Wedding Bell Blues

The Coalition Provisional Authority released more information on the "wedding" attacked by US forces near the Iraqi-Syrian border. Not only did that "wedding" take place at an unusual time, but its celebrants all seemed to be about the same age:

Senior coalition military spokesman said that dozens of people killed in a U.S. attack in the Iraqi desert early Wednesday were attending a high-level meeting of foreign fighters, not a wedding. Photos shown to reporters in Baghdad support that contention. ...

Kimmitt said troops did not find anything -- such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food -- that would indicate a wedding had been held.

Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said.

No one found dead children at the site of the attack, either, despite earlier reports. Kimmitt told CNN that the tape broadcast of dead children actually came from another incident in Ramadi. While the coalition forces found none of the usual accoutrements of a wedding, such as the aforementioned food, gifts, tents, and so on, they found plenty of other material that wouldn't normally show up on a shower registry at Bloomingdales:

At Saturday's briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt showed photos of what he said were binoculars designed for adjusting artillery fire, battery packs suitable for makeshift bombs, several terrorist training manuals, medical gear, fake ID cards and ID card-making machines, passports and telephone numbers to other countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan.

None of the men killed in the raid carried ID cards or wallets, he said.

Unless they all left their wallets in that non-existent tent for the Dinar Dance, I'd say that this group of wedding guests did not want anyone to know their true identities. Doesn't that seem a bit odd for a wedding? It does to the CPA, but apparently not to the media. The reporting on the "wedding" attack is eerily reminiscent of Peter Arnett's notorious "baby-milk factory" report during the first Gulf War. It seems that the media still hasn't learned anything about wartime reporting.

Estonians To Build Nazi Memorial?

The European Union's new member, Estonia, has just handed them their first major cultural challenge. Estonian veterans of World War II, which consist of men who fought for Nazi Germany's notorious SS, plan on building a memorial to Estonian SS soldiers who fought the Russians:

The Society of Fighters for Estonia's Freedom, which includes, among others, veterans of the Estonian 20th SS division, has initiated the opening of a monument to Estonian SS fighters who fought for Nazi Germany during WWII, Russia's Interfax quoted the Postimees newspaper as reporting on Saturday.

The initiators plan to install the monument in Tallinn's district of Maarjamae, about fifty meters away from a memorial in honor of the Soviet forces who fought in Estonia, in July this year, Interfax said.

Three large crosses are already installed at the site. The new monument is intended to include plaques bearing the names of 16 Estonian units that fought for the Wehrmacht. There will also be flagpoles, a plaque with explanatory text in four languages, and a cast-iron map of Estonia indicating the places where the SS units fought against the Soviet army, the Russian news agency reported.

After the fifty-year Soviet domination of this small Baltic nation, I understand why the Estonians would honor their partisan veterans who fought against the Russians as a matter of Estonian survival -- a battle they lost, obviously, which consigned Estonia to its thraldom under the Iron Curtain. However, the SS were much more involved in the terrible crimes of the Nazi regime, including the management of the concentration camps that dotted Germany and all of the occupied territories. Indeed, at least a dozen such camps were established in Estonia, such as Dorpat, Lodensee, Reval, Klooga, and others.

Why honor these men? Have the Estonians forgotten that the Nazis were also conquerors, bloody, vicious, and evil ones at that? Surely the Estonians could not have survived decades of Soviet tyranny just to celebrate the only possible regime that could make the Soviets look decent by comparison. Instead of building monuments to their association with the Nazis, you'd think they would prefer to keep it quiet.

Here's hoping clearer heads prevail. In the meantime, expect France, Poland, and other victims of the Nazi evil -- probably Germany too, as they understand the dangers of honoring that menace -- to loudly protest this development through the EU Parliament. (via Memeorandum)

New Map at Politburo Diktat: Kablogh, Holy City of the Ri'ight

The Commissar has long been known as the official cartographer of the Blogosphere, and regularly produces vivid active-link maps to navigate through the blog universe. He's created a new, Party-approved map of Kablogh that you must check out (or the KGBlog agents will get you, Comrades!):

The monuments of Kablogh, notably the now-empty House of Allah Mosque, have seen fierce fighting in recent weeks. The righteous Ri'ightes pray to the House of Allah mosque five times daily, hoping for the imminent return of its rightful occupant. Other Ri'ight strongholds include the LFG Embassy, the Captain's Quarter, the Canadian Embassy, and the Barking Moonbat Airport.

Be sure to report promptly to the Commissar, and check out all of the great spots on the map. Don't forget to visit the eerily quiet House of Allah while you're there.

Al Franken Calls For Voter Fraud To Elect Kerry

Ben Wikler, from Al Franken's Air America blog, has called for Democrats in safe states to move to so-called "battleground states," using Civil War imagery to promote the strategy of voter fraud in the latest example of left-wing contempt for democratic process (posted here and scroll down to 5/18/04, at the Permalink-deficient Air America website:

Just as 1850s Kansas became a battleground in the fight against slavery, so has 2000s Ohio become a battleground state--in fact, some say, the battleground state--in the fight for the White House. If we win in Ohio, we almost certainly win the entire election.

And we can win. But it will take some work.

The most important factor, of course, is the work being done by Ohioans. But those of us in the rest of the nation could tip the balance. As the office of the Ohio Secretary of State notes, only 30 days of residency are required in order to vote in the election. Have you been thinking about moving this October? Move to Ohio!

In keeping with the "Bleeding Kansas" reference with which Wikler starts his spiel, the nutcases at Air America refer to this new strategy of desperation as "Bleeding Ohio." Bleeding Kansas was a critical, violent run-up to the Civil War that killed 55 people in the Nebraska Territory province in a battle between pro-slavery Missourians who regularly rode in from the east every time a vote was taken on forming a government, and Free State Kansans, mostly transplants from the North who wanted to keep enough land to homestead rather than allow slavers to create the kind of vast plantations that pushed people off the land and into tenant-farming situations. As PBS notes, the vote fraud caused more than just partisan sniping:

Rumors had spread through the South that 20,000 Northerners were descending on Kansas, and in November 1854, thousands of armed Southerners, mostly from Missouri, poured over the line to vote for a proslavery congressional delegate. Only half the ballots were cast by registered voters, and at one location, only 20 of over 600 voters were legal residents. The proslavery forces won the election.

On March 30, 1855, another election was held to choose members of the territorial legislature. The Missourians, or "Border Ruffians," as they were called, again poured over the line. This time, they swelled the numbers from 2,905 registered voters to 6,307 actual ballots cast. Only 791 voted against slavery. ...

Most settlers who had come to Kansas from the North and the South only wanted to homestead in peace. They were not interested in the conflict over slavery, but they found themselves in the midst of a battleground. Violence erupted throughout the territory. Southerners were driven by the rhetoric of leaders such as David Atchison, a Missouri senator. Atchison proclaimed the Northerners to be "negro thieves" and "abolitionist tyrants." He encouraged Missourians to defend their institution "with the bayonet and with blood" and, if necessary, "to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district."

The northerners, however, were not all abolitionists as Atchison claimed. In fact, abolitionists were in the minority. Most of the Free State settlers were part of a movement called Free Soil, which demanded free territory for free white people. They hated slavery, but not out of concern for the slaves themselves. They hated it because plantations took over the land and prevented white working people from having their own homesteads. They hated it because it brought large numbers of black people wherever it went. The Free Staters voted 1,287 to 453 to outlaw black people, slave or free, from Kansas. Their territory would be white.

So dispense with the romanticism (and I got this link from Wikler on his Bleeding Ohio post, ironically enough). Neither side of Bleeding Kansas represented our values now, but the massive voter fraud from the pro-slavery Missourians started a violent conflict -- probably analogous to a gang war now, or a range war in terms of Western lore -- that only ended with the secession of the Southern states to the Confederacy and a truncated Congress' approval of the Free State, pro-abolition state constitution. Gang fights and range wars: that's what Air America proposes for Ohio?

Let's say that Al Franken and Air America manage to convince a significant percentage of their dwindling audience to suddenly pick up their kit bags and land in Ohio. Not only will they be dropping into an election of which they know nothing except for the Presidency, but they will be diluting the voting rights of Ohioans who will still live in the Buckeye State after the election. How do you feel about that, Ohio? Are you prepared to welcome a few thousand more people who won't have jobs, of course, and who therefore will probably be filing for public assistance? Perhaps some of them will find employment while they stay -- which will take jobs away from Ohioans. Not only that, but their ignorance of state and local matters on the ballot in November won't keep them from casting votes on them, meaning that an influx of New Yorkers or Californians might wind up deciding crucial issues on your ballots.

Wouldn't that make you happy?

This must be Voter Fraud Week on the Left. First, Al Franken and his staff dream up this conspiracy, and then John Kerry decides to play games with his own nominating convention, turning it into a pep rally or a bad TV miniseries with a laughable cliffhanger. What's next, a Torricelli/Lautenberg-type switcheroo at the last moment in order to put Howard Dean on the top of the ballot?

I wouldn't be surprised.

Village Voice Flashback: Kerry Obstructed POW/MIA Investigation

John Kerry released new advertisements this month designed to shore up his credentials on foreign policy and veterans' affairs. Among the statements made in the advertisements made in his support promoted Kerry's efforts in investigating the POW/MIA issue, along with John McCain, whose partnership Kerry's ads also promote. As Kerry says on his campaign blog:

John Kerry and Senator John McCain chaired the country's most thorough investigation into the fate of POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia. Kerry has personally pressed Vietnamese officials to cooperate in ongoing efforts to get answers for families. And he also sponsored POW/MIA Recognition Day. Kerry's Senate committee pressed for unparalleled declassification of documents, increased excavation work in Vietnam, and gathering of testimony from 144 witnesses. According to the Boston Globe, "the effort produced real answers for the some 120 families who had lived for decades without knowing whether a loved one was still alive in Southeast Asia."

However, the Village Voice reported back in February that Kerry did more to obstruct that investigation than to pursue evidence indicating that Vietnam deliberately withheld captured American servicement after our withdrawal. Sydney Schanberg wrote this devastating exposé for the Village Voice -- neither of which could ever be confused as Republican shills -- just as Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination in late February:

Senator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners—perhaps hundreds—were never acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.

The Massachusetts senator, now seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a decade ago— shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and sanitizing the committee's final report—when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs.

Schanberg details the malfeasance of this investigation with plenty of blame to spread around. However, Schanberg makes clear that he holds Kerry in particular contempt for his actions in tubing the investigation:

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

* He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

* Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."

* A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."

Be sure to read the entire article. Kerry may wish to rethink campaign allusions to his participation in this investigation. (Via Mitch Berg)

WaPo: Abuse Not Intended For Interrogations

Scott Highan and Joe Stephens report in today's Washington Post that witness and suspect statements in the Abu Ghraib abuse investigation cast doubt on the notion that the abuse stemmed from military intelligence direction, but instead serviced the amusement and frustration of the MPs assigned to guard them:

Prisoners posed in three of the most infamous photographs of abuse to come out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not being softened up for interrogation by intelligence officers but instead were being punished for criminal acts or the amusement of their jailers, according to previously secret documents obtained by The Washington Post. ...

In one of the most striking images to surface, a detainee jokingly referred to as "Gilligan" by the MPs was forced to stand on a box of food, with wires connected to his fingers, toes and penis. [Spec. Sabrina] Harman said she attached the wires to "Gilligan" and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.

"Why did you do this to the detainee 'Gilligan'?" a military investigator asked.

"Just playing with him," Harman said.

Again -- a lack of discipline and training will create problems exactly like this. Until I see some hard evidence indicating otherwise, the abuse problems don't indicate anything else other than bored MPs allowing themselves to become inhumane towards detainees they despised, and a command structure that failed to enforce basic discipline with its reserve units. As more information becomes public, that analysis looks stronger and stronger.

