaugh, etc. have done. Remember O’Reilly begging Al Qaeda to bomb San Francisco? Or Coulter suggesting liberal Supreme Court Justice Stevens be poisoned? Or Limbaugh suggesting we shouldn’t kill of all the liberals because we will need some for our Museum exhibits? Or what about Glenn Beck publicly musing about if he should or could kill Michael Moore by choking him with his bare hands?

The most high profile “liberals” in the media are probably Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore. Anyone ever hear of them joking about killing Republicans or conservatives? Naw, I didn’t think so. So wingnuts, do us all a favor and cut the crap with the bogus comparisons of the hate speech that froths from the anuses of popular right wing media figures on a daily basis and so called “liberal haters.” We may consider Bush and Cheney to be war criminals but no one on the left is advocating for their assassination. We just want them to face charges in a court of law for their crimes. Your fellow travelers, however, prefer to take the law into their own hands.

In March 1993, three months into the administration of our first pro-choice president, Bill Clinton, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. That was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.

Today’s assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn’t portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

And let’s not forget the Oklahoma City bombing, the murderous violence by Eric Rudolph, the assassination plots against Obama, the wingnut dirty bomb maker from Maine, James Adkisson, the admitted liberal hate crime murderer, and all the other crazed right wing plots that fortunately for us were foiled over the last decade:

In the 10 years since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, roughly 60 right-wing terrorist plots have been uncovered in the United States, according to an upcoming report by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. The plots, all foiled by law enforcement, reportedly included violent plans by antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members to use various types of chemical bombs and other weapons.

Plots like these, for example:

Oct. 25, 2004: FBI agents in Tennessee arrested Demetrius “Van” Crocker after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C-4 plastic explosives from an undercover agent. Crocker, who was involved with white supremacist groups, was charged with trying to get explosives to destroy a building and faces more than 20 years in prison.

… April 10, 2003: The FBI raided the home of William Krar, of Noonday, Texas, and discovered an arsenal of more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote control briefcase bombs, and almost 2 pounds of sodium cyanide, enough to make a bomb that could kill everyone in a large building. Krar, reportedly associated with white supremacist groups, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for possession of a chemical weapon.

And if you claim that the relentless hate speech from right wing talk show hosts who sling the slurs of “traitors” and “fascists” and “communists” and “Muslim Lovers” and “baby killers” ad nauseam at liberals and progressives has had no effect on the high level of violence perpetrated by right wing terrorists over the past 30 years, well, you’re either delusional or a deliberate liar. Myself, I opt for the latter explanation. Because the truth has a “well known liberal bias” and you guys always seem to prefer fighting it with bigger and bigger lies. Just like O’Reilly did in his slanderous campaign against Dr. Tiller, a man far better and more compassionate than most of you will ever be.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

Uh-oh.

“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyber-operations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”

All right, listen up! We’ve got our marching orders. We’re under attack from some kids in Pacoima and we’re going to take them out. Someone ready the Operation Cyber Freedom worm-bomb thingy.  

Those little twerps won’t know what hit them! They call themselves Hackers! Hah! We’ll show those mother…uh, sorry, forgot WWL Radio was here doing a story on Cyber Terror and why a new new Pearl Harbor may be necessary to restore order and the rule of law in a territory which is akin to a virtual Wild Wild West shootout at the OK Corral. I didn’t say that out loud and you didn’t hear it from me, but there’s no room for outlaws in a global economy.

Let me tell you something about battlefield strategy, if you can handle it without spitting up a little in your mouth and the importance of protecting one’s freedom of movement within the battle-space. In other words if it’s in your way, you knock it down. And if you want it you go get it. Two kids from Pacoima? Blow-up their computers and send them to reform school prison until they learn the Internet is for shopping and email and not screwing around with proprietary databases. And no that is not on the record hotshot, but there is no difference between the Internet and TV – both are made to sell stuff: Period, end-of-story. If it’s necessary to shut down the Internet in order to protect it from a Cyber911 perpetrated by alien cyber-terrorists and foreign governments, not to mention the occasional electromagnetic coronal mass ejection from the sun, then by gumbo that’s what we’ll do. The military created the Internet; it’s our ball; it’s ours to pick up and take off the field of play unless you play by the rules we say. And that don’t mean it’s a game. This is life and death. Privacy and anonymity are not possible in a cross-dimensional battlespace. All suspects must voluntarily submit to surveillance to demonstrate innocence. To mistrust the government is to make you a conspiracy theorist which makes you insane. We may lie to protect our guilt, but we always have consumers’ best interests at heart. So you don’t have to believe us but you must always trust us or it’s treason.

Now, just because we have a zero-tolerance strategy against privacy doesn’t mean we’re going to be watching your every move. It’s like Lincoln said, “You can watch some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time but you can’t watch all the people all the time.” Which means, come on, we’re only going to watch you after the fact. Post-crime. Not pre-crime. We’ll use your electronic trail to hunt you down when you’re being chased and not a moment before. And when we do catch you, it doesn’t mean we’re going to get all Guantanamo over your ass. America follows the Geneva Conventions except when we don’t which is classified which it should be because otherwise it endangers the troops and private contractors and the whole manufacturing consent project which gets harder and harder the more voices are heard.

