If these guys are terrorists, they aren’t very good ones. At least that seems to be the picture that is slowly emerging of the 17 men and boys charged this week under Canada’s anti-terror laws.

Their so-called training camp turns out to have been a swath of bush near Washago, where their activities ã shooting off firearms and playing paintball ã were so obvious and so irritating that local residents immediately called police.

Serious terrorists, like Osama bin Laden, base their operations in remote areas where no one will bother them. These suspects, it is alleged, simply trespassed on someone’s farm and, when the owner told them to leave, gave him lip.

Serious terrorists, like the 19 who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, try to avoid making waves. They try to blend in.

The young men charged this week apparently didn’t bother with this kind of tradecraft. They apparently didn’t realize, or perhaps didn’t care, that large groups of brown-skinned urbanites dressed in camouflage are not a common sight in rural central Ontario.

So when local resident Mike Cote came upon a group of just such men near his Ramara Township farm last December, he immediately informed police.

As he told the Star this week, the group appeared cold, wet and bedraggled. Some had fallen though the thin ice into a marsh. The leader of these alleged terrorists was so disgusted with his young charges that he complained to Cote about their incompetence.

These, apparently, were the conspirators. One, a former army reservist, allegedly wanted to cut off Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s head. How would he find it?

It appears that a good many knew the police were on to these suspects. Harper knew. So did Toronto Mayor David Miller. So did some of the suspects’ neighbours. So did many near the ill-fated Ramara Township “training camp,” who told the Star later that police asked them to keep their mouths shut.

But the alleged terrorists, it seems, remained blissfully ignorant.

They let themselves get snared in an RCMP sting when one of the 17 allegedly placed an order for three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a substance that can be used to make bombs.

According to police, suspects happily took possession of the “fertilizer” when it was delivered, not realizing that the RCMP had substituted harmless white powder in its stead.

But then that seems to be the history of this group. For militant terrorists, if that’s what they are, they are remarkably naive.

Some, it appears, chatted openly online about their paramilitary exploits at websites such as the now-dismantled http://www.shaheed.ca, oblivious to the fact that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service regularly troll such sites.

“I got my gun and tomorrow in the morning I am gonna do some target practise (sic) inshAllah (God willing) hott,” reads one 2003 posting. “Checked out some paintball guns today at walmart.”

Shaheed, the Arabic word for witness, is often used to refer to someone who has died defending Islam ã including suicide bombers. It’s not a terribly subtle title for a radical Islamic website. But then not all of the postings on http://www.shaheed.ca were radical or even devout.

“Man, ppl always say the Ummah (community of Islam) is so weak blah blah,” reads one 2004 posting. “What ummah? I don’t believe that there’s 2 billion or whatever muslims in the world….It sux.”

“Alhumdulilah (thank God) today was the first successful day of work,” reads another 2004 posting. “What a great day it was. Sure we were late, but it’s far. But Alhumdulilah, the boss is really nice. … After that we went for pizza.”
thestar.com

WASHINGTON – For the first time since Congress mandated its annual publication, a State Department report cataloging human trafficking across the globe includes allegations that American taxpayers financed such abuses.

This year’s Trafficking in Persons Report, released Monday, also ranks Iran among the 12 nations in the world with the worst records for limiting human trafficking within and across its borders, just as the Bush administration is attempting to bring pressure on Tehran because of its developing nuclear program.

Other familiar Bush administration targets, such as Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, also made this year’s list of the worst dozen, while White House allies and other strategically important nations – including India, Mexico, Russia and China – escaped the roll call despite evidence in the report of growing problems.

People can be trafficked across or within borders for prostitution or forced labor, a practice officials describe as a modern form of slavery.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled this year’s report by telling reporters that the United States and its allies “will stop at nothing to end the debasement of our fellow men and women.”

Yet this year’s report includes a special section on reforms the Defense Department instituted after an investigation prompted by “Pipeline to Peril,” a series published by the Chicago Tribune in October that detailed human trafficking into Iraq for privatized U.S. military support operations.

Human brokers and subcontractors from Asia to the Middle East have worked in concert to import thousands of laborers into Iraq from impoverished countries, often employing fraud or coercion along the way, seizing workers’ passports and charging recruitment “fees” that make it difficult for workers to escape employment in the war zone.

U.S. military leaders in Iraq have acknowledged confirming widespread abuses against such workers, who are brought to Iraq to do menial labor on U.S. bases for contractors and subcontractors. Those businesses ultimately receive their checks from the U.S. government. The abuses corroborated by military investigators included violations of U.S. human-trafficking laws.
mercurynews.com

When US bombers finally caught up with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to end the life of one of the world’s most savage terrorists, they were acting on a remarkable chain of intelligence.

It started in a dusty border post in the rock-strewn desert between Iraq and Jordan. A quiet operation that received no attention. A frontier guard arrested by the Jordanian police. Not even worth a news brief in a local newspaper.

But Mohammed al-Karbouli was not just a frontier guard.

