Dec. 9, 2010: Vehicles burn on a road leading to the city of Morelia, Mexico, after gunmen arrived at all five roads leading into the city, fired into the air and forced people from their vehicles.
MORELIA, Mexico – Gunmen blockaded a western Mexican city Thursday with vehicles they stole from motorists and then torched in a second day of violence for the region that has left at least five people dead, including an 8-month-old baby.
The gunmen arrived at all five roads leading into Morelia and fired into the air to force drivers and passengers from their vehicles, said Jonathan Arrendondo, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office of Michoacan state, where the city is located.
An Associated Press reporter saw a 75-year-old man being treated for a bullet wound to the leg at one of the entry points. Witnesses said the man had been a passenger on a bus and was struck by the bullet as he tried to flee.
Such blockades have become a common cartel tactic in Mexico’s raging drug war.
The practice started earlier this year in northeastern Mexico, where the Gulf and Zetas drug gangs are locked in a fierce turf war, and recently spread to Michoacan, home state of President Felipe Calderon.
Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to the Senate majority and minority leaders Thursday opposing language in a House-passed spending bill that would effectively prevent the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The provision in the $1.1 trillion continuing resolution, which passed Wednesday, would prevent any funds from being used to transfer detainees, including suspected terrorists, from the prison to the United States. It would thus make trials other than military tribunals impossible.
Holder told Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the provision is an unprecedented grab of executive authority by the Congress.
“We have been unable to identify any parallel ? in the history of our nation in which Congress has intervened to prohibit the prosecution of particular persons or crimes,” he wrote.
“The provision goes well beyond existing law and would unwisely restrict the ability of the executive branch to prosecute alleged terrorists in Federal courts or military commission in the United States as well as its ability to incarcerate those convicted in such tribunals,” Holder wrote.
Read the rest.
ACAPULCO, Mexico – Gunmen kidnapped 20 men who were traveling together in Mexico’s Pacific coast resort city of Acapulco, authorities said Saturday.
A shootout between drug gangs, meanwhile, left 14 people dead in remote town in the northern state of Durango, Mexican newspapers reported.
The group of men in Acapulco was visiting from the western city of Morelia and looking for a place to stay when they were abducted Thursday, said Fernando Monreal, director of state investigative police in Guerrero state, where the resort city is located.
He said the kidnapping was reported by a man who had been with the group.
Fly Your Flag Today
In the United States, Patriot Day occurs on September 11 of each year, designated in memory of the 2,993 killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
On this day, the American flag be flown at half-staff at individual American homes, at the White House, and on all U.S. government buildings and establishments, home and abroad. Americans should observe a moment of silence beginning at 8:46 A.M. (Eastern Daylight Time), the time the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Why isn’t Obama’s Department of Homeland Security concerned?
An indictment was handed down Aug. 30 by the Southern District Court of New York that shows a connection between Hezbollah – the proxy army of Iran and a designated terrorist organization – and the drug cartels that violently plague the U.S.-Mexico border.
In short, a well-known international arms dealer was trying to orchestrate an arms-for-drugs deal in which cocaine from FARC – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which works with Mexican drug cartels to take cocaine into America – would be traded for thousands of weapons housed by a Hezbollah operative in Mexico.
This most recent case brings up several questions: Why would a member of Hezbollah be in Mexico? Why would Hezbollah need thousands of weapons in Mexico? Why are members of Hezbollah willing to work with FARC? Perhaps to exchange weapons for drugs? If Hezbollah has guns in Mexico and wants drugs, isn’t it logical to assume that it is trading with more accessible Mexican drug cartels?
Yesterday’s detonation of two car bombs in Mexico came just days after the bodies of 72 illegal aliens — mostly from Central America — were found at a ranch about 100 miles from Ciudad Victoria.
This ranks as the worst massacre since Mexican President Calderon sent 45,000 troops and thousands of federal police to fight drug cartels in late 2006.
The bomb attacks occurred the same day officials discovered the body of a police officer investigating the massacre. Mexican mayors are routinely gunned down and one, fearful for himself and his family, sought refuge in El Paso Texas. The military is corrupt and police are savagely killed by drug lords.
Reuters reports that at least 30 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006. The country is among the world’s most dangerous for reporters — and, it seems, anyone else. More than 28,000 people have died in drug related violence during that same time.
As the violence escalates and illegals are increasingly entering the United States by sea in violation of our law, we become ever more vulnerable. Despite these facts, the Obama administration is imposing new and more lenient policies upon Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
ICE assistant secretary John Morton, an underling of Janet Napolitano’s, has instructed the agency’s legal office to stop the deportation proceedings of foreign nationals — “without criminal convictions” – who may now be eligible for a green card. Judges will be advised to dismiss pending cases.
How long before we will be flooded with “political refugees” from Mexico being welcomed as new Democrats for Obama?
Hat tip: Seeing Red AZ
Obama is dropping the case against the Cole bombing, a jihadist act of war. In October 2000, the Cole was attacked by Muslim terrorists in a homicide attack in the Yemeni post of Aden. Seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-nine were injured, and the ship was damaged.
Today we hear they are dropping the case. Another big fat lie, to what end? To advance what agenda? Whose interests? Certainly it’s not America’s.
Obama Administration Halts Commission Trial Against Cole Bomber NRO
It’s a sleepy Friday in late August, the president is on another vacation, Congress is out of town, no one is paying much attention. What better time for the Obama administration to pull the plug, once again, on military commissions? This time, it has halted the case of top al-Qaeda operative Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was to be prosecuted by a military court for the Cole bombing. The Washington Post report is here, and Jen Rubin has thoughts at Contentions.
None of this is terribly surprising. Prosecuting the Cole case by military commission sticks in the Left’s craw because it shows the incoherence of the Obama/Holder position. They want to treat the war like a crime and endow our enemies with all the rights and advantages of civilian courts; yet, they went military in the Cole case, despite the fact that there is a pending Justice Department civilian indictment addressing that attack. There can be only one explanation for that: they are afraid the case against Nashiri is weak and might not hold up under (slightly) more exacting civilian court due process. That is, the Obama/Holder position is not principled — for all their “rule of law” malarkey, they are willing to go where they have the best chance to win. But there were no military commissions when the Cole was bombed, so what is the basis for trying it militarily? Answer: the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war . . . except the Left doesn’t accept that it’s a war and the administration wants to prosecute the 9/11 plotters in civilian court. None of it makes any sense.
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (Reuters) – Two car bombs exploded in northern Mexico early on Friday, days after marines found the bodies of 72 people gunned down in the country’s escalating war with powerful drug cartels.
The blasts, the second and third modest-sized bombs planted in a vehicle this month in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northern Gulf state of Tamaulipas, and the fourth in Mexico since late July, caused no casualties but damaged buildings.
The attacks came the same day officials discovered the body of a police officer investigating the massacre of dozens of migrants in the latest attack linked to Mexico’s drug war.
“I’m told of the explosion of two car bombs here in the state, one in the offices of local traffic police and the other in the installations of Televisa,” Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez told local radio, referring to Mexico’s top broadcaster.
The explosion on the street outside Televisa’s studios in Ciudad Victoria, located 220 miles south of the Texas border, apparently part of a growing campaign of intimidation of the media, left little more than the car’s engine and front chassis.
There’s a new argument emerging among supporters of the Ground Zero mosque. Distressed by President Obama’s waffling on the issue, they’re calling on former President George W. Bush to announce his support for the project, because in this case Bush understands better than Obama the connection between the war on terror and the larger question of America’s relationship with Islam. It’s an extraordinary change of position for commentators who long argued that Bush had done grievous harm to America’s image in the Muslim world and that Obama represented a fresh start for the United States. Nevertheless, they are now seeing a different side of the former president.
“It’s time for W. to weigh in,” writes the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Bush, Dowd explains, understands that “you can’t have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam.” Dowd finds it “odd” that Obama seems less sure on that matter. But to set things back on the right course, she says, “W. needs to get his bullhorn back out” — a reference to Bush’s famous “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” speech at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001.
In the three fiscal years from 2007-2009, the Department of Homeland Security caught and released 481 illegal aliens from state sponsors of terrorism and “countries of interest” who are now fugitives, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement database obtained by CNSNews.com as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request.
The four state sponsors of terrorism, as determined by the State Department, are Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba. The “countries of interest” are those additional countries whose citizens have been subjected to enhanced screening on U.S.-bound flights by the Transportation Security Administration as a result of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253.
On Jan. 3, 2010, TSA said in a statement that the agency was “mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world who holds a passport issued by or is traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening.” TSA did not specify which nations it considered “countries of interest.”
Read the rest.