We’re not going to torture our enemy anymore to get them to stop making breaches in the hull of our national cyber-security infrastructure, which if you want to know what that means in plain American, it means the security of transactions. In order to maintain the security of state secrets, you’ve got to give up yours. Is that asking too much? Like the UFO geek from England. We don’t want to torture him. That’s not why we want him so bad we’ll stop at nothing to get our hands on him. We don’t want to punish or retribute him. We want to wipe his memory clean through drugs and electroshock, lock him up forever and that is all we’re asking. Space Command is not something we like to talk about or remember even on the holidays. Once you understand everywhere is a battlefield then everything clears up pronto. Where do you think Cheney’s secret bunker was? And you did not hear that from me. So forget about all that, except to say, and this is the final word on the subject, but who do you think is going to clean up all that orbiting debris; all the space junk, huh? And who is going to protect you from killer satellites, huh? Not to mention the alien menace, uh, I mean asteroids, comets, rocks as big as stadiums which you can only see about 5 five minutes before impact. There are all kinds of heroes you’ll never hear about or even imagine they exist. And, like the Space Command, Cyber Command is a land of unsung heroes.

We protect your credit-card information and your financial statements and we follow your every move to insure your safety from enemies known and unknown from within and without, real and virtual, terrestrial and…but you didn’t hear that from me.

Our only mission at Cyber Command is to ensure battlefield supremacy in a war between privacy and security. Privacy means you’ve got something to hide and security means we have a right to know what it is. It’s not rocket science.

The kids in Pacoima are just as dangerous as…well, that would be classified now wouldn’t it potato-head?

Anyway, do you know how many billion barrels of bubbly crude it takes to power the internet each and every day? No one does! Does that sound like sound management practice to you? The Internet is a national security risk. It’s a drain on our energy supply; it exponentiates our carbon footprint and exacerbates our prime directive – Omniscience. Too many open secrets. Too many sock-puppet blabber mouths and chronic contrarians. Not to mention organized crime syndicates, political action committees and FBI Agents posing as pre-teens out for a good time. The internet is not a right but a privilege and you’ve got to give up your anonymity to prove you’re worthy of privacy – it’s that simple. Call it Orwellian if you want; I call it an Imperative.

Now, let’s go scare the hell out of those punks in Pacoima.

Yesterday’s news was filled with articles about Dr, George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, one of the few publicly accessible late-term abortion doctors left in the country, who was  shot down in the lobby of the church he was attending.

President Obama issued a statement that he was “shocked and outraged” by the murder. According to the Wichita Eagle:

“However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence,” the president said in a statement issued by the White House.

A suspect was captured, arrested and charged and now the press and media fallout is getting intense.

Operation Rescue (which, if you can get on their website at http://www.OperationRescue.org – I can’t because Fronteir Communications that I get my web connection from has blocked all connections to the site) has issued a muted “apology” to the Tiller family, but they kept Tiller on a target list for years and really have no real feelings of responsibility for encouraging his murder.  

What we have here is a full example of Christian Fundamentalist Terrorism, and, like terrorism of any kind, it needs to be eliminated. Given the religious intolerance views of so many in this country, it is doubtful that such elimination will happen.

Then there is the matter of Bill O’Brien on FOX who has also kept a focus on Tiller which could be interpreted as influencing violence. To think that FOX will do anything about O’Brien’s position here is laughable.

This morning the Attorney General sent Federal officers out to guard and protect Tiller’s clinic, which will not close, hopefully.

Keep your eyes on the news, there’s more coming.

Under The LobsterScope

I know most of my readers are pro-choice but I still think it worth considering what it means to ask a woman to carry a pregnancy to term when she knows that the baby will have one of the following conditions:

Anencephaly
Trisomy 13
Trisomy 18
Trisomy 21
Polycystic kidney disease
Spina bifida
Hydrocephalus
Potter’s syndrome
Lethal dwarfism

Holoprosencephaly
Anterior and posterior encephalocele
Non-immune hydrops

The cached version of Dr. Tiller’s admission criteria shows the following:

Admission Criteria

In order to offer you an appointment, we require that a physician refer you to our center. In addition, we need your genetic counselor or doctor to provide us with gestational and diagnostic information regarding your pregnancy. Over the past twenty-five years, we have had experience with pregnancy terminations in such situations as anencephaly, Trisomy 13, 18, and 21, polycystic kidney disease, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, Potter’s syndrome, lethal dwarfism, holoprosencephaly, anterior and posterior encephalocele, non-immune hydrops, and a variety of other very significant abnormalities.

Dr. Tiller was acquitted of all charges that he failed to consult a second doctor or demand referrals. A lot of bogus charges have been made against him. Late-term abortions are not performed for frivolous reasons, no matter what Bill O’Reilly says.