Response to questions raised in last blog entry

This short little blog is in response to the person who posted the questions in regards to my last blog entry entitled “Karbala, and what could have been.”

(see the comment post and questions in full here)

Question number one: I assume that you are asking me if I support Obama or McCain and / or whether or not I think that either one of the two will bring about a change. And again, I can only assume here that you mean for the better.

Well, here it goes for whatever it’s worth. If you ask me, the United States hasn’t been a true democracy since who knows when. I am highly uninformed when it comes to politics, the electoral process, etc… But I think that it would be extremely naive to think that the “powers that be” would allow a man to become the president who wasn’t in league with them regarding their plans, agendas, and what not. I mean really, think about it. A lot of planning and manipulations were needed to justify the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the whole so called war on terror in general. It took a tremendous amount of effort into pulling the wool over the eyes of an entire nation as has been done here in the U.S. I hate to give the fuckers any credit, but whoever concocted this whole bullshit fantasy that allows the United States to attack whomever they want, whenever they want, and to do it in a way that even blatant lies later go unchallenged, is damn near a genius in my eyes. And throw on top of that the fact that people, human beings, can be kidnapped from third party nations, held indefinitely without charges, and then rot away in cells without even the right to legal council, it’s enough to make you think that we are back in the dark ages, which honestly, I believe that if we aren’t yet, then we will be soon, and I mean very soon.

So, back to the question, no, I do not support either Obama nor McCain, nor any other candidate for that matter. I believe that whoever is elected will continue to be a figurehead for whoever is really calling the shots back stage. As to who “they” are calling the shots, well, I will leave that for you to decide. There are many more people out there who know a lot more facts than I do. I will leave it up to them to figure out who “they” are. I have my own theories and opinions but until I can prove them I prefer to keep them to myself. But I promise the world this; that the day I can prove who they are, and why they are bent on destroying the world as we know it, I will make it known in a heart beat. Until then…you get the point.

Question number two: I guess that I already answered this one to some extent in the answer to question number one, i.e., the kidnapping of people from third party countries and holding them indefinitely without so much as legal representation. Just the very idea of this is wrong on so many different levels that I don’t even know where to begin. I ask the following question with the utmost sincerity and humility; Does anybody out there really believe that it is right, whether morally, legally, however you want to put it, to simply kidnap a man from a country that isn’t even his, treat him in the most inhuman ways possible, and then lock him up in yet another country, well actually a military base, and hold him indefinitely with no rights whatsoever? Come on now; tell the truth if you are honest with yourself.

First of all, look at it this way. Let’s say that you have a man in Afghanistan who is fighting against coalition soldiers. He is from whatever country, again, let’s just say Egypt. According to the Geneva Convention, if this man was wearing some kind of uniform that made him recognizable as belonging to whatever guerilla formation that he belonged to, and after all, terrorist, terrorist organization, terrorism, these are all semantics used in place of what the man really was, and that’s a guerrilla soldier. Nobody is saying that that makes it right; I am simply clarifying what the man really was by definition of the Geneva Convention, like the Viet Cong in Vietnam. Furthermore, if this man had a commander who ultimately could be held accountable for the mans actions, then under the Geneva Convention this man is considered an enemy soldier and therefore afforded the rights of any prisoner of war, which the people being held in Gitmo are not. What’s more is that if the man was a guerilla soldier fighting in Afghanistan then it seems logical to me for the Afghan authorities to deal with him; as in his arrest, detention, charges, his trial, and ultimately his sentence and punishment if found guilty of specific crimes. Whatever the man is accused of happened on Afghan soil; therefore it is one hundred percent within Afghan jurisdiction.

So how on Gods green earth does this man end up in U.S. custody, transferred (kidnapped) to Gitmo, or any one of the other secret or not so secret detention facilities that we all know exist, like Abu Ghraib, and held “indefinitely?”

Even if there were a strong case against our hypothetical man here, and there was reason for him to be extradited to the U.S., then the U.S. would have to go through the extradition process like all modern civilized nations do. And this process would start by Afghanistan first deporting the man to his native country, and then there would have to be an extradition treaty between the U.S. and whatever country that the man is from, and then the process would proceed from there. But you can’t just bypass the whole procedure that every other nation on earth would have to abide by just because you are the United States of America. That’s just down right dirty. And we are supposed to be the ones with the moral high ground? Yeah right.

Now, the above statements by no means cover all the cases and circumstances that led every individual into the confines of Gitmo or wherever. Some are far more complicated than others obviously. And I am not saying that the U.S. doesn’t have a right to defend it’s self. Hell, if anything, where others might be against the use of torture I might actually support it, believe it or not, if the end truly justifies the means. As in if lives are going to be lost if a certain individual doesn’t talk, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. But we all know when torture can be justified and when it’s just down right bullshit.

