Is the US releasing Guantanamo detainees with implanted tracking devices?

Was it a coincidence that a senior Taliban commander, well after having been captured by US forces, detained at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, and allowed to return to Afghanistan, would suddenly be gunned down in a remote Afghan village while plotting to attack the government?

American troops captured Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar early in the war and shipped him to the US base in Cuba where he was milked of any intelligence he might provide. Within months, the Americans allowed him to go back to Afghanistan.

Why?

Could his release have been an intelligence operation itself? Could American intelligence officers have embedded a tracking device in the Taliban commander's body, unbeknown to him, permitting him to reunite with his terrorist network?

US intelligence could have tracked his every move by satellite. He might have betrayed, unwittingly, all his comrades: their locations, their movements, the structures of their networks - everything needed for the US and its Afghan allies to watch the Taliban's clandestine operations, and then to finish him off when he was no longer of value.

How many other former Guantanamo detainees might be released with tracking devices embedded in them?

If the US is implanting these systems, it would show a new boldness in fighting the terrorists. If it hasn't been implanting them, it should start right away.

Kerry rhetoric risks provoking more terrorist attacks

Senator Kerry is taking his campaign rhetoric to dangerous new levels. I predict that his new statements, if sustained, will provoke the terrorists into carrying out more deadly bombings of American personnel, other foreigners helping Iraq rebuild, and innocent Iraqi civilians.

According to the September 29, 2004 Washington Post, "A senior Kerry adviser said the only way Bush can be defeated is if Democrats win, or neutralize, the debate on Iraq by playing up chaos and casualties there and convince voters that the war undermined the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists."

A terrorist seeking to undermine and oust President Bush would take comfort in the new Kerry plan - and would feed on it by ratcheting up the violence in Iraq, as has been the case over the last several weeks.

The Post added that since September 15, "virtually every day, Kerry has warned that if Bush is reelected, the situation in Iraq will worsen and continue to divert attention from nuclear threats and terrorism."

Terrorist threat issued through Greek KGB newspaper

A newspaper founded by the Soviet KGB was the source of a report that terrorists threatened to bomb an Athens-to-New York airliner, causing the plane to make an emergency landing in England under RAF military escort.

The Greek daily Ethnos, which the KGB founded as a propaganda and disinformation operation in the 1980s, says it received three anonymous phone calls warning of the terrorist attack on the Olympic Airlines jet, according to the BBC.

British fighter planes intercepted the Greek airliner on September 26, 2004. An overnight search turned up nothing suspicious, and the plane and passengers safely resumed their flight.

Vatican: World War IV has begun

A senior cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church who served as the Vatican's ambassador to the United Nations has declared that World War IV has begun.

"We have entered the Fourth World War," said Cardinal Renato Martino, chief of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace, in remarks published on September 7. The cardinal added that the Cold War of 1945-1989 was in reality World War III.

He made his comment shortly after the Vatican issued a statement on the September 1 attack of Muslim terrorists on Christian children at a Russian school.

Cardinal Martino is not a hawk by any means, and he harshly opposed the war to liberate Iraq. Without citing Islamic extremism by name his most recent remarks, he did specify its terrorist methods and left no mistake about the aggressor:

"I believe that we are in the midst of another world war," the cardinal told Italian newspapers. "And it involves absolutely everyone because we don't know what will happen when we leave a hotel, when we get on a bus, when we go into a coffee bar. War itself is sitting down right next to each and every one of us," he said.

"Every state has to put in place the best possible policing method and this, naturally, might affect some personal freedoms. States have to carry out a defensive policy," he added.

Despite the sharpness of his criticism of U.S. policy in Iraq, Cardinal Martino acknowledged in early 2003 that their could be a just reason, in extremis, for invading Iraq and that new realities are forcing a re-thinking of the just-war theory.

His comment about World War IV indicates that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church continues to reconsider the matter of war in the present-day, post-Cold War world, and that it is placing the Cold War into a historical perspective.

Wars often change their names as events add historical context to them. Few Americans refer to the Civil War as the "War Between the States" any more. It took World War II to change the worldwide view that the Great War of 1914-1918 was actually World War I.

Cardinal Martino's recognition of the Cold War as World War III and the present "Global War on Terrorism" as World War IV. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, his statement coincided with a Commentary magazine cover story titled "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win."

The cardinal's statement does not appear to be an official state position of the Vatican, which has its own equivalent of a foreign ministry and has not commented on the issue. However, it appears to represent the beginning of a change in the thinking of the Catholic Church about the war on terrorism.

Click here for a link to the site of the Vatican mission to the United Nations.

Bush's Vietnam-era duty: Defending the homeland from Soviet attack

Remember the "wimp factor" that dogged the George Bush the elder in the 1988 presidential contest?

His campaign torpedoed the epithet forever with a single, understated TV ad. The ad simply showed grainy black-and-white film footage of Bush, then a teenage Navy pilot, being rescued at sea after the Japanese shot him down.

Here's how the campaign of our current President Bush can drive a stake through the heart of public doubts about his Vietnam-era military service: run a similar ad that merely shows what his job was in the Air National Guard at the time most American fighting men were in Southeast Asia.

The ad should say this: While our forces were fighting the communists in far-off Vietnam, the nation relied on other combat-ready men at home to defend the nation from a surprise Soviet nuclear attack.

One of those men was Lt. George W. Bush.

Rather than a risk possible two-year draft in the regular forces, Bush chose to volunteer for a certain six-year hitch with the Air National Guard. Where privilege might have landed him in a safe administrative position, he chose one of the riskiest jobs in the force, piloting an old but high-performance jet fighter, the Convair F-102 "Delta Dagger."

His mission during the Cold War: to intercept Soviet Tu-95 strategic nuclear bombers that ran regular doomsday missions up and down the Eastern seaboard threatening American cities with nuclear destruction.

Bush's F-102 was a dangerous machine to fly. Built in the 1950s, the primitive single-engine plane, with a delta-wing design that pilots say made it tough to control, could fly at supersonic speed with an arsenal of 24 unguided rockets and six guided missiles to intercept incoming aircraft.

Col. William Campenni, who served with Bush in the same squadron, wrote in a February 11, 2004 letter to the Washington Times, "Our Texas Air National Guard lost several planes right there in Houston during Lt. Bush's tenure, with fatalities. Just strapping on one of those obsolescing F-102s was risking one's life."

While Navy swift boat sailors risked their lives daily on the Mekong Delta, Lt. Bush risked his as an F-102 pilot, ready to defend the homeland against a Soviet nuclear attack.

Kerry's lawyer now working for Saddam Hussein

An expected member of Saddam Hussein's international legal defense team once represented John Kerry.

Ramsey Clark, head of the pro-Saddam protest group International ANSWER, is reported to be part of the former Iraqi dictator's legal defense team.

As an antiwar protest leader in 1971, Kerry retained the openly pro-Hanoi Clark to represent his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in a suit against the federal government. Kerry's suit was to force the federal government to allow him to stage a political protest among the graves of soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

The April 23, 1971 edition of the Communist Party USA's Daily World newspaper ran a UPI photo of Kerry slipping Clark a note as the Hanoi supporter addressed demonstrators.