This site is still alive and kicking thanks to the generosity and talents of Alan M. Carroll (aka Annoying Old Guy). Without him, the JYB would still be suffering with Blogger's bad code and long-term archive loss.
No corpse is too big or small for leftists to shamelessly exploit for political gain.
(thanks to Chris)
I'VE BEEN LIVING AWAY FROM THE BLOGS TODAY, but this post at Michelle Malkin's is sad if true--Cindy Sheehan's husband may be filing for divorce. That Cindy Sheehan has been used as what amounts to a prop in a political theatre road show to the extent she has--whether or not the divorce story pans out--is tragic. Yet it fits the leftist pattern.
Like it or not, August is a great month to stage the kind of nonsensical, over the top protest that Sheehan has wrapped herself in. She may not realize it, but her new friends certainly do. Recall that it was a year ago this month that double amputee Max Cleland rolled up to the ranch in Crawford demanding to present President Bush with a letter about the Swiftvets. The letter asked the president to slam the Swifties for exposing Kerry for the fraud he is, but it made great political theatre because you had this wounded vet trying to arrange a meeting with a wartime president about that earlier war, the one the president didn't fight in. In Sheehan's case you have the obviously distraught, possibly now mentally ill, mother of a slain soldier in the war so many on the left believe Bush started for some shadowy reason trying to arrange a meeting with the president about that war and why her son died in it. Never mind she already met with him, and never mind she has changed her story about that meeting. It all makes great theatre.
I don't blame her for quite a bit of what's going on around her. These people who have surrounded her are I'm sure treating her like a queen, like every word she says carries some special weight, whether she actually makes any sense at all or not. But they're not doing it because they care about her. They're doing it because she's useful, and with every incendiary charge she generates a headline, and these people don't care that each new charge also makes her look like a raving loon. She's useful just like Max Cleland was useful. Once they're done with Sheehan they'll toss her out just like they did Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, all those years ago.
How dumb is Oliver Willis? He apparently just discovered that Michelle Malkin is of Filipino extraction. I tells ya, you could've knocked me over with a feather when I found out.
I won't go into what it would take to knock Oliver Willis over, though.
Here's one thing I can't figure out, though. Maybe it betrays how dumb I am, but I just can't see why it matters that Michelle is a) Filipino and b) female. And I especially can't see why it matters to liberals, people who claim to want a colorblind society without glass ceilings but who seem to hate the fact that a minority woman dominates the blogosphere. I just don't make no sense to me.
WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, how sexist are liberals these days? From the looks of the way they're reacting to Katherine Harris' appearance on FNC tonight, liberals are both sexist and dumb. Essentially, they're all atwitter over the fact that Harris has breasts. Again, I tells ya, you could've knocked me over with a feather upon hearing that shocking news. You mean to tell me--let me get this straight--that a grown woman has--just so I have this right--a grown, adult female of the human species has two glands, roughly symmetrical, protruding from her chest?
It's as though liberals are waking up and seeing this big wide world for the first times in their lives. Several years of appearances on Fox and other channels didn't convince Oliver Willis that Michelle Malkin is Filipino, he had to learn her maiden name to figure it out, and now liberals are discovering the mammary glands on the human female. What's next--liberals discover that the big bright round thing in the daytime sky is called "the Sun?"
Speaking of big round things, it's not as though Katherine Harris was manning (forgive my sexist term there) the cameras and telling the director when to cut from one shot to the other. In all likelihood she never looked through the viewfinder and didn't know where the wider shot ended, and they had her squared off to the other camera. The way Fox had them set up (hehe, I said "set"), one of the two cams was bound to catch Harris' three dimensionality. As if that's a bad thing! I must say it made for a very flattering shot from that one camera, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense to mock her for it.
But hey, she's a Republican, so to liberals she is absolutely fair game to mock for any and every reason they can come up with.
Remember those ten caliphascist agitators the UK rounded up for deporation a few days ago? Because they're in the legal system now, and because human rights groups are tripping over each other to represent them, it may take three years to deport them:
JUDGES are preparing for a trial of strength with the Government over its determination swiftly to deport ten Islamic extremists arrested yesterday.
Charles Clarke described the men picked up in early morning raids as a threat to national security. They included the cleric, Abu Qatada, described as “al-Qaeda’s spiritual ambassador in Europe”, as disclosed in The Times yesterday.
Ministers are determined to get rid of militants who allegedly stir up hatred and the courts have been told not to block plans to expel foreign undesirables. The deportations are regarded as the first test of judges’ willingness to accept Tony Blair’s assertion that the rules of the game have changed.
The Government is planning legislation instructing judges how to interpret the Human Rights Act, it emerged last night. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, said that the new law would oblige judges to give equal weight to considerations of national security and to the rights of the individual. “All law operates on the basis that if the facts change then the law changes, and the law is going to change,” he said. “We have got to get the right balance and ultimately where the balance lies is a matter for Parliament.”
