yuck.

Fixed it.

You'll notice that among the witnesses King is planning to call, law enforcement officials and counter-terrorism specialists are conspicuously missing. They wouldn't be likely to support his narrative.

“I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.”

I find this argument unpersuasive, although I note that I am not a citizen of the United States and have found myself within earshot of an IRA explosion.

Another difference is that the IRA political wing worked for a non-military solution and eventually achieved one. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me King imagines any peaceful solution unimaginable* and possibly undesirable.

* I on the other hand think such an attempt to be very difficult, time consuming and sometimes painful. Also worth attempting.

Nice.

The two Muslims in my work group are nice people, and as far as I can tell they're as non-radical as you can find. (They're less radical than me....)

There's also this

(I've no reason to think that he's a Christian, mind. But I'm sure he has associates who are 'linked' with 'historically Christian communities'.)

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Spokane, Washington, a bomb was found on the path of the parade. It was disarmed before it was detonated.

An official briefed by law enforcement but not allowed to speak to the media regarding the investigation said the bomb was "chilling" in its sophistication. The bomb contained anti-coagulant chemical agents intended to make anyone wounded by the blast "bleed out," the official said.

The bomb was surrounded by metal shrapnel and designed to go off by remote control, the official said. (CNN)

The suspect in that bombing was just arrested. There was no story on the cover of The Oregonian about it. I did come across a small story inside the paper. I guess it wasn't newsworthy because he's a white supremacist rather than a "Radical Islamist".

"I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States."

So presumably he believes that patriotic citizens of countries not attacked by al-Qaeda would be acting quite morally to support AQ's attacks on the US? At any rate, that pretty much lets the rest of the world off the hook in supporting the War On Terror, which is nice. My compatriots can now stop dying in Afghanistan directly, assuming that King doesn't find some other bunch of nice new playmates who will blow up his allies' forces on their way home from his pals' wars.

I hope that these hearings will indeed radicalize Muslims alongside many other Americans - though not in the direction that King is trolling for, or one which the explodey boys will like very much at all.

On the other hand, the right-wing propaganda machine has done a good enough job of making Muslims to be a politically acceptable scary enemy that this hearing may help radicalize more right-wing voters into being scared and xenophobic more than the number of civilized people it radicalizes into giving King the public scorn he deserves. Or at least he thinks it will, and he's pretty sure the Republican leadership won't throw him under a bus for trying.

If the purpose of the Homeland Security organs of government were to actually make the homeland more secure, as opposed to making the people more afraid and dependent, it would be unthinkable that this terrorist supporter would be in charge of a Congressional committee on it, but as it is, he'll probably get attaboys from all the right folks.

bomb contained anti-coagulant chemical agents intended to make anyone wounded by the blast "bleed out," the official said

That may have been what was intended, but it's not going to work that way. They're claiming it was something similar to rat poison, ie, a vitamin K antagonist. These stop vitamin K being recycled, and when you run out of vitamin K you stop making various clotting factors. But this all takes time. Days, not minutes. And there's a perfectly effective antidote: vitamin K.

And that's ignoring the fact that if you get hit by enough bomb shrapnel to get a significant dose of the anticoagulant you'll have enough holes in you to not need any other reason to bleed out.

OB disclaimer: this comment appears for argumentative purposes only and does not constitute any actual policy on behalf of Her Majesty's Government or any other similar entity. Sheesh.

That bomb thing is straight out of Tom Clancy's latest. All he'll get is a fraction of a penny from the library loan, and there were all sorts of little glitches--obvious writing errors such as missed words, as well as some glaring mil-tech errors--which make that feel generous.

He has the terrorist go out to plant a claymore mine, and writes it as if the rat poison was added while the guy is setting it up on-site. Could be a block of text got a cut-and-paste into the wrong place, but you'd think a competent editor would notice.

There's other stuff as bad, quite apart from stuff where the criticism could be seen as political. But Red October, regardless of any political payload, was a book worth reading. Now he's turning out right-wing wank-fests.

"So. Invisible killer drones."
"Keeps getting better."
- from one of Eureka's SNAFUs

He was using warfarin (Coumadin)? You're kidding! That has an onset time measured in days, and the anticoagulant effect is preceded by a period of hypercoagulation. Plus I'm not certain that the route would work (assuming that the chemical wasn't denatured by the heat of the explosion to start with).

Hezbolah blew up a bunch of US marines occupying Lebanon in the 80s. I don't think Hamas or FARC has ever attacked the US directly, though I could be wrong. (And FARC is certainly fine with killing Americans they come across, or kidnapping them and holding them for ransom.) And yet, I'm pretty sure if I started collecting money to send to Hamas or FARC, I'd end up in prison for material support of terrorists. So I don't think King's definition makes much sense, relative to the law.

The narrative right now is that we are to fear the scary brown Muslims, not the scary white neo-Nazis, the scary black gang members, the scary brown narcos[1], the scary yellow (or is that red) Chinese spies, the scary green environmentalists, etc. I'm sure sooner or later, we'll find some other easily-identified group to have a coordinated media fear-drumming-up campaign against. And really, it's okay if you want to be afraid of any or all those other groups while you're scared of the scary brown Muslims, who are undoubtedly hiding under your bed next to the child molester you're also supposed to fear constantly.

[1] Who, in terms of resources, firepower, and infiltration of the US, are easily two or three orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than Al Qaida.

Would it be too cynical to speculate that that number might be one (1)?

He was using warfarin (Coumadin)? You're kidding!

I assume it was one of the modern rat-poison variants like brodifacoum rather than actual pharmaceutical-grade Coumadin, but the effect would be the same.

Regardless of how effective or ineffective he would have been, with everything else being exactly the one-for-one same, if his first name had been Mohammad that would have been front-page in every paper in the country, and Beck and Limbaugh and Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and all the rest of the nonsense-screamers of the right would be yammering about it still.

I think that when there's a shift in political power (in the US, at least; that's all I really know well enough to comment about), as there was in the House after the last election, there are usually concerns from the new minority party that the new majority will engage in some kind of extreme overreaction.

Usually, that's not what happens. This time, well ... I guess they're not bothering with subtlety, it's just an all-out attack on, I don't know, everything reasonable?

Oh, no question. It's amazing how little has been said about the arrest here in Portland; we're only a few hundred miles away, and we've already had one "terrorist" event recently, as janetl pointed out. But, yes, that was a scary brown person, so much was made of it, despite the obvious FBI entrapment.

I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for more than 30 years, and I can remember many incidents involving scary white people, mostly Aryan Nation types (though the Rajneeshees were a bizarre change of pace). Just a few weeks ago we had a trial involving a couple of anti-government militia (a father and son, the family that slays together, stays together :-( accused of setting a bomb that killed a bomb squad officer and a police captain, and seriously injured the police chief of a small town just south of here. Ignoring this sort of thing to try to build up xenophobia about Muslims¹ is going to mean that more cops and civilians are going to be injured and killed because we're not paying attention to the real dangers.

1. Notice that a number of Sikhs have been attacked in the US because they wore turbans and had beards. The FUD that the xenophobes have been spreading doesn't take into account that the Sikhs are not Muslims, nor Arabs, and have no connection to any sort of Mujahadeen radical movement. Doesn't matter: they're brown and they're scary.

The FBI’s tactics surfaced last week in the case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, California. According to MPAC, in 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual.

Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life “a living hell.” Niazi was arrested last week on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was released yesterday on $500,000 bail.

MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.