Challenge, Chapter 6: Post-9/11 Connections

Continuing on the Blogosphere Challenge on the Feith memo, the last part deals with Iraqi/al-Qaeda connections after 9/11, which would be the biggest impetus for America to include Saddam's removal as an integral part of the war on terror. Hayes continues:

Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:

31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel.

The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration:

References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11.

In President Bush's speech on September 20, 2001, he made it clear that the United States considered any government that provided support or shelter to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist groups that conspired to attack American interests to be an open target and a threat to our national security:

The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them[emphasis mine]. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the support alleged in this entry is extremely significant. First, according to this report, Iraq hosted al-Qaeda as a state policy, which was enough for us to attack the Taliban and remove them from power. Second, terrorists cannot operate in the open; governments that supply false identification and travel papers fatally undermine our national security by allowing these individuals to travel without notice. Even if this only occurred post-9/11, there is little doubt that al-Qaeda would still love to attack American homeland targets, and having professionally forged travel papers makes that much easier to do. This makes the Iraqi government a clear and present danger to the United States, given that they were doing this with full knowledge of the aims of al-Qaeda and of the Bush Doctrine on terrorism, as stated above. Not only is this very worrying, but it is also clearly not "old" data that, according to mainstream media outlets, has been "previously discredited". It predates the March 2003 hostilities by only a few months.

The next section, while not considered as solid by Feith and the intelligence service that collected the information, certainly seems to explain an awful lot about insurgency in postwar Iraq:

Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell's case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.

37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi's procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.

38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.

The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."

If true, this would not only demonstrate direct Iraqi support to al-Qaeda, but also would recast the "insurgency" currently operating primarily in the Sunni Triangle as an al-Qaeda operation, rather than an organic native resistance movement. Note that this data was collected and presented well before the current insurgency began (indeed, before the war began), and it accurately predicted the nature of the attacks: hand-held rocket and mortar attacks, and surface-to-air missiles.

Next, the rest of the Hayes article. Here are links to my previous posts: one, two, three, four, and five.

Why California?

So I'm here in California now, land of Ah-nold da Governator and Carls Jr hamburgers ... mmm, good.

The weather today is 65 degrees, sunny with a bit of wind.

In Minnesota? 32 degrees and snowing.

Heh.

On The Road Again ...

I'll be scaling down the blogging significantly for the next eight days, as I will be traveling to Southern California for the Thanksgiving holiday with the First Mate, our son and daughter-in-law, and our granddaughter, the Little Admiral. (She's 18 months old, and she's got Grampa wrapped around her little finger.) It'll be the first plane trip for her, and we're all praying that she'll sleep through it, or at least not get all wired up during the 4-hour flight. She'll be visiting Disneyland for the first time, so Grampa's bringing the camcorder and lots of film. I'll post the best picture of it once I get back and have the pictures developed.

I do plan on taking the computer with me -- I need something to do on the flight, and the laptop's got a DVD drive, so it's my little entertainment center. My father has a wireless network that needs some tweaking, so I'll be testing it out with my laptop. (How convenient for me!) I suspect I'll post a few short notes at the end of the day when I check my work e-mail, but nothing like the productivity I've been maintaining for the past six weeks. Keep checking in with me, and if you haven't had a chance to read the featured posts on the right, try a few and see what you think.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Lileks: Brilliant as Always

James Lileks is a Minnesota treasure, and his take on Nightline's decision to bump coverage of the President's bellwether speech at Whitehall to cover, of all things, Michael Jackson is a terrific example:

You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.

You would expect that a major commercial media outlet like ABC, with a supposedly top-notch news program like Nightline, would be able to distinguish between what should have been a news flash and a major development in a critical policy change announced by a president in a speech made during a state visit. But apparently Ted Koppel and company believe the arrest status of a pop singer is more important, which should call into question Nightline's editorial policy, as Lileks also emphatically says:

Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person’s Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.

Read the whole thing. Later in the Bleat, he takes on a suddenly snarky Salaam Pax and in typically blunt Midwestern fashion, tells him to grow up. (via Instapundit)

France's Rushdie Moment

Power Line is referring readers to this FrontPage magazine article detailing how Islamofascism in France is destroying free speech:

“...I hope someone slits your throat, you dirty, Jew pig...”

France, once the land of Enlightenment, is turning into a place of darkness, thanks to Islamist fanaticism.

Death threats like the one above have forced a French publishing house to cancel plans this month to publish a translated version of American author Robert Spencer’s book, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About The World’s Fastest Growing Faith.

As I posted earlier this morning, this is the cause for which the totalitarian apologists and their clueless followers march in Trafalgar Square, the Mall in Washington, and in cities near you. Followers of Islam, the "religion of peace", have shut down the publication of a book which dares to analyze the Qu'ran and its message of jihad. Fascism can abide no dissent -- and make no mistake about it, Islamists are the new Fascisti, determined to silence the unbelievers into dhimmitude or, if that cannot be done, to kill them and so silence them permanently. The author notes the laughably gargantuan gap between the PR of militant Islamism and its reality:

“What you have here is a subjugation of public opinion in France,” he said. “It’s ironic. If you don’t say Islam is a religion of peace, they will kill you. My book doesn’t advocate murdering anyone. It only investigates questions about Islam, but it is so threatening that they’ll kill to silence it.”

France is particularly vulnerable to this incursion against human rights and Western values due to its centuries of colonial interference in North Africa; a significant minority of the French is Muslim (estimates vary between 10-15%), and it is widely believed that Muslims may comprise the plurality of France within one or two more generations. French politicians therefore are loath to confront Islamism, believing in the safety of appeasement -- as if that's worked for France in the past. For instance, as Front Page notes, the French publishing industry has had no problems producing this:

While people are threatened with death over publication of Spencer’s work, the novel Rever la Palestine (Dream of Palestine) faced no apparent obstacles in reaching the booksellers. Published by France’s third-largest publishing house, Rever is intended for young people and concerns Palestinian teenagers fighting against “bloodthirsty Jews, who assassinate children, and old people, profane mosques, and rape Arab women.”

The fifteen-year-old author, an Egyptian living in Italy, has one of the book’s characters calling for a Jihad against the Jews, while the main character becomes a suicide bomber who kills five Israelis.

Read the entire article, and weep for the nation that once was France. It is dying, and the French are selling themselves into dhimmitude.

Challenge, Chapter 5: Mainstream Media Gets Interested, But To What Purpose?

Finally, some of the mainstream media has taken an interest in the Feith memo, as reported by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard. Unfortunately, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a report that seemed to care more about the fact that the Weekly Standard is owned by Rupert Murdoch than in the evidence at hand. Here's the second paragraph:

CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government’s “secret evidence of cooperation” between Saddam and bin Laden. Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, touted the magazine’s scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on “Fox News Sunday.” (Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.) [bold emphasis mine -- CE] “These are hard facts, and I’d like to see you refute any one of them,” he told a skeptical Juan Williams of National Public Radio.

Specific facts and critical arguments don't show up until after Isikoff and Hosenball make sure you know that this is all a Murdoch-inspired, if not Murdoch-financed, attempt to smear the good names of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. When they do get down to facts, they don't seem to do a good job of getting them right, as Stephen Hayes points out in his rebuttal:

The Newsweek story goes on: "While Hayes's story insists 'the bulk of the reporting . . . contradicts [Abdallah's] claim,' the actual examples cited in the memo to buttress this point are less than persuasive." The Newsweek writers offer two examples--allegations that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague and reporting from Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, a senior al Qaeda operative who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to U.S. custody in early January 2002.

The most recent alleged Atta meeting, in April 2001, is disputed, a fact THE WEEKLY STANDARD article makes clear. Isikoff and Hosenball claim that the intelligence is bogus, as U.S. investigators have "not unearthed a scintilla of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the alleged rendezvous." (See Edward Jay Epstein's recent report in Slate for a fuller account of the controversy over this meeting.)

Czech intelligence, however, reports not one but four meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Atta. The CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague, but "data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS." This disclaimer was reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD article, which also noted that the Czech government continues to stand by its reporting.

When I read the original Hayes article, it was very clear that Feith and Hayes spoke about four visits, not one, and was also clear that the April 2001 visit alleged by Czech intelligence had been the most difficult to verify. However, the Newsweek article never mentions any other visits by Atta to Prague, even though these visits were crucial to understanding the memo, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein in Slate, hardly a Murdoch co-conspirator:

It was known, however, that Atta had business in Prague prior to the 9/11 attack. Kmonicek, the deputy foreign minister, had found a paper trail of passport records showing that Atta had applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic on May 26, 2000 in Bonn, Germany. Atta must have had business there, since he could have transited through the Czech Republic on Czech Air without a visa. ...

When Atta learned in Hamburg that his Czech visa would not be ready until May 31, he nevertheless flew on May 30 to the Prague International Airport, where he would not be allowed to go beyond the transit lounge. Although a large part of this area is surveiled by cameras, he managed to spend all but a few minutes out of their range. After some six hours, he then caught a flight back to Hamburg. From this visaless round trip, Czech intelligence inferred that Atta had a meeting on May 30 that could not wait, even a day—and that whoever arranged it was probably familiar with the transit lounge's surveillance. Finally, the BIS determined that the Prague connection was not limited to a single appointment since Atta returned to Prague by bus on June 2 (now with visa BONN200005260024), and, after a brief wait in the bus station, disappeared for nearly 20 hours before catching a flight to the United States.

Why was all this important -- Atta's movements between Hamburg and Prague, and on which days he went where?

The Czechs reviewing these visits in retrospect further assumed that Atta's business in Prague was somehow related to his activities in the United States, given that large sums of laundered funds began to flow to the 9/11 conspiracy in June 2000, after Atta left Prague. Even more ominous, if the BIS's subsequent identification of Atta in Prague was accurate, then some part of the mechanism behind the activities of hijacker-terrorists may have been based in Prague at least until mid April 2001.

