Reuters:

German officials are drawing up lists of hundreds of Islamic militants to be deported from the country under a new law making expulsions easier, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel said on Saturday. Der Spiegel said authorities were already using their powers under an immigration law introduced this month in conducting an operation dubbed “Aktion Kehraus” (“Action Sweep Out”). The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the report beyond saying that deportations were a matter for Germany’s 16 federal states.
Under new rules, potential deportees will not be able to use normal legal channels to challenge an expulsion order. A special panel of the Federal Administrative Court will be responsible, with no right of appeal. Der Spiegel said judges were expected to deal with up to 2,000 cases per year.
Since the revelations in 2001 that Arab students who had lived for years in Hamburg led the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Germans have questioned their liberal laws under which some suspected militants even draw welfare benefits. Interior Minister Otto Schily has suggested that evidence of training at an al Qaeda camp should be clear grounds for expelling a foreign national. Distributing videos calling for “holy war” could also be punished the same way.

Hat tip – Outside The Beltway

Diana West tells it like it is;

I found it wickedly ironic that around the time the Website Islam Online claimed Fox television decided “to remove some stereotypical aspects about American Muslims” from its terrorism series “24” — whose hero, after defusing the terrorist threat from Bosnia, South America, Germany, and corporate America, now battles honest-to-goodness Muslim terrorists — real-life news broke about the vicious murders of a Coptic Christian family whose bound and gagged bodies, slit throats and stab wounds on a Coptic cross tattoo immediately raised fears that the crime may have been Islamic in nature, a slaying of “infidels” — in Jersey City.

Drudge is running a banner right now that reports Al Zarqawi may have been arrested. There is very little to go on right now, but it’s from the same paper that broke the news of Saddam Hussein’s capture:

Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, whom the US occupation authorities declared to be the “target number one” in Iraq, has been arrested in the city of Baakuba, the Emirate newspaper al-Bayane reported on Tuesday referring to Kurdish sources. Al-Zarqawi, leader of the terrorist group Al-Tawhid Wa’al-Jihad, was recently appointed the director of the Al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq.

Let’s hope so. If true, it won’t end the violence in Iraq, (that won’t happen so long as Iran exists) but the psychological impact on both sides will be profound.
Powerline ties this report in with confirmed information of the capture of his high ranking Zarqawi operatives earlier this week.

With the world media riveted on the plight of the tsunami survivors, 2 billion in aid pledged, and the UN scratching and clawing its way to a pretense of leadership – in hindsight, the 70,000 dead and million displaced people of Darfur might have been better advised to pray for very heavy rains.

Yeslin Bin Laden was interviewed by Matt Lauer for NBC Dateline, in July of this year.

Lauer: “Did you immediately suspect that your brother might be involved in this?”
Bin Laden: “Never thought. It’s too sophisticated, I thought, for anybody to imagine something like this.”
But somebody had imagined it. And now Yeslam BinLadin shared a name and a father with the most wanted man on earth.
Lauer: “To many people around the world right now, the name Bin Laden is synonymous with terror.”
Bin Laden: “Uh-huh.”
Lauer: “Does that distress you?”
Bin Laden: “It does because we are well known, and we have been well known before September 11 for being a very well- to-do and proper family.”
Lauer: “And after September 11, you’re well known for a much different reason.”
Bin Laden: “One person is known for a much different reason. And a lot of people amalgamate the whole thing.”
[…]
Yeslam says the last time anyone in his family spoke to Osama was in the early 1990s when he was living in Sudan.

Uh-huh.;

PARIS (Reuters) – A French judge has widened a probe into the financial network surrounding the family of Osama bin Laden after questioning his half-brother and learning of a 241 million euro transfer to Pakistan, Le Monde daily said. Investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke received court authorization to extend his investigation after Yeslam bin Laden was questioned on Sept. 27 over allegations of links with the organizers of attacks in 2001 in the United States, the paper said in its Saturday edition.

Via Junkyard Blog this Wall Street Journal explanation as to what POW status and the Geneva Convention really mean. As opposed to the cherished misbelief in the media and elsewhere, any protective status that prisoners and combatants have in war, capture or interrogation is established by their actions and conduct. Break the rules, and the best you can hope for is that your captors will be inclined towards giving you the benefit of the doubt.
But there is no good excuse for the recent accusations against US forces by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which should be perfectly aware of how these things work.

