| From The Editor January 15, 2007 |
The Next Jihadists: Iraq's Lost ChildrenAmmar will tell you he's proud to be carrying a gun. His father was a brigadier in Saddam Hussein's Army, a man who saw combat in his country's several wars, and from an early age Ammar had accompanied him to the shooting range. "I got used to the sound of guns then," Ammar says. So he was ready, last fall, when the imam in his Baghdad neighborhood urged residents to take up arms against the invader-who in this case happened to be members of a Shiite militia trying to push into the predominantly Sunni area. Ammar joined the neighborhood watch, a ragtag bunch of men who stand guard nightly at improvised roadblocks and rooftop observation posts. In mid-October Ammar fought his first big battle against soldiers from the Mahdi Army-"the garbage collectors and robbers," as he contemptuously refers to the Shiite militia. He says he put his Kalashnikov assault rifle to good use: "I think I injured or even killed two of them. Our group killed more than six of them that night." Ammar is 17 years old. A tall, thin boy with a beard just starting up, he has already seen far more of the dark side of life than anyone really should. As the grisly toll of Baghdad's death squads spiked last fall, he helped out in the room at his local mosque where bodies are ritually washed before they are buried. Some corpses had been burned with chemicals. Limbs had been cut off, eyes torn out. One day at the beginning of November, a neighbor of Ammar's, a college student and fellow Sunni, disappeared at an impromptu checkpoint set up by the Mahdi Army. When the neighbor's body finally turned up at the mosque for burial, Ammar saw that he had been beheaded. (He recognized his friend from the clothing.) "I ran into the garden and threw up," Ammar says. Then he vowed revenge. Sectarian warfare is reshaping Iraq in all sorts of malevolent ways day in and day out. But it is also forging the future by poisoning the next generation of Iraqis. Like many of its neighbors, Iraq is a young country: nearly half the population is under the age of 18. And those children have had a particularly turbulent upbringing. Kids like Ammar were born in the aftermath of one debilitating war, against neighboring Iran, then suffered two others and years of impoverishing sanctions in between. They are especially vulnerable to the demons that now grip Iraq. Hassan Ali, a sociologist at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, estimates that at least 1 million Iraqi kids have seen their lives damaged by the war-they've lost parents and homes, watched as their communities have been torn apart by sectarian furies. "These children will come to believe in the principles of force and violence," says Ali. "There's no question that society as a whole is going to feel the effects in the future"-and not only Iraqi society. From the Middle East to Europe to America, violence may well beget violence around the world for years to come. Full Story Gary Jackson |
| QUOTE OF THE WEEK |
| "A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man. " Tacitus |
| PROFESSIONAL ARTICLES, EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS |
Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn't fazed by chaos. He'd been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia's civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, "was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them." |
| BREAKING NEWS FOR THE PROFESSIONAL |
Terror thrives on crime world linksA MAN arrested in Sydney and charged with possession of stolen Australian Defence Force rocket launchers has been linked to a group with plans to use the weapons for terrorism. Police allege Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor was one of several targets. Police also allege the man they arrested, Taha Abdul Rahman, sold five rocket launchers to Mohammad Ali Elomar through an associate, Adnan Darwiche, a Sydney drug dealer who is serving a prison sentence for double murder. Elomar is one of nine Sydney men charged in late 2005 with conspiring to make explosives in preparation for a terrorist attack. These events raise disturbing questions not only about the security of our military weapons supply chain (the IRA used a similar type of rocket launcher in 2000 to attack MI6 headquarters), but about the links between the criminal and terrorist worlds in Australia. As NSW assistant commissioner for counter terrorism Nick Kaldas has observed in relation to this case, the line between criminality and politically motivated acts of terrorism is blurring worldwide.Full Story Britain to E-Mail Terror Threat AlertsThe British government is offering an e-mail bulletin service to notify people of changes to the nation's terror threat level, a development that illustrates increasing fears of extremist attacks in Britain and the rising power of digital communications. The domestic security agency, MI5, announced the new service Tuesday and said it will also provide e-mail bulletins on "major developments in national security affairs." It plans to add a service providing the same information in text messages to cellphones, officials said. People would have to register on the MI5 Web site to receive the alerts.Full Story U.S. Worried About Homegrown TerroristsThe nation's homeland security chief said Friday he is increasingly worried about ``homegrown'' terrorists and will give more help to local police trying to root out such plots. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced several changes in how the government chooses to dole out anti-terror money to major U.S. cities, moving away from what he said was too much ``bean-counting'' last year that subjected the agency to ridicule.Full Story Are you a citizen? Prove itWhen Colorado state Sen. Andy McElhany (R) championed adoption of the strictest identification requirements in the country, his aim was to keep illegal immigrants off state welfare rolls. He didn't anticipate making it harder for his 15-year-old daughter to get a learner's permit. But that's what happened when his wife and daughter showed up at the Division of Motor Vehicles office in Colorado Springs in September. They brought the teen's passport, only to discover DMV had changed the rules and a passport was no longer a sufficient form of identification. "There's no reason to believe a 15-year-old girl is going to be running around with a fake passport just to get a driver's permit," a chagrined McElhany said.Full Story Intel chief: Hezbollah may be next U.S. threatAl-Qaida poses the gravest terrorist threat to the United States, and an emboldened Hezbollah is a growing danger, the U.S. intelligence chief said Thursday. In his annual review of global threats, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte highlighted an increasingly worrisome assessment of Hezbollah -backed by Iran and Syria - since its 34-day war with Israel last year. "As a result of last summer's hostilities, Hezbollah's self-confidence and hostility toward the United States as a supporter of Israel could cause the group to increase its contingency planning against United States interests, "Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee.Full Story |
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Pentagon seeks to increase militaryFor the first time since President Bush mobilized the National Guard and Reserve after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Pentagon is abandoning its limit on the time a citizen-soldier can be required to serve on active duty. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday that the change would have been made even if Bush had not ordered an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, further straining the Army and Marine Corps. The Pentagon also announced that it is proposing to Congress that the size of the Army be increased by 65,000, to 547,000, and that the Marine Corps, the smallest of the services, grow by 27,000, to 202,000, over the next five years. No cost estimate was provided, but officials said it would be at least several billion dollars.Full Story America's Prisons: Breeding Grounds for Muslim ConvertsIf I had to pick a single issue on which I would hope to see our counter-terrorism policy give more focus to during 2007, it would be to have real progress made in altering the mindsets, dynamics and structures in what are rapidly emerging as a major source of domestic Islamist terrorism, America's prisons and jails. Some progress has already been made. Federal prison authorities and state authorities in larger jurisdictions have been fairly proactive in isolating suspected terrorists and known radical Islamists from the general inmate population. But more has to be done to stop prison authorities from continuing to condone a well-established propensity for Muslims inmates to self-segregate.Full Story Pentagon viewing Americans' bank recordsThe Pentagon and to a lesser extent the CIA have been using a little-known power to look at the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage within the United States, officials said Saturday. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Saturday the Defense Department "makes requests for information under authorities of the National Security Letter statutes ... but does not use the specific term National Security Letter in its investigatory practice." Whitman did not indicate the number of requests that have been made in recent years, but said authorities operate under the Right to Financial Privacy Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the National Security Act.Full Story Bugged coins used to steal defence secretsCANADIAN coins containing tiny transmitters have been found in the pockets of at least three US defence industry workers who visited Canada in recent years, the US Defence Department has said. "On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors' employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons," the US Defence Security Service said in an unclassified report on its website. The agency is a branch of the Pentagon.Full Story Airstrikes in Somalia mark new forayThe American airstrike in Somalia, which officials say killed as many as 10 suspected terrorists, marked a new, open military foray by the United States into a part of the world that has been a chief concern in the war on terror. The Horn of Africa, and particularly Somalia, has worried the U.S. military since America began a global campaign in 2001 to defeat al-Qaida, which had operated from havens inside Afghanistan until U.S. forces invaded in October of that year. A short time later, the U.S. military established a special group of forces based in nearby Djibouti to work with Ethiopia, Kenya and other governments in the area to combat terrorists.Full Story |
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NORTH AMERICAN SNIPER CHAMPIONSHIPMARCH 12-15, 2007MERIDIAN PUBLIC SAFETY TRAINING FACILITY 1180 SANDFLAT ROAD MERIDIAN, MS For further information about the 2007 NASC, contact:
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| FRANKS REVIEW |
Service Equipment ReviewSHOT Show 2007 Quick LookThis week we're just taking a quick look, but next week we'll be posting multiple pages of reviews of the new products released at SHOT Show. SHOT Show was everything one would expect it to be: In a word: HUGE. While it may not seem like a difficult task, walking every aisle and stopping at every booth that seems to have anything even remotely of interest isn't all that easy. Even doing it over a four day period, given the number of times you have to return to certain booths (because sometimes the people you need to see / talk to aren't there on your first visit) means you walk a lot of ground two, three or four times. The 29th Annual SHOT Show is like the biggest outdoor store you can imagine and this week we're taking a quick look at what I consider to be the HOT items for 2007. On January 22nd, we will be posting our full reviews.Full Story Can Be Viewed At: http://www.borelliconsulting.com/evals/other/shot07main.htm Recreational Equipment ReviewSHOT Show 2007 Recreational Products Quick LookAlthough SHOT Show started out focused on Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor sports, it dedicated a specific space to military and law enforcement products a few years back. That section has grown in size and significance and plenty of what is available there is covered on this week's tactical side. On the recreational side there was much more space dedicated and I'll do the best I can to cover as much of the new products as possible. This week, though, we're taking a quick look at the notable new product releases on the recreational side. I've done my best to include hunting, fishing, camping, archery, backpacking, etc.. Given that the outdoor (original) part of SHOT Show is much larger than the military / LE part, I faced quite a challenge walking it all and finding the items I thought you readers would be most interested in. Let's take a look...
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| CHAPLAINS CORNER |
NOT WHERE YOU WOULD RATHER BE?I had amazing experiences again this past Christmas season. Again,
I was given the opportunity to spend lots of someone else's money
for the benefit of those in need. I am most thankful that I have
been chosen to be so blessed. After spending so much time seeing
others be so blessed, I intentionally spent Christmas Day alone.
The morning began with me awakening early to find a tv movie about
a family that had moved from the city to the area where I grew up.
The location was so familiar that it could have been right in the
same area that I roamed and explored as a child... and I had an
episode of wanting to be there roaming those hills, valleys and
rivers again... a very powerful episode... and that led into remembering
Christmas past from my growing up years in poverty... then remembering
Christmas with my children... and the last Christmas that I had
with my wife, Sue, because she died immediately after Christmas
five years ago... |
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