Lawyers for the ten men and human rights groups warned the Government that it faces a fight that could take up to three years and cost about £2 million.
That financial figure is probably for each one. Multiply it by ten to get an idea of how much it will cost the UK to get rid of these ten radicals. And what's to say they won't just sneak back after some time has passed?
Aside from all of that, there are a couple of other things worth noting in the article. If it's true as the article suggests that judges are "preparing for a trial of strength with the government" over the deportations, what does that say about those judges? It suggests that they're more interested in having a cockfight with Tony Blair then with ridding the country of a clear menace. Second, why do human rights groups fawn over and defend these radical clerics? The clerics themselves do not believe in human rights; they use human rights as a canard to shame us or to thwart our efforts against them. Otherwise, they don't give a fig for the worth of any human who isn't a Muslim of their flavor, and they don't even care about those Muslims enough not to dupe them into becoming suicide bombers. These are terrible people whose words and actions show that left alone they will damage the cause of human rights. The best that can be said about these human rights groups who defend them is that they choose their cases very unwisely. The worst that can be said about them is that they're demonstrably on the other side in this war.
Dr. BLT: Didn't Iraq's repeated, innumerable violations of signed agreements render the approach of the world community to his innumerable violations impotent and ineffective?
Pearcy: What about our innumerable human rights violations? Sanctioned torture, indiscriminate bombings in complete disregard of civilian losses of life, prison abuse abroad, prison abuse at home, detentions without charges, murders by military people and only minor sentences in response, arming of Israel to use against Palestinians, etc. Why is it war when we do it and terrorism if they do it back?
Dr. BLT: How do you feel the US should have responded to a nation, and to Saddam (a violent, ruthless dictator bent on consistently thumbing his nose at the UN) and the world community? So many UN resolutions were signed, and then immediately violated.
Pearcy: Yes, like the US agreement to act with NATO
Dr. BLT: Just how effective do you believe yet another resolution would have been?
Pearcy: We can defend our nation without launching an offensive. Anyhow, what your asking is really no different from someone in China or Iran asking whether they should pass a resolution condemning the US or instead simply invade the US (perhaps together?) in order to liberate its people from a president they believe is evil and a war criminal and who is using his military to conquer other weak nations for illegitimate ends.
It's obvious Mr. Pearcy, bright enough to be a lawyer, isn't bright enough to distinguish a liberal democracy from either a Communist regime or a radical mullahcracy. Further, he can't think past Mother Jones headlines. And he seems to be suggesting that Iraq's history with regard to violating UN resolutions is irrelevant to the war.
How can you reason with someone who demonstrates and advocates this level of ignorance and relativistic thinking? I don't think you can. It's a waste of time to try. I really don't think folks like Pearcy are subject to reasonable discourse. I'm sure as he sat across from Dr. B he seemed perfectly reasonable, but the man is a loon.
As for where he stands in the war, it's pretty clear that he stands with whoever is against the US.
In very, very brief summation: The 9-11 commission did know about Able Danger; some of its staff were briefed on it twice, and the information got to some but not all of the commissioners. Specifically, commissioners Kean, Hamilton, Roemer, or Lehman were left out of the loop. Of those four, three gave all appearances of acting in a nonpartisan manner; I only remember Tim Roemer (a Democrat) giving off whiffs of partisanship. Lee Hamilton, the other Democrat of the four, seemed to me to be interested only in gathering the facts. For whatever that's worth.
From TKS' summary, we also have a major hint that Able Danger only identified the Brooklyn cell. That lets some air out of Eric Umansky's and Mickey Kaus' speculation that the Brooklyn cell was among hundreds or thousands of other leads, thus the signal-to-noise ratio was too faint for anyone to have taken any action at the time, and that's also why the commission dismissed it.
What seems increasingly likely, based on the TKS summary and others, is that the commissioners who knew of Able Danger dismissed it because its Mohammed Atta timeline didn't agree with theirs. That in and of itself is no reason to dismiss evidence unless your outcome is predetermined, which it may well have been to one or more commissioners and staff. Intriguingly, the Able Danger timeline seems to leave room for the Atta meeting in Prague, which to this day Czech intelligence insists happened and to this day is only refuted by US sources because Atta's cell phone was used in the US when he was supposed to be in Prague. Like one of his cellmates couldn't have used it to order pizza or something. That has always struck me as an awfully flimsy data point to use to sink a credible report from an allied intelligence agency.
