Al-Jazeera Speaks to Ex-SD Imam

Excerpts of Al-Jazeera interview with Anwar Awlaki on Feb. 2, 2010.  Translated and released by NEFA Foundation.  Awlaki lived in San Diego in the 1990s.

Q. What is the truth about you meeting with Omar Farooq [the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing] or that you announced a Fatwa about the legitimacy of the operation?A. The mujahid brother Omar al-Farooq—may Allah release him—is one of my students; yes, we were in correspondence, but I did not give Omar Farooq a Fatwa in regards to this operation.

Q. You envision him as a mujahid; meaning, do you back him up?

A. I support what Omar Farooq has done after I witnessed my brothers in Palestine for more than 60 years being killed, and in Iraq they are being killed, and in Afghanistan they are being killed, and the American missiles and raids killed 17 women and 23 children in my tribe; thus, don’t ask me whether al-Qaeda killed, or if it bombed an American civil jet after all of that, as three hundred Americans are nothing before the thousands of Muslims they killed.

Q. You supported [alleged Fort Hood shooter] Nidal Hasan and you justified it that the target is military and not civic. In regards to the jet [incident] of Omar Farooq it is a civic jet; meaning, the targets are the American public?

A. If the jet was military or the target was for the American army, it would be better. And, al-Qaeda Organization has its choices, and in regards to the public, the American populace is living within a democratic regime and they hold the responsibility of its policies; the American populace elected the criminal Bush for two presidential runs, and they elected Obama who’s not different from Bush, and one of his first declarations were that he will not abandon Israel despite that there were other candidates in the American elections who oppose the foreign American wars and those only received low percentages of the total votes. The American populace is a participant in all the crimes of their government, but if they weren’t supportive of that then they should change their government; they are the ones who pay taxes that are being spent on the army and they are who send their children to the army; they carry the responsibility.

Q. Do you believe that the Yemeni Government is facilitating your assassination?

A. The Yemeni government sells its own citizens to America in order to eat bloody money it received from the west, with their blood. The Yemeni officials say to the Americans: attack whatever you desire but do not adopt the actions thereof in order to not have people revolt against us, and with total impertinence the Yemeni government adopts it. For example, the Cruise Missiles were seen by the people in the region in Shabwa and Abeen and Arhab, and the some of the Cluster Bombs remained undetonated and people saw them. The state is lying in its claims, and the state adopted the operation in order to refute the accusation of being a cooperative. The American surveillance jets always revolve in the Yemeni sphere; so what is this country that allows its enemy to eavesdrop on its people and invade their privacies, then considers this cooperation accepted?

"King of Pork" John Murtha Dead at 77.

John Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Committee who was considered one of the most corrupt members of Congress, died today.

The Defense Appropriations subcommittee is perhaps the most powerful in the House, funding not just the world’s biggest military, but the U.S. intelligence community as well.

President Obama signed the $636 billion 210 Defense appropriations bill into law in December. In it, Taxpayers for Common Sense counted 1,720 earmarks totalling $4.2 billion.

As chairman, Murtha cleaned up with 23 earmarks worth $76.5 billion.

With so much power and money flowing through it, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has become fertile ground for corruption on both sides of the aisle. One of its more infamous members was another Vietnam war hero like Murtha, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif.

With Murtha gone, the lobbyists and defense contractors who fed at his trough for so many years are in mourning. At the top of that heap is lobbyist Paul Magliochetti, a former Murtha aide whose PMA Group was raided last year.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania will also need to find another sponsor for all the pet projects nurtured for years by Murtha, the representative since 1974. Things like the National Drug Intelligence Center. Or the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. Or the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.

The FBI captured Murtha’s bare-knuckled performance on videotape in 1980 during an undercover sting aimed at exposing corrupt lawmakers. Murtha turned down 50,000 cash from the representative for a phony Arab sheikh, but not before adding, “After we’ve done some business, I might change my mind.”

Murtha was never charged with a crime, and in Congress, Speaker Tip O’Neill protected Murtha, as George Crile revealed in Charlie Wilson’s War. Wilson shut down the House Ethics Committee’s probe before a special prosecutor could move on Murtha.

