Dave Francis

The ridiculousness of coalition building is overwhelming. The length to which the US is going in order to build and maintain a coalition is increasingly becoming frustrating and counter-productive.

Has anyone noticed how the US government in general, and the FBI in particular have consistently pointed out that there was no indication that the anthrax attacks had anything to do with the attacks on September 11? It was all a coincidence, we were told to believe. “We have found no direct link to organized terrorism” said FBI director Robert Mueller.

I don’t believe for a moment there is an FBI agent in existence that honestly thinks that is true. If there is, I suggest he be removed. The level of gullibility required is something more appropriate to a college professor at Berkeley. We need more common sense in law enforcement.

The evidence regarding the anthrax attacks is now being shown to the general public. The letters have been photographed, and the photographs released.

The letters to NBC and the New York Post repeat the exact same phrases, and were mailed from Trenton New Jersey. They both say Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the kinds of things Osama’s boys are fond of saying.

Handwriting experts say the same person wrote the letters.

The anthrax-tainted letter sent to American Media in Florida was mailed from Boca Raton Florida, very close to the home of several of the hijackers. Also, some of the hijackers had subscriptions to publications produced at American Media Inc.

I don’t think the director of the FBI is so stupid as to not notice these things, or to think them unimportant. He is holding off on stating the obvious, that the anthrax attack is almost certainly a product of the same malignant minds that attacked the USA on September 11th, in order to protect the sensibilities of some of our coalition partners. It is political correctness gone berserk.

Coalitions are nice. It feels good to be popular. Sometimes other concerns need to take precedence. Make no mistake about it; this is not the Gulf War, chapter II. The Gulf War was about protecting an ally, (albeit one of dubious quality.) stopping aggression, maintaining the free flow of oil, and having a broad coalition to help achieve those goals was, perhaps, helpful. This war is about something else. It is about national survival. If the murder of several thousand civilians wasn’t enough to drive home the point, now we have the random attacks of anthrax, and nobody has any clear idea so far as to how widespread these attacks are. These people want to kill us. Kill you. Your parents, your children, all of us.

The coalition our politicians need to worry about is the one at home. They need to think more about the sensibilities of Peoria and less about those in Pashawar. The opinions in Dubuque ought to count for a lot more than those in Dushanbe. If this hyper-sensitivity continues, this war is going to be a disaster. Nothing will be accomplished, other than reaffirming the idea that exists in the Islamic ranks that they can defeat a superpower. That is dangerous. How many more need to die from dramatic attacks like September 11th or from insidious silent attacks coming through the mail before our government gets really serious?

Ramadan starts soon, and you can hear the chorus of dissent building already. If we continue to fight during the Muslim holy holidays, they say, it will help bin Ladin’s propaganda that we are waging a war on Islam. We will offend Muslim ‘allies’ if we continue to wage war. A war which we had no desire to fight, but were brutally thrown into by the attacks on the USA. Imagine that we take a break for Ramadan. Imagine explaining to the families of American servicemen that they need to wait a month longer to see their sons and daughters defending America so as not to offend anyone. Imagine giving bin Ladin a months respite to plan, plot and recover from the devastation we have so far brought to him. Imagine giving the ‘America Last’ crowd a month to scream about how we brought this on ourselves, and lastly, imagine the squeals if we were to pick up the fight at the end of Ramadan. It will be disastrous to stop, for Ramadan, or any reason, save that we have accomplished our task.

The interests of the United States and it’s citizens should be the primary focus of our government. Those interests are best served by the absolute destruction of the terrorists who seek to harm us in the most efficient way possible. If that isn’t clear to the people running our government, they should be replaced with people who understand.

In other news;

The anthrax that was sent to Senator Daschle’s office had been treated with a substance only known to exist in a few places. The USA, Iraq, and the former Soviet Union are known to have produced a chemical additive used to make the anthrax more effective as a weapon. As reported earlier in The Francis Report, the Russian Mafia was shopping anthrax made in chemical weapons labs in the former Soviet Union.

Here in St. Petersburg, the anthrax hoaxes are beginning. A man was arrested last week for sending a letter laced with a white powder and a threatening note. The recipient recognized the handwriting, and turned the letter over to authorities. The sender was arrested, and charged with ‘melkoye khuliganstvo’, or minor hooliganism. He pled guilty, explaining that he was drunk when he sent the letter. He was fined 50 roubles, about a dollar and eighty cents. In the Netherlands, a man was sentenced to 2 months in prison and two years probation for mailing powdered milk to a friend as a joke.

Musings about our ‘allies’ in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abd Ulaziz, who effectively rules the kingdom, has attacked the western media, saying, ‘The vicious western media attack against the Kingdom is only because of the ancient spite against Islam.’

More than half the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and yet nobody in that country has been arrested. There have been people detained in more than 40 different countries due to the September 11th attacks, but in Saudi Arabia, not one. There also has been no acknowledgement by the Saudi rulers as to their citizen’s involvement. There is a Saudi ‘charity’ listed on President Bush’s list of terrorist organizations, yet no assets in Saudi Arabia have been frozen. Not of this organization, or of any of the Saudi citizens who are listed as terrorists. 62 other countries have complied with US requests to block assets of suspect persons or organizations. There are 59 Saudi citizens that the US is actively looking for, to question them about possible terrorist involvement, but so far the Saudi royal family has yet to help us find any of them.

The war gets ugly at times. 22 Pakistanis, members of a radical Islamic group called Harkat ul-Mujahedeen were killed in Kabul when a bomb hit the house they were in, planning how to help the Taliban in it’s war with the US. When the bodies were being brought back to Pakistan for burial, the border guards turned them around. Pakistani border guards at the Torkham border crossing in the Khyber pass refused to allow the bodies to be returned for burial, forcing the remains to be smuggled over mountainous terrain, at night, to find their resting place back in Pakistan.

While Colin Powell may think the Taliban have a place in the new government that is going to rule Afghanistan after the war, Vladimir Putin has no sympathy for them. "We consider that the Taliban movement has compromised itself by cooperation with international terrorism," Putin was quoted as saying, after a meeting in Dushanbe Tajikistan with the Tajik leader, Emomoly Rakhmonov.

DJF
St. Petersburg, Russia
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