From Captain's Quarters, we learn that not only was Gorelick's wall relevant to all this, but that it generated complaints from inside the Reno justice department. Mary Jo White, prosecutor of the 1993 WTC bombers, complained in two separate memos--both of which are still secret, and neither of which figured into the 9-11 commission's final report--that the wall would make it next to impossible to prevent terrorist attacks on US soil and would probably result in loss of life.
From FrontPage, we find a most intriguing lead. One Dietrich Snell seems to have a Carmen Sandiego quality--he turns up wherever you look. He was a co-prosecutor on the 1993 WTC case. He appears to have turned down a terrorists' offer to betray Operation Bojinka, which was an aborted al Qaeda op that eerily foreshadowed 9-11. Snell turns up in 1996 hovering near the TWA 800 explosion investigation, about which conspiracy theories (not all of them kooky) abound. He turns up on staff to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whom 9-11 vicitms families want to re-open the 9-11 investigation away from Washington's blue ribbon commission. Snell turns up alongside the 9-11 commission, not as a witness but on the staff as Senior Counsel and witness interrogator. And he turns out to have been one of the commission staff briefed on Able Danger. Either Mr. Snell is the worst investigator in the history of the world, or there's more to his career than meets the eye.
My caution is that we don't want to start sounding like a right-wing version of the left-wing bloggers who went positively psycho when it came to the so-called "Downing Street Memos" and the so-called smoking gun they provided -- which neither smoked nor was a gun. They went psycho in part because they were so sure they had the goods they had always longed for, and yet the revelation of the memos didn't force Tony Blair into a no-confidence vote, nor did it begin impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush.
So everybody remain calm, is what I'm saying. Focus on what we know and let's not go spinning crazy conspiracy theories without more proof.
Sensible stuff. The last thing I'd want to become is a mirror image of a lefty lunatic of the DU variety. There are two three points of Able Danger from which conspiracies might spin. One: Sandy Berger's escapades at the National Archives. We know about Able Danger to some extent, and we know about Stickypants Berger to some extent, and we know that the timeline of the commission's deliberations and Berger's actions match pretty well. We do not know that they are related events (though on a surface level they sure look like they could be). Two: Dietrich Snell. He shows up in too many relevant places to be irrelevant. It's a fact that both he and Jamie Gorelick should have been witnesses before, not part of, the 9-11 commission. But we don't know what Snell actually did or didn't do, other than ignore (or bury, if you like) Able Danger. Three: Jamie Gorelick and the wall. She should have been a witness before the commission, not sitting in judgement upon it. That's a fact. She raised and strengthened the infamous wall--another fact. It was certainly in her interests to keep the wall as far away from 9-11 blame assignments as possible. We have a motive for a cover-up there, no doubt about it. But a motive isn't enough to convict. Of course, this is a blog, not a court, and I personally think she's guilty as hell.
That was the subject line to an email I received this morning. Intrigued by the incendiary words, I opened the email and found in it a link to this article by Jason Apuzzo. It describes a few films now in the Hollywood pipeline. The subject header to that email couldn't have been more accurate. Here's what Hollywood plans to serve up in the coming years:
-"V For Vendetta." From Warner Brothers and the creators of "The Matrix" comes this film about a futuristic Great Britain that's become a 'fascist state.' A masked 'freedom fighter' named V uses terror tactics (including bombing the London Underground) to undermine the government - leading to a climax in which the British Parliament is blown up. Natalie Portman stars as a skinhead who turns to 'the revolution' after doing time as a Guantanamo-style prisoner.
- "Munich." Steven Spielberg directs this film about the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic terror attacks that killed eleven Israeli athletes. "Munich"'s screenplay is written by playwrite Tony Kushner ("Angels in America"), who has been quoted as saying: "I think the founding of the state of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity ... I wish modern Israel hadn¹t been born." The film focuses on the crisis of conscience undergone by Israeli commandos tasked with killing PLO terrorists - rather than on the barbarity of the terrorists themselves.
- "Untitled Oliver Stone 9/11 Project." Paramount will distribute Oliver Stone's new film recounting the rescue of two Port Authority officers after the 9/11 attacks. The film will star Nicholas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal - who recently suggested that America was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
As for Stone, he had this to say only a month after 9/11: "This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening, like madmen."
"Syriana." Starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, this Warner Brothers film - set during the first Bush administration - features a plot by American oil companies and the U.S. government to redraw Middle East borders for greater oil profiteering. The film even depicts a handsome, 'tragic' suicide bomber driven to jihad after being fired by an American oil company! The film's climax comes with the jihadist launching an explosive device into an oil tanker as American oil barons and Saudi officials look on.
"The Scorpion's Gate." Sony has optioned former terrorism-czar Richard Clarke's novel about oil companies and Washington politicians colluding to reshape the map of the Middle East for greater oil profiteering - this time by launching a global nuclear war.