So when Isikoff and Hosenball only focus on the one meeting, which Hayes and the Feith memo both agree was the murkiest, to discredit the entire memo without ever mentioning the other unusual visits for which there is ample evidence, it implies less sloppiness than outright, deliberate obtuseness. Hayes has more ammunition as well:

The Newsweek authors also cite an unnamed "U.S. official" who claims that the intelligence in the memo was selectively presented and "contradicted by other things." To support this argument, Isikoff and Hosenball cite a late 1998 trip to Afghanistan by Faruq Hijazi. Hijazi served Saddam Hussein both as deputy director of Iraqi intelligence and later as ambassador to Turkey. At that meeting, the authors contend, bin Laden rejected an Iraqi offer of asylum. Their source is Vince Cannistraro, a knowledgeable former CIA counterterrorism official--the kind of expert whose views should be taken very seriously. He may be right. And if his understanding of the meeting's outcome is accurate, that information certainly should have been included in the Feith memo.

But stop for a moment and consider what this analysis means. It demonstrates that at the very least, Saddam Hussein was willing to give Osama bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Is this not precisely the kind of collusion the administration cited as it made its case for war? If such a distinguished skeptic of the links believes that Saddam Hussein would have offered bin Laden asylum, why is it so hard to believe--to take one example from a "well-placed source" cited in the Feith memo--that Hussein sent his intelligence director to bin Laden's farm in 1996 to train the al Qaeda leader in explosives? Or, to take another from a "regular and reliable source" mentioned in the memo, that bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, "visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998"?

These concerns never occurred to Isikoff and Hosenball, who treat the Feith memo as a prosecution, a law-enforcement case where anything less than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a lie. But intelligence gathering, and war in general, is not law enforcement, and evidentiary parsing such as this is useless. Again, you have to look at context, which is what Hayes has consistently tried to provide.

Prior to 9/11, the Newsweek approach may have made some sense, if you preferred to combat terrorism using the Clintonian law-enforcement approach. This evidence may or may not have supported an indictment (which the Reno Justice Department actually got, and which I note Isikoff and Hosenball never mention), and so sitting and waiting to see if any further information could be developed was certainly an option, and it was the one we used. After 9/11, it became apparent that the law-enforcement indictment process was not going to secure Americans against attack, and that a severe threat faced the US. The best intelligence we had indicated strong links between Saddam Hussein, who was in the middle of defying 16 UNSC resolutions and the cease-fire agreement that halted Gulf War hostilities, and al-Qaeda, who had just murdered 3,000 American civilians in the worst foreign attack in our history. Waiting around for more information to develop would mean allowing more collusion between Saddam and Osama, while Saddam kept refusing to account for massive amounts of chemical and biological agents. Afghanistan was the primary target, since it actively housed Osama's gang. But Saddam had to be next.

Was the intelligence accurate? We won't know that until we get a complete airing of the data, without having to trip over mainstream media who don't want to tell the whole story and who keep trying to discredit Hayes with half-truths and crucial omissions. CNN's interview with James Woolsey, CIA chief under Clinton, has him saying that the evidence he's seen makes the connection theory a "slam dunk". George Tenet and Colin Powell, who are supposed to be the skeptics of this administration, have both enthusiastically pushed this interpretation of the intelligence they've seen. The Justice Department, in 1998, thought the evidence strong enough that they returned an indictment against Osama which referenced an agreement between him and Saddam. Maybe it isn't "case closed," as Hayes proclaimed, but as Glenn Reynolds said yesterday, we'd settle for mainstream media acknowledging that it's at least "case open." That won't happen until the blogosphere keeps pushing for an in-depth review of all data possibly linking al-Qaeda to Iraq.

UPDATE: LT Smash has an excellent extended post into this matter. His post goes through some different points of contention than I've addressed here, so be sure to read all the way through his stuff, and check out all of his embedded links. His conclusion -- "The war in Iraq was, in fact, a legitimate act of self-defense by the United States of America" -- seems to be borne out by the intelligence we're finally getting a chance to see.

Demosophia also expresses his disgust with the Isikoff/Hosenball article here. He does a fine job of noting the ridiculously poor job those authors did in actually reading and understanding the article.

News You'll Never See

I'm trying to avoid the whole Creepy Jacko thing, but certain odd points just seem to beg for a bit of blogging. Take this, for instance, from his brother Jermaine:

Jackson's brother Jermaine denounced the allegations in a CNN interview as "nothing but a modern-day lynching." "This is what they want to see: him in handcuffs. You got it. But it won't be for long, I promise you," Jermaine Jackson said.

Modern-day lynching? Tom Daschle had this to say about Jermaine's choice of words:

"I was offended. I think it was unfortunate," Daschle said. "I think those within the civil rights leadership who have commented and have asked for an apology are right."

And this from the LCCR:

"Either [he] has conveniently forgotten a frightening period of American history, or he is willfully demeaning all those African-Americans who were hung from trees throughout the period of racial segregation in the South," said Wade Henderson, the director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Oh, wait ... they didn't say that about Jermaine -- they said it about Senator Zell Miller when he used the term "lynching" to describe the treatment Justice Janice Rogers Brown has been receiving from filibuster-happy Democrats. I don't understand, especially from the LCCR; aren't they the ones protecting the legacy of "African-Americans who were hung from trees throughout the period of racial segregation in the South" by viciously opposing successful African-Americans? Why hasn't he spoken out here?

Behind The Protests ... Same Old Crowd

Hindrocket returns from Britain with perspective on President Bush's visit and the protests that have ensued. Power Line posts Hindrocket's extensive post, which is definitely worth a read:

What was most striking to me was the utter lack of substance in most coverage of the visit. The focus was almost exclusively on the security precautions attending the trip, which were pretty universally frowned upon, and the demonstrations against President Bush, which were hoped-for, salivated over, and covered with gusto. No one spoiled the mood by reminding readers that these were the same tired demonstrations (and largely the same tired demonstrators) who have greeted past American presidents. The BBC, for the most part, disdained to cover the visit at all.

Hindrocket spent quite a bit of time in England and had a chance to look into the guiding spirits behind these tired, and oddly absent, demonstrators. Not surprisingly, some familiar faces appeared during his investigation:

It isn't hard to find out who the leaders of the anti-Bush demonstrations are; I picked up one of their leaflets on the street. It gave the URL for the "Stop the War Coalition" as http://www.stopwar.org.uk. ... In 2001 the Stop the War Coalition elected a Steering Committee which included such luminaries as Mohammed Aslam Aijaz of the London Council of Mosques and Saddam apologist Tariq Ali. ... But there's more: the Stop the War Coalition's Steering Committee includes George Galloway, who was thrown out of the Labour Party on suspicion--soon to be confirmed, I think--of being on Saddam's payroll; John Rees, long-time English Communist whose tracts on Marxism continue to be published for an ever-dwindling audience; Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, member of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, who considered Sept. 11 a "very positive [development], one that would allow the Muslim community to get out of their ghettos and play a role in mainstream politics, in this case a mass protest movement."

Read the entire post -- it is very, very illuminating. It seems to me that these people are an echo of the German-American Bund, who loudly demonstrated during the 30s to impress upon Americans the friendliness of the volk running the Fatherland at the time, and loudly claiming that a cabal of Jewish reactionaries were controlling FDR, pushing him into needless confrontation with those polite, friendly Germans who only wanted to return to prosperity and recover land and sovereignty stolen from them at Versailles. They also evoke the Communists of the same period, who spent the 30s extolling the Soviet Union as a worker's paradise while millions were starved, tortured, and imprisoned during Stalin's reign of terror. After the non-aggression pact, CPUSA demonstrated to keep America neutral; after Hitler double-crossed Stalin, CPUSA started screaming for American intervention.

So when we see protests like these, with idiots like these screaming insipid slogans like "Bush, Blair, CIA, How many kids did you kill today," it's crucial to know who funds these things, whose philosophy guides them, and their true intent. Like they did in France in 1939-40, these die-hard Stalinists and fascists are determined to grind down morale until the West shrugs its shoulders and abandons its positions on the wall. They wait for their chance to swarm over, kick us to the side of the road, and let a long, dark night of totalitarian rule fall over the Western world. They cannot win unless we refuse to fight; we cannot lose unless we first lose all hope.

All Your Foreign Policies Are Belong To Us

Thousands of British protestors are storming the streets ... well, sort of, as David Carr lets us know at Samizdata:

I took my camera along because, frankly, I was expecting sparks to fly but as I stepped out of Goodge Street Underground Station into the pre-demo melee, I detected an atmosphere that I judged to be disappointingly muted. Perhaps I had set the bar of my expectations too high. The gathering protestors seemed to me to be quite bouyant but way short of combustible. You don't spend three decades attending soccer matches in England without developing a sense of smell for impending mob violence. There was not even a whiff of it here.

Carr notes that the turnout was much less than trumpeted, although it was estimated at 70,000, which is not a small showing. He details the composition of the crowd as a "usual suspects" crowd consisting of:

Socialist Workers, Young Socialist Workers, Old Socialist Workers, Retired Socialist Workers, Communist Revolutionaries, Trade Unionists, Enviro-mentalists, Gay Rights, Animal Rights, Anarchist Rights, a whole slew of ageing CND veterans, a mere smattering of Islamic banners and one po-faced old duffer demanding 'Subsidies For The Arts Now!'. No, this was pretty much a whitebread event. Or, more accurately, a redbread event. It was if the Guardian has disgorged the contents of its subscription database onto the streets of London.

Now, everyone has a right to speak up in a democracy; as Bush tellingly reminded the protestors last night, it's a right that the Iraqis have just now been able to exercise as well, no thanks to this crowd. But we're not about to allow our foreign policy and national security to be dictated by people like this:

Yes, from right to left, Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, and Fred's mother-in-law want to protect us by disarming us. Great costumes, bad teeth, and no brains. Exactly what I look for in serious political debate.

Read the whole thing. Like one of his commenters note, David Carr has a gift for satire.