Country's Secrets Lost -- Again?

Noel Schachtman at Wired reports that the Los Alamos National Laboratory reports that the lab has once again lost a data-storage device containing classified information, which at this facility would consist of nuclear technology -- something that al-Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other hostile countries and organizations would love to have fall into their hands:

The latest episode came to light Thursday, after Los Alamos admitted that, since a Monday inventory check, its custodians hadn't been able to find a "classified removable electronic media," or CREM -- disks and drives inscribed with the country's secrets.

A Los Alamos press release played down the incident, calling it "a single accounting discrepancy (that) in no way constitutes a compromise of national security." Los Alamos has tens of thousands of removable hard drives, discs and memory sticks. When one can't be found, it's usually because of something innocent, like "administrative errors" or outdated machinery.

But lab critics were hearing none of it. "Can't they ever get anything right?" said Los Alamos security consultant-turned-whistleblower Glenn Walp. "They take the same old corporate line: 'It's not us, it's the system.' How refreshing it would be if someone at that place would have the backbone to admit they screwed up."

Los Alamos last came into national focus in January of last year when more storage devices went MIA. In fact, the lab has lost disk drives in four times in the past three years, later finding them in the facility in all cases, but the pattern raises concerns about security procedures and the lack of care taken by Los Alamos staff. Wired reports that the Energy Department has pressured the lab to switch storage strategies in order to go "diskless" by 2009 -- but a lot can happen in five years, and having one or more of these disks go permanently missing could result in thousands or even millions of deaths.

Perhaps Congress should step in at some point and relieve Los Alamos from its security responsibilities and have the DoD or Energy Department directly manage them instead.

UPDATE: Be sure to read Gerry's enlightening information regarding DOE security in the comments.

New York State Gov't Misdirected 9/11 Rebuilding Funds: WaPo

In the aftermath of the destruction in Lower Manhattan on 9/11, Congress acted on the will of the American people to defiantly rebuild what had been destroyed by the Islamofascists within the space of a few hours. Congress created, and President Bush approved, the Liberty Bond program and funded it to the tune of $8 billion. They intended the money to rescue the financial condition of the areas damaged at and around Ground Zero and gave New York state and city officials unprecedented leeway to manage the funds in order to reduce bottlenecks and promote maximum efficiency and speed for the rebuilding effort.

Unfortunately, state and city officials have spent the money on an ever-widening radius of projects, both in geography and scope, according to the Washington Post:

Six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved an $8 billion program to repair this city's damaged office towers, build apartment buildings and finance the rebirth of the financial district. But two years later, city records show that much of the money, dubbed Liberty Bonds, has gone to developers of prime real estate in midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and to builders of luxury housing.

Local and state officials -- over the objections of their own downtown development chief -- gave one developer $650 million from the Liberty Bonds to erect an office tower for the Bank of America near Times Square, miles from the shattered precincts of Ground Zero. According to city records, another developer got $113 million to build a tower for Bank of New York in Brooklyn. One of the few projects downtown has gone to actor and sometime developer Robert De Niro, who picked up nearly $39 million from the bonds in November to build a boutique hotel in Tribeca, directly north of Ground Zero.

Congress designated $1.6 billion of the Liberty Bonds for rental housing. Nearly all the money from those bonds has gone to prominent developers to build luxury apartment towers in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero, accelerating its transformation into one of New York's richest neighborhoods, the city records show.

I love Robert DeNiro on screen -- who doesn't? -- but that doesn't mean I love stuffing money into his pockets to build a hotel, especially money intended to actually rebuild the damage done on 9/11. Nor do I believe that building high-rent housing in Manhattan really requires federal funding to complete. Congress has reacted to these developments (figuratively and literally) with some dismay but acknowledge that the funding carried little in the way of mandates:

Congress put few conditions on the Liberty Bond program, but the program's advocates said the intention was clear -- and it was not for luxury apartments and commercial projects far from the site of the World Trade Center. In fact, the program stipulated that New York's governor and the city's mayor had to deem a downtown project "not feasible" before diverting money for use elsewhere in the city.

"We didn't put a lot of strings on the Liberty Bonds, but more should have gone for jobs and affordable housing," said U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.). "A lot of this money has been spent on projects that fit the letter of the law but not the spirit."

Maloney misspeaks here, as these projects will create jobs for several years as they work towards completion, and new businesses will eventually occupy some of the spaces created by the funding. It just won't be where the damage actually occurred. As fas as Congress' disappointment, what happened with Liberty Bonds is the mirror image of a traditional complaint about federal regulation for states: unfunded mandates. In this case, the government supplied unmandated funds, and it's clear that neither practice produces desirable results.

State and local officials defend their choices by saying that the money went to areas where businesses threatened to leave the area, which would have futher destabilized the city's economy:

The city's Industrial Development Corp. was designated to hand out the commercial Liberty Bonds. The corporation's executive director, Barbara Basser-Bigio, said that city and state officials wanted to jump-start the broader city economy and that some of the projects would not have been built without the assistance. "Our top priority is to create office space," she said. "We are looking to stimulate the economy through the creation of jobs and enhance business districts throughout the city."

New York officials also say that critics are missing the urgency felt in the weeks after the attacks to retain businesses in the city, especially Lower Manhattan, which remains the nation's third-largest central business district. "Downtown was hemorrhaging in those days," said Carl Weisbrod, a former top city development official and now president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. "It was critical to stabilize the residential and commercial communities."

The first recovery aid began to flow to New York in the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks. The Bush administration tapped $3.5 billion in community development block grants, a federal program usually reserved for economic development in poor communities. Of this money, $300 million was quickly directed to a program to retain companies tempted to flee from downtown Manhattan. Auditing firm Deloitte & Touche got $17 million, Bank of Nova Scotia got $3 million, and Bank of New York received $40 million. American Express got $25 million even without threatening to leave its 3 World Financial Center home. Other federal money intended for small businesses ending up going to investment-house brokers and traders.

The explanation makes sense, and compensating businesses to stay in the area directly impacted by the attack makes some sense; otherwise, with increased overhead cost for the location stretching out several years, most of them probably would have left for other locations. However, the Liberty Bond program was not intended to act as a corporate-welfare grant but to physically rebuild the Lower Manhattan sites that were destroyed or damaged in the attack. Maintenance of the local economy is the state's responsibility. After all, what concerns New York is that most of those business would have moved across the border to New Jersey and would have taken their tax base with them. Does New York plan on repaying those bond funds from the tax revenue they rescued with them?

Congress may need to update the Liberty Bond program in order to enact greater oversight over the use of the funds. Until they do, they have only themselves to blame if money intended to restore Ground Zero winds up at a Grand Zero before the World Trade Center reconstruction even begins.

Boston Awakes To A $15 Million Scam

The Boston Globe carries local reaction this morning to the Democrats' surprise announcement yesterday that the Democratic nominating convention may not produce a nominee. Needless to say, for a city that spening millions of dollars and proposing a week of major highway blockages and business shutdowns for the convention, the prospect of suffering all of this for a "pep rally" does not amuse Bostonians in the least:

Local organizers were caught off-guard by the Kerry campaign yesterday. Mayor Thomas Menino told WBZ-TV, "I was very suprised by it." This week's announcements of road closings for the convention have already taken a toll, he said. "After being beat up two days, and now this. . . . It's just a question about why this wasn't brought up earlier." ...

Raising the stakes for the city and state, too, the Democratic Party has received about $15 million in taxpayer funds to hold its nominating convention. Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman who is now president of the independent Campaign Legal Center, predicts that Democrats would probably have to return the money if the event did not produce a nominee. ''If this convention doesn't produce a nominee in Boston, what's the point?" Potter said. ...

Republican National Committee lawyers immediately began researching the implications such a move would have on federal dollars that flow to the convention. Darrell Crate, chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, said he was concerned that state or city taxpayers would be on the hook if the convention sacrifices federal dollars. He said that the traffic delays in and around Boston would hardly be worth the hassle if there isn't a formal nomination. ''I feel bad for the hundreds of thousands of commuters who would be inconvenienced just for a pep rally," Crate said.

How about it, Boston? Feel like kicking the $15 million back into the mix? I doubt that Democrats would even ask. However, if they lose the $15 million in federal funding for the convention, they would have to replace it from their own pockets. Wouldn't that tend to negate the money advantage that Kerry gains from playing games with the nomination? Even Democrats, outside of the Kerry campaign, show little enthusiasm for this plan:

While Democratic Party officials publicly lined up behind the Kerry campaign's brainstorming, some said privately that they, too, were concerned about the fate of the $15 million in federal funding and that the convention would lose its potency if it did not yield a nominee. According to one Democratic Party official, who spoke on condition on anonymity, the party rules could be rewritten to transform the July gathering ''from a nominating convention to a convention for rallying around the candidate-nominee."

''I don't know if a really big rally would work," the official said.

Another concern is the Democrats' ability to have television networks cover their July convention, and especially Kerry's speech, if he is not officially nominated. ''Does it factor in? Sure," said Mark Lukasiewicz, executive producer of NBC News political coverage. ''We have to consider the news value of the convention. We don't like hearing there's one more piece of news that's not going to happen at the convention."

Holding a convention without officially choosing a nominee could also anger voters in Kerry's home state. ''People will be inconvenienced for four days, and he isn't even going to accept the nomination," said Dan Payne, a Democratic political consultant.

So far, it sounds like Kerry and his staff have made lots of friends in his hometown from this suggestion. It looks like you've been hoodwinked, Boston Democrats, but don't expect a lot of sympathy from the nation; after all, John Kerry is one of yours. You should have seen this coming. Have fun at the pep rally.

Did Saddam's Nephew Help Kill Nick Berg?

While Michael Berg continues to blame everyone except the people who sawed his son's head off while he was still alive for Nick Berg's death, US and Iraqi forces continue their investigation into his brutal murder. The London Guardian reports that Iraqi forces have arrested an uncertain number of people in the case, including a nephew of Saddam Hussein:

The mystery of who killed Nick Berg, the freelance contractor beheaded on video, took a new twist last night when Iraqi police claimed they had arrested four suspects with links to Saddam Hussein's family. Iraqi security officials said Berg's alleged killers were part of a group led by a close relative of Saddam - his nephew Yasser al-Sabawi.

The men were seized a week ago after a tip-off, they said. All were former members of the Fedayeen Saddam, the para military group notorious for its loyalty to Iraq's ex-president.

American commander General Mark Kimmitt said that American forces had arrested four men in connection with the killing, releasing two of them later on. The Guardian also reports that the informant that tipped Iraqi police was later murdered, as the Iraqis fumbled security on the case. al-Sabawi was not among those arrested by either group, but intelligence points in his direction.

I doubt we'll find out much in the next few days, at least nothing solid, while both Americans and Iraqis work on their investigations. However, the fact that enough information has flowed to authorities so quickly indicates to me that the Iraqi people have had enough of the Fedayeen and other "insurgents" prolonging the pain of occupation and delaying reconstruction.

If They're Unhappy Now ...

Boston reacted in disbelief and anger at the proposed closing of major highways for the four-day Democratic National Convention in July, and some businesses now may furlough workers during the week and close down:

Boston business owners and area motorists reacted with disbelief and fury on Friday to plans to shut down major highways for security reasons during this summer's Democratic National Convention. ... Convention planners had already said one of Boston's two main train stations and some roads would close during the event. But on Thursday, officials unveiled a more draconian set of traffic restrictions involving several miles of highways.

At the same time, they launched a new public relations campaign entitled "Let's Work Around It" which urges residents to adjust travel plans and asks businesses to let employees work from home or take vacation.

In response, Boston's radio airwaves echoed with howls of protest from angry commuters, and some firms acknowledged they would have to shut down during the four-day event, force staff to take days off or stay open with skeleton crews.