So I guess really that my answer to question number two is that there is a right way to do something, and then there is the wrong way. And Guantanamo Bay isn’t one of the right ways. And for all of you reading this shaking your head saying what a load of shit, I ask you this, why then when we had a chance to infiltrate UBL’s inner circle and possibly do his ass if need be, we DIDN’T! Answer me that first before you shake your head at anything that I say. The problem that is called Usama Bin Laden, if he truly is the source of the problem, could have been dealt with long before people were losing their lives, whether to airplanes flying into buildings, or truck bombs going off behind embassies.

I’m waiting, you geniuses that were shaking your heads, for the answer to that one. If you can provide me with the answer I will be the first one to rethink some of the things that I say. So we’ll see…

Question number three: No, it doesn’t surprise me at all that there are mercs from the places that you mentioned, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia fighting covert wars in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq.

Serbs are Slavic. They have demonstrated their utter and complete contempt and hatred for the Muslims of the world, much like their Slavic brothers, the Russians, first in Bosnia, then in Kosova, and now as mercenaries in Chechnya (against the Chechens of course), and Kashmir. And here once again is an example of the biased nature of the so-called journalistic world. So-called because a journalist is supposed to be neutral, an unbiased outsider simply reporting the facts as he or she sees them so that the rest of the world can stay informed. Yet time and again this isn’t the case. How many of you reading this remember Sebrenicia? But be quick about it, no cheating and looking it up online. Right now as you read this think to yourself what happened in Sebrenicia. Are you drawing a blank? If you’re not, and you remember, then I commend you. But if you have forgotten, or never knew in the first place, I blame the media for that.

How is it, that in this day and age, up to EIGHT THOUSAND innocent civilians could be slaughtered in the course of 24 hours, and even worse, using the old fashioned way of lining them up and machine gunning them into giant pits? I mean any way that you’re killed is a bad way, but to me it just seems a little different to say that x number of people were killed in a bomb blast, or a rocket attack, or whatever. It’s not that it changes the tragedy any, it just seems easier to ignore I guess. Not for me, but I guess maybe for the average person listening to the news, I don’t know. But to say that eight thousand people, an entire city basically, were rounded up, which must have taken hours, then sorted into groups, and then finally gunned down in rows as the next batch watched, to me that is some really heavy shit to comprehend. Look back to what happened in Azerbaijan in ’91 or ’92, the Russians rolled into downtown Baku with their tanks and gunned down something like three hundred people. To me, that’s even hard to deal with.

Then what about the Kurds that Sadam Hussein killed with the chemical weapons, what was it, like five thousand? And then of course our own tragedy here in the U.S., Sept. 11. But even that was only three thousand plus. What I’m saying here is that it just seems to change the way that you view a tragedy. To me I would think that three thousand people killed all at once instantly is easier to digest for the average person than eight thousand people over the course of a 24 hour saga filled with scenes as if it were the Apocalypse its self. Yet, when the Sebrenicia massacre took place in 1995, I myself hardly remember the media making much of a fuss over it. It was almost as if the incident was one of those back page article type of stories, like, “and by the way, today eight thousand Muslims were slaughtered by Serbian forces in Sebrenicia, and now on to today’s real headlines.”

Yet when an event takes place where Muslims were the perpetrators, not only is it sure to make every front page and headline, the journalists are so quick to remind us how one incident perpetrated by a handful of Muslim bad guys is evidence that the entire religion of Islam is flawed and must be eradicated. Case in point, the infamous Ann Coulter. Her solution for the “war on terror” is to quote ‘invade all of the Muslim countries, kill their leaders, and force the rest of the population to convert to Christianity or face death’ end quote. But again, the Serbian CHRISTIAN forces that slaughtered eight thousand Muslims in Sebrenicia did not reflect on Christianity one iota. Nor did the Orthodox Christian priests riding into battle on the tops of tanks in Chechnya, only to look the other way once a village was entered by the Russian soldiers and the raping and killing began, reflect on Christianity. Nor did individuals like Timothy McVeigh’s actions, who was a Christian, reflect on the religion. Nor do all of the wackos who blow up abortion clinics in the name of God reflect on Christianity. But even when a Palestinian Nationalist, who happens to be Christian by faith, and yes, many Palestinians are Christians, blows something up in the name of Palestine, not the name of Allah, somehow even this is translated into Islamic terrorism by the media.

Point being that everybody has bad guys. Every country, every group, every religion. Muslims by far are no exception to this rule. But you have to call it like you see it. Eight thousand lives lost are not any less tragic just because they are Muslims. But apparently in the medias eyes this is exactly the case.

