More details on the foiled plot in Birmingham, England have been released. The plot was earlier reported as a plot of radical Islamic terrorists in England to take a British Muslim soldier hostage and behead him, filming the murder and distributing it on the Internet. Gruesome to say the least.

Since the arrest of eight suspects in pre-dawn raids, another man was taken into custody as he tried to leave the city. So much for the valient mujahideen, eh? British police though warn there may still be two plotters on the loose.

From the Guardian:

In what would mark a new departure for UK jihadists, members of the group are alleged to have been preparing to film the kidnap victim as he begged for mercy before being murdered, and were then planning to post the footage on the web . . .

Eight men were arrested in raids before dawn at their homes across Birmingham yesterday, while a ninth was seized later in the day as he drove out of the city along the M6 motorway. Those who were identified by relatives and neighbours were mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, and included at least two shopkeepers and one businessman. There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that all those arrested were Britons of Pakistani origin.

The man alleged to have been the intended victim, a lance corporal in his 20s, was taken into police protective custody yesterday along with several members of his family amid reports that two other men had evaded arrest. He had recently arrived home on leave after a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and police and the security service, MI5, believe he was to have been bundled into a van as he walked along a street and driven to a pre-prepared cell where he could be filmed. There, they allege, he was likely to have been tortured and eventually beheaded.

The operation appears to underline recent warnings by senior police and the security service that the UK could be particularly vulnerable to attack by al-Qaida because of its traditional links with Pakistan. Detectives from the newly-formed Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit carried out the raids at 4am at houses in the Sparkhill, Washwood Heath, Kingstanding and Edgbaston areas of Birmingham.

This sounds like a pretty serious operation, being that the suspects had already picked out the victim and were at least in the process of staging the area where the soldier would be murdered for their political jihadist gain. Remember though, radical Islam is not political, or so we’re always told by Islamist groups.

And like we always hear of these suspects, there are those voices who claim he was such a nice man.

One was named locally as Amjad Mahmood, 29, a father of two young sons, who worked at his father’s store. A man who identified himself as Mr Mahmood’s brother, Ziah Khan, said he ran out of his own nearby home when he heard the police raid. “The little boys were shouting ‘please don’t take our father’ over and over again,” he said. “He is a very decent man, all he does is work. He is no terrorist. He doesn’t have time for anything else - he never leaves the country.”

Mahmood is certainly innocent until proven guilty, but what we never see is those same family member, friends or neighbors recant their nice words after they are found guilty. We are led to believe those taken into custody over heinous plots or acts of terrorists were just mixed up individuals, and indeed they are, but someone who plots to behead another man for propoganda purposes to fuel the flames of jihad are not nice people under any definition of the word.

UPDATE: The Times of London offers more, below the fold.

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Iran is preparing a new generation of jihadists to go to war against the so-called West (read: non-Islamic nations) in schools, the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP) finds in a report that analyzed 115 textbooks and teacher guides in all grades.  I must say, the results of the study aren’t surprising in the least, and actually I figured this was happening all along.  One doesn’t just say one day, “hey, I want to be a jihadi.”

What is new is there are more descriptive phrases used for the United States than I had previously known about.  Not only is the United States the “Great Satan,” according to Iranian textbooks, the U.S. is also the “World Devourer” and the “Arrogant One.”  If I, as a citizen of the United States, wasn’t so arrogant, I might give such phrases more thought.  Alas though, I am still partial to being considered a citizen of the Great Satan.  It just has that ring to it that none of the other nicknames has.

From the summary of the findings (pdf) in a sociology class for grade 11:

…America is known as an Imperialist country, which embarks on military intervention
wherever it sees that its interests are in danger. It does not refrain from massacring
people, from burying alive the soldiers of the opposite side and from using mass
destruction weapons (as it did with Iraq). It makes use of atomic bombs (the
bombardment of Japan). It uses the weapon of human rights in order to suppress the
justice seekers (like its abuse against Islamic Iran). It creates the greatest dictatorships
and the violent and torturous security-oriented regimes, and defends them. It also does
not feel uncomfortable whatsoever while human rights are violated (Iran in the time of
the Shah after 1953). Its security system runs the largest smuggling networks, but it
makes use of the pretext of drug smuggling in order to arrest those who oppose its
policies in other countries (the case of Panama).

