DebateGate

But of course       

it`s not the intruder you got to worry about it`s the family.  unless you took gun safety training the chances of someone shooting a family member is very high.


Well added, Kimba.  Taking Firearms safety courses is definately a good idea.  I've taken several, and it indeed helps the mindset in dealing with a stressful situation, while handling a firearm.  Of course, nothing can prepare anyone for such an event, but by taking such courses, it does lessen the potential harm to family, while maximizing the harm towards the intruder

What's really funny in all this is the attitude of "Gee, when someone insults Christianity, none of US go ape-shit."  Like there was no Spanish Inquisition.  Like nobody ever got burned at the stake.

Care to show us any modern versions of the inquisation?  Burning at the stake?  I thought not.  I can show you some modern versions of beheadings, the murdering of nuns, and riots in the streets.  What's also ironic is all this violent "condemnation" of the Pope, for a quote of a fella eons ago, referencing the potential violence of a particular religion.  Quite prophetic

I'll stick with my Sig-Sauer       

I know this guy who has traveled extensively in the Middle East and makes calls overseas to Arabs in the Middle East; he visits web sites and checks out books at the library on subjects such as exotic weapons, poisons, explosive devices, organic chemistry, and firearms; he has a collection of books he picked up over the years from Palladin Press on the same subjects, as well as survival, urban warfare, sniping, terrorism, security, and several other subjects related to warfare or surviving after the apocolypse or whatever you want to call it.  Think I should call the FBI and turn myself in?[/color]

I don't see anything about Jihad made easy, and Islamic Terrorism is your Friend, so no, I see no reason.  Do you?  I have several firearms reference materials myself, though nothing related to terrorism.  Perhaps just keep focused on purchasing such books, vs checking anything out. 

It was before Bush even took office

Anti-U.S. allies back Iran nukes
September 17, 2006

From combined dispatches
    HAVANA -- Developing countries yesterday wrapped up a multinational summit with North Korea charging that U.S. threats drove it to acquire deterrent atomic weapons and Iran winning solid support for its nuclear ambitions.
    Iran, Venezuela and Cuba joined North Korea in leading efforts to forge an anti-U.S. alliance. Summit leaders, in a statement on Iran, "reaffirmed the basic and inalienable right of all states to develop research, production and use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes."
    They warned that any attack or threat against any nuclear facility used for peaceful purposes was a violation of international law.
     North Korea took the opportunity to assail the United States for unilateral actions against individual countries and called for a revitalization of the 118-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
    "The United States is attempting to deprive other countries of even their legitimate right to peaceful nuclear activities," said North Korea's second-ranking leader, Kim Yong-nam.
    Mr. Kim blamed Washington for "threatening Korea using all sorts of maneuvers, accusing it of being part of an 'Axis of Evil.'"
    He added: "Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean Peninsula and the region."
    The leaders' statement on Iran, released as the meeting ended, was an updated version of a document adopted in May at a NAM ministerial meeting in Malaysia.
    They stressed that the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency found that all nuclear material declared by Iran had been accounted for.
    Governments with friendly ties to Washington, among them India, Pakistan, Chile, Peru and Colombia, sought to steer the summit away from confrontation and finger-pointing at the United States.
    "I do not see this summit as anti-U.S.," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told reporters. "NAM has been set up not to be anti-any country."
    The NAM leaders called for a negotiated settlement to the nuclear dispute with Iran. The United States is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for both nuclear power and atomic weapons.
    Leaders took turns on the podium to decry global poverty, unfair trade practices and "arbitrary" actions by the United States and other powerful nations that they complained controlled the United Nations.
    In a concrete result, nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan agreed to resume formal peace negotiations that were frozen after the July train bombings in Bombay that killed nearly 200 people.
    Cuban President Fidel Castro, a symbol of opposition to Washington, was scheduled to preside over the summit, but was too ill to attend.
    Mr. Castro received U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a dressing gown in his hospital room. The 80-year-old communist leader, who took power in a revolution in 1959, ceded power temporarily to his brother, Raul, on July 31 after undergoing surgery to stop intestinal bleeding.
    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with his penchant for banter and controversy, dominated the summit opening Friday, pledging support for Iran if it is attacked by the United States.
    Other countries called for moderation. A Colombian delegate said friendlier nations had tried to soften the anti-U.S. content of the final statement.
    The summit brought together some states not only impatient with what they see as a U.S.-dominated United Nations, but eager to strengthen the NAM as an alternative and to foster cooperation within the Third World.
    "The United States is turning the Security Council into a platform for imposing its policies. ... We should reinforce NAM, and it should play its role more efficiently," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday at the summit.