I recall the experiences we had as Angelenos during the 1984 Summer Olympics. People expressed tremendous concern about traffic, and businesses adjusted work shifts and schedules in order to keep the freeways moving. We all pulled together in small ways, and the games were tremendously successful. However, we worked towards a common goal for a positive result:

"We're road kill," lamented the Boston Herald on its front page as it described the "commuter nightmare" that awaits drivers from July 26-29, when Democrats are expected to nominate Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry as their presidential candidate [emph mine].

Unfortunately, Democrats are no longer expected to nominate Kerry in Boston, as the Kerry campaign has decided to play manipulative games with campaign-finance laws instead. How do you think Bostonians will feel about enduring all of this disruption and expense just to see their hometown candidate nuance his way out of town without the nomination?

Watcher's Council: New Opening!

The Watcher of Weasels informs me on a quick break from his patrol that the Watcher's Council has another opening available. Those fortunate few members select the best of the blogosphere every week and vote on the nominated posts. Plus, you get to claim membership in a murky and vaguely menacing-sounding fraternity! What could be better?

I wish I could commit to it, but unfortunately I don't have the time. I encourage one of you intrepid bloggers to contact the Watcher ASAP, if for no other reason than to ensure CQ posts continue to get nominated. [Yes, everything's all about me. I admit it - Ed.] It looks like a lot of fun!

Kerry, The Reluctant Bride

The presumptive Democratic nominee for President, John Kerry, wishes to remain "presumptive" as long as possible, it seems. Party activists now propose to have Kerry wait as long as possible to accept the nomination in order to avoid campaign-spending limits that kick in once the nomination is made:

Sen. John Kerry may postpone accepting his party's presidential nomination at the July Democratic convention -- a tactic aimed at reserving his campaign war chest for the fight against President Bush.

Under federal campaign rules, once a candidate accepts the party nomination, the campaign is limited to spending around $75 million.

So, just as with the proliferation of 527s and MoveOn, we have the party of campaign-finance reform manipulating the rules on which they insisted for their own gain. If nothing else illustrates the futility and hypocrisy of classifying money into silly little categories, the spectacle of a major-party nominee addressing a nominating convention at its climax while pretending that he's not really the nominee should drive it home like never before. What will he say to the gathered delegates? "I pledge to win this election, assuming I accept your nomination at a later undetermined date!"

Needless to say, Republicans managed to suppress their laughter long enough to note the silliness to which the Democrats have no shame to stoop:

The Bush-Cheney campaign took delight in the issue.

"Only John Kerry could be for a nominating convention, but be against the nomination," Ken Mehlman, the Bush-Cheney campaign manager, said in a written statement. "This is just the latest example of John Kerry's belief that the rules are for other people, not for him."

Democrats countercharged that Republicans played the system by scheduling their nominating convention so late in the season (first week of September). However, no one has ever proposed rules for the scheduling of conventions, and at the time, Democrats were delighted by the schedule as it caused ballot problems for Republicans in Illinois. What Kerry proposes is to walk out of his own nominating convention and lie about his status in order to spend money illegally. Is this the campaign finance reform about which Democrats have lectured us for last two sessions of Congress?

UPDATE: Matt from Blogs For Bush wonders why Democrats need to worry about this if all the recent stories about their fund-raising prowess are true. He thinks it shows a weakness they're trying to keep covered up. I'd say he's right.

UPDATE II: Another perspective from the myway news portal, via Memeorandum:

When the Democratic Party scheduled its convention, it didn't know it would have a nominee who opted out of public financing for the primaries and the $45 million spending limit the program imposes through the spring and summer.

At the time, the party anticipated it would face the same situation it has in previous elections: a nominee who emerged from the primaries hovering at the spending limit and had to limp through several months awaiting the convention and the campaign-sustaining government financing.

The Democrats claim that the Republicans created a situation from the scheduling of their convention that created an unfair advantage, which they want to correct by this ridiculous subterfuge. However, as this report makes clear, the decision to schedule the Democratic convention in July intended to make federal financing available as soon as possible for a candidate expected to be limping towards the convention, bloody from the front-loaded primaries. It appears that they were just too clever for their own good, and now want to whine that its all the Republicans' fault. All they're doing is making the case that the Democrats have become the party of arrested development.

And from the AP comes more of the questions this desperate move provokes:

Television networks were uncertain Friday how Kerry's plan would affect their convention coverage, still in the planning stages. ... "It's one more thing that's not happening at a convention," said Mark Lukasiewicz, in charge of special events coverage for NBC News. "It's one more thing to factor in as we decide how much resources — financial and editorial — we have to give to convention coverage."

While convention coverage has dropped in the past couple of decades, a nominating convention that won't end in a nomination will matter even less than normal. Nominees count on the free coverage of their speeches and the enthusiasm of convention delegates to give them a bounce in polling immediately afterwards. By postponing accepting the actual nomination, Kerry risks losing that promotional capacity of the convention.

The FEC may not sign off on the plan in any case:

The convention is defined as when the nomination takes place, Noble said. Having delegates vote in Boston, but Kerry put off his acceptance, might not pass muster, he said.

"They would have to come up with an argument that would basically look at the convention as continuing past the convention dates," Noble said. "Could they do it? It's possible. In the end it would be up to the FEC and possibly the courts, if it's challenged."

The Kerry campaign and DNC would be wise to ask the FEC's advice before trying to change the nomination process, said FEC spokesman Bob Biersack, adding that the commission has not faced such a question before.

In other words, suck it up, buttercup. You picked the July date when the strategy suited you. Now that it doesn't, it's no one's fault but your own. Their failure to accept responsibility for their mistakes reminds me of Kerry's famous retort on the Idaho slopes this past winter when he blamed his Secret Service security detail for falling off his snowboard, referring to an agent as "that son of a bitch".

Welcome To America

I want to offer my congratulations to my long-distance Northern Alliance colleague, Deacon from Power Line, and his wife Yvonne on her naturalization as an American citizen today, in Baltimore. Yvonne originially came from France. As Deacon states, Yvonne was joined by what would appear to be a UN coalition for today's ceremony:

America became even more diverse today as a new batch of citizens was sworn-in in Baltimore (and presumably elsewhere). One of these new citizens is my wife. Her group of about 50 was, as one would expect, quite a melange. It contained a few Anglos, at least one Frenchwoman (my wife), a handful of Eastern Europeans (mostly Russian), many Latino[a]s, many Africans, and some Asians, a few from the near east and a few from the far. There may even have been a couple of Bush voters in the group.

Deacon noted a jarring, discordant note prior to the ceremony:

[It] occurred before the ceremony, as we sat in the waiting area while CNN offered wall-to-wall coverage of the Abu-Ghraib story. Had the citizens-to-be been watching, they might (depending on their ideology) have wondered why they want to enroll in a country that (a) systemically engages in horrific abuses of human rights or (b) does not systemically engage in such abuses but acts as if it does. Fortunately, during the ceremony the reasons for enrolling were stated with reasonable clarity.

I understand what Deacon means, but I think that Abu Ghraib, while humiliating at the moment, demonstrates what America is all about. We have a free press that can print anything as long as it's not an intentional mistruth which forces us to acknowledge our errors. We have a freely-elected legislature with real power, holding our military and executive accountable for the actions it takes during a war. You see our military taking steps to protect a large group of prisoners, a high percentage of which probably took up arms against Americans, not because we love what they did but because we love who we think we're supposed to be -- and we have no tolerance for those who dishonor us.

Whether you think that the media, Congress, or military brass have overreacted or underreacted, if you look at the process through the eyes of those who haven't known a free and open society, the very notion of accountability to the people and a free press must be astounding. I agree with Deacon that the naturalization ceremony should remind everyone about our high-minded principles -- but the reality on CNN reminds everyone that our processes are designed to ensure the vitality of those principles. I wish Abu Ghraib had never happened, but our response is part of our strength, too.

Bienvenue, Yvonne, and congratulations. America is proud to welcome you to the world's greatest democracy. We hope to continue to prove worthy of your citizenship.

The Veneer of Civilization

Dale Franks at QandO posted a difficult lesson for Americans and people of Western civilization, one that we have forgotten but that history proves time and again:

Scott Higham and Joe Stephens of the Washington Post continue the rollout of allegations from Abu Ghraib. And it just keeps getting worse and worse. The Post has also obtained more pictures from Abu Ghraib, which they present along with the article. Seeing, the pictures, they remind me of nothing so much as something you'd hear about going on in the gulag or the konzentrationslager.

We like to think that, because we are Americans, we don't do stuff like this. That we are better than that. That's something the Nazis or the commies would do, probably because they are, in some way, morally deficient in a way that Americans are not.

That is a bright and shining lie.

The awful truth is that, when people are left to their own devices, and have the power of life and death over others, they will become as cruel as they are allowed to be.

Dale writes brilliantly on the need for military discipline in order to prevent such barbarity from arising during wartime, and why the failure to maintain discipline is the most likely explanation for the sadistic abuses at Abu Ghraib. Be sure to read all of Dale's thoughtful post, and remember this when people talk about the mindless drilling and anal-retentive commanders in the military. Discipline exists for a reason, and it's not just because practice makes perfect.

First Mate Update, Cont'd

Just a short note to update everyone on the First Mate. She's back home and very tired but doing well. What happens from time to time on a dialysis shunt is that the natural tendency of blood to clot will narrow the line where it enters the body. To combat this, the dialysis center fills the line with a medication that suppresses the clotting reaction at the end of each session. (The medicine sits in the line and doesn't flow into the body; it has something to do with the pressure differential, but I'm a bit unclear on that concept.)

If this doesn't work, though, what happens is that the shunt becomes to narrow to pump the blood at a sufficient rate to properly dialyze, and a failure to dialyze is a big deal for the patient. Normally they would have sent her home to try again the next day, but since we're so close to the transplant date, they wanted to make sure nothing happened to postpone the surgery. By the time the hospital's dialysis unit checked on her, the problem had corrected itself and she was able to dialyze there with no problem. Of course, the joy of the hospital stay means she got next to no sleep all night, so she's exhausted, but other than that she's doing fine.

Thanks to all of you who commented or wrote e-mails to me with your prayers and well-wishes. Both of us are truly grateful for all of your concern. I'll keep you updated on her status as we get closer to the transplant.

Michael Berg, Moral Coward

I can understand the grief of a parent mourning the loss of a treasured son, and how that grief can lead a father to lash out irrationally. I try to make allowances for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in that situation. However, Michael Berg has completely exhausted my sympathy and patience with a twisted and craven opinion piece published by the London Guardian today, in which he romanticizes his son's killers while saving his venom for George Bush (emphases are mine):

People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him.

I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.

When exactly did all of that soul-touching occur? When they sawed his head from his body while he was still alive? He assigns more humanity and depth of character to those who brutally murdered his son than he does to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the next two paragraphs:

George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain, or that of my family, or of the world that grieves for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nick nor that of the American people, let alone that of the Iraqi people his policies are killing daily.

Donald Rumsfeld said that he took responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences.

Even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living.

Would that include Ayman al-Zarqawi, or Osama bin Laden, who were killing Americans well before Bush took office? Or perhaps he doesn't consider the seventeen American sailors who died in the attack on the USS Cole to be true Americans. (Kerry obviously doesn't, as he claims that "when Bill Clinton left office, not one young American in uniform was dying in a war anywhere in the world".) Note that he transfers all of the evil done to his son very neatly to the present administration, as if Islamofascism suddenly raised itself up from a zero point sometime after 9/11, in response to George Bush's policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Berg makes this point explicitly later in his remarks:

So what were we to do when we in America were attacked on September 11, that infamous day? I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them. Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.

Berg's prescription for the proper response to 9/11 is simple, and simple-minded: accept the blame for the slaughter of thousands of Americans and retreat from the world. After all, it's our fault they hate us and kill us. Obviously, Berg feels this way about al-Zarqawi; the poor, oppressed terrorist looked deep into his son's eyes and probably regretted that he'd have to saw his head off and display it gleefully to a video camera, and then post it on the Internet to brag about what he'd done. Bush made him do that.