How is this related to question number three? I’m not sure myself, but I think that the point that I was trying to make is that it doesn’t surprise me that there are Serbian mercenaries working in Chechnya and Kashmir. And it surprises me even less that you don’t hear about this in the media. Yet we have all heard the stories of supposed Chechen mercenaries in Iraq. It’s all about the spin game. Just once I would like to see the events of the world told like they happened, without an agenda and without putting a spin on it. I think that the world might become a much different place, and definitely for the better.

Question number four: As to Australian troops making a difference in the war on terror. That’s one that I can’t really answer. If anything maybe staying out of it would actually help things. Once people wake up and realize that the so-called war on terror is not really a war on terror but a war with an agenda, a big business agenda, and once people realize that this isn’t about “Islam versus the West”, and people will realize that when America loses all of it’s support and is left standing alone still bleating about the war on terror, yet the rest of the “western world” can coincide in peace with Islam and the Muslim people of the world, then, and only then will a “difference” be made.

So, my anonymously posting friend, I hope that I was able to answer your questions. Also, as for the rest of you, please bear with me as a finish writing something that I would like all of you to read regarding the world of prosthetics. Lately, it has been weighing on me the fact that so many young American soldiers are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan missing limbs. The world of prosthetics isn’t one that you want to stumble into alone and unprepared. Yeah, to a certain extent it takes will power and all that stuff to overcome an injury like getting a leg or an arm blown off, but you can also say that missing a limb is one of the injuries where all the will power in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere without the right equipment. It’s kind of like saying that you are determined to win the Indy 500 with a Ford Focus. Dream about it all you want, but it just isn’t going to happen, end of story. Prosthetics are a lot like that. You can have all the will power possible and a positive attitude to boot, but get paired up with a shitty leg or a crappy arm and you are going to loose your determination real quick.

In my next blog I want to talk about the ups and downs of the prosthetic world and how if you don’t inform yourself you are going to have a hard time when you get fitted with a prosthesis that holds you back instead of allowing you to get back to normal life. So keep checking back for my next blog. I also have some pictures of my new leg that totally kicks ass, or at least will kick ass when and if I can walk again. So until then.

Karbala, and what could have been...

When a person applies for a new job what happens? Usually, (and I am probably the least knowledgeable person on the face of the earth regarding actual “Jobs”), you fill out a resume, schedule an appointment, and then interview for the job. Am I close here? 

So, what if for example, you were to apply for a job in which you had years of experience in that particular field? Let’s say also that your resume was filled with some very impressive information, perhaps you had worked with some of the best in the industry (my hypothetical industry that I am making up here), you had more experience than most others in that industry, and your work to date had never been questioned. Also, you had never been disciplined at any time during your previous job. But, you had done something kind of bad. Let’s say that at your old job your supervisor whom you worked very well with took another position at one of your companies other locations. Then, your new supervisor turns out to be a major asshole who is not only incompetent at his job, but he also doesn’t like you because of your religion and he wants to push his religion on you. So then Mr. Born Again starts implying that you aren’t doing your job right, and that maybe even you aren’t performing well enough. Yet up until that point your work had never been criticized or questioned and your former supervisor had always given you high marks. So finally you tell your new supervisor, “you know what, if you think that you have something against me then bring it now, if not then fuck you.” At the same time you tell his boss and the general manager of that whole company, “if you aren’t going to stand up for me here then fuck you to.” And then you walk out.

Now, was that the best career move ever made? Obviously not. But, does that make you any less capable at your job or make you unreliable in your field? Fuck no! So then what if you go down and apply for a new job with a different company and now suddenly they don’t want to hire you. Again, you’ve never been accused of stealing from your old company, being lazy or inept, and most importantly other than telling your bosses to fuck off you never did anything to harm their company, and you can even say that you had made a lot of personal sacrifices for your job.

So enough hypothetical bullshit, you get the point, right? Now move forward, or actually back, to the year 2003. The United States was getting ready to invade Iraq, to anybody with any common sense this was an absurd idea. Other than being a second rate dictator that did some fucked up things to his own people, what threat did Saddam actually pose to the world? I am writing this to tell my own personal story about what would have been my role in the war, so I’m not going to get into all of the lies that have now been discovered in regards to the days and months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, but I urge you to do your own research on this subject. Hello, what ever happened to the weapons of mass destruction? The Al Qaeda links? Anybody? Just yesterday somebody forwarded me an article that I have posted the link for. It appears, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least, that Judith Miller and the New York Times actually bears a considerable share of the weight for creating the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq. At any rate, you read this article and decide for your self:

 “Not fit to print: How Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby used New York Times reporter Judith Miller to make the case for invasion.”