UN Details al-Qaeda Threat

The UN, which has consistently been AWOL in the war on terror, reports on al-Qaeda capabilities:

Some members of al Qaeda most likely possess portable surface-to-air missiles and may use them to target military transport planes, a U.N. report says.

The threat was among several findings detailed in the report by the United Nations' al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee which also cited a shifting of the terror network's strategy, a move towards "softer" targets and a warning the group was working towards a biological or chemical attack.

Gee, I wonder where they might have gotten chemical or biological weapons??

The report also identifies Iraq as "fertile ground" for al Qaeda, which receives the "funds it needs from charities, deep pocket donors, and business and criminal activities, including the drug trade."

Iraq was fertile ground for al-Qaeda, as British and American intelligence knew for years. The report will be published later this month, but if they only focus on the present instead of where al-Qaeda received funding, shelter, and support in the past, the report will be nothing more than a whitewash. But with countries like Syria serving on the UN committee on counterterrorism, my guess is that a whitewash may be the best result.

The report will confirm something that I've been saying for a few days now, too:

However, the killings and detentions of several members of al Qaeda has damaged the terror network, Munoz said. "They don't have today the capacity to attack the World [Trade Center] towers as they did on the 11th of September, 2001," he said. "That capacity they don't have, that has been destroyed."

In other words, the American war on terrorism, and specifically al-Qaeda, has been effective. The country is safer -- not completely safe -- but we are eroding the ability of this organization to mount large-scale operations against America and its citizens. As long as we persevere, we will continue to erode its operational capability and eventually cut off all support, which will reduce al-Qaeda to rockthrowers. Will the report actually connect those dots? Unlikely.

Evolution in Weblogs

I noticed that I have moved up the food chain again, going from Flappy Bird to Adorable Little Rodent in the TTLB Ecosystem. Captain's Quarters is currently ranked in the mid-700s, and we're averaging about 300 hits a day. (At that rate, I'll need 28 months to hit Venomous Kate's latest milestone, and she did it in 8 months!! Way to go, Kate!)

Thanks to everyone who's blogrolled me, or has been linking to my posts!

They Don't Just Eat Donuts in Eagan

In Eagan, Minnesota, the police chief isn't a desk jockey, at least not full time:

A teenager who allegedly burglarized eight Eagan homes in less than three hours Tuesday didn't realize who was waiting for him when he headed for the street. ... Out of the unmarked squad stepped Eagan Police Chief Kent Therkelsen.

Therkelsen drew his gun and ordered the 16-year-old boy to the ground. The youth complied, going face down. Less than a minute later, officer Paul Maier pulled up to assist his boss.

Chief Therkelsen has an engaging sense of humor about the incident:

Therkelsen said he doesn't want to turn Tuesday's arrest into "the Kent show." He credits the hard work of his officers and the quick action of citizens. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time, he said. "My theory is this guy was looking for the oldest cop he could surrender to," he said, laughing.

Three cheers for the Chief, and someone buy that man a dozen Krispy Kremes, now!

She Wants to Throw The Book at Bambi

I don't know why I moved from LA to Minnesota. I honestly thought that I would feel safer here, but then I readthis story:

Laura Lee Nicholas heard a couple of taps on her bedroom window Wednesday morning. Her day was about to get very interesting. ``All of a sudden, I heard this really bad crash,'' the 21-year-old college student said. ``I thought it was a burglar.''

She hid under her blanket. Noise coming from her dresser followed, as she imagined a burglar taking everything out of her dresser.

Nicholas thought the burglar had left her room, which is on the ground level of her parents' home. So she peeked out from under the blanket to grab a cell phone. That's when she saw a deer, staring right back at her.

She still called police, and two officers quickly led the deer back outside. It was turned over to a humane society.

Man, even the deer are tough in Minnesota. I suppose it was looking for someething to fence quickly out in the Range, so it could get high on fermented leaves. Bad news, those home-invasion deer. But I love the way the AP finishes this story: the deer was turned over "to a humane society". Well I guess that leaves out our society, then. Maybe they turned it over to the Swiss.

Update on Miss Afghanistan

For all of you fans of beauty in the cause of freedom, the Los Angeles Times has an update to the story of Miss Afghanistan, who made headlines around the world when she competed in the Miss Earth pageant in Manila:

Miss Afghanistan knew she was taking a risk when she strutted across a Manila catwalk in a bright red bikini. ... But she did not know she would be denounced by the government of her native land, criticized by fellow Afghans — even in the U.S. — and at the same time hailed by others as a role model for girls and women in the "new Afghanistan."

All because of a bikini — and a modest one at that.

Where is Vida Samadzai now? She's at Cal State Fullerton, my alma mater, where I managed to avoid graduating by avoiding classes. She's studying international business and communications, and is making a film about her experiences as an Afghani in America. One word of advice, Vida: avoid the pool tables at the student union, or you may wind up following in my footsteps.

The article is interesting, but the writer can't avoid silly touches like this:

When the controversy dies down, people may remember Miss Afghanistan only for the bikini. They may forget that in another part of the competition she also wore a traditional costume: green pants, a maroon and gold dress and a veil.

Perhaps that's because, unfortunately, Afghani women wearing veils did not qualify as news. If that's difficult for an LA Times reporter to understand, it may explain why they were so reluctant to investigate Cruz Bustamante's racist and seditious political alliances.

In case you've forgotten Ms. Samadzai, here's a couple of reminders:

Go Titans!

Turks In The Crosshairs Again

Blasts rocked Istanbul in another twin set of bombings this morning, killing at least 15 and injuring hundreds in attacks aimed at British interests:

Two blasts have rocked Istanbul, killing at least 15 people and devastating both the HSBC Bank headquarters and British consulate in an apparent suicide attack the government has linked to Islamist militants. Turkish television, quoting city health officials, said that besides the 15 killed, 320 people were injured.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the strikes on Thursday bore "all the hallmarks of the international terrorism operations practised by al Qaeda and associated organisations".

While Turkey has strong Western connections and is the only Islamic democracy operating in the Middle East, it is ruled by an Islamist party at the moment, making Turkey an odd target, especially since Turkey refused to militarily support the Coalition, inflicting an embarrassing diplomatic setback to George Bush just weeks after Bush faced down France over the issue of deploying defensive forces to protect Turkey. Islamic terrorists bombing buildings and killing Muslims in Turkey will not endear Turkey's voters to Islamist political parties. Nor will bombing the British convince Britons to pull out of the war on terror; it's likely to inflame public opinion more towards fighting Islamofascism.

Although it's often hinted at, no one is really talking about the sharp change of focus that al-Qaeda has made of late. No one wants to assume that they've completely lost the ability to launch complicated and more destructive attacks outside their own back yard, but there's little other explanation to their sudden desire to blow up Muslims in Middle East territory. As I posted yesterday, the smaller scale and the restricted geography of these attacks points towards success in the war against al-Qaeda by all countries involved, even the "weasels". But we may see attacks like these for some time while we continue to roll up their operations.

UPDATE: Power Line has links to some photos. Not for young eyes.

Challenge, Chapter 4: Stephen Hayes Responds

Stepping away from the first Weekly Standard article for today, Stephen Hayes writes a powerful rebuttal to both the Pentagon non-response response and the naysayers in the mainstream media using it to justify their inaction (via Power Line):

IF THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTING in the memo was left out of earlier "finished intelligence products" because the reporting is inaccurate, it seems odd that it would form the basis of briefings given to the secretary of Defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and the vice president. And it would be stranger still to include such intelligence in a memo to a Senate panel investigating the potential misuse of intelligence.

If, on the other hand, the information in the Feith memo is accurate, it changes everything. An operational relationship between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as detailed in the memo, would represent a threat the United States could not afford to ignore.

Hayes defines the areas of confusion that the Pentagon response created, and then goes step by step in defusing each argument authoritatively. For instance, to the charge that the Feith memo reference raw data which may or may not be true, Hayes responds:

(3) The Pentagon statement allows that some of the information in the document comes from "raw reports." The implication is that such reports might be wrong. True enough. That's why THE WEEKLY STANDARD article, for obvious reasons, never claimed knowledge of the authenticity of all 50 enumerated intelligence data points. But most of the information in the memo appears to have multiple sources and to be internally consistent. Consider point 18 and the analysis that follows.

18. According to foreign government service sensitive CIA reporting, Faruq Hijazi went to Afghanistan in 1999 along with several other Iraqi officials to meet with Bin Laden. The source claimed that Hijazi would have met Bin Laden only at Saddam's explicit direction.
Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17 and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al-Qaida operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The cover nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.

...

The part of the memo dealt with in the article was called "Summary of Body of Intelligence Reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda Contacts (1990-2003)," and it contains passages in bold and in normal typeface. A note at the bottom of the first page reads: "All bolded sentences contain information from intelligence reporting. Unbolded sentences represent comments/analyses."

Please read the entire article, if you haven't yet done so. For an idea about how this data has been received by non-media intelligence experts, Hayes provides a powerful example:

James Woolsey, CIA director under President Bill Clinton, made reference to the Tenet letter in an appearance this past weekend on "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." Tenet's enumeration of the links and the evidence in the Feith memo has Woolsey convinced.

"Anybody who says there is no working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence going back to the early '90s--they can only say that if they're illiterate. This is a slam dunk."

Again, I'll ask: Where is the mainstream press??

The Master/Slave Controversy

Instapundit links to a post at Boing Boing that details a benighted response to the electronics industry-standard terms of master and slave. This is from an e-mail sent to technology vendors from Los Angeles County:

One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words ''Master/Slave'' appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label. We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department.

While I hardly ever pass up a chance to tweak the nose of my native LA, this issue came up years ago at my former company which will remain nameless (a Fortune 500 company at the time, Fortune 100 now after a series of acquisitions and mergers, and lawyers up the wazoo, if you get my drift). In the area we worked, automation systems have to be designed to be hot-redundant, meaning that a failure on one computer will result in an automatic switch to a redundant computer that has been copying all of the data changes in real time. When the system was designed (mid-80s), the "hot" computer was labeled the Master system, and the backup the slave, per standard terminology at the time.