The basic idea behind granting POW status is that soldiers who surrender or are captured are not to be punished so long as they have behaved according to certain rules — such as fighting in uniform and doing their best to direct their own attacks at enemy soldiers rather than civilians. Part of their protection from punishment is that they not be subject to coercive interrogation; they are required only to give name, rank and serial number. They may, however, be held for the duration of the conflict so that they do not return to the
battlefield.
The POW concept is certainly a great humanitarian advance, since the slaughter of captured enemies used to be routine and since it provides some incentive to fair battlefield conduct. But it is a concept in jeopardy thanks to its ostensible guardians at the ICRC. By demanding POW status for un-uniformed combatants who target civilians — in contravention of the plain language of the Geneva Conventions — the ICRC started the fight over Guantanamo by attempting to remove one of the few carrots we have to encourage humane behavior in war.
Now it goes further and demands that these combatants get even more privileges than legitimate POWs. Has it occurred to no one in Geneva that indefinite detention can’t possibly be “tantamount to torture” for illegal combatants if it is the expected course of events for real POWs? The prospect of Guantanamo detainees returning to the battlefield is real, and more than two dozen of those already released have done so.
The ICRC also objects to interrogation pressure that is typically no more abusive than the good cop-bad cop routines common in American police stations. And where the interrogation techniques go further, they include nothing worse than loud music, temperature extremes, and uncomfortable positions. To call such discomforts “a form of torture” is to rob the word of all meaning and implicitly elevate the behavior of truly odious regimes.
Finally, from the damned-if-you-do file, we have the ICRC complaining that U.S. doctors took the care to examine the detainees’ health to determine if particular stress techniques might be too much for a given individual. This is alleged somehow to be a violation of “medical ethics” rather than the example of American humanity that it actually is.

If the ICRC accusations sound more like political maneuvering than legitimate concern, there’s a reason. Junkyard’s B. Preston adds;

One source of tension between the US and the ICRC concerns Protocol 1, a 1970s attempt to revise the Geneva Conventions. The US (along with several of our strongest allies) has explicitly rejected Protocol 1 because it includes non-state actors (i.e. terrorists) under Geneva’s protections. That would effectively grant protections to terrorists that they will never grant any of their hostages and would also keep us from gaining any useful intelligence from detained combatants. That intelligence saves lives and weakens the terrorists. It shortens the war, in our favor.
At least part of the intention of the ICRC’s Gitmo report appears to be an attempt to force the US to ratify Protocol 1 by default, by pressuring us into granting the terrorists at Gitmo Protocol 1 status.

The Red Cross’s one true strength has been a long-established and respected reputation for neutrality during world conflicts. If the politically motivated left continues to infect the ICRC and squander trust to score a few political hits for the global cause of anti-Americanism, this once hallowed organization risks not only the lives of their workers on the ground, but their very reason for being.
I also suspect that some of the behavior of the ICRC may be fueled by instincts of self- preservation. The modern reality for the Red Cross is that terrorist groups tend not to care about noble concepts like neutrality unless there is some advantage to be realized. I feel for them, but that’s not an excuse for abandoning their most fundamental strength. If the Red Cross believes it can buy some insurance by advocating for terrorists as though they should be considered “equals” to legitimate military prisoners, they can expect to be disappointed. If they cannot depend on their historic neutrality to protect their people on the ground, conspiring to aid one side over the other is not likely to improve matters.

Exerpts from the audit of The 2001 Anti-Terrorism Initiative from the March 2004 Report, Office of The Auditor General.

The government as a whole failed to achieve improvements in the ability of security information systems to communicate with each other. Consequently, needed improvements will be delayed by several years. Moreover, even as the government was launching programs that would create new needs for fingerprint identification, projects that would have helped it to deal with the increased demand were not included in the initiative.

… gaps and inconsistencies in the watch lists used to screen visa applicants, refugee claimants, and travellers seeking to enter Canada. There is no overall quality control of this vital function, which is spread over several departments and agencies. No one monitors delays in the entry or the quality of the data on watch lists.

… criminal intelligence data are not used to screen applicants for clearance to restricted areas at airports, meaning that security clearances are issued without checking applicants for criminal association

We found no evidence that officials of the Privy Council Office, Finance Canada, and the Treasury Board Secretariat had based their review of departmental proposals on a national threat and risk assessment…

… Other projects appeared designed to maintain the government’s existing public safety and policing programs, not to respond directly to the increased need for security after September 11. [eg.] Public Security and Anti-Terrorism funds were allocated to the Solicitor General to combat organized crime and the illegal drug trade in First Nations communities, including the cultivation of marijuana…

We expected also to see a lessons-learned study that assessed how the Government of Canada had responded to the attacks in the United States. We found a wide variety of reports. In some cases, extensive analyses were carried out but never endorsed by senior management; lack of support by senior management undermines any effort to implement change. In other cases we were given basic reports that appeared to be summaries but that provided no detailed analysis.

…front-line officers at airports still do not receive passport information.

Terrorist Watch Lists … In our initial audit work we found significantly fewer terrorist lookouts in the Service’s tracking system than in Immigration’s database … Immigration’s records were in such disarray that we were unable to complete a full reconciliation during the course of our audit.