But I had my own run-in with this journalist Judith Miller back in 2002. I was doing a Fox and Friends Live show in New York when my publisher called me and told me to wait around after the Fox and Friends interview. I had something to do that day and I told my publisher no. Aside from whatever it was that I had to do, I had heard about this unscrupulous woman Judith Miller and I didn’t want anything to do with her. This created a major fight with my publishers, they threatened me and I threatened them. They told me that if I didn’t do the interview with her then I was in breach of contract. I told them that if they forced me to do the interview then I would come out and say that the whole book was a lie. Eventually my editor got involved and tried to be the voice of reason and he convinced me that the interview would be good for the book. I still didn’t believe it but ended up giving in. Why I gave in I don’t know. I was very much against giving out free information so that somebody else could write a book or newspaper article based off my information that had cost me my own blood and sweat to gather.

And that’s exactly what it turned out to be. I asked Judith Miller straight out what she planned to do with our “interview” and she told me that she was writing an article but that she promised to plug my book. I later saw the article and the information that I had given her and there wasn’t hide nor hair of a mention about Aukai Collins or the book My Jihad. It would be a disservice to my self if I didn’t take this chance to say: “Judith Miller, you are a bitch of the first class.”

 

Anyway, on with the story. Seeing at the time that the looming war was based mainly on bullshit created by the above mentioned writer as well as others in the government I felt that it was my duty to get involved. I mean after all, this was my line of work, and most importantly it involved my country this time. It greatly bothered me to think that soon some young American kids were going to be going to fight a war that they knew nothing about, against an enemy that although they lacked the technological superiority that we had, would not hesitate to chew up and mutilate our troops if given the chance. So it was with this in mind that I put forth the following proposal.

I had been friends with a young Iraqi guy named Qasim for quite some time at that point. Qasim was an ex-Republican guard soldier that had fled Iraq during the first Gulf War. Qasim was also from a very large influential family in the city of Karbala, some seventy odd miles south west of Baghdad. His family were Shia that carried the family name Al-Sayed which in Arabic means descended from the prophet. When I came to the realization that the war was going to go through despite all of the obvious lies and disinformation it just felt stupid to sit around and do nothing. If the war couldn’t be avoided then maybe at the very least something could be done to lessen the casualties on both sides.

First I contacted one of my former employers. Despite having told the bosses to fuck off, I naively thought at that point that it wouldn’t cause me any problems in the future in terms of me doing my part so to speak, if my services were needed then what was the difference right? So I put the plan forward. My proposal was very simply and to the point. Qasim and I had made arraignments to travel to Syria through some contacts that we both had, arm up there, and then cross the border into Iraq. From there we planned to enter Karbala discreetly, after having of course sent word to his family, and prepare some of the guys, mostly his cousins, in Karbala to provide whatever service that they could for the U.S. forces that would be advancing through that area on the way to Baghdad. All that I asked for was the actual money to get us there. I didn’t even try to profit off the damn thing. All I asked for was enough to get to Syria and then a little bit of money for gear and other stuff on the ground. We’re talking about less than twenty thousand dollars here, a fraction of the cost than what it supposedly takes to feed a hundred troops for a couple of weeks. (Haliburton charges the military something like ninety bucks per meal to feed U.S. troops, you do the math.)

As was my response to my offer in helping to find Daniel Pearl before he was killed, I was simply ignored regarding the Iraq proposal as if I were some crank off the street. So next I went to private sources. I had this retarded idea that Soldier of Fortune magazine might actually like to get a real inside story for once, seeing as they had become some third rate magazine that couldn’t even afford to answer their phones anymore. But to no avail on that angle either. I was told by a former editor that worked for SOF at the time that Robert K. Brown had just taken some girl on vacation so all of SOF’s funds were tied up at the time.

So I went back to my former employers and pushed the subject. That’s when I got really pissed off. These fuckers has the audacity to tell me that I of all people should understand why having me on the ground over in Iraq would make some of the brass very nervous. Are you kidding me! Look, let’s all look at this in perspective. I fought the Russian army in Chechnya. Not only was that the right thing to do, it had nothing to do with the United States. After that I served my country in the intelligence field. I risked my head, literally, on many an occasion at the order of the FBI and at times the CIA. I now have a price on my head in some places of the world for the work that I did to protect the United States. So how in the world could my presence in Iraq drumming up support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq amongst the Shiites of Karbala possible “worry” anybody. I ask you, the reader, to comment on this, lets have an open forum so to speak.