However, the first place this system was due to be implemented was in the South -- New Orleans, I believe, although I'm not completely sure. When the status screen came up for the first time, an operator looked at the system status line which read, MASTER-A, SLAVE-B, so that the center knew which computer was hot (and therefore which computer required the system commands for backups, etc). The operator looked up at the installing technician and said, "What is this 'master-slave' SHIT?"

After some very hurried conversation with the home office, the labels were changed to MASTER and TRACKER. And TRACKER it remained until the systems were finally decommissioned within the last couple of years.

UPDATE: The Volokh Conspiracy posts about the legal issues involved in the LA memo.

UPDATE 2, 11/24/03: It's officially true -- Snopes has confirmed both the original memo and the sincerity of the policy from LA County.

Nolan Myers' Family Speaks Out

Some of you may remember this post regarding the death of a Minnesota teen in North Carolina, who was hit by a drunk driver while being a Good Samaritan and trying to assist stranded motorists on Route 54. Nolan was one of six people killed by Larry Robert Veeder, whose blood alcohol level was .18, which is over twice the legal threshold in most states, including North Carolina. Veeder was charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter.

This was the story as I excerpted it from the Star Tribune (links no longer valid):

When Nolan Myers saw somebody was in need he was always willing to lend a helping hand, his family and friends said. ... He and three friends came upon the accident and stopped to be good samaritans. As Myers, 18, of Carver, Minn., reached one of the injured motorists, the driver of a speeding van plowed into the vehicles and the bystanders, killing five people, including Myers. A sixth person died en route to the hospital, authorities said.

No matter the circumstances, the sudden death of such a young person is tragic; all the possibilities of their life gone in an instant, along with the children and grandchildren that will never be, the comfort he would have provided his family as they grew older. Gone. And when that young man has the character and caring that Nolan was in the middle of demonstrating, assisting people he didn't know just because it was the right thing to do, that makes the tragedy even more keenly felt. And when it turns out that he died because someone decided to drink repeatedly and then get in a truck and drive, it's no longer just a tragedy; it's a travesty.

This evening, I received a comment to this post from Phil Myers, a member of Nolan's family, that I would like to put into its own post. Phil Myers writes about this much better than I ever will.

Nolan's death has touched many, and his family is struggling with finding forgiveness for the Mr. Veeder who took the life of their only son and five others, while injuring three, two of whom will be in physical therapy for at least a year. Mr. Veeder's blood alcohol level was .18 - over twice the legal level, measured after being booked since he had the presence of mind to refuse a breathalizer at the scene. This is still not expected to elevate the charges to secondary murder from involuntary manslaughter according to the DA, notwithstanding the fact that he was going 60 mph at the time and 55 at impact of the trailblazer from which a young man had been rescued moments before by Nolan and others. [Speed limit was 45 -- Ed.]

Poor lighting says the defense? The Raleigh impound parking lot adjoins the intersection, and is floodlit at night. Numerous drivers came upon the scene from the same direction before Mr. Veeder, and did U-turns to retreat from the scene. Then along comes Mr. Veeder at 60... mows down nine and slams into the damaged trailblazer, pushing it another 76 feet. After justice, Mr. Veeder needs treatment, but his behavior has ruined numerous lives and dreams. Accountability for tragidies such as this is necessary to make clear to everyone the implications of choosing to drive intoxicated. I do sympathize with Mr. Veeder, however, in that he must now live on with this nightmare in his heart for the rest of his life...perhaps a fate worse than the worst punishment the people of North Carolina can mete out. - PJM

I can't imagine the grief that Mr. Myers and his family are experiencing, along with the completely justified anger and resentment towards Mr. Veeder for taking Nolan from them. Their concern over forgiveness and treatment for Mr. Veeder shows what kind of people Nolan came from. Please keep these people in your prayers. Remember this, and what the loss of a fine young man means to his family and to all of us, if you're tempted to drive after having a few drinks or see someone else who tries it.

Wandering Aimlessly Through the Blogosphere

I love to go awandering Along the mountain track And when I go, I love to sing My knapsack on my back

Valderee, valderah,
Valderee, valderah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,
Valderee, valderah,
My knapsack on my back

Random sightings while taking a stroll through the blogosphere this evening ...

Roger Simon has a good post on Simon & Garfunkel (no relation ... or is he?), and the recent reunion concert he attended. Reminds me of the concert I saw in 1982, during their first reunion concert tour. Roger also posts on the Feith memo and the update from Stephen Hayes, which I'll post about in tomorrow's Challenge post.

Little Green Footballs has little pink tanks. No, really.

Croooow Blog has some nice examples of bias at ABC news, including George Stephanopoulos' knee-jerk tax-and-spend reflex and Ted Koppel's oversized ego. (They should have hired Letterman.) Don't forget to blogroll Croooow Blog, too.

Jon at QandO explains why we can't just toss the keys to the car to the Iraqis, in a post every parent of a teenager will understand.

Michael Kantor at the Calico Cat reminds us about FDR's attempt to stack the Supreme Court to pave the way for the New Deal. FDR failed, but judicial activism thrives, and Hamilton is spinning in his grave. He also disagrees with me about gay marriage but agrees that non-lawyers probably don't know enough about the Massachussets state constitution to accurately criticize yesterday's ruling, and gives a different libertarian take on the issue.

The Commissar discovers multimedia presentations and polls, two concepts I thought that the Great Socialist Revolution would have rendered useless. His chart on approval of the war demonstrates that American resolve is standing more firm than the mainstream media reflects.

Bill bloviates like no one else. And if you're ever over at his house, watch where you step.

Steve at Second Nature details the bitter and explosive battle between two sworn enemies ... Burger King and KFC??

The Sophorist, besides discovering my craven apple-polishing over at the Politburo Diktat, has also discovered the magic and wonder of Google.

Venomous Kate at Electric Venom is celebrating 250,000 hits. Be sure to drop by and give her a few more. But don't look at my hit counter, mmmkay?

Meryl Yourish answers questions directly, when asked politely. It's too bad there isn't more dialogue between the two sides in the Middle East that resembles this, instead of this.

Valderee, valderah, Valderee, valderah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, Valderee, valderah, Come join my happy song

A Little Perspective from The Politburo Diktat

There may be some in the blogosphere who are foolish enough to underestimate the Politburo Diktat, but not me, and this post is one reason why. The Commissar makes a point about commitment to victory by using a particularly apt historical analogy:

Da, Comrade, Great Patriotic War. That was war. Commissar not understand Americans. Are they at war? Did enemies kill 3,000 citizens in one morning? How does America want to win war? Sit around campfire, on Peace Rug, sing Kumbaya? In Great Patriotic War, Soviet Union lost 20 million in four years of war. 5 million a year. 400,000 a month. 13,000 per day. 500 per hour. Comrades, by this scale, America has been at war in Iraq for about one hour. Now you talk "exit strategy?"

Read the entire post. The Commissar has a terrific blog, both in content and style. And no, I'm not sucking up to get my rank and commission back, either.

Don't We Look Peachy?

I know every media outlet in the nation is covering the Michael Jackson/Neverland Ranch search story, instead of something a bit more useful, but our national shame has reached international status. Merde in France has posted about this, linking to a Canadian story, with this lovely little quote from The King of Pop:

Jackson denounced media coverage of the search in a statement released by Backerman to The Associated Press. "I've seen lawyers who don't represent me and spokespeople who do not know me speaking for me. These characters always seem to surface with dreadful allegations just as another project, an album, a video is being released," the Jackson statement said.

Yes, it's not enough that this well-known creep manages to embarrass us internationally, he also manages to plug his latest project along with it. Hey, I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity, is there?

Also, Merde in France suggested a song for the occasion, but it's all in French, so I can't read it. If your French is better than mine, let me know what the lyrics say. And as always, check out the entire blog if you haven't already -- it's always illuminating!

Great Security at Buckingham Palace

Security breaches like this happen here in America, too, but with all of the protests going on over President Bush's visit, you'd think a little bit of double-checking would be in order:

The Daily Mirror newspaper, claiming to have exposed a security breach at Buckingham Palace, said its reporter had been given full access to Queen Elizabeth II's residence on his first day on the job two months ago. The Mirror said reporter Ryan Parry had been due to serve breakfast Wednesday morning to key Bush aides. It said Parry quit his job as a royal footman at midnight Tuesday.

It's not unusual for new hires to begin working ahead of receiving their security clearances, but very unusual to be given complete access to the most sensitive areas, regardless of where you work:

Parry said he gave one real reference and one fake reference when he applied for work at the palace. He said he was given an all-areas security pass on his first day at work. ... "Had I been a terrorist intent on assassinating the queen or American President George Bush, I could have done so with absolute ease," Parry said. "Indeed this morning I would have been serving breakfast to key members of his government, including National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell," he added.

Nice job, guys. (via Drudge Report)

A Taste of Defeatism at the LA Times

LA Times publishes a featured analysis today that reviews al-Qaeda's effectiveness and strategy in the wake of 9/11. Not surprisingly for the LA Times, it focuses on the negative:

"Al Qaeda as an ideology is now stronger than Al Qaeda as an organization," said Mustafa Alani of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London. "What we are witnessing now is a major shift in Al Qaeda's strategy. I believe it is successful. Now they are not on the defensive. They are on the offensive."

Large-scale terrorist groups never go on the defensive, unless you get them all trapped in a building, SLA-style. By their nature, they operate as distributed networks. This was true even prior to 9/11. It's not as if the entire group arrived in Kenya and Tanzania to bomb our embassies; they operate in cells.

A U.S.-led assault on Al Qaeda has left many of the network's leaders dead, in jail or on the run. Still, counter-terrorism officials have linked Al Qaeda or its followers to a drumbeat of attacks in Russia, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the Philippines, dating back to spring. Intent on maximizing the propaganda impact of its actions, the network has shifted from a single-minded focus on American interests to a broader mix including Jewish and Muslim targets.