And then Berg lectures America about committing to "honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously," and in the next breath to "truly respect the sovereignty of every state." Unfortunately, in this world those two directives are mutually exclusive, especially when states such as Taliban-run Afghanistan choose to harbor or support terrorists who attack other states. Had Saddam "truly respected" Kuwait's sovereignty, we wouldn't have attacked Iraq in 1991, and had he abided by the terms of the cease-fire he signed, we wouldn't have had to finish the job in 2003. Had al-Qaeda "truly respected" our sovereignty in 2001, we wouldn't have attacked the Taliban. Had either of those tyrannies honored and respected every human's need to live freely, al-Qaeda wouldn't exist and we would already see democracy flourishing in the Middle East. Berg condemns Bush for a lack of respect for liberty -- after Bush liberated 50 million people so that they can have a chance at self-determination.

Michael Berg is a moral coward. He wants peace and freedom without any sacrifice, he wants liberty for every human as long as it doesn't cost anything, and he wants sovereignty of other nations respected while they harbor those who attack us. He romanticizes those who killed his son like one might slaughter cattle -- worse, actually -- and transfers the blame to George Bush for partisan purposes. He's exploiting his son's ghastly execution for political gain -- and providing yet another example of the shamelessness of the radical left.

UPDATE: Michele at A Small Victory, not surprisingly, agrees with me:

I'm never going to get tired of repeating this: They. Will. Kill. You. When they attack us again - and they will - they will kill you, too. They will not care if you belong to ANSWER or Move On. They will not care that you support them. They will not be going through the buildings or subways or whatever structure they plan to blow up and pull out the anti-war people. Make no mistake, they hate you. They will use you as pawns while they can but in the end, you'll be on the same end of their terrorism as I will. ...

Mike Berg is an opportunist who is seizing the moment of his son's death as a way to spread his leftist propaganda.

How incredibly disgusting.

Reading through her comments, I found this nugget ...

Um yeah, Mike Berg just had his son executed on the international stage. Cut him some fucking slack.

Any of you people casting aspersions on him for his statements or beliefs need to consider his position. His son was executed.

Until you've had your child murdered on film and shown around the world, shut the fuck up about his means of dealing with his grief.

... which drew this immediate response:

Well, if he's going to share his grief with every camera/microphone/newspaper journalist in sight, he'd goddamn well better be prepared to hear a little criticism in return.

Exactly.

Herbert Rehabilitates Camilo Mejia

Normally I skip over Bob Herbert in the New York Times as he reliably demonstrates a complete lack of understanding on almost anything he writes. However, today's column covers the story of Sgt. Camilo Mejia, whose story I noted in a post late last night. As expected, Herbert insists on rehabilitating Mejia by excusing his desertion on the basis of ... well, on the basis of his working for Rumsfeld, as Herbert concludes:

When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant Mejia, "you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don't find it, if you don't believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know, it becomes pretty tough to accept it — to willingly be a part of the war."

A military court will decide whether Sergeant Mejia, who served honorably while he was in Iraq, is a deserter or a conscientious objector or something in between. But the issues he has raised deserve a close reading by the nation as a whole, which is finally beginning to emerge from the fog of deliberate misrepresentations created by Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. about this war.

The truth is the antidote to that crowd. Whatever the outcome of Sergeant Mejia's court-martial, he has made a contribution to the truth about Iraq.

And what of his desertion of his unit by going AWOL while on leave, abandoning them to their front-line mission while he hid out for five months? Herbert writes that off as just a normal reaction to the "horror" of serving in Iraq:

Sergeant Mejia told me in a long telephone interview this week that he had qualms about the war from the beginning but he followed his orders and went to Iraq in April 2003. He led an infantry squad and saw plenty of action. But the more he thought about the war — including the slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the mistreatment of prisoners (which he personally witnessed), the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.'s (some of whom are the targets of bounty hunters in search of a reported $2,000 per head), the ineptitude of inexperienced, glory-hunting military officers who at times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as "hajis," the way the Vietnamese were known as "gooks") — the more he thought about these things, the more he felt that this war could not be justified, and that he could no longer be part of it.

Sergeant Mejia's legal defense is complex (among other things, he is seeking conscientious objector status), but his essential point is that war is too terrible to be waged willy-nilly, that there must always be an ethically or morally sound reason for opening the spigots to such horror. And he believes that threshold was never met in Iraq.

Not to overstate the obvious, which Herbert never addresses, but those are decisions that Mejia doesn't get to make. Mejia volunteered for the Army, which means that he agreed to follow orders and to report where assigned, when told to do so. He doesn't get to sit around and create a personal calculus of what duties fulfill him and which do not, or when a war is justified or when it isn't. He swore an oath to follow the direction of the command structure established by the Constitution and the political leadership of the United States. Moreover, this isn't just some green recruit -- this is a non-commissioned officer, who had grave responsibilities for leading his unit in battle, and the US relied on his presence to maximize their chances of survival under fire.

The way Herbert tells the story, Mejia is some sort of hero for bugging out and hiding from the Army for five months. Nonsense. Let's make this clear. We have an all-volunteer armed services. No one enlists under duress or draft any longer. Part of the reasonable calculation of enlisting should be that you may wind up in combat. People who don't think this through aren't heroes, they're idiots. The heroes are the ones in Iraq, putting their lives on the line, not the ones slinking over the hill at the end of a furlough.

Yesterday, I noted sarcastically that Mejia would have a bright future in politics after serving his sentence in a reference to John Kerry's experience in slandering his "band of brothers" on his return from Vietnam. Mr. Herbert, I was joking. You sound like you'd gladly serve as his campaign manager.

The Ivory Tower

Stanley Fish, retiring dean of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois-Chicago, argues in a New York Times op-ed that academia dilutes and warps its raison d'etre when it attempts to play active roles in partisan politics. Instead, Fish exhorts his colleagues to focus on the truly academic roles of analysis and scholarship:

Marx famously said that our job is not to interpret the world, but to change it. In the academy, however, it is exactly the reverse: our job is not to change the world, but to interpret it. While academic labors might in some instances play a role in real-world politics — if, say, the Supreme Court cites your book on the way to a decision — it should not be the design or aim of academics to play that role.

While academics in general will agree that a university should not dance to the tune of external constituencies, they will most likely resist the injunction to police the boundary between academic work and political work. They will resist because they simply don't believe in the boundary — they believe that all activities are inherently political, and an injunction to avoid politics is meaningless and futile.

Unfortunately, while Fish hits all of the structural arguments in reserving academic efforts for academia, he addresses none of the most corrosive damage done by academics who insist on dragging partisanship into their work. Fish misses the best argument of all for his point, which is that continued partisanship on the part of professors and college administrators fatally undermines the weakness of their autonomy and the trust that had been built into their independent viewpoint over centuries of scholarly and scientific approach to issues, large and small. Advocacy destroys credibility, and without credibility, a university becomes nothing more than an expensive partisan think tank.

Academics simply can't have it both ways. If they insist on taking an active part in the partisanship in either the official capacities of their roles as academics or leaning on those credentials for greater personal impact, then they move the partisan battlefields to the campuses of the universities and colleges whence they come. How often do we hear from professors taking active roles in partisan debates on issues like the war on terror, welfare reform (an example noted by Fish), economics, and the like, in their capacity as academics? Protests against war and globalization and other pet causes would not be complete without lectures from local and national academics. And yet when studies demonstrate the overwhelmingly leftist bias in higher education, academics cry "McCarthyism" and accuse their critics of attempting to sabotage the independence of the universities and stifling free debate. They want the freedom to engage in partisanship without the consequences of having their qualifications and motivations called into question, while they routinely do the same to their partisan targets. It's not McCarthyism, it's politics, and if they find it distasteful, they should avoid it as Fish implores.

Fish makes a number of good points in his article, but in my mind, he missed a golden opportunity on his way to retirement to tell his friends exactly how badly they're damaging the institutions they serve. Perhaps they will read between the lines, but I suspect most of them will miss the real danger. It's a message they don't want to hear, and for Fish's part, one he didn't want to communicate.

Post: Material Witness Will Prove Abuse Localized

The Washington Post's Jackie Spinner analyzes the plea deal that Spc. Jeremy Sivits completed with his conviction and sentencing at his court-martial yesterday in Baghdad and concludes that he will make a powerful witness for prosecutors in upcoming cases:

Spc. Jeremy Sivits's tearful apology and no-excuse testimony at his court-martial on Wednesday will make him a credible witness against other soldiers charged with mistreating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and could undermine arguments that they were simply following orders, military legal experts said Thursday.

Sivits, the first of seven U.S. soldiers charged with prisoner abuse to be convicted, told an Army judge that he knew what he was doing was wrong, saying, "sir, I am truly sorry. I am sorry for what I've done."

The 24-year-old Army reservist agreed to testify against his fellow soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company in exchange for a lighter sentence. A judge ordered him to spend a year in jail for failing to stop the abuse and for taking a photograph of prisoners being tormented.

More accurately, Sivits agreed to cooperate in return for lowered specifications at his court-martial, not for sentencing leniency per se. His attorney attempted to mitigate the sentencing by submitted the Taguba report and hint that the conclusions would assist the judge in finding that the responsibility lies elsewhere for the abuse. The judge noted that he had plenty of time, took twenty minutes to read through the Taguba report -- and promptly sentenced Sivits to the maximum allowable time for the charges filed against him.Spinner notes that this indicates a lack of sympathy towards the entire notion of shared responsibility in the military; Sivits himself acknowledged that he knew what he did was wrong, but participated anyway.

One legal expert, quoted at the end of the article, questions Sivits' value in other courts-martial by claiming that his participation was limited to a single hour, buried within two months of abuses at Abu Ghraib. However, Sivits' testimony will bury the notion that their unit had been ordered to abuse prisoners, especially in the sexually sadistic manner that the soldiers used. Other experts Spinner quotes are more pessimistic about the remaining soldiers' chances for successfully defending themselves against Sivits' testimony:

Sivits "made it appear he was genuinely sorry," said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former Air Force lawyer. "It gave him a fairly substantial amount of credibility." ... Sivits's testimony "is going to make some of them think seriously about pleading" guilty, Saltzburg said.

David Sheldon, a Washington civilian who acts as a defense attorney in military courts, said Sivits helped the Army prosecution in another way. By identifying himself as one of the photographers of the hundreds of images taken of detainees and their alleged abusers, Sivits has laid a foundation for allowing the photos to be admitted as evidence, Sheldon said.

And, as I noted above, Sheldon also agrees that the tough sentence handed down to Sivits -- who, after all, is cooperating -- shows that the Army will not me merciful in its sentencing. I expect that most of the Abu Ghraib sadists will start offering plea deals, and the military would probably prefer to negotiate rather than extend the notoriety of the abuses. The only one for whom negotiation may not work would be Spc. Charles Graner, who appears to have been the ringleader, both in involving other soldiers and in dishing out the abuse.

Convicting Sivits provides a good foundation for the next set of cases. In the meantime, the Pentagon needs to push for a complete accounting for all detention facilities -- training, discipline, and procedures -- in order to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

The Story Behind The Pictures

Tomorrow's Washington Post outlines the abuses at Abu Ghraib in a detailed and disturbing report based on declassified sworn statements from the victims themselves. They describe a disgusting example of inhumanity, but interestingly, the article only implicates a small number of MPs at the Iraqi prison:

Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets. ...

Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.

Scott Higham and Joe Stephens review the witness statements in an excellent article, which should be required reading for everyone in the US. They paint a picture of how power can corrupt individuals, especially in an environment where discipline has utterly decayed and supervision missing. For instance, here are a few excerpts of the abuses reported:

"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees," said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. "We had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything." ....

Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures. "The kid was hurting very bad," Hilas said. ...

Another detainee told military investigators that American soldiers sodomized and beat him. The detainee ... said he was kept naked for five days when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib and was forced to kneel for four hours with a hood over his head. He said he was beaten so badly one day that the hood flew off his head. "The police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling, and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet," he said in his sworn statement.

One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to pull down his zipper. "I started screaming," he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him. "I was glowing and they were laughing" he said.

If true, these reports do nothing but reflect shame and dishonor on those who committed these crimes and the command that failed to provide the discipline and supervision needed. However, while I am sure this report will stoke the anti-war fires around the country, reading the entire article tells you how localized and unusual this occurrence was. For one thing, the same name keeps coming up in the statements:

Eight of the detainees identified by name one particular soldier at the center of the abuse investigation, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., a member of the 372nd Military Police Company from Cresaptown, Md. Five others described abuse at the hands of a solider who matches Graner's description.

Not only Graner, but only a handful of other guards make appearances in the testimony, some of which match the descriptions of the eight guards awaiting courts-martial. In fact, the Post notes that all of the abuse described in the report took place in one cellblock and always during the same shift -- Graner's graveyard shift:

The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A [emph mine] in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The Pentagon continues to investigate allegations of abuse, and more information on other abuses may come to light. For now, however, even by the statements of the victims themselves, Abu Ghraib crimes appear to be limited to a small group of soldiers who allowed their power over their detainees to warp their humanity. The evidence thus far certainly doesn't validate the free-for-all sadistic image that the media has created.

UPDATE: Another Post story details more of the images from the photos and videos coming out of Abu Ghraib, seen by Congress but not yet released to the public. Some "highlights" of the sadism at work:

Another soldier is seen in a photo brandishing a black baton as a naked prisoner -- cuffed at the ankles and smeared with a brown substance -- stands at the center of the prison hallway and holds his arms spread to either side. Detainees recoil from unmuzzled dogs in at least four photos. ...

Hooded and cloaked men are handcuffed to hallway rails. A prisoner in flexible handcuffs is made to use a banana to simulate anal sex. Two naked male detainees are handcuffed to each other. A naked detainee hangs upside down from a top bunk. Another naked detainee grimaces, his face pressed against the ground, a soldier bending his arm behind his back. Blood covers the detainee's left knee, and another soldier grabs his right leg.

As reported earlier, the photographers and videographers became bored with torturing the prisoners and eventually started documenting consensual sex between the guards. No one can argue that the Pentagon ordered that as detention policy. What we have here is an undisciplined and unsupervised unit, whose boredom and lack of humanity gave them all the impetus they needed to cruelly mistreat prisoners on their own accord.

The Handy And Media-Friendly Excuse For All Deserters

Fox News reports on a soldier who deserted his unit by failing to return from leave who now faces a court-martial. However, the soldier plans on using two different and interesting defenses for abandoning his unit while it currently serves under fire in Ramadi, Iraq. Can anyone guess which one will get all the media attention he could wish?

A U.S. soldier charged with desertion for leaving his unit in Iraq contended Thursday at this court-martial that he did not commit a crime because the Army had improperly failed to discharge him. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an infantry squad leader in the Florida National Guard, acknowledged disobeying his commanders' orders to return to Iraq in October after a two-week furlough.

Mejia said he asked to be discharged under a National Guard regulation barring non-U.S. citizens from serving more than eight years. Mejia, who joined the Army nine years ago, has dual citizenship in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

Mejia's request garnered an immediate refusal, and he received orders to return to his unit at the end of his leave. Instead, Mejia simply disappeared for five months while his unit continued fighting in Iraq on the front lines, gradually losing about a third of its strength to combat injuries. In fact, Mejia specifically avoided using credit cards or his cell phone to avoid being traced. When he finally turned himself in, Mejia had the nerve to file for conscientious-objector status -- in a volunteer army.

However, the citizenship issue is just Mejia's warm-up. For the main course, Mejia plans on keeping the interest of every newspaper editor in the country with a hint of Abu Ghraib:

Mejia testified his war experience had convinced him he no longer wanted to fight. "I did have problems in Iraq," Mejia said. "I don't believe I'm allowed to speak about these things here, but I did not agree with many things."

When he turned himself in March 15, Mejia said he was upset at seeing civilians hit by gunfire and at seeing an Iraqi boy die after confusion over which military doctor should treat him.

In his objector application, filed March 16, he also claims he saw Iraqi prisoners treated cruelly [emph mine] when he was put in charge of processing detainees last May at al-Assad, an Iraqi air base occupied by U.S. forces.

As a non-commissioned officer, the unit looked to Mejia for leadership and support. Instead, Mejia bailed on them and now wants to paint them as war criminals to get himself off the hook for desertion. After all of the media exploitation of Abu Ghraib (with a big assist from some willing Senators looking for the media spotlight), plan on hearing this excuse from any others who go over the hill this year.

Mejia could wind up doing a year in prison for desertion. However, as Mejia demonstrates by crapping all over his fellow soldiers on his return to the US, he has a great career in politics after he gets out.

First Mate Update

I planned on doing a lot of blogging tonight from the dialysis center, where we go three days a week for the First Mate, but it looks like I won't be able to do much. The good news for the First Mate is that we have a transplant date scheduled for her -- June 8. Our friend retested after failing an initial test as she was convinced nothing was wrong with her. Well, she was right; the first test results turned out to be mistaken. She's now completed her testing and everyone's approved for the transplant. We're incredibly grateful for all of the thoughts and prayers directed our way from all of you.

Now, the bad news: her catheter got infected again and won't work now. We're waiting on some lab results to check out her blood chemistry to see if she's way off on her potassium levels, which we suspect may also be the case. If so, I'll be shutting down in a few minutes and we'll be taking her to the hospital to remove the line and to install a new one. That will probably mean a couple of days in the hospital while they make the switch, and I'll be hanging around there instead of spending a lot of time with the computer on my lap.

I'll be back later on tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, check through some of the archives, and I'm sure Whiskey will be posting later tonight and tomorrow morning.

INSTANT UPDATE: Yup, to hospital we go. The doctor wants to err on the side of caution in order to avoid a delay in the transplant.

UPDATE AGAIN: It's about 10 PM here; the FM is resting as best as anyone can at a hospital. She's in good spirits and of course this is all mostly precautionary. For those of you who have e-mailed or commented on this post with your kind thoughts, both she and I thank you so much ... they're much appreciated.

Navel-Gazing In New Jersey

Everyone says the same thing about polls in the spring -- they don't mean anything, it's still too early, lots of things could change, yada yada yada. They may not make a good predictor of the eventual outcome, but they certainly indicate how campaigns are performing -- and in heavily-Democratic New Jersey, the Kerry campaign has just received a shock:

Forty-six percent of the respondents support Kerry, 43 percent back Bush, and 5 percent would vote for independent candidate Ralph Nader. The poll, released Thursday, has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Among independent voters polled, Kerry and Bush are about even in the race for New Jersey's 15 electoral votes.

Kerry's favorability is poor in New Jersey, which Al Gore won by 16 percentage points in 2000. Twenty-seven percent approve of the Democrat, 28 percent don't and 33 percent are mixed, according to the poll.

Having Bush within the margin of error so early in the race means that far from being able to count on traditionally-solid New Jersey, the Kerry campaign will need to sink valuable resources convincing Jerseyites of Kerry's likability, in a state where Gore trounced Bush in 2000, and Lautenberg snatched from the Republicans in a quasi-legal, last-minute switcheroo with Bob Torricelli in 2002 -- after 9/11.

National polls actually don't mean much. Just as in 2000, you have to look at the state-by-state polling to understand the real trends. Kerry not only hasn't taken any of Bush's red states away from him, but he's lost the solid grips that Gore had on some blue states in 2000, including New Jersey and California, where Kerry's lead has dropped to a single percentage point. National polls show this as a dead heat overall, but where it counts -- electoral votes -- Bush appears to be gaining strength as his support remains much more committed than Kerry's. And all of this as the Bush campaign weathers bad news by the bushel.

With the economy improving and hoping for a successful transition in Iraq, Bush could pick up a lot more steam, and votes, in these states over the summer, making more and more battleground states out of what pundits assumed were safely in Kerry's corner.

Ecosystem Update: Upward and Onward

The Truth Laid Bare Ecosystem, in which many blogs voluntarily participate in order to determine their relative ranking, just went through an update after a week of status quo. When the dust settled, Captain's Quarters evolved from Large Mammal to Playful Primate and made it to the top 100 blogs for the first time. We're now ranked at #89. (And on a slow blogging day, no less, although I'll pick up the reins later on today.)

NZ Bear uses a complicated methodology to calculate inbound and outbound blogroll links from each registered blog and then ranks the results based on inbound links. CQ has 395 unique inbound links, so to everyone who's been kind enough to blogroll me, I appreciate it! If you haven't yet blogrolled me, I hope you will sometime in the future, but more importantly, I hope you come back here to read and debate the posts that Whiskey and I write.

Enough of this monkey business for now, though. Back to blogging!

Catholic Church Takes Stand On Principle, Confuses Politicians

Pro-abortion Catholic politicians sent an angry letter to the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington DC, protesting the stand taken by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in recommending withholding Communion from those politicians who promote or enact laws legalizing abortion:

Forty-eight Roman Catholic members of Congress who are Democrats have signed a letter to the cardinal archbishop of Washington, D.C., saying the threats by some bishops to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights were "deeply hurtful," counterproductive and "miring the Church in partisan politics." ...

The letter's signers, including about a dozen who are considered anti-abortion Democrats, said the bishops are "allowing the church to be used for partisan purposes.'' They also question why these bishops made abortion a litmus test while ignoring politicians who voted counter to the church by endorsing the death penalty and the war in Iraq.

This argument demonstrates a lack of insight into the Church to which these politicians profess membership as well as an inability to recognize when a religious organization feels as though it has been used by politicians as a cover for pro-abortion activists.

In the first place, despite the clearly superficial understanding of Catholic philosophy demonstrated by the signatories, Catholic teaching does allow for both war and the death penalty, although the thresholds are fairly tough. St. Thomas Aquinas first wrote about the concepts of the "just war" and formulated them into doctrine almost a millenium ago. In fact, the doctrine can be found within the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, the basic text of Catholic philosophy and religious teachings. The basic premise:

All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. Despite this admonition of the Church, it sometimes becomes necessary to use force to obtain the end of justice. This is the right, and the duty, of those who have responsibilities for others, such as civil leaders and police forces. While individuals may renounce all violence those who must preserve justice may not do so, though it should be the last resort, "once all peace efforts have failed." [Cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et spes 79, 4]

As with all moral acts the use of force to obtain justice must comply with three conditions to be morally good. First, the act must be good in itself. The use of force to obtain justice is morally licit in itself. Second, it must be done with a good intention, which as noted earlier must be to correct vice, to restore justice or to restrain evil, and not to inflict evil for its own sake. Thirdly, it must be appropriate in the circumstances. An act which may otherwise be good and well motivated can be sinful by reason of imprudent judgment and execution.

In this regard Just War doctrine gives certain conditions for the legitimate exercise of force, all of which must be met:

"1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3. there must be serious prospects of success;

4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition" [CCC 2309].

In regards to the death penalty, which I oppose on moral grounds related to my Catholic faith but not dictated by it, the Church also allows for its use under a narrow set of circumstances -- and again, the Catechism itself provides the framework (para. 2267):

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.

