Lies, Deceit And Incompetence

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

I was sounding off a bit in last week’s Sunday Sermon about the state of things in Iraq, a mess created by blundering American and British intervention in a situation they did not, and still do not understand.

Last week I concentrated on the fact that ISIS, the al Qaeda splinter group – big name, ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ – has now seized large parts of northern Iraq, with consequent freeing of prisoners, fleeing of frightened former residents of that area and even unconfirmed reports of ‘mass beheadings’. Other reports of mass executions of official Iraqi army personnel seem to have been confirmed.

Presumably there will be worse to come.

All in the name of an Islamic State?

Well, hold on, maybe not just that.

It turns out that as Iraq descends into what will probably be a bloody civil war, the ISIS-al Qaeda forces have taken time to raid Mosul’s central bank and relieve it of some 500 billion Iraqi dinars, worth approximately $425 million.

Mosul is not only the largest city in northern Iraq, it is an oil hub at the vital intersection of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, thus providing rich pickings for the terrorists.

They also reportedly stole additional $ millions from a number of other banks across Mosul and what has only been quantified as a “large quantity of gold bullion.”

Others towns and cities, like Saddam Hussein’s old home town Tikrit, have suffered a similar fate.

As a result of all this George Bush / Tony Bliar created disaster, the ISIS/al Qaeda chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a previously relatively unknown figure, is now the leader of perhaps the ‘world’s richest terror force’.

(Quick side note to President Obama – I’m sure he reads this blog 🙂

– Hi Barrack, you can stop using American taxpayers’ money

to fund these ISIS terrorists in Syria, they have enough money now.)

.

In fact, to put the latest cash haul in perspective, at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US, Al-Qaeda had been working with an operating budget of around $30 million (source ‘Council on Foreign Relations’), so even allowing for inflation they are substantially richer today, and by definition have it in their power to do much more damage not just in the Middle East region, but worldwide.

As regional analyst Brown Moses succinctly put it on Twitter, this recent haul of ill gotten gains will “buy a whole lot of Jihad……For example, with $425 million, ISIS could pay 60,000 fighters around $600 a month for a year.”

It might even do a lot more. ISIS has already attracted 12,000 militants from abroad, 3,000 of whom are from the West. With bought mercenaries on board things can only get worse.

When Bush and Blair used Words of Mass Deception about Saddam Hussein having Weapons of Mass destruction as a bogus excuse to attack Iraq there were no terrorists and no terrorist threat from that country. Thanks to their lies, deceit and incompetence, there are now.

If this is an ‘improvement’ I can’t see it  –  can you?

=========================================================

.

Two Post Tuesday

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

. 

It’s not often that I post twice in one day. I did the funny post earlier but there is something else that I want to say and today is the day to say it. Strap yourselves in!

I don’t remember where I was when JKF was shot. It was a bit too far back in time for me to be worrying about such things. I do remember where I was when I saw my first movie about the assassination, though. I was in a cinema. The movie was called Executive Action and starred Burt Lancaster. Some critics panned it at the time but I thought it was very good, based on a conspiracy theme naturally enough. I actually thought it was better that Stone’s acclaimed effort, ‘JFK’, made many years later.

I also remember where I was this day eleven years ago. It was the day that the world changed for ever and I was sitting in my study at home battling with a few spreadsheets for a business plan I was putting together. The TV was on in the background and the normal programs suddenly cut to what was happening in New York.

 

World Trade Center, New York City, September 11, 2001

Of course that was the end of my spreadsheets for the day. I became totally enthralled in the news coverage which was to say the least confused. By that time the first tower was belching out a steady stream of smoke. It was clearly on fire and had been very badly damaged.

The reporters were speculating as to what may have been the cause. They talked about ‘accidents’ and eyewitness reports of a small private aircraft hitting the building. But, to anyone with any wit at all, it had to have been much more than a small airplane to do that amount of damage to a building that huge.

Then, as I continued to watch, the second plane hit the other tower. Some of the reporters still could not come to grips with what was happening. The second plane was clearly a large commercial jet and, equally clearly, it had been flown deliberately into the second tower.

This was the real deal. And all of the multi-billion dollar military/intelligence defense network had been caught with their trousers down round their collective ankles.

A massive terror attack was in progress and we were able to watch it in real time on our televisions. It was at the same time mesmerizing, engrossing and, not least, horrifying.

The horrific nature of what had happened became clearer when everyone began to realize that, not only had many innocent people probably lost their lives when the airplanes had struck the buildings, but also that there was little or no hope of saving those on the floors above where the impact had occurred. It got even worse when some of the trapped people threw themselves out of the building and could been seen falling to the ground and to certain death.

Emergency services rushed to the scene. Many acts of extreme bravery followed as police and firefighters went into the burning buildings with little or no regard for their own safety. I can’t say this for sure, but I imagine at least some of them knew there was little chance they would get back out again. But they did it anyway.

Then we heard that the Pentagon had been the target of a further attack and yet another airplane, also bound we were told for the Washington DC area, had gone down somewhere en route.

In all 2,977 people were murdered as a result of the terrorist attacks that morning.

We know who was responsible for the attacks. We know that many of their terrorist comrades, including the figurehead Bin Laden, have since been killed. And we know the terrible cost in terms of lost lives and serious injuries to the various armed forces who were sent to do that job.

September 11 is now officially ‘Patriot Day’, a day of remembrance. And we should all take at least a moment in honor of the victims.

Sadly the aftermath of these terrorist attacks eleven years ago brought only knee-jerk reactions from jerk politicians. They had the audacity to call it the Patriot Act, but it attacks the freedom of innocent law-abiding citizens just as much as it does the terrorists and criminals.

Contaminated by the hellish liberal inspired ‘guilt’ that now pervades all government decisions and means that it is no longer perceived as acceptable if we take our own side in a fight, a raft of idiotic, unnecessary and unfair legislation has, and is, being enacted.

This is being done in the name of defending the homeland, but unwilling to only target the national, ethnic or religious groups who are responsible for the vast majority of the terror, poor old law-abiding Joe Public gets targeted as well.

Everyone is now guilty until they can prove their innocence. Get on an airplane at an airport and you are treated as a potential terrorist and irradiated and probed and so forth. Open a bank account and you are treated as a potential terrorist trying to launder money – despite the fact that it was the banks themselves who were doing that job.

It’s not that any of this is a great hardship. It’s just that it is completely unnecessary and unproductive. It is the typical politician’s and bureaucrat’s way of trying to con the populace by substituting activity for real progress.

A lot of potential terrorist attacks in America and elsewhere have been thwarted during the past eleven years, but not one of them as a result of all the overt claptrap at airports and so forth.

Will it change? Will sanity and intelligence take over?

Not a chance.

Will it get worse? Will the bureaucrats’ hunger for control and interference increase?

Of course it will, regardless of whether the regime is Republicrat or Democrican.

So who really did win?

The terrorists may well have lost, but the people certainly didn’t win!