Except in Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has not mounted a successful attack on American interests anywhere, and several have been thwarted by the US now that it has fully accepted that we are under attack. Note also that the attacks have not been the highly coordinated and expensive attacks of 9/11 -- they have gone back to car bombs against targets of opportunity. This is not to say that these attacks aren't a highly serious problem, of course. They are. But they're not delivering biochemical or nuclear attacks against major metropolitan areas, in the US or elsewhere, which is what they were aiming to do. The US understands the difference:

Al Qaeda has always been relatively decentralized and unstructured. But today it moves faster, inciting attacks that require less time, expertise or high-level supervision, said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI analyst and terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"It was always a network of networks whose inner core would wait patiently for three to five years to carry out spectacular attacks," Levitt said. "What's different today is that it's not clear they can conduct attacks with that kind of command and control. So to maintain relevancy, they gave the go-ahead: Do what you can, where you can, when you can. And they are targeting softer targets more frequently."

This is a natural evolution in the war on terror, and one of the reasons why President Bush warned that it would take years to prosecute. Once command and control was damaged or destroyed, al-Qaeda was going to lose its "big-project" capability, but the individual cells would still exist and be able to do substantial, if uncoordinated, damage with minimal communication from a reduced central authority. Cash flow continues to be attacked, but cash that had already been received by the cells would be difficult to find and confiscate, meaning that cells could continue operations for a period of time before losing their economic ability to go on. The fact that these cells have staged successful, low-risk operations involving what the article calls "Kleenex kamikazes" should not surprise anyone. We may see that for years to come while we dry up financing, although al-Qaeda may do that for us if they keep attacking Saudi civilians during Ramadan.

The resurgent global menace leads critics to assert that the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have boomeranged by scattering Al Qaeda's forces, making them harder to detect, and inspiring like-minded extremists.

"I think it [U.S. strategy] has backfired," said Alani, of the London defense studies institute. "There is no evidence they can cope effectively with these groups."

Backfired? Only if you're suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, or a typical Baby Boomer for whom instant gratification takes too long, or perhaps a defeatist who believed that the only way to address al-Qaeda was to apologize for offending them with our tall buildings, promise to build no more, and disengage with the world. Can we learn from setbacks and do better? Of course we can. But to pretend that eliminating al-Qaeda's primary sponsors in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing or capturing most of its top leadership, and rendering them incapable of "big-project" missions isn't progress only serves to create defeatism and surrender to terror, and more to the point, doesn't reflect reality.

Challenge, Chapter 3: Independent Confirmation from the IIS

Taking a further look into Stephen Hayes' report on the Feith memo, we can see that Osama and Saddam spent the years between their initial rapprochement and the 1998 embassy bombings building the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS). In 1998, as tension was building between Saddam and UNSCOM, Iraq's upper echelons were escalating contacts with the terrorist group:

IN ADDITION TO THE CONTACTS CLUSTERED in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad's point of contact with al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz."

11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan in 1999. . . .

14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.

Again, we see that the data provided in the memo contains evalution of the reliability of the sources involved. Not only that, but there are some recognizable, high-level names in this data: Tariq Aziz, one of the central authority figures in Ba'athist Iraq; Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden's top lieutenants prior to 9/11; and Faruq Hijazi, an Iraqi ambassador and #2 at the IIS. These aren't just some low-level operatives hanging out in a bar in Prague.

Not only was Iraq meeting with and providing support to al-Qaeda, Saddam's henchmen were negotiating the provision of base camps in an-Nasiriyah and Kurdistan. Kurdistan, if one recalls, is where Ansaar al-Islam wound up being based, and an-Nasiriyah is in the area where terrorist training camps for Palestinians were found. Remember that postwar insistence that Saddam had no control over Kurdistan since the Gulf War truce imposed "no-fly" zones in the north and south and therefore had no responsibility for the existence of the Ansaar al-Islam base there? In 1998 they had enough control in Kurdistan to be working towards building a base there; in fact, Ansaar al-Islam is almost certainly an al-Qaeda affiliate, so bin Laden was apparently successful in his mission.

But even if you don't find the Feith memo reliable, there's independent confirmation -- from the IIS itself:

President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon on February 18, 1998, and prepared the nation for war. He warned of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals" and said "there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The day after this speech, according to documents unearthed in April 2003 in the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing coming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered by liquid paper that, when revealed, exposed a plan to increase cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to that memo, the IIS agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might provide "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

Four days later, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa deploring the UN policy in Iraq and urging his followers to "kill Americans":

"The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

From this sequence of events, and the public revelation of the contents of the IIS documents discovered by the journalists, this is strong evidence of Iraqi/al-Qaeda cooperation, at the least. Osama may have been motivated enough on his own to issue that fatwa. But the captured IIS documents, despite its attempted redactions, certainly show that the Iraqis were trying hard to get Osama and his deadly network on board and working to kill Americans.

Now, ask yourself this: if you are the American President, the day after 9/11, and these intelligence reports demonstrate this strong linkage between Saddam and the man who just slaughtered 3,000 civilians in the single worst foreign attack on America in history, do you consider the removal of Saddam as a "distraction" from the war on terror, or a major component of its success?

More tomorrow. Spread the word. (Previous posts in this series can be found here and here.)

UPDATES: SmarterCop posted about the memo on Monday, noting that quite a bit of this information was available to the Clinton Administration. While I think that Clinton couldn't have done much more than he did against al-Qaeda without a 9/11-scale event (even with that, look how many people oppose any action at all), he makes a brilliant point about the rhetoric from Clinton's people now, notably Al Gore's contention that a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection was a lie:

It's odd that former Vice President and runner-up Al Gore would contradict these intelligence findings.

...And much of the reporting comes from Clinton-era intelligence. Not that you would know this from Al Gore's recent public statements. Indeed, the former vice president claims to be privy to new "evidence" that the administration lied. In an August speech at New York University, Gore claimed: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Really?

It may be sooner, it may be later, but I have a suspicion we're going to find the Democrats are going to try to spin helicopter-speed to get out of this credibility rut.

Make sure to check it out. (via Peaktalk's Carnival of the Vanities)

Demosophia gives a more detailed look at bin Laden's fatwa against America in 1998, and makes a number of good points, as well as linking back to several bloggers who are continuing their efforts to get this story out. (It's another excellent blog, too.)

Slate Picks Up the Scent

Slate (no friend of the Bush administration) has picked up the story of the Hayes memo and the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection in two articles today; the first revisits the thread of the Prague-Mohammed Atta visit, and the second deals directly with the apathy of the press regarding the Feith memo. (via Croooow Blog)

Edward Jay Epstein retraces the investigation into Mohammed Atta's travels prior to 9/11, specifically the Czech intelligence report -- never repudiated by the Czechs -- that Atta met with Iraqi officials known to be IIS operatives:

The reason there had been joint Czech-American interest in the case traced back to the December 1998 when al-Ani's predecessor at the Iraq Embassy, Jabir Salim, defected from his post. In his debriefings, Salim said that he had been supplied with $150,000 by Baghdad to prepare a car-bombing of an American target, the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe. (This bombing never took place because Salim could not recruit a bomber.)

So when al-Ani replaced Salim at the Iraq Embassy in Prague in 1999, both the United States and the Czech Republic wanted him closely watched in case he had a similar assignment. ... Then, on April 8, 2001, a BIS watcher saw al-Ani meeting in a restaurant outside Prague with an Arab man in his 20s. This set off alarm bells because a BIS informant in the Arab community had provided information indicating that the person with whom al-Ani was meeting was a visiting "student" from Hamburg—and one who was potentially dangerous.

Three days after the 9/11 attack, the Czech Republic was able to identify the "student" as Mohammed Atta. The Czechs contacted the FBI, who became extremely interested, at least at first, before the story leaked out of Washington. Clearly embarrassed by the implications, the FBI then backtracked and let out a story that Atta could not possibly have been in Prague at the time of that meeting; "federal law enforcement officials" told the New York Times that the FBI had in its possession records of car rentals and hotel receipts that coincided with that date. The press reported that Atta had definitely been in Virginia Beach at the time, and the story was treated like a rumor, one with an express purpose to erroneously link Saddam to 9/11. It is still presented as an argument of American dementia by the left, specifically as an argument against Fox News and Rupert Murdoch.

The only problem is that the FBI had no car rental records or hotel receipts for Atta that covers that time:

All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license. His international license was at his father's home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, "It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias" to "meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague." Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.

Obviously, just because he could have traveled to Prague doesn't mean he actually did. But Atta was in Prague before then. Despite knowing that he could not leave the airport terminal because of a snag in his visa, Atta traveled from Bonn to Prague on May 30, 2000 and spent six hours in the transit lounge, staying out of surveillance camera range. He flew back to Hamburg without ever leaving the airport. Why is this significant? Because his visa would have allowed him to leave the airport on May 31. Why then fly on the 30th? Did he have a meeting that could not wait, and if so, what could it have been? Perhaps not coincidentally, large sums of money began flowing to the 9/11 conspirators in June 2000.

Unfortunately, the FBI is no longer cooperating with the Czech probe, so no further answers have been forthcoming. Perhaps this is a good time to ask why.

In the second story, Jack Shaefer wonders why the national press hasn't aggressively reported on the leaked Feith memo:

One anonymous "former senior intelligence officer" quoted by Pincus sniffs that the memo is not an intelligence product but "data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."

Help me! Many a reporter has hitched a ride onto Page One with the leak of intelligence much rawer than the stuff in Feith's memo. You can bet the farm that if a mainstream publication had gotten the Feith memo first, it would have used it immediately—perhaps as a hook to re-examine the ongoing war between the Pentagon and CIA about how to interpret intelligence. Likewise, you'd be wise to bet your wife's farm that had a similar memo arguing no Saddam-Osama connection been leaked to the press, it would have generated 100 times the news interest as the Hayes story.