"The Chancellor Manuscript." Paramount reworks Robert Ludlum¹s 1977 thriller into an anti-Patriot Act star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Here's the film's screenwriter, Michael Seitzman: "We live in this crazy post-Patriot Act environment where Benjamin Franklin¹s warning that 'those that give up essential liberties for temporary security don¹t deserve either one' are being ignored, so the subject matter seemed ripe."
"No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah." Universal has attached Harrison Ford to star as real-life General Jim Mattis - in this story blaming the White House for the deaths of fifty Marines in one of the Iraq war's deadliest battles. Based on the book of the same name by Bing West.
"American Dreamz." This 'satire' from Universal Pictures deals with Pakistani suicide bombers out to kill the US president. The film stars Hugh Grant, Richard Dreyfuss, Willem Dafoe and Mandy Moore. According to writer-director Paul Weitz ("American Pie"), "The film is a comic examination of ... cultural obsessions" like the War on Terror "and how they can anaesthetise us to the actual issues of our day."
"Terminus." Set in the Middle East of the future, this Warner Brothers film depicts a 'disillusioned' war correspondent covering an 'insurgency' he decides he must support. The producer, Basil Iwanyk, says: "It deals head on with what some call insurgency, what some call guerilla warfare and what some call freedom fighting."
"Jarhead." This Universal release, starring Jamie Foxx and Jake Gyllenhaal, deals with the 'dehumanization' of Marine trainees prior to and during the 1991 Gulf War. Based on Andrew Swofford's notorious and questionable memoirs of the same name.
Well, that's certainly a clarifying list. "No true glory" to describe the Marines' amazing fight to free Fallujah. "Jarhead" to smear our military as a bunch of dehumanized robots. A reporter joining the insurgency--well, at least that one's realistic. It's clear from that list that the Hollywood left simply hates the US military. It's Vietnam all over again, only they're making the movies while the war is still going on instead of years later. And when they're not giving us anti-military fare, Hollywood is serving up films starring some of the biggest names in in the industry about suicide bombers, killing the president and other nutty conspiracy theories, and who knows what kind of nonsense Oliver Stone is going to pack into his 9-11 film.
It's not just Hollywood, either. There's a terrific looking real-time strategy game that's been out for a few months now called Act of War: Direct Action. Graphically and in terms of the tactics it allows, it may be the best RTS game yet made. But check out its storyline:
A ruthless secret group of petroleum company owners known as the Consortium finances an international terrorist organisation to stage a series of attacks around the world in an effort to destabilise the global economy and profit from skyrocketing oil prices. A group of seasoned military veterans and young techies are recruited into a special high-tech task force and begin the worldwide job of tracking down the terrorists and uncovering the international conspiracy before the terrorists can strike in the heart of America itself.
Ripped from today's headlines, Act of War is a frightening and believable tale of suspense, international intrigue and geopolitical military conflict. Through a techno-thriller story constructed by best-selling author Dale Brown, this real-time strategy experience puts you squarely in control of counterterrorist forces to defend cities of the world. It's the first look at tomorrow's war. No place is safe!
It's the Halliburton/Bush MIHOP (made-it-happen-on-purpose) moonbat view of the global war on terror as shoot-em-up video game. And believe me, I've played the demo of this game--graphically it's staggering and the combat is well executed. It will be an effective vehicle for pushing the conspiracy theorist misunderstanding of the war.
Why is the entertainment industry doing this? Why does it think undermining the war is a good way to make a buck? Just how depraved is Hollywood?
THIS MAY BE A GOOD MOMENT to talk about The Great Raid, the new Miramax film about an amazing American rescue mission during World War II. The trailer looks great, the story looks inspiring, and it looks like it will be a wonderful, patriotic film. But it's about a war that happened decades ago and about which there is little argument as to which side was right and which side was wrong. It's always a good time to make a patriotic film, but what we need from Hollywood right now isn't so much a patriotic look back at that war but a patriotic look around at this war. Oh, they'll say they're being patriotic and spout the usual canard about how patriotic it is to dissent, Bush is Hitler, etc. But that's my point. As evil as our enemies were during World War II, surely it's obvious by now that the enemy we're battling today is worse. But Hollywood and the left can't see that, or if they do see it they don't care. For the US, World War II began with a sneak attack on one of our major navy bases. In the GWOT, the war began with a sneak attack on our civilians. As terribly as our POWs were treated by the Japanese, at least those POWs were military. The present enemy has treated its captives worse, and its captives have been almost entirely civilians. The present enemy has gone out of its way to target civilians, including children, massacring hundreds of them at school in Beslan. The only reason al Qaeda hasn't started up where the Nazis left off on the "final solution" is that al Qaeda doesn't command the machinery of a modern state. Yet. Give them + the Iranians + the Syrians + the Palestinians time, though, and the space to operate and they will.
