Iranian Mullahs Continue Crackdown; Regime's Demonstrators Urge Death Of Opposition

The mullahs have sent out their own demonstrators who are calling for the death to the protesters.

Tens of thousands of Iranians have protested in favour of their government in major cities across the country, following recent opposition protests.

Government supporters marched in Tehran, Shiraz, Qom and elsewhere, chanting "Death to opponents!"

The rallies - reportedly organised by the government - were a response to the opposition demonstrations on Sunday.

Tehran has accused Western powers of stirring-up the protests which left at least eight people dead.

Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei are continuing to oppress the Iranian people and calling those who consider the government illegitimate pawns of the West, even though all evidence points to the regime stealing the election from Mirhussein Mousavi.

The regime also broke multiple taboos by engaging in a deadly crackdown during Ashura, which is something that not even the feared Shah of Iran did while still hoping to retain power in 1978-1979. The martyrdom of Ali weighs so heavily on Shia thinking that comparisons to Ali and Yazid are prevalent in the opposition's characterizations of the crackdown. They portray Ahmadinejad and Khamenei as Yazid, who killed Ali on the plain of Karbala in 680AD. As Michael Totten points out:

Ashura is a Shia religious holiday, and it is not joyous. It is a day of lamentation that marks the date when the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid killed Hussein, son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, during the Battle of Karbala in the year 680. It’s one of the most infamous episodes in the struggle for power that permanently ruptured the house of Islam into its warring Sunni and Shia halves. The Shia – the partisans of Ali and his lineage – have been at war with the Sunnis – those who took the side of Yazid – for thirteen centuries. That Khamenei’s security people would murder unarmed demonstrators on this day of all days, and that his opponents now denounce him as the Yazid of Iran, may very well set most of the religious conservatives against him for as long as he and his government live.

Turnabout is also fair play given that Khamenei once fashioned himself as a modern-day Ali during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Now, he's engaging in the very kinds of activities he once demonstrated against.

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Can You Spot the Threat?

MSNBC has this interactive feature that lets you play the role of a security screener who sits behind a scanner to detect possible threats. You can flag bags for additional screening depending on whether they have firearms, explosives, or knives.

You have two minutes to screen as many bags as possible, and are then scored on how many threats were correctly identified and how many false positives were incurred. The more false positives, the longer the line would be.

On my first run through, I managed to get all the threats identified, but had four false positives in 20 bags checked.

It gives you an idea of what kinds of pressures the TSA screeners are under.

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Dropping the Ball

Last month, a Somali was arrested trying to bring a syringe and a powdered substance on board an aircraft. The scenario was frighteningly similar to the methods used by Abdul Mutallab on Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

A man tried to board a commercial airliner in Mogadishu last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe that could have caused an explosion in a case bearing chilling similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The Somali man — whose name has not yet been released — was arrested by African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai. A Somali police spokesman, Abdulahi Hassan Barise, said the suspect is in Somali custody.

"We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaida or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed," said Barise.

A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid — tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack. The diplomat spoke on condition he not be identified because he isn't authorized to release the information.

Multiple media outlets are also reporting that the CIA had intercepted signals of an impending attack.

Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the information did not include a name, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day.

The government also had more information about where Mr. Abdulmutallab had been and what some of his plans were.

Some of the information was partial or incomplete, and it was not obvious that it was connected, the official said, but in retrospect it now appears clear that had it all been examined together it would have pointed to the pending attack. The official said the administration was “increasingly confident” that Al Qaeda had a role in the attack, as the group’s Yemeni branch has publicly claimed.

Shortly after being briefed, Mr. Obama addressed reporters in his second public statement on the matter in two days, announcing that a review already had revealed a breakdown in the intelligence system that did not properly identify the suspect as a dangerous extremist who should have been prevented from flying to the United States.

“A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said. He said he had ordered government agencies to give him a preliminary report on Thursday about what happened and added that he would “insist on accountability at every level,” although he did not elaborate.

