Coalition forces located three trucks with anti-aircraft guns driven by suspected terrorists near Karmah, Iraq in the Anbar province after the suspects were firing upon a house. The house, we’re told, was indeed not in flight at the time.

Intelligence reports and surveillance of a known al-Qaeda in Iraq meeting location led Coalition Forces to three trucks, two of which carried mounted anti-aircraft artillery weapons. Coalition Forces followed the vehicles to an area where terrorists emerged from the vehicles and engaged two houses with heavy fire. The ground attack was assessed to be practice for possible future attacks against Coalition Forces.

Coalition Forces continued to follow the vehicles as they left the target practice location and waited until the armed vehicles were away from potential civilian casualties. A fixed-wing aircraft was called in to destroy the vehicles. One truck with an anti-aircraft weapon and two sedans associated with the trucks were destroyed, killing an estimated 10 to 14 terrorists.

The two remaining trucks departed the strike scene in different directions, but Coalition Forces continued to follow them. Each was destroyed in a separate air strike after the vehicle’s occupants abandoned it and fled the scene.

Coalition Forces followed an additional vehicle from the scene of the first strike and targeted the building it returned to in an overnight raid. Eight suspected terrorists were detained in the raid, and one was treated for shrapnel wounds he received from the air strike earlier in the evening. (source)

It was Al Qaida in Iraq that was targeted. MNF-Iraq claims it was an Al Qaida in Iraq training session.

Video of the attack:

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More of the same really from Al-Aqsa TV in Palestine. The addition is the creepy looking and sounding mouse, which is quite obviously a rip off of Mickey Mouse.

My favorite part though resides around the young girl explaining the world wouldn’t be here without the civilization advances of Muslims. That’s, well, an interesting belief. You could make that exact argument with Arabs and I’d largely agree, but Islam wasn’t founded until . . . well, you get the point. Name one item on that stage that was invented by a Muslim.

Courtesty of MEMRI TV.

Last night’s ’60 Minutes’ interview with former British jihadi Hassan Butt:

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Gavshon: The position of moderate Muslims is that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. Do you buy that?

Butt: No. Absolutely not. By completely being in denial, um, it’s like an alcoholic basically. Unless an alcoholic acknowledges that he has a problem with alcohol, he’s never going to be able to go forward. And as long as we as Muslims do not acknowledge that there is a violent streak in Islam, unless we acknowledge that, then we are always going to lose to battle to the militants by being in complete denial about it.

Butt, by the way, was a relative big shot in England for a few years. The video segment doesn’t exactly explain how important Butt was nor how unbelievable his conversion from jihadi to anti-jihadi is, and that’s the crux of the matter. I’m not convinced he has actually changed colors because we’re talking about a period of months between his justifying acts of terror and calling for them to turning the page. I suppose if it could happen the other way, it can happen this way too.

A British cleric justifies the heinous beheading of British contractor Kenneth Bigley in the following video.

Dr. Rusty Shackleford makes the important points.

In the video, the speaker justifies Kenneth Bigley’s murder on the grounds that Bigley was in Iraq to help fix military hardware which would then be used to “kill Muslims”. This is not true. Kenneth Bigley, Jack Hensley, and Eugene Armstrong were in Iraq to work on civilian reconstruction efforts. They were there helping Muslims. It is al Qaeda in Iraq that continues to murder Muslims to this day.

The speaker then says Bigley was in Iraq to “steal the money of the Muslims”. Which, of course, is also patently untrue. Ken Bigley was being paid by the U.S. government to help the Iraqis rebuild their country so that Muslims in Iraq would have a functioning economy so that they could earn money for themselves. It is those that murdered Ken Bigley that steal money from Muslims by blowing up Iraq’s infrastructure.

The speaker, in what seems to be a bit of “humor”, warns that people involved in the reconstruction effort–or, as he deems it, “stealing from Muslims”—should “mind your head”. No doubt, a reference to the dozens of civilians beheaded by al Qaeda and other jihadi groups in Iraq.

Last, even though Bigley “converted” to Islam at the point of a knife, the speaker reiterates that since Islam forbids forced conversions, then Bigley must have become a Muslim of his own free will. See if you follow that sick and twisted logic? And if that is the case, even though the speaker does not say it in this video, those listening would undoubtedly understand another reason why his murder was “justified”. To the Salafi jihadi mind, Muslims helping the U.S. and U.K. in Iraq are “traitors”.

It is this cleric’s assertion Bigley was there to take sand out of the tracks of tanks that infuriates me. He knows not what he’s saying, but people are still there listening to him and not questioning him.

CENTCOM has released a new video showing what is alleged to be Al Qaida in Iraq shoot at an American helicopter in Iraq using an anti-aircraft gun mounted in the back of a pickup truck. The terrorists shoot at the helicopter in a populated area, drive away in an attempt to stay hidden and followed by getting out on foot and hiding in a tree line.

What they didn’t plan on was the United States having heat-vision able to see the still hot gun and the heat from the terrorists’ bodies. The eventually met their demise while hiding out in this tree line.

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This video very much looks like videos we saw from the Israeli-Hezbollah war last year, where Hezbollah would fire weaponry in populated areas, therefore it is perfectly reasonable to assume this is a common tactic of jihadis to place local residents in the line of fire when they aren’t bombing them. And still, no outrage from those who live in these areas.

Inspired by two politicians trying to court the Alabama vote:

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From a 1999 ‘Mad TV’ skit of the same name:

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I didn’t catch Rudy Giuliani’s speech at CPAC tonight because there was a Stars game on, but I did record it and watched the speech. It was hardly moving, but there were a few things that stuck out.

Giuiliani fully admits many of his own ideals are different than many of those at the CPAC, but he also embraces the commonalities shared. He also has a deep respect for President Ronald Reagan and used Reagan in many of his points, some of which you will see in the video below. He also has many good ideas, even though the speech was not set to introduce ideas.

Below is the part of Giuliani’s speech about terrorism, leaving out long applause and his comparison to how he brought down the Gambino crime family through getting to them and interrogating the family’s members. It was a long comparison, primarily because he was far from the top of his game tonight, and it just ended up restating other items he brought up in his speech.

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Also read Ed Morissey’s take on the speech, who was at the convention, and note Giuliani was the star of the day. After seeing some of the other speeches as they are replaying now on CSPAN, Giuliani does seem to have garnered the biggest crowds and most responsive crowds.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or as Allahpundit calls him, the “Dane Cook of anti-semitism,” for his rather less than original comments, blamed all the world’s problems on the United States and Israel yet again. In a tirade only fitting of Ahmadinejad, while in Sudan meeting with the Sudanese government, Ahmadinejad said “there is no place in the world that suffers from divisions and wars unless America or the Zionists’ fingerprints are seen there.”

“Our strength and the cornerstone of the victory is in our (Muslims’) unity … we have to pay attention to the devils who want to cause divisions among us,” the Iranian president said.

“They want to keep science in their hands only … they don’t want the rest of the world to progress,” he said referring Iran’s nuclear program.

Once again framing the opposition to Iran’s nuclear program as some sort of litmus test for nuclear advancement, Ahmadinejad spins this opposition to note that the collective ‘West’ is against scientific research and advancement. This is a constant moniker of Ahmadinejad’s, again forgetting that scientific breakthrough has come through the work of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and Iran’s friends in Moscow who have built Iranian nuclear facilities.

On February 22 of this year, Ahmadinejad again called for the end of Israel, which again is a symbol rather than just a nation when it comes to Ahmadinejad’s use of the word ‘zionism,’ stating Israel’s existence will soon meet an “undesirable ending.”

That did not stop the National Council of Churches, an American group of American Mennonites, Quakers, Episcopalians, United Methodists who responded to Ahmadinejad’s invitation to visit Iran, from deciding it is their quest to travel “to Washington, D.C., and visit Congress to give a report on Iran’s desire for peace.” The group, quite obviously, was suckered in by Ahmadinejad’s double speak and refuses to read or hear what the Iranian leader tells other gatherings.

More below the fold, including a video . . .

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During the Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill this week, newly appointed DNI John McConnell fielded several questions and prepared an opening statement laying the groundwork for the discussion. The Washington Post did a short write-up on the discussion and highlighted a few choice items if you’re interested in their summary of events.

But the hearing was just over three hours in length, making a short summary fitting on what one wants to include. The full briefing is available for viewing on C-SPAN’s site, but there’s something incredibly wrong with the site’s search feature so I cannot directly link the video. You can start HERE, and move on as the days advance.

Among the points made on Al Qaida by McConnell from his opening statement (PDF) are the following:

• Al-Qa’ida is the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to US interests, including to the Homeland. We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qa’ida operatives, but we also have seen that al-Qa’ida’s core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our Homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe
• Many of our most important interests intersect in Pakistan, there the Taliban and al-Qa’ida maintain critical sanctuaries. As I noted earlier, Pakistan is our partner in the war on terror and has captured several al-Qa’ida leaders. However, it is also a major source of Islamic extremism
• Eliminating the safehaven that the Taliban and other extremists have found in Pakistan’s tribal areas is not sufficient to end the insurgency in Afghanistan but it is necessary. We recognize that aggressive military action, however, has been costly for Pakistani security forces and appreciate concerns over the potential for sparking tribal rebellion and a backlash by sympathetic Islamic political parties. There is widespread opposition among these parties to the US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. With elections expected later this year, the situation will become even more challenging—for President Musharraf and for the US.

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