As happy as I am to see Miramax produce something like The Great Raid, I'd rather see a film lauding today's heroes, the ones fighting to protect us right now from a monstrous enemy bent on destroying us one nuked city at a time. But Hollywood apparently isn't capable of producing that kind of film anymore.
By law, the Pentagon's Able Danger group's findings should have filtered up through the executive branch of the government. A Reagan-era executive order demanded that any intelligence the military gleaned within the US was to be handed over to the FBI. We now know that that didn't happen, or at least that if it did, it had no effect whatsoever on US terrorism policy. We further know that the 9-11 commission did not include Able Danger's findings in its own final report, though some members were apparently aware of those findings.
Which commission members knew about Able Danger, and why did they dismiss it? What role did the Gorelick wall play in keeping Able Danger's findings from going where they should have gone. Did anyone above the Pentagon (i.e. on the National Security Council) find out about Able Danger when it was most relevant--summer 2000?
This is not a time for the commission to "dialogue to consensus" as it did last year to avoid the appearance of partisanship. This is a time for getting at the truth. This is a time for demanding some answers.
MORE HERE: The Able Danger teams findings filtered up to some point within the Pentagon, where the Gorelick wall seems to have kicked in to bottle them up. Thus, they never got to the FBI with the team's recommendation that the Brooklyn cell be investigated and taken out. But it's still likely that the findings went higher than the Pentagon for further review, probably to the NSC. That's the logical place they would go. Someone on the NSC--NSA Berger or someone on his staff--would probably have reviewed the findings to see if the Pentagon had acted appropriately, etc.
What the findings didn't seem to have anything to say about was the nature of the threat the cell posed, when they would strike, or anything along those lines. It gave identities and linked them to al Qaeda. That's critical, because in the pre-Patriot Act days if you didn't have specificity as to the attack and if it didn't seem imminent, you couldn't form much of a legal basis to act against it directly. And because of the Gorelick wall, you couldn't pass the intelligence on to the FBI for further review. Pentagon lawyers so ruled based on the administration's 1995 FISA policy, keeping the FBI in the dark. It would probably have taken someone at the level of Berger or Reno to overrule that, and in the post-Waco environment none of them were going to do that.
All of this is said to get us here--Atta was a pilot on 9-11. So was at least one other of the four that Able Danger identified, giving us two pilots. We don't know to this day who the other two pilots were that day. Were they the other two in the Brooklyn cell? If they were, then the wall directly contributed to 9-11. Had the information been shared, the FBI would have acted on it and at the very least started to tail the group. There is a very, very good chance that the tail would have led them to others in on the plot, and to chances to unravel it.
If you're Sandy Berger and this information passed your desk and your post-Waco hangover led you to dismiss it, it would be worth it for you to cover it up any way you can. And if you're Jamie Gorelick and your wall had this horrendous effect, if you wanted to work in Washington again and didn't want history to associate your name with lethal foolishness, you would do what you could to minimize the role your policy played.
I notice that neither one has stepped up to any camera anywhere since Able Danger broke.
The newest stats say that Texas joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii as majority-minority (the latter being majority Asian, which makes sense).
The problem with this as I see it isn't necessarily the numbers of immigrants, it is the quality. Immigrants should respect our laws, respect our culture and adopt our values. Otherwise, if they have no interest in doing these things, they should not emigrate. They should stay where they were born. Adopting our values and way of life should be part of the deal that allows them to come here.
What we have, though, is a bad neighbor to the south that is purging the lower levels of its racially stratified society by pushing them to come here however they can, to live in pockets, and never bother to assimilate into either our culture or values. These illegal immigrants so far don't seem very interested in becoming Americans. They want to be Mexicans, displaced. And that's the problem.
As anecdotal evidence, I visit a state park in Maryland frequently. We started visiting there last year. One thing we noticed right away this year was that on weekends it transforms into a Spanish-speaking mini-city. This year, the park added Spanish signs here and there and have added bilingual announcements over the loudspeaker. These are young families we are talking about; presumably the children are learning English at school and so forth. As far north as Maryland there shouldn't be a need for Spanish-language anything. Yet there is.
Maryland is one of a handful of states that are the next group to go majority-minority. Texas, California and New Mexico sort of make sense--they were, after all, once a part of Mexico. But Maryland? New York, Georgia and Mississippi aren't far behind--and none of them were ever a part of Mexico either.