Shaefer hits the nail on the head -- this memo doesn't conform to the accepted wisdom of the mainstream press, so they're choosing to ignore it, except in terms of who leaked it. Read Shaefer's entire column; it's encouraging to those of us who want the memo explored in much more depth than we're seeing right now. As a commenter said over at Roger Simon's blog, "This is the most important story of the war." The media should start recognizing that.

Mass. Court Strikes Down Gay-Marriage Ban

I'm sure this news will fan the flames of the blogosphere and talk radio for the next few days:

Massachusetts' highest court ruled 4-3 Tuesday that the state's ban on same- sex marriage is unconstitutional and gave lawmakers 180 days to come up with a solution that would allow gay couples to wed. ... "Whether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family — these are among the most basic of every individual's liberty and due process rights," the majority opinion said. "And central to personal freedom and security is the assurance that the laws will apply equally to persons in similar situations."

"Barred access to the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage, a person who enters into an intimate, exclusive union with another of the same sex is arbitrarily deprived of membership in one of our community's most rewarding and cherished institutions," the opinion said

Bear in mind that the Massachussets Supreme Court interprets the state constitution, not the federal Constitution, and without knowing too much about the Mass. constitution, it's hard to remark whether they are spot-on or in left field here. As a rule, I think mandates like these from the bench are a bad idea. Unless there is a literal conflict with the constitution, social issues like these need to be processed through elected representatives to ensure legitimacy. The civil-rights struggle was an exception because there were laws and practices in the states that directly conflicted with the literal meaning of the 13th and 14th amendments. Now the legislature in Massachussets is threatening to amend its constitution to specifically forbid gay marriage to counter this judicial activism.

Nevertheless (and this is where I part company with many of my friends), I think lifting the ban on gay marriage is inevitable and actually a good idea. The argument against this is mostly based on religious principles, or on the protection of procreation. Neither argument stands up in a secular legal environment. Civil marriage, at one time, may have borne some relation to religious marriage, but if it ever did it certainly does not now. Civil marriages are now nothing more than privileged contracts, recognized by the state for the disposition of shared property, child support where applicable, and distribution of benefits, both private and public. The notion that a civil marriage confers some sacramental status to a relationship is ludicrous in an age where you can drive up and have an Elvis impersonator marry you -- legally, and binding in all 50 states -- an hour after you roll into Las Vegas. Unlike other contracts, civil marriages can be broken by one party alone without mandatory penalties thanks to no-fault divorces; my wife could give you chapter and verse on that topic from the end of her first marriage. In this country, civil marriage has been so divorced from religious meaning that you can easily get married and divorced once a year, every year, and still have summers to yourself.

The idea that civil marriage protects the procreative child-rearing processes are similarly flawed, and for much the same reasons. Straight people do not wait to be married to procreate, or to practice the mechanism of procreation, to get exceedingly technical. Divorce from a civil marriage is just as easily obtained whether children are present or not. The argument also overlooks the most obvious issue: gay couples are much more unlikely to produce children anyway, for obvious reason, especially male gay couples. And for those who bring children into the relationship, the non-related partner has no legal standing with the children, regardless of how stable and long the relationship may be. Children who may have spent most of their formative years with such a person could be taken away if the related parent dies and the blood family decides (as next of kin) to remove them from the only home they've known.

Up to now, American legal systems have forced gay couples to use a "civil union" contract to mimic marriage without officially recognizing these contract relationships as such. Civil unions, not surprisingly, offer the exact same benefits as civil marriage: disposition of shared property, child support where applicable, and distribution of benefits. Even private benefits, such as health insurance through work, are generally honored by most companies these days. Civil unions do not protect its members with next-of-kin status, however; in a Terri Schiavo-like situation, the partner of the patient is at the mercy of blood relatives, who in some cases may have been openly hostile to both people due to their relationship and orientation. It forces odd linguistic constructions like "significant other" and "life partner", where "spouse" is a lot more convenient. Civil unions offer a second-class status to a contractual relationship that is otherwise no different than civil marriage.

Churches, of course, can put any restriction on marriage that they see fit, because church membership is voluntary (legally speaking, of course). People do not need church approval for civil marriage, and churches often refuse to recognize civil marriages for failing one test or another. Legalizing gay marriages will do nothing to change church prerogative in setting their own standards for marriage.

On the other hand, legalizing gay marriages will tend to eliminate a radicalizing issue in the gay community and bind gay couples closer to mainstream society. Absent this issue, gay couples will feel more engaged in their communities and in the political processes that affect them, and will cease to be single-issue voters. And most of all, it will eliminate another type of "unspeakable" class in what should be a classless society.

Like the elimination of sodomy laws, I believe that we are seeing the right result from the wrong process. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent relative to the former, few doubted the laws were silly, but it should have been left to the legislature to remediate that. Unless we want to start making both marriage and divorce in this country much more difficult to enter into, then it's time we dropped the pretense of the civil government giving a sacramental blessing to marriage, quit trying to build two "separate but equal" systems of contract unions, and legalize gay civil marriages through legislation.

UN Buggers Out -- Again

The UN, which purports to be the only agency that can restore democracy to war-torn areas, is abandoning its efforts in Afghanistan after the death of a French aid worker:

The U.N. refugee agency began pulling foreign staff out of large swaths of southern and eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites) on Tuesday in the wake of the killing of a French worker, a decision that could affect tens of thousands of Afghan returnees. ... The withdrawal of international staff follows a series of attacks on the United Nations in recent days, including the drive-by killing of Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old UNHCR worker, as she traveled through a bazaar in a clearly marked U.N. vehicle in the city of Ghazni, 60 miles southwest of the capital.

That same day saw a bomb attack on a U.N. vehicle in eastern Paktia province. And on Nov. 11, a car bomb exploded outside U.N. offices in Kandahar, injuring two people.

So, while Kofi Annan and the French continue to berate the Americans for not turning over Iraq to UN control, the UN continues itscraven tradition by evacuating when any violence at all breaks out. We've seen the pattern before: in Srebrenca, in Rwanda, the UN stood around while people committed genocide around them, and then left without firing a shot to stop it. They've pulled out of Iraq after two bombings, blaming American forces for a lack of security, when in fact the UN refused American security, claiming that it would affect their neutrality. The UN instead had retained the security forces they had prior to the war -- which were Saddam's IIS intelligence minders. In effect, the UN had hired its former Ba'athist jailers as security. They left pointing fingers at the Americans, and refused to accept their own report on UN security blunders. But the point is they left, and they're not planning on returning. It appears they're on their way out of Afghanistan now, too.

And for a grim laugh, here's what the UN had to say Monday before the withdrawal was announced:

U.N. spokesman David Singh had said the killing would never force the world body to quit Afghanistan. "The United Nations is here to stay in every part of the country," he said in Kabul, the capital, on Monday, before the withdrawal announcement by UNHCR.

I guess he hadn't gotten the memo yet.

Challenge, Chapter 2: Osama's Peace with Saddam

One of the constant themes of the anti-war media blitz was that Osama and Saddam were enemies due to Saddam's secularism (or skin-deep Islamism prior to the first Gulf War) and Osama's fanatical Islamist beliefs. Osama, they said, could not abide a secularist such as Saddam and probably was working against him. Believers in this meme -- and there were many -- argued that an American war that deposed Saddam benefited al-Qaeda rather than hinder it. Cynical essays were published during the brief war that had Osama celebrating the Americans doing his dirty work in Iraq.

However, reality was somewhat different, as even the Clinton administration knew well before the embassy bombings of 1998. After those bombings, Janet Reno's Justice Department indicted Osama bin Laden for both bombings and for conspiring to kill Americans:

According to the indictment, bin Laden and al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in Sudan and with representatives of the Government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah with the goal of working together against their common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

"In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq," the indictment said. [USIA press release, 11/4/98]

That substantiates this part of the Feith memo, as has been discussed at length around the blogosphere:

5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.

This agreement did not just comprise a non-aggression pact between Osama and Saddam; it was the basis of a working relationship, allowing al-Qaeda safe harbor from which to plot attacks against American and Western targets:

8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.

Remember that this section of the Feith memo does not detail newly-discovered intelligence on the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Saddam regime; this was known to the Clinton administration, and presumably to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at least as far back as 1998. Why, then, have the Democrats been insisting that there was no evidence of a link between al-Qaeda, Osama, and Saddam Hussein? According to evidence available to the Clinton administration and the Senate, they knew about the link from multiple sources. In this light, the Rockefeller memo of the past month is particularly reprehensible, as is the public statements of most Democratic presidential candidates, excepting Lieberman and Gephardt.

More tomorrow. And if you're blogging on this memo daily in response to Andrew Sullivan's challenge to the blogosphere, please send a trackback ping so I can liink your posts on my site, or leave a comment with the URL of your post.

UPDATE: Power Line links to a Washington Post article and an Andrew Sullivan critique of it. The article is off-line at the moment, but here's a quote that states the thinking of the reporter, Walter Pincus:

The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

That's a pretty lame excuse for burying the story -- just the two paragraphs I quote today mention "a well placed source" and "a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated". That both analyzes them and addresses their accuracy. The entire Feith memo has numerous such passages. And, let's remember, that the correlation was strong enough for Justice in '98 to claim the exact same correlation as discussed in my post. This is why the blogosphere needs to stay on top of this story.

UPDATES: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for linking to this post. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here. Note: The next part can be found here.

Jon at QandO has more on the WaPo article; he notes that Pincus' attitude towards investigative journalism seems a bit suspect.

Let's Keep the British Protests in Perspective

All we're hearing in our newspapers is that Britain's about to erupt with anti-American hatred in response to a visit from President Bush. Well, it's a bit overblown, as the Guardian reports in a new poll taken amongst the British electorate:

The survey shows that public opinion in Britain is overwhelmingly pro-American with 62% of voters believing that the US is "generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world". It explodes the conventional political wisdom at Westminster that Mr Bush's visit will prove damaging to Tony Blair. Only 15% of British voters agree with the idea that America is the "evil empire" in the world.

