“When this Protect America Act expires, we are going to go back under the same set of rules and regulations that were in place before 9/11” –Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, 2/15/08
February 18, 2008 — The Protect America Act - a modernization of the three-decade old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes intercepts of foreign communications - has expired.
Before departing on a 10-day recess, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats Thursday refused to vote on a reauthorization of the law - even though it passed by a huge bipartisan majority in the Senate earlier in the week.
However, House Democrats did find time to issue contempt-of-Congress citations to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former counsel Harriet Miers. The citations relate to the overblown fired-federal-prosecutors “scandal” of a year ago.
Thus, Pelosi and Co. made their priorities abundantly clear to the country:
Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.
These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.
The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.
That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.
“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most…”
The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” — Americans — had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces. Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar”, the unnamed emir admitted.
$63,300. That’s the 2004 median household income of people in their prime working years, ages 25-59 (it’s $70,000 for married households and nearly $80,000 for two-earner households).
$248,700. That’s the median net worth of pre-retirement Americans, ages 55-64.
Zero. That’s the median credit card debt for all American households.
Drowning in debt? Squeezed to the gills? Living paycheck to paycheck? I don’t think so…
It’s true that the middle class is shrinking — but that’s because more families are better off. The share of prime-age adults in households with real incomes above $100,000 rose by 13.1 percentage points from 1979 to 2004. The share of households making less than $75,000 dropped by 14 percent. Fully 41 percent of prime-age American adults are in households with incomes above $75,000.
Among married-couple households the picture is even brighter. In 2004, the median income for these households was $70,000, and $78,000 for couples with two earners.
Husbands living in a “harem” with multiple wives have been cleared to claim state benefits for all their different partners.
A Muslim man with four spouses - which is permitted under Islamic law - could receive £10,000 a year in income support alone.
He could also be entitled to more generous housing and council tax benefit, to reflect the fact his household needs a bigger property.
Ministers have decided that, even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, polygamous marriages can be recognised formally by the state - provided they took place overseas, in countries where they are legal.
The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife.
Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.
Islamic extremists have created “no-go” areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops warns today.
The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester and the Church’s only Asian bishop, says that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.
The Muslim Council of Britain today described his comments as “frantic scaremongering”, while William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said the bishop had “probably put it too strongly”.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said the idea of no-go areas was “a gross caricature of reality”.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Bishop Nazir-Ali compares the threat to the use of intimidation by the far-Right, and says that it is becoming increasingly difficult for Christianity to be the nation’s public religion in a multifaith, multicultural society.
His comments come as a poll of the General Synod - the Church’s parliament - shows that its senior leaders, including bishops, also believe that Britain is being damaged by large-scale immigration.