Then, there's where al Qaeda is operating and continuing to recruit for jihad. That means looking more closely at Yemen and other failed states like Somalia.



UPDATE:
CNN makes it clear that the ball got dropped by the CIA who failed to circulate the information it had obtained to the necessary authorities, including DHS and the TSA, who were in a position to stop Mutallab from boarding.

UPDATE:
Reports claiming that Mutallab didn't have a passport when he boarded NW Air Flt. 253 are untrue.

The suspected terrorist who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 Christmas day did present a passport to authorities in Amsterdam before boarding the Detroit-bound plane, Holland's counter-terrorism agency said Wednesday.

Abdulmutallab arrived in Amsterdam on Friday from Lagos, Nigeria. After a layover of less than three hours, he passed through a security check at the gate in Amsterdam, including a hand baggage scan and a metal detector, officials said.

Abdulmutallab was carrying a valid Nigerian passport and had a valid U.S. visa, the Dutch said. His name did not appear on any Dutch list of terror suspects.

The problem is that his flight profile should have raised alarm bells - buying a 1-way ticket in Lagos for Nigeria to Detroit in cash; to say nothing of the warnings received by the CIA and Mutallab's own father contacting law enforcement to warn about his son's actions.

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Edison NJ Finally Gets Mass Transit Parking

Edison New Jersey has been clamoring for additional parking for NJ Transit trains heading to Manhattan along the Northeast Corridor for years. The waiting list was so long as to discourage people from taking the train altogether and instead driving into Manhattan.

All that has finally changed as NJ Transit will be unveiling a new parking lot with 477 parking spots. The funds apparently came from the 2009 ARRA stimulus porkfest, but in this instance, it is actually money well spent since it gets people out of their cars and onto trains to reduce congestion.

The new lot more than doubles the parking capacity at Edison.

It also makes one wonder how many parking lots could have been built had anyone in NJ Transit taken the opportunity to compare the cost of building the new lot $4.7 million to the millions spent on Mahwah Rt 17 which continues to remain severely underutilized or the Secaucus Transfer, which costs nearly $1 billion and which was originally built without a parking lot to facilitate people to commute to Manhattan by train instead of driving.

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The Future of Travel Will Remain Unkind To Travelers Because of Terrorism

The Retorican isn't alone in suggesting that traveling commando may be the future of air travel (traveling naked has also been suggested).

So much about air security and preventing terrorism is about the perception of security and safety than actual security and safety. Techniques that might actually prevent terrorism are not adopted or employed because of privacy concerns or discrimination, when there are clear profiles of individuals who have committed acts of terrorism in the past.

NY State Assemblyman Dov Hikind was looking to introduce legislation requiring profiling, but his statement shows that he doesn't get the security situation either.



He was talking about profiling people from the Middle East and South East Asia, when Mutallab was from Nigeria (which is in Africa) and had a Nigerian passport along with a valid US visa. Profiling based on location by itself doesn't work; the Fort Dix Six were originally from Albania (Europe). Other terrorists were home-grown.

The main issue is that the overwhelming majority of those seeking to engage in mass casualty attacks aboard aircraft are engaged in jihad. That means looking for those who would fit that profile.

Christopher Hitchens encapsulates the issue more succinctly and deftly than I could.

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

The idea of patting down and going through the security checkpoints are more for providing the veneer of safety and security. With limited resources at our disposal, the need to focus them where they can do the most good is needed.

Regulations that limit who can get up to go to the bathroom and when during a flight makes no sense as a terrorist can simply blow up the plane from his or her seat. Screeners asking whether you packed your own bags is another inane issue; it does little to separate out true threats from those who aren't. On this point, the Israelis have made it an art form of screening out threats based on asking a series of questions that can weed out those who are traveling for business or pleasure and those who have another agenda. It takes a different level of training, and an acceptance by the flying public to accept more invasive questioning over itiniaries than many are accustomed to today when flying on US domestic airlines (and indeed much of the world's airlines).

