A Northwest Airlines passenger from Nigeria, who said he was acting on al-Qaida‘s instructions, set off an explosive device Friday in a failed terrorist attack on the plane as it was landing in Detroit, federal officials said.

Flight 253 with 278 passengers aboard was 20 minutes from the airport when it sounded like a firecracker had exploded, witnesses said. One passenger jumped over others and tried to subdue the man. Shortly afterward, the suspect was taken to a front row seat with his pants cut off and his legs burned.

The White House said it believed it was an attempted act of terrorism and stricter security measures were quickly imposed on airline travel, but were not specified.

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. Others had slightly different spellings.

One law enforcement source said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil.

“It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase,” said Peter Smith, a passenger from the Netherlands. “First there was a pop, and then (there) was smoke.”

At least one passenger acted heroically.

Smith said the passenger, sitting opposite the man, climbed over passengers, went across the aisle and tried to restrain the man. The heroic passenger appeared to have been burned.- Associated Press

One of the lessons learned from 9-11 is that passive action in the skies is just going to lead you to the grave. As seen today, and eight years ago with the shoe bomber, passengers will fight back.

What will these stricter security measures be? Not surprisingly, there is no media outcry about government secrecy now that we have a Democrat in the White House.

I was a Northwest Airlines Platinum or Gold Frequent Flyer from 1996-2002 and flew about 400,000 flight miles in that period. Personally I’ve been on Northwest’s service from Amsterdam to Detroit. When I flew it, a  747 was the plane used.

The tiny Pacific nation of Palau’s decision to allow 13 Chinese Muslims from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to resettle there has sparked anger among islanders who fear for the safety of the tranquil tourist haven.

The U.S. government determined last year that the Chinese Muslims, or Uighurs, were not enemy combatants and should be released from the U.S. military prison in Cuba. China has objected to their resettlement, calling the men “terrorist suspects” and demanding they be sent home.

The U.S. has said it fears the men would be executed if they were returned to China.

Palau President Johnson Toribiong explained his decision to grant the Uighurs entry as traditional hospitality, but public opinion has appeared overwhelmingly negative. Some complained Friday that the government failed to consult the people.

“I totally disagree” with allowing the Uighurs onto Palau, Natalia Baulis, a 30-year-old mother of two, told The Associated Press by telephone.

“It’s good to be humanitarian and all, but still these people … to me are scary,” she said.

The Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs) have been in custody since they were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001.

Fermin Nariang, editor of the Palau newspaper Island Times, said he had been stopped in the streets of the capital, Koror, by residents venting their anger.

“This is a very small country … and some are saying if the whole world doesn’t want these folks, why are we taking them?” Nariang said.

The newspaper quoted islander Debedebk Mongami as saying, “I’m also afraid this news is going to scare the tourists who plan to come to Palau.”  [Associated Press]

If you are wondering wondering why the people of Palau are so upset about having these people dumped on them here is an indication why:

Within the Uighur community are extremist groups who are radical Islamist fundamentalists dedicated to using terrorism to achieve their goals of independence.  (………..)

Just to be clear, these men are not choirboys who strayed on the path home from church services.  They were captured in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, in which they were by their own admission undergoing training so that they could return to China to be terrorists supporting an independent Uighur Islamic nation.  In several cases they were captured by the Northern Alliance or its supporters and eventually screened by US forces.  Some reports on anti-war websites claim that the Uighurs were “sold” to Americans for $5,000 apiece, but this is an unconfirmed rumor.

But the TV privileges underscored potential difficulties to come, according to one current and one former U.S. official. Not long after being granted access to TV, some of the Uighurs were watching a soccer game. When a woman with bare arms was shown on the screen, one of the group grabbed the television and threw it to the ground, according to the officials.  [LA Times]

So for everyone living in Palau have fun with your non-dangerous Uighur neighbors who smash TV’s at the first sighting of women with bare arms.

So why did the Palau government accept the Uighurs when no one else would?  Follow the money:

Palau will also receive $200 million in development and other aid as thanks for taking in the Uighurs, according to two US officials speaking to the AP on the condition of anonymity. A senior State Department official quoted in The New York Times rejected the idea that the money was a quid pro quo.