When Murtha was in the running for majority leader in the fall of 2006, someone leaked a copy of the FBI videotape to The American Spectator. (See here.)

Coughlin Stoia and the Angelides Commission (Updated)

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Buried at the end of a WSJ story today are more revelations about the close ties between a San Diego law firm and former California Treasurer Phil Angelides, who chairs the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins’ filed suit in July 2006 against UnitedHealth Group on behalf of CalPERS, the giant California pension fund.

A month later, Coughlin Stoia and its attorneys contributed $107,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of Phil Angelides, who was a member of Calpers’s board.

Asked whether the donations were related to the hiring of the law firm, a spokeswoman for Mr. Angelides declined to say, but said that Mr. Angelides “was one of a number of members of the Calpers board and he had tens of thousands of donations during the eight years he was treasurer.”

The UnitedHealth suit was settled in August for $925 million. Calpers’s share of that came to $3.2 million.

The legal fee was $65 million. Most of it went to Coughlin Stoia.

Angelides received about $250,000 in total contributions for his failed gubernatorial campaign in 2006 from Coughlin Stoia lawyers:

  • Byron Georgiou, a commissioner on the Angelides panel, is of counsel to Coughlin Stoia, serving as the “primary liaison” with a number of the firm’s main institutional clients.
  • Georgiou, who’s based in Las Vegas, gave $44,600 to Angelides for Governor, according to campaign finance records.
  • Nearly half of that came after Coughlin Stoia was picked to represent CalPERS in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.

Christopher Seefer, a Coughlin Stoia partner, was appointed by Angelides to serve as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s assistant director and deputy general counsel.

Coughlin Stoia was formed in 2004 when the high-profile securities-litigation firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach split up.

Bill Lerach was sentenced to two years in prison for paying cash kickbacks to plaintiffs in an effort to gain control of big lawsuits and win larger fees in 150 cases over 20 years. His partner in crime, Melvyn Weiss, got two and a half years.

The James S. Copley "Library"

Kudos to David Copley for selling the private $15 million rare book and manuscript collection his parents amassed.

The James S. Copley Library served virtually no one in San Diego.

It was a world-class collection locked away inside the headquarters of the Copley Press, the private company that published The San Diego Union-Tribune and other newspapers.

It could have and should have been used to inspire and educate future newspaper readers.

That, apparently, wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of David’s mother, Helen Copley, who commissioned the library as a  monument for her late husband.

Only now is it becoming clear just how incredible a collection it was:

  • One of a few surviving broadside Declarations of Independence printed in the weeks after July 4, 1776 (estimated value $600,000-$800,000)
  • A significant collection of papers and correspondence belonging to Henry Strachey, Secretary to the British Commission for Restoring Peace in America (est. $700,000/1.2 million)
  • Abraham Lincoln instructing General McClellan to either attack Richmond or come back to defend Washington (est. $500/700,000)
  • A listing by Father Junipero Serra on March 1, 1777 of all of the missions he founded in Alta California (est. $250/350,000)
  • Walt Whitman writing his mother in 1864 about Grant, Lee and the Battle of the Wilderness (est.
    $18/25,000)
  • Mark Twain’s unpublished manuscript, “A Family Sketch”; an intimate and introspective memoir of his family and his own boyhood days (est. $120/160,000)
  • Albert Einstein’s autograph speech delivered to the California Institute Associates on 25 January 1932 (est.
    $40/60,000)

Here’s hoping that the future owners of this incredible collection are more public-minded.

Where's Alan?

The nomination of Alan D. Bersin, a former U.S. Attorney and schools chief in San Diego, seems to have gotten hung up in the Senate.

President Obama nominated Bersin to be Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection back on Sept. 29th.  There’s been no action since then.

Bersin’s nomination was received by the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Customs.

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the committee chairman, apparently sees no urgency in scheduling a hearing for the head of an agency with a priority mission of preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. 

Meanwhile, Bersin continues to serve as DHS Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs. He held virtually the same job in the Clinton administration while serving as U.S. Attorney for San Diego.

Before joining DHS, Bersin was California’s education secretary.