Keep things in perspective. I would be in Iraq ahead of U.S. forces with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of American strategy, plans, intelligence, etc. I wasn’t asking the U.S. military to tell me what route they were going to be using to get to the capitol, Baghdad. I wasn’t asking for the coordinates of any U.S. or coalition force whereabouts. I simply wanted to have an armed group of Shiites in the area of Karbala waiting to welcome U.S. forces and then in turn do what ever was asked of them. Like the so-called philosophy nowadays, let the Iraqi’s handle their own problems. This group of Qasims friends and family could have been used in any number of roles, from forward reconnaissance, as translators, to actually sending them ahead and letting them fight first thereby saving American kids from dying in a war that wasn’t theirs to begin with. I challenge you to find something wrong with this plan. Not the fine details of it, but just as a general plan. I truly believe that a force like I am talking about, combined with other similar forces could have reduced the blood shed considerably, on both sides.

So why was I turned down, and if you say liability I will scream. Bullshit! My M.O. has never been against my own country. And just like the parable that I drew at the beginning of this blog, simply telling a couple of assholes to fuck off does not warrant being black listed, when the services that you can provide are of an extremely important and valuable nature.

So what else? Am I unqualified for such an undertaking? I dare you to say that even more than the above dare. I was crossing the Iraqi border from Jordan back in 1996 before it was in fad. While I was in Amman waiting for surgery I found some guys that were taking a 4x4 and crossing the border through the desert so as to avoid the bandits that were working the main highways. They would fill up this little Nissan Patrol with shoes, medicine, food, just whatever they could scrounge up and run it into Iraq. This was at a time when I don’t think an American would have been a welcome site to the Iraqi authorities. But I did it.

Also, nowadays I laugh when I read websites like Black Water and International Executives where they have these classes to supposedly teach the big time commandos who graduate from their ultra ninja courses on how to blend in with the locals and not do anything offensive to the Islamic people of the area that they are planning to work in. Point being here is that if anybody was qualified for such an undertaking back in 2003 it was me.

So once again, I ask you why? Following that I still persisted in trying to do my part in both wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, by trying to come up with ways to lessen casualties on both sides. In the early days of the Afghan invasion I saw that there was a big problem right off the bat. Afghan warlords, like the criminal and pedophile Rashid Dustom, were playing American forces like a violin. Calls were coming in all the time about supposed Taliban sightings. American troops would swoop down on some village in the mountains, lose a few troops, kill some Afghan civilians, and then find out that there were no Taliban, only some armed militia of a rival warlord. So, there to I offered to volunteer. What was there to lose by having an experienced individual roaming around the mountains of Afghanistan with a satellite phone that he just happened to find under a rock reporting any real Taliban troop movements, thereby saving lives on both sides yet again? Or at least if lives were going to be lost then let it be over the right thing and not because some warlord was playing you.

 To be continued.

 (Note: Check back with this blog again later to see a video podcast in which Aukai talks about the actions he took to try to prevent Daniel Pearl’s death. Few people know the whole story of his personal experiences with Omar Saeed Sheikh and Aukai’s offer via the FBI to assist in the case. )

Aukai Collins - now on MySpace

To those who utilize social networks as a means of communication, you can now visit and speak with Aukai here also:

http://www.myspace.com/aukaicollins

(excerpt from Aukai's myspace site)

I resisted the urge to put up a myspace page for quite some time. But then somebody reminded me that just about the whole world has one up now, and since I am such a slave to fads, (NOT!), I just had to get in on the action. Actually I did some research first. I checked out Ben Affleck's site, remember folks, I told him and I quote here "don't marry the bitch," but did he listen to me? Of course not. Then there was his little brother who took a small town girl from Connecticut, flew her to the big city, Los Angles, flattered her plain ass to just the right degree and managed to walk out of the deal with my movie rights (this was a long time ago). Worst part of it all was that Casey thought that he was going to use my book as the vehicle to take him up a notch in his career. He actually though that he was going to play me. Casey Affleck! Yeah right, and I'm going to play Barbara Streisand.

So what does that have to do with this blog and myspace in general? Absolutely nothing. From confused minds come confused products. But I did want to say this. I saw that a lot of people out there in myspace land have my book, My Jihad, listed on their pages. It's kind of for you guys that I put up a myspace page. I want to hear your thoughts on my book. I also want to hear your thoughts about our current predicament in general. Do you guys think that we stand a chance as a people, and I mean like as in the human race when I say that, or all we all doomed because of the lies and actions of a small ignorant man from Texas that has a comprehension of the English language equivalent to that of a not so bright third grader?

Seven years have passed now since a day that forever changed our world. The "bad guys" of the world are no worse off now than they were before even though war has been declared on them. The true baddies that sit in their caves somewhere plotting to bring down freedom and democracy are still just as much at it as ever. In the mean time a lot of innocent people have died on all sides. Whether some PFC from a small town in Idaho who was blown up just trying to do his job, or some ten year old child from Jalabad who died when his whole house was vaporized by a two thousand pound bomb. I see a very long trail of blood and not a whole hell of a lot to show for it. There was a time when, and I will use the word "we" instead of "I" just so you don't think that I am full of shit, could have removed the man who is allegedly responsible for so much death and destruction in the world. But I, oops, I mean we, was told to stay away from him. Sit back and ask yourself why that was? Because I for one would like to be the first one to know.