Before anyone slaps me with the racist or xenophobe smear, I should remind everyone that not only am I not that, but that I created an immigrant ten years ago when I persuaded a woman entirely out of my class to marry me, who happens to be non-white and non-American. I don't have a problem with immigration per se. Skin color is as irrelevant to me as it can be. But my wife doesn't go around demanding by sheer stubbornness that the United States transform itself to cater to her culture. It's the values that matter, and that is precisely what is at risk.
is a small, bitter, venal, petty man. He has never forgiven America for rejecting him in 1980, and he does his best to undermine this nation whenever the opportunity presents itself--two weeks ago in the UK, for instance, when he denounced our policies and trashed us as a country while he was among our allies. Carter is not our best ex-president, and his work for Habitat for Humanity puts gloss on an obsessive mind worthy of being dubbed "Gollumesque;" he is our worst living ex-president and possibly the worst president this country has ever had.
The Captain links to a story in The Scotsman alledging that Steven Vincent was murdered not because he exposed corruption in Basra's police force, but because he had committed a dishonorable act in Muslim terms:
AN American journalist who was shot dead in Basra last week was executed by Shiite extremists who knew he was intending to marry his Muslim interpreter, it has emerged.
Steven Vincent was shot a week before the planned wedding to Nouriya Itais and had already delivered a $2,500 dowry to her family.
The disclosure casts new light on the grip of Islamic religious sects in the British-run south- east of Iraq - raising concern that they will take control once troops start to withdraw. Mr Vincent was abducted from his hotel three days after writing a piece in the New York Times accusing British officials of allowing religious parties to infiltrate the Basra police.
In America, his death was taken as retribution for his article. But in London yesterday, British officials pointed out that the police in Basra believed it was retribution for his affair.
"We warned him to look after his security in a more professional manner than he was doing," said the official.
To take the last point first, the British aren't the only ones who warned Steven to watch his back a little more closely. Even I warned him about that.
But taken as a whole, there isn't a lot of there to this story. Steven did confess in his book, In the Red Zone, to a certain infatuation with his interpreter, but iirc he attributed that mostly to the pressures of exploring a war zone with her. And there was no indication that I've seen that the emotions went any further than that. He remained married to his wife in the US, to whom he addressed his blog posts from Iraq.
The Captain speculates that the Scotsman story--based on one anonymous source, and we all know how reliable those can be--may be a bit of British backfilling to cover over what Steven was actually reporting from Basra. He reported in his last story that far from being an Iraqi success story, Basra was slowly coming under the sway of mullahs and Sadrists, that they were infiltrating the police force, and the British were standing by and letting it all happen. I think the Captain's speculation is probably right.
It may become incumbent upon those of us who knew Steven in any way, and I knew him a little but not a great deal, to make some permanent record of his heroism lest the press smears stand and then get amplified by the likes of the despicable armchair professor Juan Cole. Vincent was the Kipling of this war--he traveled the zone for himself and he wrote some terrific prose about it. He had a real eye for detail that shone in his work. He also had a great way of capturing conversation and the spirit behind it, and he was a quick enough study that his book captured some of the sweep of history that influences this war. He was a man of real insight. What form this permanent record takes--a biography, a movie, a documentary--I don't know. But it seems like it might become necessary. And let's face it, we could use a hero right now and Steven provided himself.
Two major and serious--and interesting--drug posts today among this blog's allies. The first is from Stop The ACLU!, which notes that the ACLU favors the legalization of all drugs, including the hard stuff. STACLU first quotes from the organization's web site:
“The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) opposes criminal prohibition of drugs. Not only is prohibition a proven failure as a drug control strategy, but it subjects otherwise lawabiding citizens to arrest, prosecution and imprisonment for what they do in private. In trying to enforce the drug laws, the government violates the fundamental rights of privacy and personal autonomy that are guaranteed by our Constitution. The ACLU believes that unless they do harm to others, people should not be punished even if they do harm to themselves. There are better ways to control drug use, ways that will ultimately lead to a healthier, freer and less crimeridden society”.ACLU Website
And STACLU proceeds to eviscerate them as they deserve. Read it when you have a few minutes.
I'll only note in passing that this the same ACLU that is trying to turn the Boy Scouts of America into a social and political pariah, because of what the Boy Scouts believe. The ACLU is not about civil liberties, it is about slavery to centralized government run on their terms.
Speaking of slavery, an argument against slavery to addictive drugs forms the core of See-Dubya's libertarian case for drug control.
You can't be a libertarian and support tyranny, nor can you support slavery. If all men are created equal before God, then slavery is an abomination and no man is naturally the subject of any other. A slave, or a subject, may have his own will, but he is not free to exercise it except insofar as it comports with his master's.
Likewise an addict may have a reason most of the time, and a complex inner life, but he is in the end a slave to those who will provide him with the means to satisfy his addiction. The worst cases--and you can spare me the accounts of the white collar friends of yours who appear to sail through life without a care snorting and shooting up everything in the Harrison Act--I said the worst cases, and there are far too many of them--will kill and rob and mortgage their house and blow the baby's college fund and sell their bodies to satisfy their masters. An addict, or for that matter someone tripping or stoned, is not a free man. In many cases, you can't even commit murder when you're high--under the law your "mental defect" can prevent you from reaching the mental state required to form the mens rea for intentional homicide.
