Blinded Prison Guard: Don't House Terror Suspects in NYC

Saturday, November 14, 2009
By Joseph Abrams

The high-security prison in New York City where 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is expected to be sent to await his trial has a supermax wing to keep even the most notorious criminals quiet — but it isn't perfect. Just ask Louis Pepe.

Ten months before Al Qaeda in 2001 struck a deathblow in the heart lower Manhattan, one of the terrorist group's founding members plunged a sharpened comb through Pepe's left eye and into his brain, blinding the 42-year-old prison guard and causing severe brain injuries that plague him to this day.

Pepe told FoxNews.com he worries that sending Mohammed and four of his alleged fellow 9/11 conspirators to New York could compromise the safety of the guards at the MCC prison. Keeping the prisoners in one location, he said, was especially dangerous.

"Could you imagine over there what they're gonna do, God forbid?" asked Pepe, now 52, who lost feeling in the right side of his body and most of his ability to speak. "After all these years, you'd think they should know."

On Nov. 1, 2000, Pepe was ambushed in the cell of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim — an alleged top aide to Usama bin Laden. Salim's cellmate, another Al Qaeda suspect, joined in the attack, which prosecutors say was an attempt to steal Pepe's keys to the cell block to free other prisoners and take hostages.

The two had been granted permission by a federal>>>

Justice Denied

Posted 11/13/2009 07:14 PM ET

In this March 1, 2003 file picture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is seen shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan. Attorney General Eric Holder...View Enlarged Image

War On Terror: Eric Holder's move to try the 9/11 masterminds in Manhattan makes it official: This administration has reverted to pre-9/11 "crime" fighting.

Amid all the talk during the attorney general's surreal press conference of the "crime" committed eight years ago, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon wasn't even mentioned.

Lest anyone forget, the military headquarters of the United States was attacked that day along with the Twin Towers.

An entire wedge of the Ring was gutted when the Saudi hijackers slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into it. Nearly 200 military personnel were killed, along with the passengers and crew of the hijacked jet.

The jet was a weapon used to attack the very center of our military. That was not a "crime," as some say. It was an act of war.

And 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with the four other al-Qaida terrorist co-conspirators Holder wants to try, are no mere criminals. They are enemy combatants — and should be treated as such.

Yet this administration has adopted the same crime-centered mentality as the last Democratic administration. The one that treated al-Qaida's first World Trade Center bombing as a "crime." And al-Qaida's attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa as a "crime." And even al-Qaida's attack on the USS Cole as a "crime."

All were prosecuted in U.S. courts. A lot of good that did.

While President Bill Clinton was busy preparing indictments against the terrorists, al-Qaida was already plotting its next move. It hit the Pentagon just nine months after Clinton and his crime-fighters left office.

Maddeningly, this administration>>>

The Most Sinister Of Motives

Posted 11/13/2009 07:54 PM ET

Geopolitics: Why would China give uranium to Pakistan? Why would Russia help Iran build an A-bomb? Regional balance of power plays a role, but a nuclear 9/11 could restore Moscow and Beijing as superpowers.

Think of the destabilizing effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The country's fastest form of transportation was paralyzed as we picked up the pieces. Financial markets had to be closed, and when they reopened, private industry was dealt an immediate body blow.

Recession was a foregone conclusion. Business decisions had to be reconsidered, massive investments re-evaluated, new hirings postponed and layoffs expanded. Many firms folded.

Meanwhile, a nervous public wondered if the Golden Age of American dominance and prosperity was over. Was this the first of a series of attacks? Were we now so vulnerable within our own homeland that terrorism would become routine, part of the new fabric of the lives of those residing in free countries?

All of that came from the destruction of three buildings (the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center) and the severe damage to a fourth (the Pentagon). Several thousand died.

A nuclear version of the 9/11 attacks would destroy dozens of buildings, kill hundreds of thousands, and poison maybe millions with radiation. The Ground Zero of such an attack would not be a meeting place for prayer and remembrance, the site of a memorial monument, or a place where a new tower would rise to the skies.

The entire region would, instead, be uninhabitable, bathed in deadly cancer-causing emissions.

Would the U.S. be able to bounce back from such a catastrophe, as we did after 9/11, simply by mobilizing our forces against terrorist havens?

Perhaps. But maybe not. The annihilation in an instant of an entire city by a band of rogues would be an unprecedented event. For a superpower to be found so exposed to risk from a small group of fanatics might be too much to bear.

And who would fill the vacuum?>>>

And Then He Sang !

NOTE: You've just got to take the time to hear this young man sing; it will make you proud to be an American, and to know there's hope for the future; you'll be the loser IF you don't!! Just click on video.aol below!!

This young man sings the National Anthem prior to a college basketball game. Notice two of the players in tears HE IS ONLY 7 YEARS OLD! http://video.aol.com/video-detail/7-year-old-sings-national-anthem/40945200

Ralph Scott’s Gunnery Sergeant Stripes Fit

By DAVID HOGBERG, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILYPosted 10/30/2009 05:43 PM ET

Gunnery Sgt. Ralph Scott spent 7,361 days in the Marine Corps.

Nov. 12, 2004, was the most dangerous.

During the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, Scott rescued a wounded buddy by creating a distraction — in the heat of enemy fire.

"Anybody from that platoon, seeing what he did," said Scott's platoon sergeant, Michael Chambers. "My words can't do him justice."

For that, Scott was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Valor.

Scott became a Marine in large part because his stepfather was one.

"During my impressionable years, I grew up on military bases," Scott told IBD. "I just fell in love with the Marine Corps. I had an up-close-and-personal exposure to it."

Teen In Uniform

Scott joined in 1989, in the middle of his senior year in high school in Tallahassee, Fla. Since he was still 17, his mom had to go with him to the recruiting office to give him permission to sign up.

While in uniform, Scott>>>

When No Means No

• NOVEMBER 2, 2009, 11:12 P.M. ET

By BRET STEPHENS

I once overhead a guy try to make a date over the phone. His end of the conversation went roughly as follows:

"How about Friday?" (Pause.) "Not Friday? Because I'm free most of the weekend." (Pause.) "Not this weekend? What about next Saturday?" (Pause.) "Are you free at all next week?" (Long pause.) "Well, are you ever free?"

Apparently she was not, at least as far as he was concerned.

Now it's the turn of the Obama administration to play the guy who won't take a hint. And it falls to the Islamic Republic of Iran to be the girl who's hard—actually, impossible—to get.

Tehran's most recent abrupt rejection came last week, when it reportedly decided that it was not enough for the U.S. to trash four binding Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium. Nor was it enough that France and Russia were prepared, with America's blessing, to convert Iran's existing stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to a grade of 19.75%, a hair's breadth shy of the 20% needed for a crude nuclear device.

"The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium," an unnamed senior European official told the New York Times. "That's not a minor detail. That's the whole point of the deal."

Perhaps this is merely some tactical>>>

Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?