Whatever the cause, it’s a generous sum, especially for a country with the population of a typical American suburb (about 20,000 people) whose gross domestic product barely tops $167 million.  [Christian Science Monitor]

Think about this, the Obama administration is willing to pay roughly $15 million per terrorists for a third country to take them.  The Uighurs are considered the least dangerous of the detainees at Gitmo.  How much will the US government have to pay for the more dangerous ones?

What I find most ironic about all of this is that the American government would like China to help them get the two detained journalists in North Korea back, but at the same time they refused to give back to the Chinese government the Uighurs at Gitmo that were committed to the violent expulsion of Chinese control in Western China.

Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.

“The brutally frank answer is that we’re stuck and we’re stuck in several ways,” Gates told a U.S. Senate hearing when asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America’s standing in the world.

Gates has said he wants to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.

But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.

“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home,” he said. [Washington Post]

Gitmo is still holding 270 prisoners that are either awaiting military court martials or are in legal limbo for the reasons Secretary Gates spoke of. Over the years 500 prisoners have been released from the prison back to their home countries with 36 of them confirmed to have returned to terrorism to include one suicide bomber last month in Mosul that took part in attacks that killed seven civilians there. Plus Secretary Gates confirmed that not one US state has volunteered to house the prisoners back in America which has caused the current gridlock.

Since this issue will probably come up during the election I think it will be interesting to see how each candidate will approach this issue because closing Gitmo is not as easy as critics make it out to be.

Complete article is below the fold:

Washingtonpost.com
May 20, 2008

Efforts To Close Guantanamo At Standstill: Gates

By Andrew Gray, Reuters

WASHINGTON – Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.

“The brutally frank answer is that we’re stuck and we’re stuck in several ways,” Gates told a U.S. Senate hearing when asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America’s standing in the world.

Gates has said he wants to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.

But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.

“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home,” he said.

Some 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay and more than 500 have left since the site opened in January 2002, according to the U.S. military.

The Pentagon says some 36 former Guantanamo inmates are “confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism.”

Gates cited a Kuwaiti former inmate who carried out a suicide bombing in Mosul in northern Iraq last month. Both the bomber’s family and the U.S. military have said he carried out the attack.

The United States has also failed to come up with a solution for inmates who cannot be freed for security reasons but will not be charged under the military commissions system for trying war crimes suspects, Gates said.

“We just have a hard time figuring out … what do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 or whatever the number is,” he told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

There was also a widely held reluctance to house any of the prisoners in the United States, Gates said.

“We have a serious ‘not in my backyard’ problem. I haven’t found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state,” Gates said.

“Those three problems really have brought us to a standstill,” he added.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who questioned Gates at the hearing, said the prison was responsible for an “enormous loss of (U.S.) credibility … in the eyes of the world.”

When Feinstein said she knew Gates felt the same way as she did about Guantanamo, the defense secretary interjected “I still do,” but he offered no further comments on the issue.

The United States has asked South Korea to send a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) to Afghanistan and also to dispatch a small police force to train local police, multiple diplomatic sources here said Thursday.

South Korea has only a small group of civilians involved in PRT-related work remaining in the Central Asian country, and the U.S. request is for Seoul to dispatch a full-scale team of between 200 to 300 people, according to the sources. [Yonhap]

I guess this technically means that the South Korean government won’t be breaking their agreement with the Taliban that killed two of their citizens by not deploying military forces.  South Korea already has a small 30 man PRT team in the country now.

However, I am a bit ambivalent about South Korea returning to Afghanistan in any capacity after last year’s hostage saga that saw the South Korean government embarrassingly withdraw their reconstruction troops in Afghanistan and pay the Taliban millions of dollars to help fund their efforts to kill American and international troops.  Why am I ambivalent you may ask?  Well just think who will many Koreans blame if one of these PRT or policemen are kidnapped or killed?  We already saw the answer to this question during the hostage crisis. 

It appears I’m not the only one ambivalent about the dispatch of these South Korean policemen as well.

The government will send a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) of civic medical experts to Afghanistan to help its rehabilitation.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said an advance team including the team’s chief will leave for the war-torn nation this week. They will take over the hospital that was operated by Korean troops stationed in Bagram, 47 kilometers north of the capital, Kabul.

The 30-member team of medics and vocational training experts will be sent to Afghanistan in phases until May.

After Korean troops withdrew from the Asian country in December, the Seoul government decided to dispatch a civic reconstruction team for stronger ties with Afghanistan and the United States. [KBS Global]

After the fiasco of the Korean hostage crisis last year that led to the Taliban receiving millions of dollars in ransom money from the South Korean government, there should be a ban on any Koreans traveling to the country.  This 30 member team is nothing more than great big walking dollar signs.  If something should happen to anybody on this team who do you think Koreans will blame? 

Only the Roh government would think that after paying millions to terrorists dedicated to killing Afghan civilians and coalition troops that sending 30 civilians to Afghanistan will build stronger ties with the US.  It makes you wonder if this announcement is in response to the release of recent Newsweek article that shows details about the South Korean ransom payment which as One Free Korea explains is material support for terrorism.  Sending 30 civilians to Afghanistan isn’t going to change that. 

Mullah Abdullah Jan, the Taliban commander who led the kidnappings of 23 Korean hostages in Afghanistan, was killed in an air strike by U.S. forces.

U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a house in Ghazni province where a council of Taliban commanders was meeting on Monday night, the Associated Press reported.

Twelve Taliban leaders were killed including Abdullah, the commander of Qarabagh district in Ghazni, AP said on Tuesday, citing Ghazni provincial police chief Ali Shah Ahmadzai.

Abdullah was believed to have planned and carried out the kidnappings of the Korean missionaries on July 19.

Abdullah was directly and indirectly in contact with press around the world during the hostage crisis, including Korean media.

According to the Afghan government, at least four other Taliban leaders who were involved in the kidnappings have been killed this month, including Mullah Mateen, a commander under Abdullah. [Chosun Ilbo]

The effectiveness of the airstrikes at killing Taliban leadership targets is why you see such a misinformation campaign being launched in Afghanistan against airstrikes by the Taliban claiming all these civilians are being killed.  The misinformation campaign worked to get the US Marines kicked out of Afghanistan with the aid of the willing media and now is even being used in Iraq by Al-Sadr to try and get the Blackwater security contractors removed from that country.  Once again totally aided by the uncritical media.

Of further note is that if President Roh Moo-hyun of Korea had dispatched a contingent of ROK Army special forces soldiers after the release of the Korean hostages just imagine how much the symbolism of the methodical killing of the Taliban leadership would have had for Korea even if it was the US forces doing all the work?  Additionally it would have been a measure to save some face internationally after paying millions of dollars in ransom to terrorists who then proceeded to brag and mock Korea about it.  As it stands now the US military is avenging the murder of Korean civilians that ROK soldiers should have been helping to do themselves. 

You can read more over at One Free Korea.

"We were beaten by them many times, being forced to convert to Islam," Je Chang-hee told a news conference with 20 other fellow ex-hostages at a hospital south of Seoul, where the Christian volunteers have been receiving medical treatment since they returned home 10 days ago.

"They kicked us and beat us with guns and tree branches. Sometimes, they aimed their bayonet-topped rifles at our necks," Je said, adding that he had been held in a mountain cave with three other hostages. Je said he and the others pretended to recite Islamic conversion prayers by muttering some Korean words.  [...]

"My group was kept in a closed place like a shed (at a Taliban home) but we were not allowed to go out … it was like suffocating," said Cha Hae-jin, a female hostage.

She said the food was not suitable and that the captives vomited and suffered diarrhea, with some showing symptoms of dehydration. "Four of us once had to share two potatoes for one day," Cha said.

Je said his group of captives were forced to work.

"We lived like slaves. We had to level the ground for motorbikes, and get water (from a well) and make a fire," Je said, showing the worn-out, dirty short-sleeve shirt and trousers he wore throughout the captivity. [CNN]

No word yet if some of the hostages were in fact sexually assaulted but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were.  I’m a am surprised that they admitted to converting to Islam considering they are Christian missionaries. 

I highly recommend that everyone read my posting on this that totally destroys the leftist fantasies dreamed up in the Moveon.org ad.

Well for the Korean hostages recently released in Afghanistan the answer is to go shopping:

The hostages were transported by plane from Afghanistan to Dubai and during their lay over in Dubai they found time to do some Duty Free shopping.  This apparently has caused much anger among Korean netizens who are wondering who paid the bills for the shopping spree. 

You would think that if they had enough time to go shopping they at least could have found some time to shave.