What these misinformed Catholics have done is to confuse the personal opinions of the current Pope for Church doctrine, which are two completely different things. People often refer to the Pope's infallibility, but most lay people, even lifelong Catholics, are not aware that infallibility only applies to Church doctrine, not practice, and is specially invoked by the prelate. (The last time this happened, I believe, was in the mid-19th century regarding the Immaculate Conception of Mary.) However, the Catholic position on abortion comes from two millenia of concern for the lives of the most innocent of all people, the unborn, and is strongly denounced in the Catechism, as well as in practice by Catholic churches (see link above, scroll down to 2270):

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life. ... Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. "A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,"77 "by the very commission of the offense,"78 and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law.79 The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.

In maintaining their support of abortion, and especially as they have acted as enablers of abortion by either voting for laws which ease its access or voting against laws restricting it, these Catholics have committed a grave sin, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church. While the Catechism provides some wiggle room on war and execution, it has no such provision for abortion, and Catholics should not be surprised by this! Nor should they be shocked when the Church requires its members to adhere to its philosophy in order to remain within its community.

Charges of partisanship are ludicrous. Democrats created the "partisan" issue by becoming the pro-abortion party, much more so than Republicans, even though the GOP has a fairly significant pro-abortion minority. Despite this, Democrats routinely trot out their Catholocism at election time, hypocritically aligning themselves with a religion and philosophy with which they fundamentally disagree, just to squeeze a few more votes on Election Day. Unfortunately this allows other Catholics to presume that such views are acceptable within the church as up until now, they have not seen any reaction from the Church itself.

Small wonder, then, that the Church has finally decided to take a public stand in defense of its faith and philosophy. What good is any Church that won't? Pro-abortion Catholics, in their demand to Cardinal McCarrick, treat the Eucharist like a public utility that demands no obedience or sacrifice on the part of those who wish to receive it. The Church is not a public utility -- it is a voluntary membership to those who believe in its fundamental truths, even if they disagree with the practice of the faith in some parts. There is plenty of room in the Church for those who disagree with the war in Iraq on either side, or the death penalty as well. But for those who believe abortion to be no sin, the Catholic Church fundamentally disagrees, and always has.

Instead of writing letters demanding the Eucharist to Cardinal McCarrick, the signatories should decide what their own philosophies are and whether they belong in the Church. The Church is under no obligation to allow their beliefs to be warped and misrepresented by politicians grubbing for votes.

Addendum: Hugh Hewitt also briefly noted this story yesterday, and I wouldn't be surprised if he took another look at it today. The Washington Post also covered this story.

UPDATE: Right issue, wrong century, Chris B says; the last infallible doctrinal statement was in 1954 on the Immaculate Conception. You can read more about the apologetics of infallibility here. As Hugh Hewitt just pointed out on his show, as abortion is considered a mortal sin, one cannot receive the Eucharist without confession and repentance for engaging in abortion, whether you perform one, have one, or actively allow them to be performed. The bishops are right -- belatedly -- in refusing to allow abortion supporters to receive the Eucharist, just as it would be correct to refuse the Eucharist to an unrepentant adulterer or murderer. In fact, knowingly receiving the Eucharist while in a state of mortal sin is in itself a mortal sin, in that it disrespects the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, if you're not Catholic, none of this matters -- but if you publicly declare your Catholocism, then either you follow the rules or you don't, and failure to do so has consequences. If you don't like the rules, then choose another faith.

Nine Songs, Plus A Tap Dance

The Guardian (UK) reports on a controversial new film, Nine Songs, being released in Britain, and its lead actress who took Method acting to a level not seen anywhere else except ... er, California?

You could, perhaps, have seen it all coming. Or maybe not, if you were a 21-year-old with no significant acting roles to your name. What is clear is that Margo Stilley, the female lead in Michael Winterbottom's film Nine Songs - already famous as the most sexually explicit film in the history of mainstream British cinema - is at the centre of an almighty media ruckus. On Tuesday, tabloid headlines gleefully announced the arrival of the "Muckiest Film Ever" and the "Rudest Film Ever to Hit Our Cinemas". By yesterday Fleet Street's finest had caught up with friends and family in Stilley's native North Carolina. "Mother of Beauty in 'Real Sex' Film Shocker Prays For Her ... Oh God! Oh God!" trumpeted the Daily Express, on startlingly baroque form. "My Prayers For 'Porn' Daughter" and "Bible Belt Mum's Fear For Her Sex Movie Daughter", were the contributions from the Daily Mirror.

The Guardian treats its subject with a bit more decorum, but manages to become overwrought in a completely different way. As the leading leftist voice in Britain, the Guardian swings back far to the other end of the spectrum -- trying to convince its readership that watching explicit insertion scenes on the silver screen does not pornography make. You simply have to read this to believe that anyone would be silly enough to write it:

Some might say that one would have to be either very brave or very stupid to do what Stilley has done. She has exposed herself in all possible senses of the word. Her genitalia quite literally fill the screen. She gives a blowjob. She is penetrated. She lies on a bed, blindfolded, while her on-screen boyfriend, played by the much more seasoned actor Kieran O'Brien, performs cunnilingus on her. But what she is keen to make clear - and she is absolutely right - is that Nine Songs is not some kind of kinky porno flick.

Don't be silly -- why would I think that explicit fellatio, cunnilingus, blindfolded submission, and 20-foot high female genitalia demonstrate pornography?

Winterbottom's idea (whatever its merits and demerits as a concept) was to tell a love story from a single angle: that of the physical encounters between the couple.

Well, still sounds like a night with the Playboy Channel to me.

The sex is a metonym for the rest of the relationship: from it, the audience is led to infer the trajectory of their affair. First comes loved-up infatuation; later, there is a moving sequence when the pair, deeply in love, spend the weekend together at the seaside. Finally, we see a poignant endgame when Lisa, Stilley's character, finds more interest in her vibrator than her boyfriend.

Ah, yes, that most common of romantic plotlines: boy meets girl, girl meets vibrator, boy loses girl. Next year, they'll make it into an After School Special.

In fact the jolt of the film is seeing sex so forthrightly portrayed, not that it shows anything that one imagines most couples don't do behind closed doors. "It isn't shocking," says Stilley. "If you know you are going to watch a film like this, it's not abrasive. It's normal sex that everyone has, not crazy stuff." She also points out that only two episodes go beyond "normal" cinematic sex scenes (though the film is extremely explicit, by any standards). These are the fellatio scene and the final sequence, in which the couple have full penetrative sex.

In fact, there are two shocking components to Nine Songs. First, most couples probably indulge in all of these behaviors behind closed doors -- which is where most couples would leave them. Second is the fact that Stilley and her co-star, Kieran O'Brien, aren't a couple, and she got paid at least in part to perform intercourse and fellatio on him. Now, either that makes Stilley a "sex worker" (to use a euphemism) or a porno actress, although the two may be synonymous.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying the film should be banned or that Stilley or O'Brien should be arrested. My libertarianism informs me that she's an adult capable of making her own decisions. However, don't try to rationalize this film as anything else than what it is, because you don't need to show insertions to tell the story that Stilley describes. It's either there to tittilate or shock, or both, and insisting it's mainstream just insults everyone's intelligence.

UPDATE: This seems to be a favorite for Google searches, so if you've found my site through a search engine with this post, welcome to Captain's Quarters! Click on Main above to read the latest on my blog, and either bookmark or blogroll CQ to come back often.

Daschle, Thune In Dead Heat

South Dakota television station KELO and the Argus-Leader, the state's largest daily newspaper, announced that their polling shows that John Thune has pulled into a virtual dead heat with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle -- without having spent a cent on advertising (via Hugh Hewitt and Power Line):

We polled 800 registered voters last week who say they regularly vote. Here's who they'd choose as senator if today were Election Day.

Our KELOLAND-TV/Argus Leader scientific poll shows 49% of voters would support democrat Tom Daschle. 47% would vote for republican John Thune. And just 4 percent are undecided. There's a three and a half percent margin of error. ...

At this point, the Senate race is a tale of two campaigns. Daschle's camp has been on the air for months, and spent millions of dollars doing it. His supporters argue it's been more effective than our numbers suggest. Thune's camp contends people either aren't paying attention to the campaigning, or they're getting sick of it.

Thune, in the meantime, has waited to launch his campaign in order to pack as much punch as he can when it will be most effective. Daschle's money has done little except move him backwards, or perhaps has only managed to slow his backward momentum. One possible boost for Daschle could be the special election to fill the rest of Bill Janklow's term in this session of Congress:

A soybean farmer and former lawmaker will face a member of one of South Dakota's most distinguished political families in a closely watched special election next month to replace Rep. Bill Janklow, who resigned after being convicted of manslaughter in an auto accident. The winner of the June 1 contest between Democrat Stephanie Herseth and Republican Larry Diedrich will serve out the seven months left in Janklow's term. And no matter who wins, the two candidates will face each other again in the November election for a full two-year term in Congress.

Democrats plan on organizing a large-scale effort to take this seat from the Republicans and put it in their column. Even though the session will only last a few more months, whoever wins the seat will likely wind up winning it in November. But more importantly, as I blogged yesterday, that push will help Daschle recover some lost momentum. Republicans in South Dakota need some help countering the expected Democratic assault from around the country -- and that's why Rep. John Kline and the NRCC will provide free room and board for Minnesota Republicans to spend a few days helping to build some grassroots momentum for Larry Diedrich. Check out the link to yesterday's post for more information.

9/11: The Circus Continues

The 9/11 Commission, which has lately become the (Grand)Standing Committe on National Scolding and Punditry, interrogated former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani from a site less than two miles from Ground Zero. This hearing provided yet another opportunity for a handful of victim family members to act irrationally in order to get their faces on the evening news:

Outraged relatives of World Trade Center victims heckled former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday as their hopes that he would be grilled by the Sept. 11 commission faded in the face of gentle questioning and effusive praise from panel members.

"My son was murdered because of your incompetence!" shouted Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. Seated three rows behind Giuliani, she jabbed her finger at the former mayor and waved a sign that read "Fiction" as he gave the city's emergency response a glowing review.

Regenhard may want to review the events of 9/11 more closely. Although she may not know it, Giuliani didn't pilot either of the two planes into the World Trade Center towers, nor did he conspire with Osama bin Laden to "murder" anyone. I put this on the same level as Michael Berg, whose son was butchered by the same organization that killed Regenhard's son, who now says that Bush and Cheney murdered Nick Berg -- video evidence to the contrary.

Since when did we let the terrorists off the hook for these killings?

As I posted yesterday, I understand that these people will never recover from the devastation of losing a family member. But the reality of life is that we all lose family members, some way too early, and some at the hands of other people. Why does their grief allow them to act out and make outlandish claims, especially with Regenhard and her clique of idiots, who's almost three years past the murder of her son by Islamofascists. How long do they get to disrupt government proceedings with their rude and partisan sniping, even if the proceedings they interrupt are next to worthless? Because in my mind, their family members died in an attack on America, and that makes this entire issue a lot bigger than Regenhard. I resent her arrogating unto herself the role of judge, and I especially resent the deference shown to her and her little team of agitators by the 9/11 Commission and the media.

So let's get this straight, once and for all. Islamofascist terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans in an ongoing escalation of the war they declared on our country. Bill Clinton, George Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Madeline Albright, William Cohen, George Tenet, Condi Rice, and other Americans didn't plan the attack, didn't carry it out, and I'll bet my last dollar that in their hearts, every single one of them would have given their life to prevent it. Mistakes were made, both before and during the attack, as Giuliani said, but that's what they were -- mistakes.

Giuliani and his emergency response teams risked their lives to save as many people as possible; some gave their lives in that effort, like Regenhard's son. It's a shame that his mother spends her time using his heroism in an effort to score partisan cheap shots off of the flawed but ultimately heroic people who helped save New York from allowing the terrorists a much larger victory than they achieved. It's too bad that John Lehman uses his position on the commission to sneer at and belittle the men who put their lives on the line for decades to protect New Yorkers and who also lost good friends and co-workers on 9/11. It's a national embarrassment that a panel which should be working on improving our systems in order to prevent another 9/11 has instead turned itself into a Volksgericht with each member taking turns playing Roland Freisler, berating witnesses and making clear that any admission of error will be trumpeted on every talk show onto whose stage they can elbow their way.