Still, when it comes down to it, it is up to each individual to look out for their own security because you can't expect the security procedures in place to catch every terrorist every time; the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 outcome is proof positive that individual passengers have to act to save themselves and their fellow passengers. That really remains the last line of defense against terrorism when the terrorist tries to smuggle explosives on board on his person. We can only hope that the security measures in place prevent terrorists from bringing those explosives on board in their checked luggage - a situation that the other passengers have no control over.

And while much of the focus remains on aircraft security, other forms of mass transit remain exposed to the threat; buses and rail traffic can just as surely be attacked by terrorists with deadly consequences. Ignoring that threat is at our continued peril.

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Iran Continues Crackdown Against Dissenters

The Iranian regime continues to lash out against its opponents, branding them terrorists and trying to cast blame for the violence on the West and the US in particular.

“Some Western countries are supporting this sort of activities. This is intervention in our internal affairs. We strongly condemn it,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “In this regard, the British ambassador will be summoned today.”The British government said its ambassador to Iran, Simon Gass, would respond “robustly” to any criticism and would reiterate calls for Iran to respect the rights of its citizens.

The conservative speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, rebuked American and British officials for their “disgraceful comments” about the demonstrations, according to the state-run PressTV. The criticisms of Iran’s action were “disgustingly vivid that they clarify where this movement stands when it comes to destroying religious and revolutionary values,” he said.

The regime arrested Dr. Noushin Ebadi, sister of Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work for human rights in Iran.

Shirin Ebadi, who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her human-rights efforts in Iran, told the The Associated Press in a phone interview from London that she called her sister Monday, and that she was being punished because of the conversation.

"She was warned not to contact me," she said. "She is detained for the sake of me. She was neither politically active nor had a role in any rally."

Noushin Ebadi, a medical professor in Tehran, was arrested at her home by four intelligence agents late Monday and sent to prison, according to a statement issued by the Nobel laureate.

"It's necessary to point out that in the past two months she had been summoned several times to the Intelligence Ministry, who told her to persuade me to give up my human rights activities," the statement said. "She has been arrested solely because of my activities in human rights. ... Our country at the moment needs more than anything peace and quiet in the shadow of respect for law and any kind of behavior that goes above the law will have negative repercussions."

The opposition Web site Greenroad reported a series of additional arrests, among them Mousavi's brother-in-law, Shapour Kazemi, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, a journalist who frequently criticizes the government. Others included the son of a prominent ayatollah, a reporter for the semi-official ILNA news agency, and several activists. Mousavi's nephew was among those killed this week.

Ahmadinejad and the mullahs keep trying to cast the demonstrations as the work of a few instigators, but each time they crack down against the demonstrators, it lays bare the fact that this is a regime that stole the election between Ahmadinejad and Mirhussein Mousavi and that many consider Ahmadinejad as illegitimate.

Demonstrators continue protesting against the regime outside Iran, including in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin.

However, locating video or photos of demonstrations and the situation inside Iran is proving to be difficult because Iran continues to limit the flow of information out of the country so that it can try to eliminate the opposition and its sources of power; the distribution of information and photos that would rally people against the regime.

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The Worst Tax Ideas Of the Decade

Howard Glickman has come up with the top 10 worst tax ideas of the past year, but I think he hasn't gone nearly far enough.

In addition to the homeowner tax credit (both the old one that was meant for first time homebuyers and then the expanded one that let people who wanted to trade up get a credit even though they were going to be buying a home anyways), the estate tax mess (disappears for 2010 only to rise like a zombie to its pre Bush tax cut levels in 2011), there are a few other tax proposals of dubious merit and which would result in taxing obligations and unintended consequences from the past decade. They include:

1. Congestion pricing. Spurred by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the idea is to tax anyone coming into New York City by car or truck, even though congestion already provides a deterrent to do precisely that - and is far more effective than anyone cares to admit since on a per capita basis, the City uses less energy than elsewhere in the country because so many people walk or use mass transit rather than relying on cars for personal transportation.
2. Property tax relief by raising other taxes. This is a symptom of New Jersey, but applies elsewhere. Simply have a governor claim that you'll provide property tax relief by increasing the sales tax to issue rebates for a portion of property taxes imposed. Then admit that the whole mess is unaffordable and chop the rebate only to leave the sales tax hike in place. This way, you get tax hikes and no tax relief in one hard to swallow package.
3. New Jersey's cosmetic procedures tax. Long before the feds contemplated the Botax, New Jersey imposed a cosmetic procedures tax that has failed to live up to revenue projections. It's produced less than $15 million annually, and expanded to a national basis it would provide little in the way of revenues needed to fund the massive health care overhaul.
4. IRS tax and penalty provisions in health care bills. Speaking of the health care bills, they are heavily dependent on the IRS tax and penalty provisions to impose change on the health care delivery system. This includes eliminating OTC drugs from HSA/FSA allowed expenses, which is a back door tax. It also includes imposing penalties on those who opt not to buy insurance under the new scheme. There's also no way that this legislation will be deficit neutral unless taxes and fees rise precipitously to cover the rising costs.
5. Tax credits (and then imposing fees that negate benefits). Instead of lowering taxes and fees across the board to stimulus business, targeted taxes, such as film and television tax credits provide incentives for some businesses to conduct business in various locations, but imposing administrative fees like New York City is doing, is going to deter those same film companies from doing location shoots that spend money in the City. It adds to the bureaucracy and the compliance costs.
6. Legislating fiscal irresponsibility. Like California, New Jersey is in dire fiscal shape, but the answer proposed by outgoing Gov. Jon Corzine was to allow municipalities to avoid paying their pension obligations. It means that those municipalities and the state would be able to avoid making tough decisions - cutting the size of the state budget and eliminating structural deficits. It meant that politicians could avoid the consequences of their decisions to increase the size of the public workforce and the size of state government, rather than trying to control the costs and plan for a recession. 
7. Taxing the rich. Glickman includes this on his list, but in New York it takes on special significance. Wall Street is one of the biggest contributors in revenues to the City and State. When Wall Street melts down, so too does the state and city budget. These are the very rich folks that Democrats repeatedly hope to tax to fulfill their obligations (as the Democrats see it). So, when their revenues drop, who pays? Well, everyone else since the money simply stops rolling in and more Americans pay no taxes now than ever before.

UPDATE:
How could I have forgotten about the various cap and trade carbon emissions reduction schemes, which increase the costs of energy -and therefore on all goods and services without actually reducing emissions. It's a feel good policy that throws lots of money around and is ripe for manipulation without actual results.

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The Jib Jab Year In Review

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Lake Champlain Bridge Demolished

The Lake Champlain bridge, which had been closed to all traffic since October 16 because of serious concerns about its structural integrity was demolished today in a controlled demolition (video here).

It was all too visible why this bridge needed to be shut down; it was literally crumbling before your eyes.

Currently, there is no direct route between Crown Point, N.Y., and Addison, Vt. except for a ferry. A new bridge is expected to be in place by the summer of 2011, but it means adding 100 miles and hours commuting time between the two communities in the meantime.

There are several different types of bridges being considered as the replacement span. I think that one of the two arch designs will win out because of the similarity to the original span, but I think the cable stayed bridges may provide a unique and distinctive replacement.

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The Failure To Connect The Dots; Air Security Still Lagging

Harry Smith at CBS grills DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano who finally admits that they screwed up and where the bomber, Abdul Farouk Abdul Mutallab, put on the TIDE list and not elevated to further scrutiny, managed to bring explosives sufficient to take down an aircraft on board but was thwarted only by an alert passenger.

The security system put in place after 9/11 and then after the Richard Reid shoe bomber case didn't thwart the attack; it was the Flight 93 Let's Roll mantra by passengers refusing to go quietly to their deaths that thwarted the attacks. The screening system failed. The failure by the bomber was due to a quick thinking passenger who risked his own life to stop the bomber from detonating what appeared to be a sufficient amount of explosive to take down Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

Further restrictions on what can be brought on board the planes, let alone whether a person can have bags in their possession during the last hour of the flight or that passengers will not be allowed to go to the restroom in the last hour of the flight will not prevent terrorism of this kind; the terrorist may simply try to blow up the plane after takeoff or at any point in the course of the flight.