Karbouli, arrested on 22 May, disappeared, hidden in one of the scores of secret prisons and intelligence installations that the Jordanians run in their arid hinterland. If Karbouli’s actual detention went unnoticed, the consequences of his arrest would not. Teams of US special forces, CIA, Jordanian secret services and Iraqi intelligence have spent three years hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was blamed for beheading hostages – including the Briton, Kenneth Bigley – and killing hundreds of people in suicide bombings. This was the breakthrough they had needed.

There had been ‘breakthroughs’ before – almost as many as there have been ‘turning points’ in Iraq since 2003. But this was different. Karbouli had been arrested as part of a major investigation by Jordanian secret services into suicide bombings at hotels. He was thought to have assisted the bombers to enter Jordan from Iraq; he was also thought to have been a key figure in the transfer of weapons, money and material to insurgents in Iraq from Jordan. Most importantly, Karbouli talked.

His information was transmitted to the Americans and the intelligence stations that the Jordanians have, secretly and recently, been allowed to set up in Iraq itself. The Jordanians have made a huge effort of late to recruit agents and sympathisers among the powerful al-Dulaimi clan, in and around Falluja and Ramadi. The clan has become alienated from hardline Islamic militants such as Jordanian-born Zarqawi – even killing some ‘mujahideen’ whom they felt were targetting Iraqis too enthusiastically or encroaching on their own tribal power.
guardian.co.uk

Zarqawi Betrayed by Qaeda Insider
BAGHDAD Muhammad Ismael, a 40- year-Iraqi taxi driver, was standing outside his home in the tiny village of Hibhib on Wednesday evening when something unusual caught his eye.

Three GMC trucks, each with blackened windows, rumbled past his home and toward the little house in a nearby grove of date palms that for more than three years had stood abandoned.

“It was something very strange,” Ismael said in a telephone interview a day later. “That house is always empty.”

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders believed they had at last cornered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist whose murderous onslaught against Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops made him the most wanted man in all of Iraq.

For the first time, the U.S. officials said they had a source deep inside his terrorist group. Zarqawi, the source told them, was in the little house in the palm grove.

U.S. jets were in the sky above.

In recent weeks, U.S. officials said, they had begun following a man who they believed could lead them directly to Zarqawi: his “spiritual adviser,” a man named Sheikh Abd al-Rahman. A member of Zarqawi’s network, captured by the Americans, had told them that the sheik was Zarqawi’s most trusted adviser.

cover-stories within cover stories…

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – The worst three weeks of violence since the fall of the Taliban have left more than 500 people dead, the U.S.-led coalition said Saturday.

Fighting on Saturday killed six insurgents and three police, officials said. Late Friday, a top Afghan intelligence agent narrowly survived a bomb attack on his convoy that killed three other people near the capital, Kabul.

Much of the recent Taliban fighting is believed funded by the country’s $2.8 billion trade in opium and heroin – about 90 percent of the world’s supply.
guardian.co.uk

And who runs the global heroin trade?

June 9, 2006: On May 7th King Abdallah declared that al Qaeda had been “defeated” in Saudi Arabia. Saudi security authorities reported that clashes since May of 2003 had resulted in the deaths of about 150 Saudi and foreign personnel, as well as at least 120 confirmed al Qaeda operatives. There have been thousands of arrests, and several hundred terror suspects are believed still under arrest. No official figures were given for persons detained. But al Qaeda was never a major threat to the Saudi monarchy.
strategypage.com

This report comes from the people who predicted Zarqawi’s death for June 7. So they should know.

The world’s political elite, top thinkers and powerful business folk gathered here for an annual, ultra-secretive Bilderberg conference as heavy security kept conspiracy theorists and curious onlookers at bay.

Global luminaries such as former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, US banker David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands were greeted at the airport by limousine drivers holding single-letter “B” signs late Thursday, said local reports.

They were quickly whisked away to the Brookstreet Hotel in a serene suburb of Ottawa for three-day talks on oil markets, security concerns tied to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism, and immigration, the Ottawa Citizen reported.

Conspiracy theorists who follow the group accuse it of plotting world domination at its informal annual gatherings.

But, Richard Perle, former US defence policy advisor, upon his arrival in Ottawa, denied allegations the group crafts public policy behind closed doors. “It discusses public policy,” he stressed to a Citizen reporter.

A statement from the group said the meetings were private to encourage “frank and open discussions.”

But skeptic Daniel Estulin, who flew from Spain to try to cover the conference, said their intent is to “create a world government ruled by an elite group of people whose main objective is to control all the natural resources on the planet.”

Another local observer commented to the Citizen: “There are all sorts of gaps in what politicians say and do. This is just another example of the circumventing of the democratic process.”

The talks are by invitation-only. Because discussions are off-the-record, the group has been subject to similar criticisms and speculation about its intentions since 1954 when the first conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands.

Several sources say Poland’s Joseph Retinger, former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland, and former Unilever chief executive Paul Rijkens organized the first meeting to unite European and US elites amid growing cross-Atlantic tensions a half-century ago.

Its success spawned similar talks at posh hotels and palaces in Europe, the United States and Canada each year since.