See-Dubya notes that some will use this logic to insist that we legalize drugs and then nationalize their distribution, and we learn from STACLU that the ACLU approves of that scheme. But returning to STACLU, there's an elephant-sized fly in the ointment:
If you thought the lawsuits against the tobacco industries were frivolous, can you imagine the lawsuits that would be filed on the manufacturers of heroine, or crack?
Which would happen, of course, unless the government indemnified drug producers against such lawsuits. But why would we want the government to protect entities who are manufactuing products known to be very harmful? The precedent of the tobacco lawsuits is already out there to encourage litigation.
The solution would then be to have government do it all, and surely libertarians can see the problems with that. Then you would truly have individuals enslaved in a very real way to the government. You would have an underclass of addicts dependent on tax dollars to survive, and that underclass in a legal drug environment would undoubtedly grow. Such an ending would be fine with the ACLU--they're statist socialists--but shouldn't be fine with libertarians or, really, anyone else.
The Government was under intense pressure last night to carry out Tony Blair's threats to expel extremist Muslim clerics after news that one of them was expected to return for a heart operation on the health service.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is in Lebanon, is due to have treatment at St Thomas's Hospital, just across the Thames from the Palace of Westminster.
This is the same gentleman who justified the Beslan school massacre. He's also connected to the shoe bomber and to general terrorist incitement across Britian.
Bakri, who has said he would never warn police if he learned of an impending suicide bomber attack by fellow Muslims, is in theory free to return to his family in London as he was granted indefinite leave to stay in the 1980s.
Bakri left Britain for the first time in 20 years at the weekend after gaining a Lebanese passport, apparently without the knowledge of the Home Office, to fly to Beirut where his mother lives.
So he went to stay with mummy. It figures, since he doesn't earn an honest living in Britian:
He receives £331.28 a month in incapacity benefit and £183.30 a month in disability living allowance because of a leg injury he suffered in his teens.
Both payments will continue for at least six months while he is abroad, as long as he plans to return, as will the housing benefit on his home in Edmonton, north London, and his council tax benefit.
His wife, who remains in Britain with their seven children, can also continue to claim a benefits package thought to be worth at least £1,300 a month. Bakri drives a Toyota people carrier worth £30,000, paid for under a scheme called Motability.
The preacher is expected to return for an angioplasty procedure. That involves inserting and inflating a balloon in the coronary artery to improve blood flow.
He has been receiving treatment at North Middlesex Hospital, near his home, as well as at St Thomas's.
One of his supporters told The Daily Telegraph yesterday: "He has a heart condition and was scheduled for treatment but I don't know when or if he is planning to return for it."
I'd like to think the Brits are getting it. I really would. But then I read that Cherie Blair--that would be Tony's wife--is a true moonbat, and then I see this from Tony's deputy:
Despite Mr Blair's assurance last Friday that Britain would no longer be a haven for Muslim extremists, John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, said this week that Bakri had committed no offence and was therefore free to "come in and out".
But Home Office officials are known to be exploring every legal avenue to find a way to prevent his setting foot in the country again. The revelation that Bakri might return for NHS treatment will intensify the pressure for action to be taken, possibly after the present two-week consultation period on beefing up deportation rules.
Radical Islamic preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed has been arrested in Lebanon, security sources have said.
The London-based cleric was detained in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, as he was leaving a television interview - less than a week after he left Britain.
The preacher caused controversy by saying he would not report a potential bomber to the police and is currently being investigated by UK authorities.
Lebanese security sources gave no reason for his detention.
Bakri is not a civilized human and is wanted in Yemem for trying to overthrow the government there. Perhaps a little extradition deal can be reached?
Sandy Stickpants Berger will be sentenced in September for removing classified documents from the National Archives and destroying them. The documents were memos relating to terrorism and the Clinton administration's handling thereof, the contents of which were not unique to those pages (copies remain extant), but were unique in one respect. They had handwritten notes on them. We don't know and we'll probably never know what those handwritten notations said, or who wrote them, or for whom they were intended.
Which is why Berger stuffed them into his pants and jacket, took them home, and methodically sliced them up with scissors. Even at the risk of destroying his reputation.
Now why would he do that? Well, that's been the mystery since the story broke. Why did Berger do it? What was he hiding?
Was the Able Danger project the answer, or at least part of it?
