arik.org

Attorney General John Aschroft is in town today, to do a little business on the terrorism front. Here's the lead courtesy of the AP:

NEW YORK - A radical Muslim cleric was arrested Thursday in London, accused in a U.S. indictment of trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon while providing aid to both al-Qaida and the Taliban, officials said. ...

Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, also known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, also is charged in the 11-count indictment with hostage-taking and conspiracy in connection with a December 1998 incident that left four tourists dead in Yemen. ...

According to the indictment, Mustafa tried to establish the terrorist camp in Bly, Ore., between October 1999 and early 2000. He was also charged with specifically providing material support to al-Qaida and the Taliban to foment jihad, or holy war, in Afghanistan

Bly, Oregon is nowhere terribly interesting. But it is remote. The actual town is one of those places where at most you'll stop for gas. It has a k-8 school, three stores, a post office, three churches and a gas station...that's about it. Turns out this isn't the first time it has figured in an American military conflict.

Its last moment of notoriety came when it was bombed by the Japanese -- yes the Japanese -- during World War II. Seems Japan had this idea for causing huge forest fires in the American West and floated hydrogen ballons with bombs attached to them. On May 5th, 1945, one of those ballons landed outside Bly. A group of kids found it, and started to mess around with it. The bomb went off and six people, five of them children, died. Here's a first-hand account by a Forest Service Ranger who arrived on the scene after the explosion. From what he says, these six deaths were the only fatalities in the war caused by enemy action within the borders of the 48 contiguous states. Here's more on that incident with more info on the wider Japanese effort to bomb America with balloons.

So back to the current war. Consider this phrase:

Blest by the blood of martyrs, Land of the setting sun

Where would you imagine something like that would appear? Perhaps something written to attract Al-Qaeda recruits, or a new diatribe by some Muslim crackpot with nothing better to do that dream up new and creative ways to kill people he's never met. No. In fact that phrase, irony of ironies, appears in the second verse of the Oregon State Song.

Posted 5/27/2004 10:49:00 AM

Oregon, My Oregon