Other attendees seen arriving in Ottawa on Thursday included former Canadian ambassador to Washington Frank McKenna, Royal Dutch Shell chairman Jorma Ollila, former World Bank president James Wolfenson and Scandinavian Airlines chairman Egil Myklebust, according to reports.

Former New York governor George Pataki, Iraq’s deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, several media moguls, and cabinet ministers from Spain and Greece, were also expected to attend.
breitbart.com

…The English settler colonies in North America were different ? unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots, in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving, the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.

They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Indian residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Indian lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Indians stood in the way; he had to go.

The ‘American’ mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other (‘savage’ Indians), while keeping white society safe and separate from the ‘debauchery’ of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported ‘civilization.’
blackcommentator.com

Imagine living in a cloud forest in the Ecuadorian tropical Andes. The region is recognized as one of the most ecologically diverse places in the world.

Although the community you live in is considered poor by “first world” standards, sustainable projects from organic agriculture to ecotourism enable you to raise your family in a pristine and tranquil environment free from traffic, pollution and the excesses of consumer culture. Would you see a Wendy’s or McDonalds down the road as a fair trade off for putting the future of such a community in peril?

Gary E. Davis, President and CEO of Ascendant Copper Corporation, speaking from his office in Lakewood believes so. He said that such fast food chains would be an example of the benefits a massive copper mine would bring to the region.

To be fair, the president of the junior mining company said a commercialized mine would also provide hospitals and other service providers for local residents. Davis is quick to point out any perceived benefits and support associated with the mine. He would, because Ascendant eagerly awaits approval by the Ecuadorian government to begin the first exploration phase of its “Junin Project.”
upsidedownworld.com

Whenever I hear talk of ‘human rights’, I reach for my gun. No, dear new global democrats, don’t worry: there is no dangerous ‘Nazi’ that wants to shoot at your humanitarian holy card. It is because there are too many who, having heard ‘human rights’ invoked on their own skin, they prick up their ears and are ready with the barrel loaded after having come to know them. Three populations taken ‘at random,’ from the list of the most famous bad guys of the world: the Serbs, the Iraqis and the Cubans, who resist the assault of ‘human rights’, but who are certainly not willing to label themselves en bloc as ‘Nazis.’ These three peoples have never spoken nonsense regarding ‘human rights’ for hours and hours. They had them or they still have them, it was a real life experience, therefore, they didn’t need to waste their breath over them. Free education, from nursery school to the specialisation courses in university, free health services from aspirin to transplants, rights to a house and to a job. Seems like nothing: knowledge, health, home and work. Curiously, in all of the ‘Rogue States’ these ‘rights’ are guaranteed. They are the same ones that transmit trust in the future and safeguard the reproduction instinct.

But if you think that someone is going to explain in detail what these ‘human rights’ are by talking about education, health, homes and work, well then, you haven’t understood anything about ‘human rights’. ‘Human rights’ in the minds of the dull masses, are not those things that guarantee the rights of a collective group of people, but they are rather tied to individualistic instances, or to their degeneration to narcissistic ones, congenial to the society that ‘produces, consumes and then dies.’ Here are a few of them: the right to speak your mind (even on things that you are absolutely incompetent on and however these thoughts having a low distribution, limited to the old, dear cyclostyled pamphlets or internet lists that only a handful of people actually read), the right to ‘express’ always and everywhere one’s ‘real self,’ including the ‘sexual preferences’ (paraded beyond limits of decency and mental stability for our children), the right to the ‘free market business,’ that is, drowning in luxury and skinning your neighbour just as long as you come out first, straight up to the right to carry a gun, in full cowboy style!
axisoflogic.com

As four Mapuche activists imprisoned under draconian anti-terrorist laws spend 70 days on a hunger strike, the troubled relationship between the Chilean state and “the oldest of Chileans” is rockier than ever.

Chile’s Michelle Bachelet shone during her presidential debut in Europe last month. Hailed by Europe’s leaders and press as a progressive icon, Bachelet leads a country seen as a model of political stability, economic dynamism and social modernity.
But there was another side to BacheletÍs trip. As she touched down in Madrid, Juan Guzman – the Chilean Judge famed for his judicial siege of General Pinochet – was giving an interview to El Pais. “The police act brutally,” said Guzman, describing the persecution of Chile’s Mapuche Indians. “They raid the villages and ransack houses. With luck they decommission a sharp knife or a machete which is often the only evidence used against suspects detained and charged under anti-terrorist laws.” (1)

Next day, the Portuguese literary Nobel Prize winner, Jose Saramago, challenged Bachelet in person. “Do me a favor”, pleaded the novelist. “Look out for the Mapuches: the oldest of Chileans.” That evening, outside Madrid’s House of the Americas, Bachelet was presented with a letter. “Dear President Bachelet,” it read. “It is incomprehensible that in Chile today there are over 200 law suits involving Mapuches in which irregular laws, created by the military to suppress opposition to the dictatorship, are applied.”
upsidedownworld.com