Interpol Red Notices… On average, 48 days elapsed from [Interpol] publication to entry in the [RCMP] police system. At the time of our testing, the RCMP had a backlog of 162 notices to be entered in its database that were two months old, on average.

Lost and stolen Canadian passports not on border control watch lists … the information system used on the primary inspection line cannot distinguish between active and deactivated passports … delays between the reporting of a lost or stolen passport and the entering of the information into the RCMP database … took 70 days, on average.

There is no system that transfers information on outstanding warrants to the border watch lists …

Reading the report (and between the lines), there are areas of modest progress, many areas in which beaurocracies are resisting change, citing “the Privacy Act” and even the Charter “Freedom of Association” as excuses not to act, while the government funds technologies that are dependant upon other technologies that remain undeveloped. Committees meet, report and do nothing. And there remains no top secret method of communication between agencies, in event of a true national emergency.
About what you’d expect from a government that at its core, really doesn’t believe Canada is a target for terrorism.

David Frum has been served with a notice of libel by the Canadian branch of CAIR -Council on American Islamic Relations. In so doing, he joins a growing club.
Something about having the uncomfortable facts of their association’s links to extremists and terrorist organizations brought to light… or in their words, of being “an unscrupulous, Islamist, extremist sympathetic group in Canada supporting terrorism”.
Perhaps my wording is clumsy. Oh, well.

CBC

Teresa Borcz Khalifa is “safe and sound,” Prime Minister Marek Belka told reporters in Warsaw Saturday.
”Officials of different services took part in her release in co- operation with institutions from many countries,” Marek said.
Khalifa has lived in Iraq for 30 years, is married to an Iraqi and holds both Polish and Iraqi citizenship. She was kidnapped on Oct. 27 in Baghdad by a group that demanded Poland withdraw its troops from Iraq. Al-Jazeera television aired two videos showing Khalifa in captivity.

Good news.

Fighting alongside their Canadian brethren in the greater war on terrorism.

Newsfeed…. Nov 17, 2004
Marine shoots wounded Iraqi … War crime … Abu Graihb … Goss bullies CIA … UN Human Rights commissioner criticizes coalition … Starr Jones’ eye for queer guy … Insurgency grows … warmonger Condi Rice black … Iraq police abducted…
(More here)
update

Rusty Shackleford is reporting that Hosting Anime has shut down all terrorist related sites on their servers, including several linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The website had been previously hacked on several occasions by a group calling itself Teamz USA. The story was first reported here (and then ripped off by MSNBC) and a second hacking was reported by Chad Evans (also ripped by MSM). Might I just add that a certain Star Wars themed website gave out the URL for Zarqawi to well over a hundred people promising to take down the site again….Perhaps the new owners just got sick of all the hackers?

Now, if someone would only take care of Al Jazeera.

Fairuz Yamulky, a 38 year old Iraqi-Canadian, was taken hostage in Iraq on Sept. 7 and held for 16 days. She was tortured, beaten and threatened with death. She escaped with the assistance of one of her captors.
U.S. forces diverted a Blackhawk helicopter to pick up her and her protector in the desert, they provided medical tests and trauma counselling and gave her a place to stay in a general’s apartment.
Her treatment by Canadian government officials?

Once in Amman, Yamulky said Canadian officials never offered any followup medical help. She eventually saw her own doctor in Dubai, where her family lived while she worked in Iraq.
�
Yamulky said she could afford to pay what Canadian officials required and despite feeling traumatized was able to make some decisions.
�
But others in similar situations might not have her financial resources nor be able mentally to cope with such demands, she said.
�
“Some people come out of these traumas and they’re totally distorted,” said Yamulky.
�
“I do thank the Canadian government for keeping in contact with my family. But I do at the same time want them to have something in place when things like this go wrong.”
�
Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Marie-Christine Kilkoff said officials followed Yamulky’s plight very closely and worked with local Iraqi authorities and “other countries with a presence in Baghdad.”
�
Once Yamulky was free, they obtained an emergency passport for her and arranged travel to Jordan, though the flight was paid for by relatives and friends, said Kilkoff.
�
“While in Amman, Canadian officials advised Mrs. Yamulky that we could assist her with hotel and flight arrangements, which she declined,” she said.
�
The department has been warning Canadians since 1995 not to travel to Iraq, said Kilkoff, and its travel advisory states it has no consular services in that country.
�
Canada has one foreign service officer as a liaison with the Iraqi interim government and an RCMP officer looking into ways of aiding the country’s police forces.
�
Dining with Canadian embassy officials in Amman, Yamulky said one left the table to take a telephone call from Ottawa. She returned to ask if Yamulky would make a statement that the Canadian government had helped her.
�
“I refused,” she said. “I said I do not know how much you guys have done in my case.”

One might argue that when policies are established, and warnings given to travellers, that those who ignore them do so at their own risk and expense. Fair enough – but let us not forget that this is the same Canadian government that issued emergency passports and paid the airfare for the Khadr terrorism clan to return to Canada from Pakistan.

This time the suspects had grenades.

My initial reaction to the Bin Laden release yesterday was about the same as Wretchard’s. The tone has changed.

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

On Larry King last evening, Walter Cronkite agrees – Bin Laden would like to negotiate. Of course, he also said this…

“Indeed. Indeed. And the thing that in bringing this threat to us, there is almost, in the fact that he dressed well, that he looked well, he was clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get.”

Say, what?
update, via Instapundit; Jeff Jarvis is slowly (?) starting to see he’s supporting a candidate whose party is suffering from a case of full-blown political necrotizing fasceitis…

Roger Ebert gave this movie a single star. I can’t say I’m surprised. This is a man who will undoubtedly place Michael Moore’s discredited “documentary” on his Ten Best for 2004.

If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I’d be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it. The White House gets a free pass, since the movie seems to think Team America makes its own policies without political direction.
I wasn’t offended by the movie’s content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides — indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they’re wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn’t matter.

Really, Roger?
Were we watching the same film?
Sure, there were moments when the trigger happy “Team America” members went over the top, but you know, there was a certain “inanimate object” aspect to their “collateral damage” – the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx…
But, were you out taking a p*** during the scene involving the terrorist bombing of the Panama Canal, Roger? Did you not notice how completely unfunny the movie suddenly became when those “dead” puppets were bobbing in the floodwaters?
Come to think of it, how did your review manage to omit mention of the left’s cult-hero Michael Moore – a suicide bomber, inside Mount Rushmore? Certainly, that had to be one of the most politically charged “statements” of the film. Hans Blix, being torn to pieces in Kim Jong-il’s shark tank – did you sleep through that or just close your eyes in horror?
Finally, the biggest hint of them all – how did it end, Roger? Who “saves the world” from destruction? Alex Baldwin? Sean “rivers of chocolate” Penn?
Team America is a funny, funny movie. The sex scenes would someday join those “moments in movie history” – if you could actually show them during a “moments in movie history” retrospective. This movie outragiously, gloriously slays all the sacred cows of the politically correct. Contrary to all prior warnings, I was never offended.
I left thinking that this movie was not at all what the reviewers would have you believe it is. It has one of the most deadly serious undercurrents of any “comedy” I’ve seen in a very long time. Maybe because of the absurdity, exaggeration and the bawdiness, that undercurrent is more easily avoided or overlooked, but for me, it was just driven home more starkly because of the contrast. Perhaps it’s the fact that the stance taken by Parker and Stone – a vicious indictment of the left, of the entertainment industry and the cancer of anti-Americanism that infects and undermines the war on Islamic fascism – is so counter-Hollywood and so rare.
Go see this film.
(Don’t take grandma.)

James Joyner highlights this WaPo report:

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials. Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses. “If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force,” said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah’s Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.

(Instapundit has more.)
Belmont Club looks at the murder of Ken Bigley and the still stubborn reluctance of Western media to accept that we are at war.
A bit of serious, but necessary, reading. Grab a coffee and get to it.

Mosnews

A foreign mercenary who apparently came from Canada has been killed while fighting Russian forces in Chechnya, the headquarters of the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus told the RIA-Novosti news agency on Friday.
“The documents found on the killed African-American testify to the fact that he had arrived from Canada,” the agency’s source said. The source noted, however, that the authenticity of these documents was yet to be verified.
“At present we are translating and checking the numerous visas in his passport. The expertise to check their authenticity will be held in the nearest future,” the HQ source said.
Official spokesman of the North Caucasus HQ, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, said that the killed African-American was an expert in explosives and that he had arrived in Chechnya to replace Algerian fighter Abu Muskhab who was recently taken prisoner by Russian troops. (Kamal Burrakhlia, AKA Abu Muskhab was detained by Russia’s FSB in Chechnya on September 17, 2004. Before arriving in Chechnya in 2001, the mercenary had lived in Great Britain for almost 10 years.)
“The mercenary and three Chechen gunmen who accompanied him were killed on Thursday near the village of Niki-Khita in the Kurchaloi District of Chechnya,” Shabalkin said. The gunmen belonged to a group headed by the warlord Avdorkhanov who is under the immediate command of Aslan Maskhadov, he added.
A grenade launcher, a machine gun and two assault rifles were found on the killed fighters, the spokesman said.

The Belmont Club puts the data cited in a NYT article on “sweeping” violence in Iraq into perspective. Or more accurately, into a graph. (image below is a partial snapshot – go read the whole thing).