Just as here, the UK has a large, diverse population, and it's not difficult to come up with a few thousand mouthbreathers that would be happy to loudly protest damn near anything, especially a representative of capitalism and military strength. Supposedly, Tony Blair was supposed to be politically damaged by this visit and the highly visible protests it would inspire, but if anything, Bush's visit gives Blair another opportunity to deliver his message of engagement in Iraq's liberation and strategic alliance with the US. And it seems to be working:

The ICM poll also uncovers a surge in pro-war sentiment in the past two months as suicide bombers have stepped up their attacks on western targets and troops in Iraq. Opposition to the war has slumped by 12 points since September to only 41% of all voters. At the same time those who believe the war was justified has jumped 9 points to 47% of voters.

The Guardian breaks the polling down demographically, and it's interesting that Blair and US support seems to be strongest among younger voters -- just as in the US:

A majority of "twentysomethings" welcome Mr Bush. Hostility is strongest amongst the over-65s.

It's nice to see that young Britons are supportive of our efforts to eliminate terrorism, but it's damned annoying to see this repudiation from the generation who should best remember American assistance in defeating the Nazis, running the Atlantic blockade to keep them fed (at no insignificant loss of life), and helping them secure their island from the worst effects of WWII. It doesn't mean that they should automatically agree with anything we do -- no one seriously thinks that -- but outright hostility to an American president is just rude under the circumstances.

Even at that, it's hardly the Western meltdown portrayed by the mainstream media here, and in fact, there seems to be plenty of good news from Britain regarding popular support. Let's keep that in mind when we see the protests on TV. (link via Drudge Report)

Second Nature: Yeah, that's Me

To thine own self be true ... Shakespeare said it first, but sometimes we bloggers need a reminder of this. Nothing gets more personal than a journal, and a large part of blogging is really what used to be called journaling, an exercise I remember well from acting workshops I took back when I thought I might be the next Anson Williams, a pathetic ambition if I ever heard one. Steve at Second Nature has a good post calling us back to this truth, along with another:

Never bring a knife to a gunfight.

I am not sure who coined that phrase, but it probably wasn't the guy with the knife.

Steve describes the desire we all feel to post on every hot topic in the news, as if we're the mainstream media and are somehow obligated to remark on every single bit of data that winds up on our screens. Steve, who has been refining his blogging over the past few weeks, has settled on what works for him, and his blogging is better for it. No doubt he could write well on a wide variety of subjects, but it would eventually drain his enthusiasm, I think.

And don't forget to blogroll Second Nature. Like Twilight Cafe, it's an intriguing diversion from war and diplomacy into thoughtful topics.

Promises Kept, But Miles To Go Before He Sleeps

Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn into office today after a historic recall election, and immediately kept a key campaign promise:

Newly inaugurated California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an order rolling back a 300 percent increase in state vehicle registration fees Monday, just hours after taking the oath of office. Executive Order No. 1 repealed the $4 billion increase in the "car tax," imposed earlier this year to help shrink a massive budget shortfall from $38 million to $8 million. Analysts believe the fee hike contributed heavily to his predecessor's defeat. Reversing the car tax was one of actor Schwarzenegger's leading campaign promises.

The revenue loss will complicate his goals of balancing the budget, but perhaps at this stage it is more important to keep promises and build trust with an electorate whose trust has been badly bruised the past few years. His first legislative target appears to be the enormous workers-compensation system, which is driving businesses out of California. In order to fix the budget without increasing tax rates, he will have to increase revenues, and the only way to do that without new taxes is to aggressively grow the economy. The new governor evoked the founding of the nation to describe what he intends to do in office:

But he also invoked both former President Ronald Reagan and the framers of the Constitution, who faced a deep crisis when they met in Philadelphia in 1787.

"The dream of a new nation was falling apart," Schwarzenegger said. "Events were spiraling downward. Divisions were deep -- merchant against farmer, big states against small, north against south. Our founding fathers knew that the fate of the union was in their hands, just as the fate of California is in our hands."

But those delegates in Philadelphia produced what he called "the miracle of Philadelphia."

I hope he can deliver a Sacramento Miracle, because that's the level of expectation he's set now.

QandO Fisks the Latest E-Mail Trash

Jon at QandO does a terrific job of fisking the latest e-mail blitz: George W. Bush's "resume". A sample:

We garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later I made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

Losing sympathy was the largest diplomatic failure in world history? Gosh, I'd have thought it was, you know, the tiff that started WW1, or something.

Do tell.....what did we plan to do with that sympathy? Was there some sort of bank account in which it would have gathered interest and paid for our funeral after we'd ignored the threat for a bit longer?

And could the US possibly be the most hated, because of government controlled media propaganda like this? The United States wasn't "loved" even in the halcyon days of the Clinton administrations "please love us" foreign policy. Perhaps one should consider that our national interests are not secured by winning some sort of international popularity contest. In fact, that sort of thing can get you killed.

Read the whole thing -- and feel free to send the link to any bozo who copies you on this piece of refuse.

A Challenge to the Blogosphere

Andrew Sullivan issued a challenge to the blogosphere, one which I am enthusiastically willing to advance. Last Friday, the Weekly Standard published an explosive article detailing the many and varied contacts between al-Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Despite all of the poo-pooing of the mainstream press regarding a lack of evidence of such connections before the war, the WS story and the memo they reference makes it clear that such evidence existed in abundance, even during the Clinton administration (which Janet Reno's Justice Department even warned about in 1998). Now that this evidence has come to light, where are the mainstream media? Talking about quagmires.

So my challenge is this: Link to a different argument in the WS article each day and put your own thoughts on it in your blog. Skeptical? Good! Post about that. Because whether this memo is true or false, either way it is a huge story and deserves much more press than it's currently receiving. Keep going every day until we start to get some firm answers about the veracity and reliability of this data.

Today, I'll start at the top:

4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.

Here we have the fruits of the war in Iraq getting us solid information (we hope!) on Saddam's involvement in promoting terror, and specifically the organization that had already bombed the World Trade Center and would shortly attack American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. If this is true, then Saddam's Iraq squarely fell within stated American policy that those countries who harbor or support 9/11 terrorists will face the full power of the United States. Note that Saddam attempted to cover his tracks, post-9/11, by shifting intelligence personnel so that the connection would not be known to the US. Records of this will likely be found in the captured IIS files that are now being translated and decoded, as well as evidence of other connections and other terrorist groups.

Who's going next? (links via Instapundit)

UPDATE: Strange Women Lying in Ponds wants answers, too. And Demosophia, as always, gives an erudite deconstruction of the Feith memo and its non-response response from the DoD. Jon at QandO had reached the same conclusion yesterday.

Creative Thinking By Coalition Leadership

Today's Washington Post carries a story about creative thinking in opposition to the insurgency emanating from the Tikrit area and how it's allowed the Coalition to gather better intelligence, as well as more cooperation from local Iraqis:

Frustrated by a persistent insurgency, the U.S. military has surrounded ousted president Saddam Hussein's birthplace with concertina wire, issued identification cards to all male residents and begun controlling access to this wealthy enclave of Hussein relatives on the outskirts of Tikrit.

In order to pass through the wire and military checkpoints, all males have to present their ID cards. No card, no access, either in or out of Auja. The result is a much clearer picture of the town's residents, mostly wealthy Hussein backers and family, and better face-to-face contact with more sympathetic Iraqi leaders around the area. It avoided the intrusive and dangerous door-to-door searches that would have otherwise been necessary to determine identities. It also showed these leaders that Americans were willing to respect them if they were met half-way:

Despite the concertina wire, Russell has begun pushing a council of sheiks he meets with regularly in Tikrit to begin considering a process of reconciliation with at least some of the people of Auja, from the Bayjat tribe, who have chosen to put aside past loyalties and work with U.S. occupation authorities. ... Even the mayor of Tikrit, Wail Ali, an erudite former diplomat in Hussein's government who served in Belgium, France and Holland, expressed hatred for the people of Auja. "During Saddam's time, like mad dogs, they bite all the tribes," he said.

Asked about the fence Russell has built around Auja, Ali said, "I told him it was the best thing he did."

Now that the US has gone to the offensive again in the Sunni Triangle, opportunities like these are more critical to Coalition success in Iraq. We have to demonstrate the strength and the will to stick it out, to outlast the insurgents, but also the will to learn about the people and tailor our approach in respectful ways. I suspect that the latest offensive has been largely enabled by intelligence that efforts such as these provided, too. As we progress in providing the Iraqi people self-determination, something that they've never had before, we will see more and more Iraqis rejecting the Ba'athist tactics and goals and fingering those who perpetrate the terrorist acts.

Three cheers to the WaPo for featuring articles like this, which demonstrate that progress is being made, even if it's quiet progress.

He Still Doesn't Get It

Gray Davis, who is out of a job as of today, apparently still entertains notions of apolitical domeback, despite his recent recall:

After five years in office, Gray Davis leaves the Capitol today on an ignominious note, the only California governor ever recalled by voters. But far from being chastened, the 60-year-old Democrat has surprised longtime associates with a reaction that some characterize as deep denial of his fate.

He has hinted at a political comeback — sometimes in a joking fashion, at other times seriously — noting that his removal from office so early in his second term means he still could serve another term as governor, said people close to Davis, all speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Nothing is impossible in politics -- after all, who would have thought that Gore could have screwed up a "gimme" Presidential election in 2000, partly by losing his own home state? Who would have predicted a successful recall election back in 2002? But Davis is kidding himself if he's thinking that Californians would give him another shot at governing, when a record turnout emphatically repudiated him after calling for a costly special election just to have that chance. But that's not how he see it:

"You know, this last election just wasn't in the cards," said Davis, calmly dissecting his defeat. "I don't think there's anything we could have done differently against the opponent we had, other than — not just in the campaign but years ago — had a more aggressive communications strategy with voters. I think that would have led to a reservoir of goodwill that would have stood me in better stead once these external events happened."

I'm sure that would have helped, but it would have been better if he hadn't seemed so sleazy about raising funds, like the sweetheart deal he gave Oracle after taking substantial campaign cash from them. If anything, it was Davis' rapacious image towards fund-raising and favor distribution that infuriated the electorate. Garry South, Davis' political advisor, suggests that Davis could raise funds for non-profits, and that may put Davis to good use. But the reason Davis was good at raising funds was that everyone knew Davis was for sale. I doubt that he'll be all that effective raising funds when he has no favors to offer.

For his part, Davis has dealt with questions about a comeback with a politician's trademark equivocation, saying, "I'm not ruling anything out." What will be Davis' new life after 21 years in elective office remains a mystery. Asked about his future recently, Davis replied, "I still don't have a clue."

Which is why Davis finds himself out of a job today.

India & Syria: The New Laurel & Hardy

Who knew that when India and Syria decided to get together that it would produce such comedic possibilities:

India and Syria want the United Nations (news - web sites) to play a major role in Iraq (news - web sites) where the priority must be to restore security, said a joint statement to mark the departure of Indian premier Atal Behari Vajpayee.

The two countries said it was "vital that the Iraqi people take charge of their own destiny", and for the United Nations to "play a large role in the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq".

Wow, wouldn't that be great! Oh, wait a moment -- the UN buggered out of Iraq when their security forces allowed terrorists to bomb their facility. Their security forces, of course, were their former Iraqi Intelligence Services minders under the Saddam Hussein regime. So we should allow the UN to use Saddam's Gestapo to "play a large role in the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq"? I know just the guy to lead them -- Saddam himself! Hey, he seems all right ... I'm sure he's learned his lesson.

On the other hand, maybe I'm being too harsh on the UN. Just ask the people of Srebrenica how effective the UN can be when they protect defenseless civilians against genocidal strongmen. Of course, there's a lot less of them to ask, but you can give it a try.

The two countries urged "effective cooperation in the struggle against international terrorism," adding that terror must not be linked to one religion in particular.

Well, we have to be careful not to insult Muslims. After all, other religions commit acts of terror against civilian populations, too. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses have been terrorizing doorbells for decades now. It's only a semantic difference between doing that and:

* blowing up embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
* attacking US Navy ships in port
* kidnapping US citizens and holding them for years
* hijacking four civilian airplanes and flying them into buildings, killing 3,000 civilians

Oh, you mean that other religions haven't done that? Not even Jehovah's Witnesses? Get out!

Movie Review: Auto Focus (2002)

What an odd film; it plays like a twisted version of Rock Star without the third act. If it weren't a true story, you'd almost suspect it was written by Focus on the Family as an R-rated Afternoon Special-sort of cautionary tale. Don't peek at nudie magazines because this could happen to you!

Greg Kinnear plays Bob Crane, the star of "Hogan's Heroes" whose TV success haunted him until his murder in Phoenix in the mid-70s. Kinnear is excellent, as is Willem Dafoe as John Carpenter, the man whose sycophantic friendship allowed Crane to give free reign to the worst of his sexual demons by supplying him with the video equipment and the girls to keep a constant party rolling. Where most movies of this type use drugs or alcohol as the addiction, Auto Focus uses sex and pornography. The entire movie centers on the sick relationship between Crane and Carpenter, right up to the murder that Carpenter's always been suspected of committing.

Other cast members include Rita Wilson as Crane's first wife, Maria Bello as his second wife who discovers that the first wife may have had the right idea, Ron Liebman as Crane's agent, and a dead-on impersonation of Colonel Klink/Werner Klemperer by Kurt Fuller. None of these performances matter much, although all are good; what matters is Crane, Carpenter, and as many naked women as you can fit into an R-rated movie.

While I found the relationship between Kinnear and Dafoe compelling -- both men give outstanding performances in outside-the-box roles for each -- it wasn't enough to overcome two big problems with the movie. First off, it wasn't difficult to see where the movie would be heading. We've seen the addict-hitting-bottom trope in many movies now, and as a result, Auto Focus is almost deadly predictable. The second problem is the constant sex and nudity. I'm no prude, or at least I don't think I am (do prudes ever think they're prudes? Probably not). Nudity doesn't bother me, and neither does sex in cinema. But there was just so much of it, and it was so relentlessly tawdry, that each new sexual encounter invoked dread, rather than sympathy or titillation. Not this again! The movie wants to show Crane as a man trapped by his sexual obsession, which it does, but I also felt trapped by it.

In the end, Crane can't manage to escape his obsession; it kills him, just as surely as it destroyed his career and his personal life. Auto Focus can't escape it, either. It never transcends its essentially voyeuristic position, clucking its tongue at Crane's sexual excess while exploiting it at the same time. Worth a look, but don't spend a lot of money on it.

BuzzMachine Goes On the Offensive

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine takes on anti-Americanism and makes a no-apologies stand against it:

Pardon me, but I'm going to take a very dangerous and contrarian and by some views shrill, right-wing, illiberal stance and I'll take your barbs and the Guardian's with pride: I'm pro-American. Let me say that again, because I am one and because I was attacked and damned near killed because I am one (and yes, that matters): I am pro-American.

This quote came from a previous Jarvis post, but he builds on this thought and expands on it:

Let's be very clear: Just as anti-Semitism led directly to the Holocaust, anti-Americanism led directly to September 11th. Demonizing the people of this country made it acceptable to some and a goal for some to see fanatics murder thousands of us, just as demonizing Jews made it acceptable for fanatics to murder millions of them.

I'm not making a politically correct argument. You can criticize any policy or action of this country or of Israel and you're not by any means anti-American or anti-Semitic.
But once you generalize -- as the two American writers in question did do -- and start calling all Americans stupid and ignorant -- Moore's charges -- and ammoral -- the Newsweek guy's assertion -- you only play into the blind and finally murderous hatred of armed anti-Americans like the ones who came within a few hundred yards of killing me on September 11th.

Jarvis isn't fooling around. Read through this post and the few preceding posts on this topic. Jarvis writes with passion and conviction; hopefully, he will inspire more "pro-Americans" to equal passion and conviction.

UPDATE: Jarvis inspired Steve Glover over at Second Nature to address this issue in a different way, one that also makes a lot of sense to me. Definitely read Steve's take on Jarvis' post. Money quote:

What I like most about being an American though, is that I don't have to be any definition of an American.

Let me rephrase that for absolute clarity: I don't have to be your American.

A Prayer For Israel (Psalm 83)

If you have a few minutes, check out this beautiul presentation by A Christian Witness of a Prayer for Israel based on Psalm 83. (via Sophorist and Politburo Diktat)

It Could Have Been Worse, Comrade

The Commissar announces the results of a series of investigations of blogosphere denizens. Lucky for me, I've only been demoted (to Corporal? Bleah), and dishonorably discharged. I could have been purged in a more Stalinist manner, like a few others at the Politburo Diktat.

Go visit the Commissar and be sure to have your confessions ready.

Worst Damn Sports Analogy, Period

No story to link to here -- I'm watching the Vikings-Raiders game, and the Raiders are running all over the Vikes, who haven't helped the defense out by coughing up the ball at least four time. They're down by eleven in the 4th quarter.

The announcer, Bill Maas, decided that he would be clever about the Vike's lack of run defense. This is what he said:

"The Vikings need a whole case of Immodium, because they can't stop Oakland's runs."

Ha ha, hee hee. Sam Rosen was just about speechless after that crack, if you'll pardon my pun. I'd say Maas needs something to stop his diarrhea of the mouth.

And the Vikes just fumbled again. Oh goody.

Dixie Democrats and States Rights

The Washington Times published an analysis of Southern Democrat attitudes rolling into this election cycle, and just the number of Democrats talking on the record should be discouraging for the Dean campaign's desire to reach out to Southerners:

Interviews with Democratic chairmen throughout the Southern and border states elicit a range of surprisingly frank emotions about the party's feisty, Northeastern front-runner — from impressive to wait-and-see discomfort to fear that his liberal views on Iraq, tax cuts and social issues once again would allow Mr. Bush to sweep the region, as he did in 2000 against Al Gore.

Most acknowledge the growing conservatism that dominates their region, and some concede it will be difficult, if not impossible, to carry many Southern states if the nominee is out of step with mainstream Southern values.

What struck me was the number of people in Democratic leadership posts that were willing to be identified by name for this article -- seven, from six different states. Dean's campaign should take notice of this; these people are sending a message that Dean's candidacy will be viewed as a lost cause. One would assume the same attitude would prevail for Kerry and possibly Gephardt, although Gephardt's support of the war in Iraq might mitigate against this trend.

Obviously, Dean's outreach to Southern conservatives backfired in a big way, but probably not for the reasons given by most pundits, at least not entirely. For a small minority in the South, the Confederate flag may represent racist policies and attitudes, but for the vast majority of those who fly the Stars and Bars, the overriding issue is federal control over states' rights, and cultural domination of the North and West over the South. Unfortunately for Dean and the rest of the Democrats, their entire slate of candidates proposes nothing else but continued and elevated federal control over states (not specifically the South) in the form of more federal mandates and expanded federal programs. They're losing the blue-collar South because the Democrats can't see that, nor do the Democrats understand that their continued linking of Southern conservatives to racism shows how out of touch their national party is with the South. Finally, Southerners are not happy with people trying to take away their guns, and decades of gun-control obsession have left the South with no illusions about the intent of Democrats to disarm them, regardless of their de-emphasis on the issue during this election cycle.

It appears that the Democrats will have a very difficult time taking a single state in the South without a Southerner on the ticket. That could be good news for John Edwards in terms of VP consideration, but even that may not fly with a constituency that is sick and tired of being mocked and marginalized by their national party. That's why seven party leaders went on record with a conservative newspaper: to send the message that they're about to secede. (Thanks to Power Line for this story.)