In fact, it's a travesty, a circus, and it distracts us from winning the war that the Islamofascists continue to wage against us. Disband it now, and send the parasites riding on its back along with it.

"Wedding" Attack At 3 AM? Pentagon Says No

Earlier today, the AP and others reported that American military forces fired on a wedding celebration near the Iraqi-Syrian border after mistaking celebratory gunfire for an attack. Now, however, the Pentagon disputes that story and insists that forces attacked a terrorist safe house:

"Our report is that this was not a wedding party, that these were anti-coalition forces that fired first, and that U.S. troops returned fire, destroying several vehicles, and killing a number of them," a Pentagon spokesman said.

He was responding to a video distributed by The Associated Press showing Iraqi witnesses who said that at least 20 people were killed and five others critically wounded early Wednesday when planes fired on a wedding celebration. A man on the video said all homes in the village near the Syrian border were destroyed in the attack at about 3 a.m. local time Wednesday [emph mine]. ...

A coalition official said in a written statement that coalition forces conducted a military operation "against a suspected foreign fighter's safe house in the open desert, 85 km southwest of Husaybah, and 25 km from the Syrian border.

"During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided. Coalition forces on the ground recovered numerous weapons, 2 million Iraqi and Syrian dinar, foreign passports and a satcom radio," the statement said.

I know that the original reports didn't mention the 3 AM attack time, which seems to discredit the notion that the target could have been a wedding party in full swing. Instead, the Pentagon insists that they had intelligence pointing to this location being used as a transit point for terrorists going in and out of Iraq, and the material captured at the location indicated they were correct. Wedding parties don't need satcom radios, for instance, and while the Iraqi dinar is worth pennies now, that amount in Syrian pounds (not dinars) comes to $57,000 and some change.

This incident illustrates the necessity of waiting for further information on these attacks to determine their military necessity. Unfortunately, the wedding-strike meme has already been unleashed onto the public, and I suspect that the media won't do a lot to disabuse us of this fallacy.

Caption Contest #10 Winners!

Sorry for the delay -- I hadn't realized that it was the Captain's serve! It's time to announce the winners of this week's Captain's Caption Contest, and our guest judges this week are Dr. Kate and Farmer Joe from Urban Farmhouse, a terrific new blog -- be sure to check it out. Just to jog your memory (another Forrest Gump reference?), here's the picture:

Here are the winners!

Captain's Award (Box of Chocolates) -- Shark:

"Look at me! I'm playing poor man's squash!"

You Have The Conn #1 (Floating Feather) -- Spd Rdr:

With a subtle grace not seen since the Ford Administration, Senator Kerry gently nuances the ball over the net.

You Have The Conn #2 (We're Not Relations, Sir) -- Chris B:

"No, in Press-Ping-Ping you toss softies to me and stand there motionless as I score off you."

You Have The Conn #3 (Sorry, Jenny) -- Attila:

John Kerry, showing he can have as much fun as the next guy after a few beers, plays ping-pong in his pajamas.

Report To Sick Bay, On The Double (Your Mama REALLY Cares About Your Education, Boy) -- Elizabeth S:

If only MY balls were that big!!!!!!!!!

And now, for a couple of extra awards ---

Best Gump Reference (Bubba Was My Friend) -- Rick:

Not unlike Forest Gump, I also learned the art of ping-pong during my tenure in Vietnam...

Best Musical Reference (Gump, You're A *&$%$# Genius!) -- Purple Raider:

"They Call him Kerry, Kerry, faster than ketchup.
No one you see is nuanced as he
And we know Kerry Votes for a bill then against it
Getting the praise from Uncle Teddy.

Everyone loves the Vietnam Vet
Ever so brave and fearless is he
Medals he won sent over the fence
Then displayed for all to see

They call him Kerry, Kerry taxing the rich folks
No one you see is fairer than he
And we know Kerry Kerry lives in five mansions
Him and Teresa and his dog VC"

With no apologies to those miserable wretches who thought up that miserable flipper show in the first place.

=======

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, her at CQ, everyone's a winner -- just some of us have higher winning percentages than others. Comments on this post will remain open, as usual, in order for the winners to gloat, the others to disparage Kate and Joe's intellect and my parentage, and for any other entries submitted just for the sheer enjoyment of amazing your friends and confounding your enemies.

Send me a photograph or an e-mail with a link to a great picture you think should be the subject of our next Caption Contest, and let me know if you'd like to be the guest judge! I'll have another picture for Friday -- so be sure to come back then for the next contest.

ABC Witness Says "Cover-Up"

ABC News features an interview on its website with a "military intelligence analyst" who claims that the Army is conducting a deliberate cover-up of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In an article by Brian Ross and Alexandra Salomon, Sgt. Samuel Provance says that "dozens" of people knew about the abuse, and that it stemmed from orders given by military intelligence. The emphasis in the excerpt are mine:

"There's definitely a cover-up," the witness, Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet."

Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to.

"What I was surprised at was the silence," said Provance. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."

Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison.

He said that while he did not see the actual abuse take place, the interrogators with whom he worked freely admitted they directed the MPs' rough treatment of prisoners.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. I don't want to make too little out of Provance's testimony, but ABC News -- and I suspect the port side of the blogosphere -- makes far too much from it. What you have throughout this article is, basically, hearsay. Provance never witnessed any abuse at Abu Ghraib, and it's clear he has no idea the specific number of people involved. His statements that lead the article are filled with conjecture, saying that more people "had to be" involved. Why? Because a lot of guys walked around bragging about abusing enemy prisoners? Weak. This testimony would be almost worthless at a court-martial, I believe, although I'll let Whiskey comment on that. It would be somewhat useful for the investigation itself, if just to keep the investigators moving forward to see exactly how many people commented about abusing prisoners and to compare that to other considerations like access and opportunity.

Provance relates a couple of anecdotes about prisoners being knocked unconscious from neck blows and being stripped naked and forced to wear women's underwear, the latter of which has been known for weeks now. He then segues into allegations, also vague and interpretive, of being pressured to remain silent:

Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was assigned by the Pentagon to investigate the role of military intelligence in the abuse at the Iraq prison. Fay started his probe on April 23, but Provance said when Fay interviewed him, the general seemed interested only in the military police, not the interrogators, and seemed to discourage him from testifying.

Provance said Fay threatened to take action against him for failing to report what he saw sooner, and the sergeant fears he will be ostracized for speaking out. "I feel like I'm being punished for being honest," Provance told ABCNEWS. "You know, it was almost as if I actually felt if all my statements were shredded and I said, like most everybody else, 'I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything. I don't know what you're talking about,' then my life would be just fine right now."

In response, Army officials said it is "routine procedure to advise military personnel under investigative review" not to comment.

It's routine procedure not only for military investigations, but also for civilian investigations as well. As any lawyer or even crime aficionados could explain, having witnesses tell their stories on the evening news infects other possible witnesses, as well as taints the jury pool. Investigators don't want witnesses to discuss their testimony because it gives everyone an opportunity to get stories straight -- even for those who are not under suspicion but who have critical testimony for the case. One possible problem is that one witness who misremembers something will convince other witnesses of the mistaken sequence of events.

But, of course, explaining that to a computer specialist who's bound and determined to get on national TV probably is a waste of time, especially since the specialist in question doesn't appear to follow orders very well. If he's concerned about a cover-up, he had more discreet ways of making his testimony known to others, including contacting members of Congress. That his first response was to call up ABC makes his testimony seem a bit self-serving and just a little martyrish.

On the whole, Provance does not seem to be a very impressive witness. If a cover-up is in motion, it will take someone on the inside of that attempt to blow the lid off of it. Provance's conjecture adds little in the way of hard facts.

The Commons Takes A Powder

The London Telegraph has a disturbing story in this morning's breaking news about a protest in the House of Commons which culminated in a stupid and frightening attack on Tony Blair:

The House of Commons has been suspended after protesters threw missiles containing purple powder at Tony Blair during Prime Minister's question time. Mr Blair was hit on the back by the powder which spread a cloud of dust over MPs on the Labour benches.

The Prime Minister continued to answer a question from Michael Howard, the Tory leader, before the session was suspended by Speaker Michael Martin.

The protest was staged by two men who were sitting in an area of the public gallery normally reserved for distinguished guests. They were dragged from the gallery by security staff as MPs began to leave the chamber.

That's all of the information known at this point. British leftists seem to have as little sense about life in general and the war on terror specifically as their American counterparts, and security for the House of Commons needs an upgrade, to say the least. By this point, whenever Americans hear "powder", our minds immediately race towards anthrax or chemical weapons attacks, whether the powder be purple, saffron, or rainbow-hued. For protestors to use powder in an attack either shows an idiotic understanding of previous attacks, or a monstrous calculation designed to induce panic.

And look where these protestors decided to stage their attack -- in the heart of British democracy, where open debate on issues of the day have taken place for centuries. I rather doubt that the venue was selected by coincidence or mere tactical ease. I suspect that the protestors meant to close off debate in the Commons, shutting down Parliament in order to make a big splash on TV. Remember this when the radical leftists claim that they just want to exercise their right to free speech; they would gladly deny that right to anyone who doesn't agree with their agenda, and shutting down the Commons simply is the most efficient method.

UPDATE: Geez, it's even stupider than I thought:

A fathers' rights pressure group claimed responsibility for the incident, which happened around 11:20 a.m. GMT as the chamber was full for the weekly prime minister's questions session. Two men were arrested.

"Fathers-4-Justice," which campaigns for equal rights of access to children for divorced fathers, said the stunt was one of a series of protests it planned in the run-up to Father's Day on June 20. Purple powder is the international color for equality, a spokesman said.

"Tony Blair should appreciate what it would be like without children because he himself is a father," he added.

Morons. Hopefully they'll never have to find out what it would be like to suffer a powderized anthrax attack.

The War on Democracy

Let's face it, there is no War on Terrorism. Yes, I have thrown that phrase around a lot on this blog because I wanted to believe it. But it's not our war, we didn't start it, and despite 9/11, we still hesitate to call it what it is.

On todays OpinionJournal.com, Garry Kasparov offers us a glimpse of clarity:

"Since the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed, the battleground has been chosen by those who would blur the lines between terrorists and those fighting against them. The Bush administration has contributed to the confusion with its ambiguous "war on terror." You cannot fight a word. You need targets, you need to know what you are fighting for and against."

"The situation is worse in the Muslim world. Calling the terrorists "militants" or "radical Islamists" presupposes the existence of moderates willing to confront the radicals. Outside of Turkey, it is very hard to find moderate clerics who will stand up to Islamist terrorists, even though the majority of their victims are Muslim."

"We have seen 25 years of anti-Western propaganda and hatred emanating from Iran, not only against Israel and the U.S. but against the liberal values that make up the core of our civilization."

Mr. Kasparov concludes:

"In this fight the enemy does not play by our rules, or by any rules at all. WMD will be in terrorist hands eventually; conventional wisdom recognizes this reality. Concessions and negotiations at best only delay catastrophe. Europe and its people are in this war whether they acknowledge it or not. Those who would appease terrorists must realize that by pretending that this battle does not exist, they will soon have blood on their hands--both real and metaphorical."

Unfortunately, the mainstream media is too busy with the War on Bush to notice they have joined the enemy.

Rolling away the tripwire

The AFP reports 4,000 Army troops will leave South Korea and redeploy to Iraq. This will be first reduction in US force levels on the Korean peninsula since the early 1990s. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz remarked:

"We have moved troops off of the DMZ, where frankly, they were performing nothing except, a kind of useless -- and indeed I would say counterproductive -- tripwire function."