If I have confused you or you simply want to learn more about what I am saying here, or maybe what I am not saying here, then come by my website and I will fill you in on a few things. Even in a modern day court room they say that ignorance is not an acceptable excuse under the law. Do you think that it is any more so on that day when you meet your maker? Very bad things are being done in the world. If we as a people, the human race of people, expect to do anything about it then the first step is to understand what is going on. Once we all figure out how a passport, that was in somebodies clothing, who in turn was inside of an airplane that in turn was vaporized on impact with a very tall building, could then be found intact on the rubble strewn street below, once we figure that out then maybe we can start to figure out how to survive this gigantic mess that we are all quickly becoming entangled in.

Hunter Offroad

Those of you out there reading this who hail from the Phoenix/Tempe area, I have another recommendation for you. Check this out:

Way back when, probably like in the year 2000, I was eating at Jack in the Box with my son when he looked up and yelled “look at that daddy!” Sure enough, sitting in the parking lot in front of the store was the most bad-assed vehicle that I had ever seen. At that moment it was empty but I waited until the driver came out to get back into his super rig.

 

After introducing myself I asked the owner, turns out his name was John, what exactly this thing in front of me was. Back then he called it Zeus. It had the body of a sand rail type dune buggy, but it was built on a Chevy truck platform. Zeus had a number of incredible features, there were four custom bucket seats for the passengers, and the rear area of the truck had mounts for an emergency litter basket, those emergency baskets that you see people being hauled up the side of a mountain in if they had just driven off of a cliff in an accident. For me it was love at first site, with the truck, not John, and so began my relationship with John at Hunter Off Road.

 

A few years later as I was getting ready for The Great Mexico Debacle” as I have taken to calling it, and I had a sudden and urgent need to have a frontal defense system installed on my 1995 Isuzu Trooper 4x4. When I say frontal defense system I am not just using a fancy term for a brush guard. I needed something that would clear the road for me if a couple of Ford F-150’s operated by the cartels down in Mexico decided to block the road to keep me from escaping an ambush. I even demanded that the frontal defense system be capable of breaking through a brick wall if it was absolutely necessary. More importantly I needed it done by the next day and it was then about 3:00 in the afternoon. Just about any other company on earth would have told me to go get bent.

 

Well, the frontal defense system, aka “the devils horns” as the Mexicans would later come to call it, never did get to break through any brick walls. It did, however, demolish the front end of a Mexican State Police “Ford Lobo”, or F-150 as they call them down there, during the ambush that I will describe in another post. Basically one of the Ford Lobos rammed me head on in an attempt to stop me. Aside from barely scratching my paint, the cop driving the Ford F-150 not only didn’t stop me, he totaled the front end of his truck. I would have gotten through what actually did turn out to be an ambush thanks to John’s work, but the cops were smart enough to aim about six or seven AR-15’s at my tires. While gearing up for the mission I couldn’t afford the run flat tires that I had wanted to outfit my Isuzu Trooper with, so the party was over when all four of my tires were blown out, along with a shit load of rounds into the body of the Trooper itself. Again, the details of the above mentioned foray will be related at a later date, but the work that John had done for me can be seen on my Trooper in the video below. Pay close attention at the :07 through :09 second marks of the video and you will see Hunter Off Roads’ work in fairly decent detail.

 

 

Visit www.Hunteroffroad.com, and go to the “pics” section on the sight to see some of their amazing work. The picture shown at the top of this entry is the current incarnation of the original “Zeus” that I fell in love with eight years ago. John is now calling it the “War Wagon”, Tactical Off Road Vehicle. Ask John and he will tell you; the day that I become rich I am going to buy that truck. I’ve been telling him that for eight years now but someday it will happen… wait and see.

Anyway, John at HUNTER OFFROAD is a true master at what he does. If you can come up with an idea for your 4x4, John will make sure that it comes to life. Or, if you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and you aren’t sure what you want, but you just know that you want the sickest looking 4x4 in town, then hit up John and he’ll do the thinking for you.

