January 23, 2009 by Tim McDowell.

A Saudi man who was released from Guantanamo after spending six years inside the U.S. prison camp has joined Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen and is now the terror group’s No. 2 in the country, according to a purported Internet statement from Al Qaeda.

The announcement, made this week on a Web site commonly used by militants, came as President Barack Obama ordered the detention facility closed within a year.

The Yemen branch — known as “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” — said the man, identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, returned to his home in Saudi Arabia after his release from Guantanamo about a year ago and from there went to Yemen. The Internet statement, which could not immediately be verified, said al-Shihri was the group’s second-in-command in Yemen and his prisoner number at Guantanamo was 372.

“He managed to leave the land of the two shrines (Saudi Arabia) and join his brothers in Al Qaeda,” the statement said.

Documents released by the U.S. Defense Department show that al-Shihri was released from the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in November 2007 and transferred to his homeland. The documents confirmed his prisoner number was 372.

“The lesson here is, whoever receives former Guantánamo detainees needs to keep a close eye on them,” an American official told the New York Times.

Saudi Arabian authorities would not immediately comment on the statement. A Yemeni counterterrorism official would only say that Saudi Arabia had asked Yemen to turn over a number of wanted Saudi suspects who fled the kingdom last year for Yemen, and a man with the same name was among those wanted. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press and would not provide more details.

Al-Shihri was stopped at a Pakistani border crossing in December 2001 with injuries from an airstrike and recuperated at a hospital in Quetta for a month and a half, according to the Defense Department. Within days of his release, he became one of the first detainees sent to Guantanamo.

A congresswoman says the reports should not slow the Obama administration’s determination to quickly close the Guantanamo facility.

Rep. Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, said that President Obama has to “proceed extremely carefully” in closing the prison.

Al-Shihri allegedly traveled to Afghanistan two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, provided money to other fighters and trained at an urban warfare at a camp north of Kabul, according to a summary of the evidence against him from U.S. military review panels at Guantanamo Bay.

An alleged travel coordinator for Al Qaeda, he was also accused of meeting extremists in Mashad, Iran and briefing them on how to enter Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department documents.

Al-Shihri, however, said he traveled to Iran to buy carpets for his store in Riyadh. He said he felt Osama bin Laden had no business representing Islam, denied any links to terrorism and expressed interest in rejoining his family in Saudi Arabia.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,481849,00.html

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January 23, 2009 by Tim McDowell.

Anne Wortham is Black, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University ’s Hoover Institution.  She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association.  She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.  In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer’s television series, “A World of Ideas.”  The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas.  Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues.  She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality.  Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness.  Shortly after an interview in 2004 she was awarded tenure.

This article by her is another point of view……

No He Can’t
by Anne Wortham

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South.  I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president.  Most importantly, I am not race conscious.  I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living.  I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America .

So you have made history, Americans.  You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world.  The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won.  Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men.  Jimmie Carter, too.  And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like.  The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person.  So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians.  Toast yourselves, Black America .  Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley.  You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something!  You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine, – what little there is left, – for the chance to feel good.  There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

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January 23, 2009 by Tim McDowell.

Rwandan troops arrested the Tutsi National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) rebel leader Laurent Nkunda on 22 January 2009. Nkunda was arrested in the rebel stronghold of Bunagana at approximately 2230 local time after attempting to resist a joint Rwandan-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) military operation to apprehend him. The rebels who were with Nkunda were also encouraged to disarm. The DRC issued an international arrest warrant for Nkunda following accusations that his forces were committing atrocities against civilians during their offensives. However, it is unclear if Rwanda will agree to extradite Nkunda to the DRC.ASI Comment: Nkunda’s arrest indicates that the rebel leader has lost critical support from both his senior rebel leaders and his former Rwandan ally. The Rwandan government previously supported Nkunda’s efforts to fight Hutu militias in the DRC. However, when Nkunda refused to support Rwandan efforts to ally with the Congolese government to begin a joint military effort to eradicate the Hutu groups, Rwanda stopped backing his forces. A recent fracturing in the CNDP, followed by the splinter group’s ceasefire with the Congolese government, also signaled that Nkunda no longer enjoyed unified support from his senior command.

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