What would, and should, be your reaction to America?

Interesting these topics come up.  I had a wonderful discussion with the curator of a British flight training school earlier today for a freelance job I am doing (an article I intend to share with readers when completed).  The gentleman was trained in one of six Royal Air Force centers in the United States that officially opened up pre-Pearl Harbor and moved to the United States following the conclusion of the war to be with his wife, whom he met while he was in training.

Naturally, the topic of Japan came up and we discussed in brief the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Out or pure curiosity, I asked him what he thought of a hydrogen bomb being dropped on either city, and his response was nothing more than eloquent.  Without directly quoting him, he told me if it wasn’t for the bomb, there’s no question in his mind the war would have gone on for at least another five years and that many, many more Japanese cities would have been raised to the ground because of the materials used during the time to build homes.  So in his mind, and in the mind of countless historians, the hydrogen bomb actually saved lives on all sides of the war.

Islamists however have the uncanny ‘reasoning’ to take all context out of a situation and declare what they want in any situation.  They can negate why such a bomb might have been used to push their point forward, only because the other contextual history has no meaning to their stated goals.  In the case of school curriculum, it’s a great way to teach because no one in the classrooms knows enough to challenge the assertions.

Take for instance the following excerpt from a Islamic Culture and Religious Instruction textbook for the 8th grade:

Islam never orders [to go to] Jihad and battle for [the purpose of] conquering countries,
taking lands, exploiting people and imposing faiths and cultures. But, if people are
ignorant, live in poverty and deprivation, and the oppressors and the Arrogant Ones plunder the product of their labor – in such a situation the army of Islam knows its duty,
which is helping these deprived ones and save them from the Arrogant Ones’ claws…

If the Arrogant Ones close the way to preaching and reason and prevent guidance and
preaching, the order of Jihad is issued according to the discretion of the Prophet, or the
Imam, or the Muslims’ leader, so that the army of Islam would make the Arrogant Ones
fall in a holy Jihad and heavy attack, and pave the way for free preaching and for the
people’s awakening and their redemption.

Initiative Jihad is, then, a kind of defense as well, defense of the deprived people’s
rights, defense of the people’s honor, and defense of the rights of the oppressed.

But the very first jihads were nothing short of offensive battles to conquer lands.  The only rational defense as the first jihad wars being defensive is that it took offensive strikes to defend the Islamic empire, but for whatever reason Islamists can’t even come to that realization.

The full report (pdf) is filled with many more examples within Iranian textbooks teaching children both incorrect history and preparing children for war.  There’s another area within the same region that uses similar textbook styles, and it should be safe to question why Iran wants its youth to end up like children in Palestine.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki:

“We have told the Iranians and the Americans, ‘We know that you have a problem with each other, but we are asking you, please solve your problems outside Iraq,’ ” Nuri al-Maliki old CNN.

“We will not accept Iran to use Iraq to attack the American forces,” al-Maliki said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with CNN.

“We don’t want the American forces to take Iraq as a field to attack Iran or Syria,” he added.

Asked about the role of Iran in Iraq, al-Maliki said he was confident that Iranian influence was behind attacks on U.S. forces. “It exists, and I assure you it exists,” he said.  (source)

He should know.

A counter-terrorism raid in the city of Birmingham resulted in the arrest of eight suspects who allegedly were involved in a plan to kidnap a British Muslim soldier (clearly an apostate by an Islamists definition). The BBC notes British police had monitored the suspects for a period of a few weeks after “intelligence came into the system which caused alarm and that in turn led to action.”

It appears these arrests though are only the beginning.

“This remains a dynamic, fluid operation and it is by no means finished,” said Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw of West Midlands police. “We are literally right at the foothills of what is a very, very major investigation for us.”

Residents in the area of at least one of the suspects have responded by claiming British harassment, stating there are people arrested in the area all the time before being released.  Indeed when I was looking up information for a post I composed yesterday I ran across a British Muslim site which argued the exactly same thing and used the Muslim Council of Britain as a source of the outrage.

I’m mixed when it comes to this.  First off, I don’t know if what they say is anywhere near true.  I’ve noted several arrests, including one earlier this week, in England over the nation’s anti-terror laws, but I’ve also seen the polls and hidden videos which clearly show radical Islam has a foothold in England.  It certainly makes sense the British authorities have arrested the wrong people or gone off of bad information because unfortunately that happens, but the reason isn’t because there are no Islamists in England but rather the Islamic community is not willing to turn them in and shine the light upon them.

The foiled plot would have diverged from causing mass casualties and instead focused on instilling fear among all Brits, but particularly British Muslims, and there’s a reason for that.

Sky TV quoted sources as saying the intent was to mimic the abductions and beheadings of Westerners carried out by militants in Iraq and post a video of the killing on the Internet . . .

A defense source confirmed to Reuters the suspected target was a Muslim serving in the British military. A police source said the suspected plot would not have caused mass casualties, but would have involved a new terrorism tactic.

It is a silence the critics from within tactic this alleged terrorism plot would strive to achieve, and had it achieved it such an attack it would have been very interesting if England’s ‘moderate’ Muslim groups would have condemned not just the action, but how the terrorists decided to use the forbidden takfir charge in order to pick a victim.  As I’ve noted previously, Islamists get away with calling someone a non-Muslim, but Muslims don’t call Islamists un-Islamic.

The larger issue however is for the British authorities to find something between perceived harassment an prevention of terrorist attacks.  Assuming all eight of the suspects in this morning’s raid are guilty of the plot suspected, will it matter if a British Muslim populace is told by some leading British figures the British police is targeting Muslims (George Galloway immediately comes to mind for doing just that) and Brits of Asian descent?

It was an intelligence tip into British police that led to the watching of these suspects, a tip presumably from a Pakistani-Brit who is a Muslim, but if these arrested suspects turn out to be nothing it very well could hurt future investigations.  Certainly I am not arguing on behalf of no arrests, but those who celebrate failures and whisper successes are hurting the cause of fighting against home-grown terrorism in England, and there’s no question England has more than its fair share of Islamists and Islamists in training based on recent polls.

Thanks to reader Richard Chown for the tip.

Last Friday, Bill Roggio questioned the attack in Karbala which ended up killing five U.S. soldiers after a dozen men disguised as American soldiers slipped past security.  Roggio wondered if the attack, a highly sophisticated attack beyond the normal procedures by terrorist groups in Iraq, was pulled off by the Iranian Quds force in response to the U.S. military arresting a Quds leader in northern Iraq.

I noted the Quds threat to take American soldiers hostage this past Monday, taking note the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a bit peeved at having a high-ranking figure in U.S. custody and losing key documents which point out the links between Iran and both Sunni and Shia terrorist groups in Iraq.  All of this was just an educated guess, but now the Pentagon is investigating whether or not Iran had a hand in the attack.

“People are looking at it seriously,” one of the officials said.

That official added the Iranian connection was a leading theory in the investigation into the January 20 attack that killed five soldiers.

The second official said: “We believe it’s possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained.”

Both officials stressed the Iranian-involvement theory is a preliminary view, and there is no final conclusion. They agreed this possibility is being looked at because of the sophistication of the attack and the level of coordination.

“This was beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do,” the second official said.

The New York Times also notes the investigation and gives more information from the Iraqi side after suggesting President Bush would be pleased Iran took part in the operation (apparently not analysis, just news according to the Times).

 An Iraqi knowledgeable about the investigation said four suspects had been detained and questioned. Based on those interviews, investigators have concluded that as they fled Karbala with the abducted Americans, the attackers used advanced devices to monitor police communications and avoid the roads where the police were searching.

The suspects have also told investigators that “a religious group in Najaf” was involved in the operation, the Iraqi said, in a clear reference to the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by the breakaway Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. If that information holds up, it would dovetail with assertions by several Iraqi officials that Iran is financing and training a small number of splinter groups from the Mahdi Army to carry out special operations and assassinations.

“I hear that there are a number of commando and assassination squads that are disconnected and controlled directly by Iran,” the senior Iraqi official said, citing information directly from the prime minister’s office. “They have supplied JAM and others with significant weaponry and training,” he said using shorthand for the group, from its name in Arabic, Jaish al Mahdi.

Since it is the Times, the ‘newspaper of record’ is quick to tote the line that JAM might have been pushed towards Iran by the United States, so in essense, four executed U.S. soldiers at the hands of an Iranian outfit is simply America’s fault.  Unbelievable trail of posturing by the Times.

Cutting through the political nonsense the Times passes off, this story only adds to the ever-growing reporting that Iran is fomenting unrest in Iraq both directly and indirectly.  In theory, it doesn’t really matter if Iran had a part in the Karbala attack, for the nation is already known to have participated at least indirectly in several other attacks.  Just how much more Iranian meddling the Coalition will take is anyone’s guess at this moment, but it seems to me Iran could fire missiles into Iraq from Tehran and nothing would happen.

Pakistan has been witness to four acts of terrorism in just four days, including three suicide bombings and one mortar attack.

Last Friday, a suicide bomber also struck Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel killing a security guard who stopped the terrorist from entering the hotel.  The security guard should be remember posthumously for his valor.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber attacked Pakistani police, killing 13 and wounding six police officials. Today, a suicide bomber struck a police checkpoint in Dera Ismail Khan, killing two, and a mortar attack against a Shia mosque in NW Waziristan wounded 13.

What is going on in Pakistan and why are these attacks happening all of the sudden?  Terrorist attacks are hardly rare in Pakistan, but they do not normally come in such waves.  Could the first suicide bomber’s failure to cause mass casualties have resulted in the other three attacks?  And what about suspected Sunni on Shia violence that, for whatever reason, we are repeatedly told by Muslim leaders never happens outside of Iraq and is because of the so-called American occupation of Iraq?

In response to the mortar attack on the Shia mosque, the Pakistani government has imposed a curfew in the north-western Pakistani town of Hangu, but the attacks demonstrate what might be a political vacuum left between the Pakistani military’s control of the government and the opposition parties, “allowing militants to take over under the umbrella of the Muslim religious hardcore in the over 13,000 Islamic seminaries or madrassas in the country.”

That is not all that complicates the issue.  There is the situation with the Taliban and Al Qaida who have taken refuge in the Waziristan region and the Taliban who has declared their intent to avenge the Pakistani government’s attack on a Taliban training camp.

But tensions are also high because of threats by militants to carry out revenge attacks following recent Pakistan army operations in the tribal area. The local pro-Taliban militants had warned of revenge attacks and the retaliation has followed quickly.

The threat by Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, to take on the government of Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf everywhere appears to be real. Baitullah Mehsud had said that the government of Pakistan faced dire consequences after the military carried out an air strike in South Waziristan on 16 January in which many people were killed and injured . . .

The recent arrest of activist and former official with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) retired air force squadron leader Khalid Khawaja and threats to crackdown on the ideologues of the Pakistani Taliban, clerics Maulana Abdul Aziz and Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, has only added to the tensions between the Pakistani establishment and the religious hardcore of the country in the various Islamic seminaries.

Then there’s the following rather idiotic statement by a member of the Pakistani Muslim League.

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Watch the following video, if you can stomach it and not throw your mouse through your monitor (via The Jawa Report).

WPvideo 1.10

Steve Emerson Talks to Two Morons About Radical Muslims

Two percent? Why are apologists so transfixed by percentages and numbers? If there is one individual that wishes to kill or convert, isn’t that one too many and a problem that should be solved by responsible Muslim advocacy groups?

And Emerson, as usual, is 100 percent correct in stating the meeting with the U.S. Attorney General sets a very bad example for American Muslims who are actually moderate. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told by American Muslims who are either my friends or people I’ve just met they are tired of Islamist groups being called moderate by the U.S. government because it legitimizes the Islamist group and cancels out their voices. The people whose voices should be heard by the masses are like that of Jamal Miftah.

To prove the point, the American Muslim groups of American Muslim Alliance (AMA), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), MuslimAmerican Society (MAS), Muslim Student Association-National (MSA-N), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), Project Islamic Hope (PIH), and United Muslims of America (UMA) joined together to call for the release of Sami al-Arian who pleaded to a deal that he helped out Palestinian Islamic Jihad. I suppose to the aforementioned American Muslim groups, PIJ terrorist acts like the one in Eilat yesterday just aren’t actually terrorist acts.

And wy is CAIR helping out a Fatah group? Don’t they realize Fatah is fighting against the very group (Hamas) that helped found CAIR?

The overwhelming criticism against Americans who are Muslim has nothing at all to do with their religion, but more to do with their duplicity in condoning acts of terrorism. It is a small percentage of American Muslim who fit that profile, but to condone that small percentage’s actions and call them moderates the remaining American Muslim population feels constrained and powerless. CAIR and groups like them are Islamist groups, the very ideology that declared war on this nation many moons ago and who we, in turn, are in a war against. Our media and especially our government should not be sitting down to have a pow-wow with groups who support our nation’s enemies.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah lives in such a parallel universe it’s always entertaining to point out his views. Nasrallah told a gathered crowd Israel started last summer’s war with Hezbollah on the orders of United States President George Bush, forgetting it was a Hezbollah action which started the war and that Israel is a sovereign nation rather than the foreign puppet within a sovereign nation that Hezbollah is.

“The one who fomented chaos in Lebanon, who destroyed Lebanon, who killed women and children, old and young in Lebanon, is George Bush and [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice, who ordered the Zionists to launch the war on Lebanon,” he said.

“The one who must be punished, who must be tried, is the one who ordered the launching of war on Lebanon,” Sheikh Nasrallah told the crowd.

“George Bush wants to punish you because you resisted, he wants to punish you because you won.”

He also accused Mr Bush and Israel of “trying to defeat resistance movements in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq by starting civil wars”.

“Lebanon will not be defeated. We will not allow it to be invaded… we have proved that we are capable of defeating [invaders],” he said.

I must say I had entirely no idea Condoleezza Rice had anything to do with war planning, you know, being the top diplomat in the United States and all. What is interesting though is that Nasrallah feels whoever started the war should be punished, and I agree with him on that mark, but there was no war until Hezbollah attacked Israeli soldiers and took two hostage.

It is also Hezbollah who has saught to usurp the elected Lebanese government by holding mass demonstrations with paid protestors, demonstrations that became violent this past weekend. Unless Nasrallah somehow thinks President Bush controls Hezbollah, he’s once again proving to his followers just how deceitful he is, and they love him for it.

In related news, Yayha Jammeh, the President of Gambia, appeared on Al-Manar TV and made statements regarding what he calls Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program.”

Other small countries in the West have nuclear power plants, and that’s not an issue. Now, are they telling us that Arabs and Africans – and Muslims, for that matter – shouldn’t have nuclear weapons? If they don’t want us to have nuclear weapons, then what is their intention? But my principal belief is that nobody should have nuclear weapons. All countries should scrap their nuclear weapons, and you go back to a peaceful world. If not, every country has a right to nuclear weapons, because the way things are now – where you can sit down and then be invaded, because somebody is armed with nuclear weapons – the world is dangerous. (source)

If you’re a bit confused, I am too. Jammeh states he thinks all nations should get rid of nuclear weapons prior to this excerpt and accuses the West of having a double standard, but since this won’t likely happen, all nations have the right to have nuclear weapons.

It’s never been an issue of rights. It’s an issue of who the leadership of Iran consists of and their current and former ties to terrorists regime, regional instability and even apocalyptic desire. It’s hardly just the United States who views the Iranian regime as unsavory at best. It’s also Iranians and other regional nations.

Jammeh though believes in opening the world to nuclear weapons, only so the world could then get rid of them. But I thought he said Iran’s nuclear program was peaceful, something which I haven’t a clue how he would know about if the IAEA can’t seem to figure out through years of inspections.

The suicide bombing at a bakery in Eilat, Israel yesterday was unique in both it’s supposed purpose and its location.  Eilat is a resort town that sits on the Red Sea in the southern most tip of Israel, but it is also a resort town where most tourists are Arabs and presumably Muslims.  Why would Palestinian Islamic Jihad choose to perform a so-called ‘martyr mission’ in a resort town where fellow Muslims vacation?

It’s a perplexing quandry as to the decision of the location of the bomb, a bakery where there were only three people present at the time, but it makes perfect strategic sense to target an Israeli resort town when such a bombing could cripple the economy within Eilat.  Will vacationing Egyptians, Saudis or Jordanians visit Eilat after this bombing, knowing full well PIJ has the town within its sights?

The attack on an Arab vacation destination also doesn’t stray too far from the stated goals of the Islamist movement.  The Egyptian Sinai has been the scene of terrorist attacks previously in resort towns, though at least one of the resort town hit was a popular Israeli vacation locale.

For their part, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad stated the reason for the bombing was to stop the fighting between Hamas and Fatah.   Also with a similar claim was the Fatah faction known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

“We wanted to send a message to Hamas that there is only one enemy – Israel – and we must concentrate our fight against Israel,” said Abu Ahmed, leader of the Brigades in the northern Gaza Strip. “It is time to take the conflict from an internal dispute to where the dispute really belongs, fighting the Zionist crimes.”

PIJ is a Fatah terrorist group, meaning the likely result of the suicide bombing will be Israel will cut off any aid it was sending to Mahmoud Abbas and scrap any plans in trying to prop up Abbas over Hamas.  The statement of the bombing made by PIJ indicates they wish to unite all Palestinians behind their common foe, rather than continue to act like savages in an undeclared civil war (where’s NBC News when you need them?).

Islamists have it both ways when it comes to terrorist attacks against designated targets.  On numerous occassions, Islamist groups have condoned the act of suicide terrorism to which they claim results in ‘martyrdom’ against Infidels.  An unwritten rule however is that when Muslims are caught up in the bombings, those innocent Muslim victims are just more ‘martyrs’ to throw on the blessings delivered down by Allah to the ummah  in the form of a terrorist attack. Islamist therefore can attack anywhere they please and kill anyone they want with the same heavenly outcome.  How convenient a doctrine Islamists adhere to.

What may end up achieving the supposed goal of ending the fighting between Hamas and Fatah has little to nothing to do with Palestinians on the two different sides have an epiphany of who they feel should hold their ire, but rather through an Israeli retaliation; a retaliation, I should add, Israel has full reason to follow through upon.  It was therefore the future Israeli retaliation that the bombing was intended to trigger, thus putting both Hamas and Fatah on the defensive as opposed to the offensive against each other.

The suicide bomber missed the rush hour breakfast, deciding to attack the bakery at 9:40 a.m. local time.  Instead of choosing other more populated areas, the terrorist walked into the bakery after hitching a ride with an unsuspecting IDF reservist, Yossi Waltinsky, following entry into Israel through the Egyptian border.

Waltinsky thought that the man was suspicious, as he was wearing heavy clothing - probably to protect him from the desert chill during the night - and carried a bag. Nevertheless, Waltinsky dropped him off near a gas station, about a kilometer from the area where he carried out the attack.

According to southern district police chief Uri Bar-Lev, who rushed to Eilat immediately after hearing of the attack, Waltinksy then telephoned the police station in the town and said that he suspected the man was a terrorist. Two patrol cars rushed to the scene, but seven minutes after Waltinsky made the call, the bomber carried out the attack.

As a result of the bombing, no matter how much of a failed attempt it may prove to be, Eilat police chief Bruno Stein told reporters, “our assumption is that it’s not one bomber, and there might be more bombers in Eilat right now.”

Bill Gertz of The Washington Times notes the deputy director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, Army Brig. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, said during a speech yesterday Iran is working in concert with North Korea in developing missiles.  This much was known, but O’Reilly also said Iran has “made a claim that they are working towards developing a space launch capability, which also would give them an ICBM capability” by the year 2015, long after even the most conservative estimate of when Iran could obtain a nuclear warhead.

The cooperation between Iran and North Korea over missiles and missile tests is nothing new, however with the context of both nation’s nuclear programs this cooperation puts an entirely complex issue in a new light.  It is then of good news the United States missile defense program has progressed and will continue to do so, barring any legislative maneuvering to cancel the development, and should be fully operational within one year.

The current missile interceptors deployed at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California can protect the United States from North Korean missiles and afford “partial protection” from Middle Eastern missiles. Upgraded defenses will provide full defense from both North Korean and Middle Eastern missiles, Gen. O’Reilly said.

By 2011, the Pentagon plans to have up to 44 interceptors deployed in the United States and the first 10 interceptors in Europe; a large radar in Europe; 18 Aegis missile defense ships; 48 ground-based THAAD interceptors; two new surveillance and tracking satellites; and a battle management and integrated global fire system for the Middle East and Southwest Asian missile threats. (source)

In other missile defense news, the United States Air Force has announced they plan on testing a new airborne laser affixed to a YAL-1A, or a modified Boeing 747-400F, that will be able to intercept missiles in flight.