Chechen Rap

Had to share this - 
Check out this song and video by Chechen rappers - DJIGIT. This song is "Kuralo"

(from DJIGIT's website) 

In the year 1996, DJIGIT wrote his first rap song condemning the war in which Chechnya was still entangled with a much higher power, Russia. In 2000 he made his first breakthrough among the Chechens with Welcome to Hell. The song was about injustice and genocide of Russian towards their historical enemies, the Chechens. He was the first rapper who stoodup for his nation in his Lyrics, still remaining the only MC who is fearless of speaking the truth. By now DJIGIT was well known among the Chechen underground rappers, so that in 2003 he was joined by a talanted young DJ, RMX, who contributed alot to the DJIGIT band. In May of 2004 his rap video KOFERI was recognized through the internet media as a huge success for which DJIGIT band gained much of his popularity outside the Chechen nation. The DJIGIT band was now unstopable. However DJIGIT was not content with merely song writing, the band was aiming for professional music videos. The proved themselves capable of this by suprising the Chechen communities with the video called TB, translated as 'stabbing in the back'. The video revealed the true DJIGIT character. It showed that DJIGIT himself was aware of the enemies of the Chechen state and that he couldn't care less about their power. Obviously the message was clear and the video marked a victory for the DJIGIT band. Now their rap songs and videos were available underground and sold on the Chechen markets illegally, DJIGIT was more eager to spread his message, therefore he wrote 'Kuralo', as DJIGIT himself translates the title to 'Superiority.'Kuralo' the most recent and scandalous music video the band ever made, was completed on the first of January 2006. DJIGIT calls it as ''the new year present to all ''Chechophobs'', those who are afraid to call themselves Chechen." 'Kuralo' was not accepted by the chechen population with arms stretched, as the video was very critical of the so called Chechens who behaved themselves otherwise. Especially in Moscow, the Capital of Russia, where the Chechens, apart from in Chechnya itself, are most dominant, they considered the video as targeting them. As a result the DJIGIT band had to endure lots of criticism. Many Chechen sites were full of comments concerning the video. After 'Kuralo' DJIGIT decided to speak his thoughts in a language the whole world would understand, English. Download songs at: http://djigit.googlepages.com/audio

Ocean Beach RiffRaff (by Dominique Mainon)

Hello everyone, 

This is Dominique Mainon again. Thought I would just share with you a funny video I took of Aukai one night in Ocean Beach. 

We set out to do an interview at his mother's old hangout, The Sunshine Company in Ocean Beach, California, in which we would discuss some of his early life, specifically about his mother.

We will still explore that and soon show you some pictures of Aukai as a child and his mother and family. But for now you can see how this interview degenerated due to the "Ocean Beach Effect" that seems to be somewhat prevalent on that row. Includes a cameo from a baby possum.

Note: If any of you are fans of the show South Park, then you will  understand our homage to their episode "Night of the Living Homeless" - definitely a must-see! (Full episode is downloadable on itunes for devoted fans, just click below)

Liberty and justice for all???

I have been writing and rewriting this stupid blog like a junior high school kid with a love letter. Nothing is coming out the way that I want it to sound so I’m just going to get on with it and let you decide how it is. 

Having said that, the other problem is that it’s a sad day when a person has to think twice about what they say or how they say it in regards to their own government. I swear to God, I never would have thought that I would be saying that in the good ‘ole United States. I mean come on, that’s the kinda shit that people living under Soviet rule had to deal with. Or like people that lived in Albania under that little freak Enver Hoxha, where if you criticized him you were breaking the law. And now here, in the land of apple pie and fake tits, ignorant little men that to me have a gnomish look, minus the beard, say things like “you are either with us or against us.” Well damn, what if I simply don’t agree? Does that mean that I have to be necessarily against you? Isn’t it my right to agree or disagree? And even be critical if I want?

 

From what I know and have seen and read, this isn’t the case anymore. It reminds me of a conversation that I once had with an older man in Arizona. We were discussing the militias, and also just your average citizen, that felt the need to keep a loaded rifle and an Alice Pack next to their beds. The man said that this was nonsense in regards to the day that our own government would turn against us. He likened this to the “crazies”, as he called them, of the 50’s and 60’s that felt the need to build nuclear bomb shelters under their house. The man said that in every generation there was a threat, always unsubstantiated, that people were afraid of. He was mainly basing this loose theory off the idea that just because World War III never happened, and on that one the games not over yet anyway, anyone who prepared for it was one of the crazies. He was basically saying that people have always been afraid of some conspiracy or another, but that in the end there weren’t any Boogie Men in the closet, so everything is always going to be just peachy. 

Now I look back on that conversation and wonder who is the true crazie? In just the last seven years we have seen things happen, and laws made, that had you have told somebody about this a decade ago they would have called you loony for sure. I probably would have been one of the first ones to call you loony. During the late 90’s, while employed by we all know who, I was on this major America is the greatest place on Earth kick. I would sit there, in foreign countries, and argue the most hardcore “Islamic Radical” into a corner. And I did this on many an occasion. These were the times when people still remembered what the CIA did for the Afghan Mujahideen, and forgot what the CIA didn’t do for the Afghan people. These were the times when, at least in my circles, I rarely encountered a Muslim in the world who viewed the United States as the “Great Satan.” These were the times when a young American kid put on the Woodland pattern BDU’s that he was given in Kashmir and the guys from Harakatul Jihad cheered because he “looked like an American soldier.”