http://www.washtimes.com/world/20060917-122916-5194r.htm

Terror Flicks
Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, September 15, 2006

"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event former Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September 11, 2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They came, they killed.

For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe the job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However, unlike the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11." The hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not a single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.

One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more complex, nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been given to believe.

For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of Osama bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to mean that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has "failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The Bush administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why we are more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in some 65 countries."

This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden himself has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce complexity to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden walks among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as "looking almost regal."

As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news services such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday: "Bombings, mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."

If this is the available public context, then serious people have to assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In his comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes sense to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions inside Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable "The Path to 9/11."
The narcissistic whining of the Clinton coterie over how they're reflected in "The Path to 9/11" was an irrelevant diversion from its real value. The word "Clinton" isn't heard in the film's first 90 minutes, which recreates with startling realism the thunderous basement bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, an explosion stunning to many of us seated at our desks at the Journal's offices across the street that day.

Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham deserve thanks not obloquy for trying to give us a palpable feel for the terrorist's terrain--Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brooklyn--the world of Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 bomber, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or "KSM," identified in the 9/11 Commission Report as the main architect of September 11 and some 3,000 deaths.

KSM is one of the 14 al Qaeda captives whom President Bush revealed last week had been transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo to await trial. Congress, in the wake of the Hamdan decision, is now arguing over which panoply of legal rights given to accused U.S. soldiers at court martial will be extended to these prisoners if tried by a military commission.

Read through the 14 Guantanamo detainee biographies posted on the White House Web site, and one gets a rare feel for the events that distinguish the lives of these individuals from the daily goals of everyone else in the world--lives simply dedicated to the mass murder of innocents, and not just in lower Manhattan. Indeed, the narrator of Bin Laden's 9/11 tape conveys their milieu: "Planning for September 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens . . . but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness . . . and love for sacrificing life."

Here are some of the brothers, now at Guantanamo:

• Hambali. Indonesian. Learned radical Islam in Malaysia. Co-planned Bali resort bombing (200 killed); financed Jakarta Marriott bombing; tried to assassinate Philippine ambassador; involved in bombing 30 Indonesian churches on Christmas eve.

• Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Tanzanian-born forger. Complicit in 1998 East Africa embassy bombings (well-depicted in "The Path to 9/11"). He was also Osama's cook.

• Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, a k a Lillie. Architecture degree, Polytechnic University Malaysia; later studied bombmaking with Dr. Azahari bin Husin (deceased). Hoped to achieve martyrdom in post-9/11 attack on Los Angeles.

• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Planned 2002 bombing of USS Cole. Involved in planned attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Gibraltar and Port of Dubai.

Read all 14 of these histories devoted to "sacrificing life" to put in context the denunciations of warrantless wiretaps and the Swift financial monitoring program.

These and the others await the divine protections of American law that Senators Warner and Graham wish to give them. Republicans are also arguing among themselves over the degree of access to classified intelligence this group should receive at trial. Democrats, other than saying they'll support the more liberal version, are contributing almost nothing to the new system. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, we may assume she or he will receive, as payback, a similar level of limp support from the GOP in the same war on terror.

Say this for the Guantanamo 14: They have unity of purpose. Long term, our disunity could prove to be a big advantage to them.



http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110008949