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CommonConservative.com 11/16/03 --> "WE CALLED THEM TRAITORS"...and everyone laughed... by Tom Adkins. For years, conservatives claimed liberals were bent on destroying the United States. We suspected they were willing to ruin lives, even actively ruin America to gain political power and turn America into a socialist state. We called them traitors. And everyone laughed. We said liberals were anti-American. We said they were traitors. And we watched the evidence mount. The Rosenbergs. Whitaker Chambers. The Church Commission. The counter culture. So-called “peace protesters.” Jane Fonda. Jimmy Carter’s arrogant socialist smile. The pro-Sandinista Congress. We called them traitors. And everyone laughed....

Apology to Muslims and censure of Boykin: Resolution H. Res. 419, introduced by Rep. John Conyers Please write your congressional representative about Resolution H. Res. 419, introduced by Representative John Conyers (D-MI). Click here for the Congress.org link. The language concerning “religiously intolerant remarks” amounts to censorship of Christian, as well as other beliefs. The resolution is a knee-jerk reaction to Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin’s exercise of Free Speech and Freedom of Religion in his own church. Proposing such a bill is the worst kid of appeasement to a group that is aggressively intolerant to non-Muslims around the...

We're Not Losing Anymore - New media give conservatives a fighting chance in the culture wars. BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON Monday, November 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST The left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information--which long allowed liberal opinion makers to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they disagreed with, as if they were beneath argument--is skidding to a startlingly swift halt. The transformation has gone far beyond the rise of conservative talk radio, which, ever since Rush Limbaugh's debut 15 years ago, has chipped away at the power of the New York Times, the networks and the...

<p>KABUL, Afghanistan -- At least 22 fighters from the ousted Taliban regime and al Qaeda network were killed in an aerial assault by U.S.-led forces in southeastern Paktika province, according to Reuters..</p> <p>Air support was called in on Tuesday after a group of Taliban and al Qaeda fugitives fired rockets and heavy machine-guns on a base used by U.S.-led troops and their Afghan allies in Shkin, near the Pakistan border, on Saturday, said Paktika province govenor Mohammad Ali Jalali.</p>

<p>The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?</p>

Is Syria Next?[from the November 3, 2003 issue] Shortly after 9/11, the government received an extraordinary gift of hundreds of files on Al Qaeda, crucial data on the activities of radical Islamist cells throughout the Middle East and Europe and intelligence about future terrorist plans. These dossiers did not come from Israel or Saudi Arabia, whose kingdom appeared more concerned at the time with securing safe passage for members of the bin Laden family living in the United States, but--as Seymour Hersh revealed in the July 28 New Yorker--from Syria. One CIA analyst told Hersh, "the quality and quantity of...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

In the rush to condemn the Malaysian Prime Minister's overt anti-Semitism, some say that the speech's most important aspect has been overlooked. In the rush to condemn the Malaysian Prime Minister's overt anti-Semitism [see related article], some say that the speech's most important aspect has been overlooked. Although Mahathir mentioned the problems and infighting of Moslems all over the world numerous times, he named only one place specifically - that which he called Palestine - and hinted at a scheme to resolve the issue once and for all. He said, "For well over half a century we have fought over...

We are in a cabin deep down below decks on a Navy ship jam-packed with troops that’s pitching and creaking its way across the Atlantic in a winter gale. There is a man in every bunk. There’s a man wedged into every corner. There’s a man in every chair. The air is dense with cigarette smoke and with the staleness of packed troops and sour wool. “Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans,” puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, “but…” “To hell with the Germans,” says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. “It’s what our boys have...

<p>GAZA CITY (CNN) --A bomb went off underneath a convoy carrying U.S. diplomats in Gaza Wednesday, killing three American members of a security detail and injuring another in an unprecedented attack, U.S. officials said.</p> <p>"We're shocked by this latest terrorist outrage," said U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer.</p>

Syrian President Al-Assad Interviewed by Al-Hayat Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad was recently interviewed by the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat. I n the interview, he discussed Syrian-U.S. relations, the Israel-Lebanon border, the situation in Iraq, and the possibility of an agreement with Israel. The following are excerpts from the interview: [1] The Israeli Bombing Near Damascus "This [attack] was an attempt by the Israeli government to free itself from its great distress via an attempt to terrorize Syria and drag it and the entire region into another war, since this government is a war government and war is its raison d'&#7879;tre....

US army turns over border control to Iraqis 27/09/2003 - 10:59:36 The US Army turned over a large stretch of the border separating Iraq from Iran to an American-trained border police force today, for the first time relinquishing control of a sensitive frontier area to the provisional government. The 210-mile length of frontier running from the edges of Kurdish-controlled territory in the north to a point just southeast of Baghdad is part of a broader effort to give Iraqis more control over their affairs and relieve the US military of the burden of guarding the border. “They are now controlling...

ABIDJAN, 16 Sep 2003 (IRIN) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Tuesday asked the Security Council to authorize the deployment of 15,000 peacekeeping troops and 875 police officers to war-ravaged Liberia, as part of an enlarged UN mission to the West African country. He said in a report to the Security Council that the mission, to be known as UNMIL, would support the Transitional Government headed by businessman Gyude Bryant, which is due to take office on 14 October, and help it to extend state authority throughout Liberia. Bryant was chosen by a Liberian peace conference last month...

<p>The Taliban claimed in a 1997 meeting with U.S. officials that it had blocked attempts by both Iraq and Iran to contact Osama bin Laden, according to a previously confidential State Department memo made public yesterday.</p> <p>The memo says that the assistant secretary of state, Karl Inderfurth, was told on Dec. 7, 1997, by the Taliban's acting minister of mines and industry, Armad Jan, that his government "had stopped allowing [bin Laden] to give public interviews and had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi efforts to contact him."</p>

Publication Date: September 10, 2003 America, some say, is hobbled in its policies toward Iraq by not knowing much about what Iraqis really think. Are they on the side of radical Islamists? What kind of government would they like? What is their attitude toward the U.S.? Do the Shiites hate us? Could Iraq become another Iran under the ayatollahs? Are the people in the Sunni triangle the real problem?Up to now we've only been able to guess. We've relied on anecdotal temperature-takings of the Iraqi public, and have been at the mercy of images presented to us by the...

Make Iraq Graveyard for U.S., Qaeda Leader Says By Firouz Sedarat DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) made a surprise appearance in a videotape aired Wednesday to mark the Sept. 11 attacks, along with his top aide who urged fighters to turn Iraq (news - web sites) into a graveyard for American troops. "To our struggling brothers in Iraq: we greet you and we pray to God to be on your side in fighting the crusaders," Ayman al-Zawahri, or someone sounding very much like him, said on the tape aired...

POLL ANALYSESSeptember 11, 2003 Country's Wounds Still Open After 9/11 Almost universal view that things are not completely "back to normal"By Lydia SaadGALLUP NEWS SERVICEPRINCETON, NJ -- Two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought down the World Trade Center towers, damaged the Pentagon and killed an estimated 3,026 people, Americans are reluctant to say the United States is back to normal. According to a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, a majority believes things are "somewhat" back to normal but only 3% say things are "completely" normal. Just one in five Americans (21%) told Gallup in the Aug. 25-26 survey that...

'The Rock' does fine in KirkukThe majority welcomes us with open arms Sgt. Shawn M. Grueser Wednesday September 10, 2003; 07:35 AM KIRKUK, Iraq -- I have been serving in Iraq for over five months as a soldier with Company A, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as "The Rock." We entered the country at midnight on March 26. One thousand of my fellow soldiers and I parachuted from 10 jumbo jets (C-17s) onto a cold, muddy field in Northern Iraq. The parachute operation was the Army's only combat jump in the war and opened up...

Syrian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Glorifies Martyrs and Martyrdom In the September 6, 2003 issue of the Syrian government daily Teshreen, the Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Dr. Buthayna Sha'ban, wrote in her weekly column that "The martyrs represent the conscience of the nation. They are the noblest men in the world and the most respectable of all human beings." Three years earlier, on May 6, 2000, Syria's annual Martyrs Day,(1) Sha'ban wrote a paean to martyrs titled "The Blood of Martyrs" which was published in Teshreen. The following is the full text of her submission: "The blood of martyrs gushes hot...

<p>WASHINGTON — As the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks nears, a majority of Americans are seriously concerned about the nation's vulnerability to terrorism and believe that new attacks are likely and imminent.</p> <p>The poll results come as the nation enters the Labor Day weekend, when AAA predicts that 33.4 million Americans will be traveling, an increase of 1.8% over last year. Although AAA says that the vast majority, 28.2 million, will be traveling by car, more than one in four indicate they will be going to cities for the holiday.</p>