These were also the times when there was what many considered an unwritten truce between the Mujahideen of the world and the “west”, meaning mainly the United States, the UK, Germany, etc. The truce was that they don’t mess around in your backyard and you don’t mess around in theirs. Let them fight the Soviets, and post Soviet regimes, and in return they won’t fight you. Basically, as unbelievable as these words are now, live and let live. Just look at the Bosnian war. There were scores of young Muslims from the UK who not only fought in Bosnia against the Serbs, but who came home to free medical care. In those days the only “Muslims” in the UK talking shit about the west were government provocateurs. At the time it wasn’t understood why these big mouthed people who had never fought anybody, does the name Omar ring a bell, were allowed to talk so much garbage that didn’t make sense to anybody, neither the Muslims nor the government. 

Well back on subject. The point was that a lot of Muslims in the world believed that America was a pretty nice place to live, so why fuck it up? And even more so for those of us that are both, American and Muslim. And then suddenly everything changed, and see I got you there, I wasn’t going to say “with Sept. 11^th” like you thought. Those of us in the know saw the writing on the wall as far back as ’98-’99. Suddenly things began to shift. Three young fighters from some Arab country were picked up in Albania en route to the fight in Kosova, at CIA request, and sent to Egypt were they were unexpectedly executed. This was by far the only incident, and surely one of the less important ones, but I use the example simply because I know that it happened. If you will recall, I too was picked up in Albania that year, and amazingly was accused of having something to do with the Bombings that had taken place in Dar as Salaam and Nairobi. The shift had taken place. I was in Washington D.C. with my bosses when the above mentioned events went down. And to even suggest such a thing would have been to imply direct U.S. Government involvement which is obviously not the case. The point that I am making here is that whoever was behind the shift wasn’t going about it very responsibly. A lot began to change, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure of my own arguments anymore. 

Each time I left the country and reentered in those pivotal couple of years my treatment became worse. During one particularly ridiculous incident of harassment upon coming back from wherever, I almost did what I wasn’t allowed to do by telling them whom I worked for. The Customs people were crossing the line, they obviously didn’t know who I worked for, but did know that I was a Muslim. The treatment wasn’t only unwarranted in my case, it was down right degrading. Again, somebody was changing the way things had been, and we could see that something bad was going down. Then came the big event, Sept. 11^th.

Although shocking, it didn’t come as a surprise. Immediately there were more questions than answers. I am not a 9-11 theorist, and I’m sure that all of you have read both sides of opinions about what happened that day. Some opinions are outrageous, but I think that it would be just as outrageous to simply accept the “facts” at face value. That a hijacker’s passport could survive the inferno that engulfed the planes as they slammed into the buildings, and then flutter unharmed to the rubble below, is as unbelievable as the claim that the American Government was directly behind the events. But just as there are doubts concerning what really happened that day, considering a couple of the supposed hijackers family’s came forth and said “hey, our son died a couple of years ago so why is his face on the news,” so are there in turn doubts as to whether or not a few individuals in the government DID have prior knowledge of what was coming. Outrageous you say? Well what about the fact that the hijackers all had a meeting in Kuala Lumpur prior to Sept. 11^th, and the CIA recorded the meeting? What about the Mossad agents that lived across the street from Muhammad Atta in Florida and no doubt bugged everything that he said while there?

So, is it so outrageous to question whether or not a few individuals could have allowed a major act of terrorism to happen without stopping it to further whatever goals they have? And more importantly, we have to look at how that day not only changed the world, but our lives here in the U.S. as well. And believe it or not, this is where this blog really starts, that was just the prelude. Next, I want to talk about how eleven men, (actually I don’t know the correct number but it’s a large group close to eleven), who all have the same names, and are all on the no-fly list. When the absurdity of it isn’t in the fact that obviously all of the guys with the same name can’t be the same person, the absurdity of it is the fact the original name holder who was a “bad guy” has been dead for some time now. So why isn’t there a system in place where the group of guys can all prove that each one of them isn’t the original bad guy, and thereby fly again. 

Or if a child appears to be on the list, why doesn’t someone have the discretion to say, “ok, this kid must have the same name as some bad guy, so the kid can fly.” Equally as bad is the fact that many people on the no-fly list aren’t bad guys at all and don’t share the same name as some bad guy. There are people who are on the no-fly list who shouldn’t even be on the list to begin with, and they to have no recourse to fight back and fly again.

To be continued...

In the meantime, check out some other people who worked for their country and then ended up on the no-fly list: