Making It Easier to Deport the Pro-Terrorists The U.S. House Rules Committee today passed H.R. 10, the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act," to take steps to make sure that there is no repetition of 9/11. One of the amendments to this act is #25, proposed by Mark Green (Republican of Wisconsin) and John Hostettler (Republican of Indiana), which I am particularly pleased to note passed. Here is a summary of it:

Strengthens immigration law in regard to the inadmissibility and deportability of alien terrorists and their supporters. Provides that all terrorist-related grounds of inadmissibility would also be grounds of deportability. Makes attending a terrorist training camp an inadmissible and deportable offense. Strengthens the grounds of inadmissibility and deportability regarding providing money or other material support to a terrorist organization.

Note this sentence: "Provides that all terrorist-related grounds of inadmissibility would also be grounds of deportability." In other words, whatever can keep you out can also throw you out.

TORONTO - A convicted Palestinian terrorist [Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad] who has successfully fended off deportation since 1988 despite lying about his past to get into Canada, will next month tell a judge he should not be deported because he is ill and would not get adequate medical treatment in Lebanon.
[. . . . ] His case goes to court in Toronto on Oct. 14.

The appeal is the terrorist's latest attempt to avoid deportation. Immigration authorities began trying to deport him in 1988, but he has fended off their efforts by filing repeated court appeals. His case is often cited as evidence that Canada's refugee system is hopelessly flawed.

Mohammad joined the Popular Front at the age of 25 and underwent a month of military training before he was sent to Athens to attack an El Al plane. On Boxing Day, 1968, he and an accomplice stormed a Boeing 707 as it was readying for takeoff.

Mohammad was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison, but in 1970, six Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Greek airliner and threatened to blow it up unless he was released.

To spare the lives of its citizens, Greece set Mohammad free. Mohammad moved to Cyprus and then travelled to Spain, where he applied to immigrate to Canada. Together with his wife and three children, he arrived in Canada as an immigrant on Feb. 25, 1987. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] The new Air and Marine Operations facility opening at a former air force base in northern New York is one of one five that will be responsible for tightening surveillance along the U.S.-Canadian border.

Border patrol agents say they have noticed more air smuggling efforts over the 6,400-kilometre border recently. Just as pilots fly drugs in from Mexico, authorities fear planes carrying terrorists or explosives could come in from the north.

The first facility opened in August in Bellingham, Wash. Others are tentatively planned for near Detroit; Grand Forks, N.D., and Great Falls, Mont.

Planes from the old Plattsburgh air force base will patrol the largely wooded border east to Maine, and along Lake Ontario and the western portion of Lake Erie. Boats from the base will regularly patrol Lake Champlain and cross into the St. Lawrence River and other waterways as needed, Department of Homeland Security officials said. [. . . . ]

Moscow — A Canadian resident described by Russian officials as an explosives expert was among four insurgents killed in fighting in Chechnya, the Russian Defence Ministry said Friday.

Colonel Vyacheslav Sedov, spokesman for the ministry, identified the dead Canadian resident as Khalil Rudwan of Vancouver, according to his Canadian passport.

[. . . . ] Mr. Rudvan had been an explosives expert who entered Russia in September on a tourist visa. He said Rudvan had entered Chechnya from the neighbouring Russian region of Dagestan, accompanied by three gunmen from a militant group headed by Akhmed Avdorkhanov.

The immense scope of an Iraqi effort in the late 1990s to curry political support for ending an international trade embargo is reflected in a list of more than 1,300 oil "vouchers" that then-President Saddam Hussein gave to more than a hundred corporations, foreign officials and political parties stretching from North America to Asia, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group.

The vouchers, which provided selective rights to buy Iraqi oil at a discount and to resell it for a huge profit, were provided to both mainstream and opposition political parties in countries such as Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia; to oil companies in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, Italy, Canada and France; to an arms conglomerate in China; and to individuals in Switzerland, Jordan, the Netherlands, Russia, Malaysia and Burma, among others.

Each of the oil sales was approved by the United Nations, which was monitoring Iraqi oil transactions in an effort begun in 1996 -- known as the oil-for-food program -- to ensure that the resulting revenue was used for humanitarian projects. But Iraq saw the program differently, as a key part of a scheme to free itself from the impact of sanctions and, ultimately, to gain political support for their termination, according to the report. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] The four used British subs acquired by the Liberal government for the "bargain price" of $750 million is just the lastest chapter in that nasty story. Especially when the government has stuck with the deal despite a never-ending litany of rusted hulls, rotting electrical wiring, leaking pipes and torpedo tubes, etc. And now lethal, crippling fires while at sea.

In fact, that sorry record of mistreating Canada's armed forces goes back to the reign of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Soon after grabbing power in 1968, the left-leaning Grit PM tried to pull Canada out of the NATO and NORAD mutual defence pacts. That was at the height of the Cold War and would have suited the Soviet Union just dandy.

However, with our allies and most Canadians objecting, he was forced to pull back from that move. So, he did the next best thing: cutting Canada's troop strength and dragging his feet on replacing Canada's aging, obsolescent equipment.

For instance, I remember in the mid-1970s covering Canadian Forces operations in NATO's annual fall manoeuvres in Europe. The Canadians were stuck with 30-year-old Centurion tanks that required three days to replace an engine in the field. Time for modern U.S. tanks: three hours.

Under pressure from NATO allies and the opposition Conservatives, the Trudeauites finally bought German-made Leopard tanks. However, they were the old Mark I type that would soon become obsolete -- instead of the latest, much more formidable Mark II model.

Allan MacKinnon, then the Conservatives' defence critic, told me at the time that the Tories had to be low-key in their criticism because they feared Trudeau would simply cancel buying the new tanks entirely "if he becomes miffed." [. . . . ]

Accordingly, Time goes on, the [Transportation Security Administration] is launching a passenger profiling system known as Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. Under SPOT, the TSA staff learns to recognize suspicious personal behavior.

[. . . . ] However belatedly, the Bush administration has recognized that terrorists, more than the tools of their trade, must be watched and stopped. This amounts to a gigantic step forward in the protection of American travelers. The administration deserves congratulations for the courage to accept the need for profiling.

But SPOT is just a first step. Skilled terrorists learn how not to be nervous or give off other tell-tale signs. To be fully effective, profiling must focus on something more inherent to terrorism than anxiety. What might that be? Here is where the debate gets both productive and interesting.

[. . . . ] Smerconish [Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11] writes "We're fighting a war against young Arab male extremists, and yet our government continues to enforce politically correct ‘random screening' of airline passengers instead of targeting those who look like terrorists."

He calls for a change in policy: "Logic dictates that airport security take a longer, harder look at individuals who have ethnic, religious, nationality, and appearance factors in common with the Islamic extremist Middle Eastern men who have initiated war against us."

This is a step in the right direction, but like SPOT, it is just a start. Yes, young Arab male extremists have carried out most terrorist attacks in the West. Yes, focusing on observable traits like Arabic names or a Middle Eastern appearance is easily done. But, like nervousness, these are crude criteria that do not get to the heart of the problem, which is the Islamist ideology.

A significant number of Islamist terrorists in the West are not Arab or immigrants at all. Their ranks include converts who began life with names like Ryan Anderson, David Belfield, Willie Brigitte, Jerome & David Courtailler, Michael Christian Ganczarski, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, Mark Fidel Kools, Jose Padilla, Adam Pearlman, Richard Reid, Pierre Robert, Jack Roche, and Steven Smyrek. These converts grew up in the West, speak Western languages with no accent, and know the local sports heroes. Some of them are even blond.

Terrorists are not stupid; focusing on Arabs, as Smerconish urges, will prompt them to turn to non-Arab operatives. This is already a concern. Jean-Louis Bruguière, the leading French anti-terrorist investigating judge, warned along these lines in May 2003, recounts Robert Leiken, that "al-Qaida had stepped up its European recruiting efforts and was on the lookout for women and light-skinned converts in particular." The deputy director of a French intelligence agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, even told Mr. Leiken that "converts are our most critical work now."

IRAN Fatemeh Haghighat-Pajouh (f) aged 33

Fatemeh Haghighat-Pajouh has reportedly been sentenced to death for the murder of her husband, who allegedly tried to rape her then 15 year old daughter from a previous marriage. She is reportedly at risk of imminent execution.

According to a 6 October report in the Iranian newspaper E’temad, Fatemeh Haghighat-Pajouh murdered her husband in 1997. At her trial she alleged that her husband, identified as a 30 year old man named Bahman, was a drug addict, who had been overtly interested in her 15-year-old daughter. She also told the trial judge that Bahman had said he had lost the girl in a gambling match. When she later discovered that he had tried to rape the girl, she killed him.

[. . . . ] The E’temad report states that her execution is expected to take place in the next few days.

[. . . . ] Australians are aided in this sense of electoral lethargy by the two national broadcasters (The ABC & SBS), whose staffs are entirely drawn from the ranks of the activist left. I cannot, even if pressed and offered large sums of money, think of a single political commentator or even regular journalist on either network that is possessed of even a mildly conservative opinion. These networks have also served as leaders of the leftist media's never-ending war against the Governing Coalition Party. Not that the other free-to-air commercial television stations or the broadsheet newspapers have proven much better. Their bias is toward the populist left, and is broken only by rare guest appearances by stalwarts of the Australian right such as Tim Blair, Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen. A fortunate percentage subscribe to cable television, and are thus able to access Fox News, but it is too small a number, and Fox News's focus is (understandably) American news, and news impacting primarily on America.

The hysteria that the Australian press has been whipped into, most significantly over Iraq, has radically altered the shape of the coming election.[. . . . ]

The real importance of tomorrow's election lies in the foreign policy changes that would be instituted under the Labor Government of Mark Latham. The man who once broke a taxi-driver's arm, and ran Liverpool's (a suburb of southern Sydney) municipal council into historic levels of debt and political chaos now has an opportunity to shape Australia's place in the world. The shape it would take can be speculated upon by the remarks Mr Latham has, in the past, made about the President of the United States. "The most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory" he declared about the American President who overthrew two tyrannical regimes in a single term. Latham then went on to label his Australian conservative opponents as a "conga-line of suckholes" for having originally supported the United States in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Senator John Kerry, Mr Latham has prevaricated and occasionally made complete reversals of policy on what Labor would do in Government. "All the troops home by Christmas" was the original clarion call. Then it became some of the troops. Their position hasn't been clarified for some weeks, and thanks to Labor's compliant fifth columnists -- the media -- it isn't likely to be placed under any scrutiny, any time soon. But the fetid stench of appeasement wafts through the air, and it is unmistakable.

[. . . . ] But the single most important factor of this election -- Australia's conduct of foreign affairs in the War on Terrorism -- could signal the end of our place of relevance in the world. With Latham in power, we would become a closed, protectionist sneering nation, an international leftist pariah state like New Zealand, and as irrelevant on the global stage as Canada is swiftly becoming. That is by far the most serious peril that we face. [. . . . ]