It is merely to give the appearance of doing something about air safety. Actually taking action to thwart terrorism requires more stringent security protocols and more invasive methods that are all too likely to rankle civil libertarians and to impose further costs on flying. Technologies that could detect certain explosives aren't fully deployed around the world, and scanners that can literally see through the body aren't being deployed because of privacy concerns, even though they may have been able to detect the explosive underwear that Mutallab was wearing.

So, the two measures that have done the most to improve air security to date have nothing to do with the security at airports; it has everything to do with installing armored cockpit doors and passengers who aren't going to sit back and let hijackers or terrorists fulfill their plot aims.

UPDATE:
This isn't just a failure to connect the dots; it may now include providing al Qaeda with more dots. Two of those who were apparently involved in the planning of the attack on Northwest Air Flight 253 were previously detained at Guantanamo Bay, but were released to Saudi Arabia.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.
Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.

 So, once again, detainees released under the misbegotten idea that closing Guantanamo Bay is a good idea has turned out to be a stupendously bad one as detainees who were out of the fight were able to rejoin the jihad and plot, plan, and carry out attacks against the US and our interests around the world.

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Days of Iranian Discontent

After a simmering period of relative quiet, the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities have erupted in violence in the wake of a crackdown by the regime against protesters. Among those killed was a nephew to opposition leader Mirhussein Mousavi in what was considered to be an assassination by the regime.

Information from within Iran remains sketchy given that the regime has done all it can to prevent the flow of information, but twitter and other nontraditional media sources are getting the stories out. The regime's thugs are using extreme violence to put down the demonstrations, but the Iranian people aren't sitting back and taking it.

Not even arrests to Mousavi's aides are going to stop the ongoing demonstrations. After all, the murder of Mousavi's nephew is likely to be a rallying point; he will be seen as a martyr to the cause. His death also shows just how far Ahmadinejad and the mullahs are willing to go in maintaining their iron grip on power.

The opposition cleric and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi also lashed out at the authorities for using deadly force during Sunday’s nationwide protests, in which 10 people were reported to have been killed.

“What has happened to this religious system that it orders the killing of innocent people during the holy day of Ashura?” Mr. Karroubi said in a statement, according to the opposition Jaras Web site.

The death of Ali Moussavi, a 43-year-old nephew of Mr. Moussavi, became another flash point between the police and demonstrators.

The police used tear gas to disperse a group of mourners who gathered outside the Tehran hospital where Mr. Moussavi’s body had been held, the Nowrooz Web site reported. A prominent opposition figure said that the younger Mr. Moussavi was shot to death by assassins on Sunday, and that the authorities took his body to prevent a funeral ceremony.

A 27 year-old journalist who was reporting on the street clashes Sunday was also reported missing. Redha al Basha, who was working for Dubai TV, has not been heard from, said a spokesman for Dubai TV. Mr. Basha was last seen surrounded by security forces in Tehran, witnesses said. The decision by the authorities to use deadly force on the Ashura holiday infuriated many Iranians, and some said the violence appeared to galvanize more traditional religious people who have not been part of the protests so far. Historically, Iranian rulers have honored Ashura’s prohibition of violence, even during wartime.

Taking Mousavi's nephew's body to prevent a funeral procession will likely itself provoke further violence. Like they did during this past summer's violence, the regime is trying to claim that the protesters are anti-Iranian terrorists who are being spurred on by the West (and the US).

The violence started over the weekend following the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. Montazeri was one of the major leaders of the original Islamic Revolution, but had become a serious critic of the regime. The regime imposed martial law and that got those seeking to mourn the death of Montazeri, and even those who didn't, upset. The violent crackdown surprised many, particularly because the funeral and the current violence is occurring during the Shi'ite observance of Ashura.

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