March, 2003 - 9/11 Commission begins first hearings. One of its members is Jamie Gorelick, the person most responsible for the legal firewall between FBI/CIA and sharing intelligence information
Fall, 2003 - Briefing given to four 9/11 staff members by defense intelligence officials during an overseas trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
March, 2004 -Madeleine Albright testifies before 9/11 Commission, and defends the Clinton administration's handling of Al-Qaeda and terrorism
April, 2004 - Condi Rice testifies before 9/11 Commission; states that there was serious problem in sharing intelligence information prior to 9/11
May, 2004 - Berger testifies before the 9/11 Commission; completely overshadowed by the fact that Richard Clark and George Tenet also testified on the same day (testimony is here)
July, 2004 - Berger steps down as an advisor to the Kerry campaign after it is revealed that he was being investigated for removing classified documents from the National Archive
July, 2004 - 9/11 Commission report issued without any mention of the Able Danger information
April, 2005 - Berger pleads guilty to removing classified documents
July, 2005 - Berger's sentencing is delayed to September, 2005.
August, 2005 -News breaks about the existence of Able Danger and its ID of 9/11 hijackers in 1999 and attempts to pass this information to law enforcement.
Some 9-11 commission members are showing furiosity at not knowing before issuing their final report last year that the Pentagon's Able Danger data mining operation had identified four of the 9-11 hijackers and placed them together in Brooklyn, NY.
Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general during the Clinton years and architect of the infamous intelligence wall, has yet to say boo about Able Danger since the story hit yesterday. The press hasn't asked her for her thoughts. And none of the press have bothered to query Berger as to whether he knew anything about it, either.
Berger was covering something up when he shredded those documents. The question hasn't been whether he was covering something up, but what was he covering up. And now we hear about Able Danger, we know the information it put together went nowhere, and we know that Berger was National Security Advisor when Able Danger first put its information together, in summer 2000. He should have been in the loop at some point, as it was his job to assess threats to national security. And we know that for some reason the 9-11 commission never heard of Able Danger--and it was their job to find out everything they could about 9-11 and how it happened. We have an information gap, and we have a document shredder. And we have a motive--cover his own tracks.
MORE: So now we learn that some on the 9-11 commission were warned, 10 days before they issued their final report, that their findings were incomplete because Able Danger was omitted? And the commission issued its report anyway?
Draft portions of the Sept. 11 commission's final report offer a stinging rebuke of the FBI (news - web sites) and intelligence agencies but refrain from assigning blame to individuals in government to avoid the appearance of partisanship, several commissioners say.
The FBI may have been unfairly smeared. The restructuring of our intelligence community along commission recommendations may have been hasty and wrongheaded. And the person most responsible for 9-11 in US government terms, Jamie Gorelick, never testified before the commission and has gotten away clean. To avoid the appearance of partisanship, have we let incompetent officials survive to serve another day?
And of course, avoiding the appearance of partisanship failed utterly. The left has been out there blaming 9-11 on everything from Bush vacations to his stirring rendition of My Pet Goat. But never, ever on the policies Bush inherited from his malfeasant, derelict, shameless predecessor's administration.
Cindy Sheehan lost her son Army Spc. Casey Sheehan in combat in Iraq in 2004. She co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace and has led the fight against the Iraq War ever since.
On August 3, she heard George Bush say the soldiers who were killed in Iraq "died in a noble cause" - and she was outraged.
Cindy traveled to Crawford so she could meet with Bush to ask him "Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?"
She is now camped out on the side of a road leading to Bush's ranch and being threatened with arrest. A growing crowd of supporters is with her.
Cindy traveled to Crawford so she could meet with Bush to ask him "Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?"
The noble cause for which your son died, Mrs. Sheehan, was nothing less than freedom for 26 million Iraqis and all Americans. He was a patriot. He was also an adult who knew what he was doing when he joined the Army. There was no draft; no one forced him into the military. His death is a sad result of war, and as a former military man I believe it dishonors him to ask these questions when the answers are so obvious. He died to prevent future 9-11s and to defeat the maniacs who perpetrated the first one.
On August 3, she heard George Bush say the soldiers who were killed in Iraq "died in a noble cause" - and she was outraged.
There's deception in this line, because it makes it seem as though Sheehan heard President Bush address casualties for the first time on August 3. But she met with him directly last year, and sung a very different tune then from the one she is singing now. Democrats.com never addresses the change of heart, or even acknowledges that there has been one.
To me there is a problem with fact and tone with this email, both of which typify the bilge that Democrats.com churns out daily. Never does the email acknowledge that "Bush" is President Bush, lawfully elected twice to the highest office in the land. It addresses Mrs. Sheehan as "Cindy," at once too familiar and not a little bit patronizing. It is exploiting her emotional reaction to the death of her son. And it orders--orders--me to do something. It orders me to order the President of the United States to meet with someone he has already met with and who has now become an unreasonable, strident critic allied with radical grief pimps.
But it's typical of Democrats.com's shrill fare. Utterly typical.