The US force structure on the Korean peninsula is obsolete. The threat from the North is no longer an army marching across the DMZ; it is Kim's nuclear collection which poses the real danger. The US troops are merely potential nuclear hostages.

The reduction is the second step in a necessary reconfiguration. (The first being the plan to move troops from the DMZ to bases south of Seoul.)

AFP also reports:

"South Korea is seeking assurances that the 4,000 troops will return once their Iraq mission is concluded and has vigorously opposed any reduction in US troops, finding comfort that the presence of US troops in the region virtually guarantees immediate US military involvement if North Korea were to invade the South."

Maybe that is what the South Koreans have said, but it's not what they really mean. We all know that lack of US involvement is not the issue. Rather, the South Koreans worry that America will be more likely to make a preemptive strike against the North's nuclear plants once our own people are out of harm's way.

And that's not such a bad idea . . .

"Despicable"

The 9/11 Commission jumped the shark once and for all this afternoon when Commissioner John Lehman launched a hyperbolic, unfair, and grandstanding attack on the leaders of the New York police and fire departments -- who lost scores of men in the disaster of the World Trade Center:

The former police and fire chiefs who were lionized after the World Trade Center attack came under harsh criticism Tuesday from the Sept. 11 commission, with one member saying the departments' lack of cooperation was scandalous and "not worthy of the Boy Scouts." Commission members, in New York for an emotional two-day hearing, focused on how leaders of the two departments failed to share information effectively in the early frantic moments after two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

Former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen and former police chief Bernard Kerik shot back with infuriated responses to commissioner John Lehman's questions, the strongest of a series of pointed statements from the panel.

"I couldn't disagree with you more strongly," Von Essen replied. "I think it's outrageous that you make a statement like that." Outside the hearing, he called the questioning "despicable."

Let's try to remember that these men sent hundreds of their brothers in uniform into the burning and collapsing towers in a desperate attempt to rescue as many people as possible. Let's remember that this entire country was unprepared for an attack on this scale. Let's remember that these men represent thousands of men and women in New York that stand ready to make that sacrifice again, if necessary, to keep New Yorkers safe.

Now this pissant little Monday morning quarterback sneers at them from across the dais, belittling these men who risk their lives in service of their community instead of making a living showboating for the cameras. It's just the latest in a series of prime-time tongue-lashings that the 9/11 Commission feels qualified to give everyone while they're supposedly reviewing evidence in an open-minded and rational way. Instead of treating witnesses with respect, they belittle them to enlarge their egos.

And they do get a response from the few ultra-partisan 9/11 families, with whom I have completely lost patience. For instance:

Families of Sept. 11 victims applauded the tough questioning and shook their heads sadly as the panel enumerated a litany of communication breakdowns between the departments. Family members sporadically mocked and booed Von Essen, Kerik and Richard Sheirer, former Office of Emergency Management commissioner, and they wept earlier in the day as they watched videotape of the buildings collapsing.

As Von Essen testified, Sally Regenhard — who lost her firefighter son — held up a piece of paper reading: "LIES." ...

Family members cheered when commission member Slade Gorton launched an aggressive line of questioning about the city's 911 emergency system to Kerik, Von Essen and Sheirer.

When the agency heads tried to defer to their successors, Gorton refused to let them. "I'm asking ... what was going on Sept. 11," Gorton said to applause from the families.

I'm glad that these few, ill-mannered families are getting their money's worth, but for everyone else the 9/11 Commission is a joke. It hasn't crossed the minds of these idiots that 9/11 was an attack on America, not just a ticket to network talk-show gigs for a handful of the victims' families and an opportunity to resurrect political careers for hacks like Lehman and Bob Kerrey. And if you think I'm being too harsh on the victims' families -- and perhaps I am -- then maybe they should quit manipulating the media and start pressing for a real investigation, one that gets real information from witnesses, instead of show trials where everyone who appears is treated like they personally flew the airplanes into the buildings themselves.

It's time for someone to pull the plug on this ongoing embarrassment.

Defense Confirms Sarin Find

Fox News reports that the Defense Department has confirmed that the shell that partially exploded by the roadside yesterday contained four liters of sarin -- enough to kill thousands of people under the right conditions. The discovery indicates that more such shells will come to light (via Instapundit):

Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin, Defense Dept. officials told Fox News Tuesday. The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent. ...

New weapons caches are being found every day, experts said, including "hundreds of thousands" of rocket-propelled grenades and portable anti-aircraft weapons.

"Clearly, if we're gonna find one or two of these every so often — used as an IED or some other way — the threat is not all that high, but it does confirm suspicion that he [Saddam] did have this stuff," said Ret. U.S. Army Col. Robert Maginnis.

"It is a bazaar of weapons that are available on every marketplace throughout that country," Maginnis added. "We're doing everything we can to aggressively disarm these people, but there were so many things that were stored away by Saddam Hussein in that country ... it's a huge job that we're tackling."

With new weapons caches being found on a regular basis, and now with the discovery of WMD in two artillery shells, obviously more WMD awaits whomever finds it first -- meaning that we need to ramp up our efforts to find and secure all munitions storage points in Iraq. Meanwhile in the same report, Kurdish representatives claim to have evidence of Saddam's WMDs, saying that the UN and WHO have turned a deaf ear to their testimony:

An Iraqi Kurdish official had no doubt similar substances will be found as the weapons hunt continues.

"We don't know where they are, but we suspect they are hidden in many locations in Iraq," Howar Ziad, the Kurdish representative to the United Nations, told Fox News on Tuesday. "It's quite possible that even the neighboring states who are against the reform of Iraq ... are helping the Saddamites in hiding." ...

"We have evidence — we have victims of the use of those agents, and we're still waiting for WHO and the U.N. to come investigate," Ziad said.

Perhaps the US and the UK should do their own investigating in Kurdish territory. While it's unlikely that Saddam would have stored any WMD in that area after 1991, it's possible that older stores may still exist, dating back to the massacre of the Halabja Kurds. If so, Saddam could have banked on the elimination of sanctions allowing him to recover those stores and immediately restocking his WMD inventory until fresh programs for manufacture could be ramped up.

UPDATE: Friends of Saddam takes us down memory lane to March 2003, when the Marines discovered a cache of atropine injectors and 3,000 chemical suits near An Nasiriya. In December 2002, with the UN debating military action for Iraqi non-compliance with disarmament agreements, Saddam bought a large amount of atropine, claiming a medical use for the drug outside of military use. New Scientist magazine noted at the time:

Many arms experts believe Iraq possesses nerve agents such as sarin and VX. These work by increasing levels of the neuromuscular transmitter acetylcholine, sending muscles into spasm. Atropine blocks acetylcholine.

At the time, this discovery indicated Iraqi preparation for chemical warfare; naysayers scoffed at the notion, suggesting that Saddam feared chemical attack from the US and UK. Yesterday's discovery tells a different story.

UPDATE II: Hugh Hewitt links to Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, who wants us to know why one shell of sarin would be all al-Qaeda needs to cause a whole slew of 9/11s:

For all those who would downplay this finding, I offer the following lesson in “terror math”:

It takes 1 drop (100 mg) of sarin to kill an average person.

The artillery shell that was found contained 3 to 4 liters of sarin.

1 drop (mg) equals 0.0001 liters (1/10000 of a liter).

3-4 liters equates to roughly 50,000 drops.

Obviously, it would be impossible to distribute 50,000 drops of sarin in an effective enough manner to kill tens of thousands of people. But consider this:

The artillery shell that was found contained enough sarin that it could be divided up into 1000 300mg doses.

Each 300mg dose could kill 3000 Americans, the number that died on 9/11.

From that single artillery shell, 16 "new 9/11s” could be attempted.

Many, if not most, would likely fail. But how many would succeed? How many American deaths lay waiting in that one “WMD?” One shell, 16 “9/11s”. Now ask yourself how many more deaths are waiting in shells that were “overlooked” or “misplaced?”

Everyone get the picture now? (Updated as Joe refined the math)

Democrats Target Janklow's Congressional Seat in SD

South Dakota will hold a special election to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Rep. Bill Janklow (R) from Congress. Democrats have targeted this seat for conversion and will be launching a major get-out-the-vote effort to try to capture the seat for Stephanie Herseth, an Emily's List beneficiary. The NRCC needs Minnesota volunteers to spend a few days in South Dakota to counter these efforts, as Marcus Esmay, spokesman for Minnesota Republican candidate John Kline, informed me by e-mail today:

Congressman John Kline (R-MN) will be leading a bus-load of hard-working Minnesotans to help South Dakota counter this effort [by Democrats], and he has asked me to e-mail the administrators of all of his “favorite blogs” to request assistance in filling up our bus.

Those who join us will not only have 4+ hours to quiz Congressman Kline, but they will also have the satisfaction of helping lay out the national-groundwork for the 2004 election. South Dakota is sure to be a pivotal state over the next year and an upset Republican victory in this election could spell the end of Daschle in November.

If you are interested in letting your devoted readers in on the action, here’s what they need to know:

Who: Larry Diedrich vs. Stephanie Herseth

What: South Dakota Special Election – Bus Trip with Congressman Kline to Sioux Falls – 3 days of ‘GOP Get Out the Vote’

Where: Sioux Falls, SD

When: Bus leaves from Burnsville (other pickup locations available) at Noon on Saturday, May 29th – Returns Wednesday, June 2nd a.s.a.p.

How: If anyone would like to ‘Hop on the Bus’ with Congressman Kline, please call Diana Bratlie at 952-890-9430 or e-mail dianab@klineforcongress.com (sorry, no web-site.)

BEST YET: The NRCC feels that this is SO important, they will pay for Bus Transportation AND Room and Board.

Okay, how's that for a deal -- a free, long weekend in South Dakota, volunteering to promote democracy and the Republican candidate? I think that sounds like a great deal! Unfortunately, due to the medical requirements of the First Mate and the responsibilities of the NARN radio show, I can't go, but I'd love to hear from any of my local readers who volunteer. I can foresee a guest-blog opportunity to keep all of us informed of your efforts out there.

Keep this in mind: John Thune will face off against Tom Daschle this fall in the general election, and any Democratic efforts to get the vote out for Herseth will create more wind for Daschle's sails as well. Beating Daschle is critical for Republicans in order to restore order to the judicial nominee process in the Senate. It's the most important race in the nation in November after the presidential election. Let's help John Kline get the vote out in South Dakota for Diedrich and give Thune a huge boost to the finish line!

Link Love, The Quarter-Million Hit Version

I noticed yesterday that the hit counter finally tripped 250,000 visitors sometime in the afternoon -- and I wanted to thank everyone again who makes Captain's Quarters a regular read. When I started the blog less than eight months ago, I couldn't imagine that CQ would be reaching as many people as it does, and I count myself as incredibly fortunate to have as many regular readers and commenters as CQ does. Thinking about all of the friends I've made in the blogosphere reminded me that CQ hasn't passed around link-love in too long a time -- so, here's what's happening at the blogs that gave me a tremendous help along the way.

First, starting with my colleagues in the Northern Alliance: Hugh Hewitt wants to know why the Los Angeles Times keeps burying the lede when it comes to WMD, sarin and mustard gas. (Hugh has been tremendously gracious to me, and I can't thank him enough.) Big Trunk at Power Line notes that Dodger star Jose Lima delivered a beautiful rendition of the national anthem -- and includes a picture to demonstrate why Lima loves his adopted country. How 'bout them Dodgers, anyway? Mitch Berg takes a look at the WMD arguments from the Left and discovers (surprise!) inconsistency and incoherence. The guys at Fraters Libertas have a poll going, which closes soon, as to who has the fewest active brain cells in the US Senate. I'm telling you, it's a coin flip. Plus, JB Doubtless wonders how Steve McQueen looked when picking up his dry cleaning ... well, you have to read it to understand. King Banian at SCSU Scholars agrees with me about the cheap partisan shot that Minnesota Democrats took at Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke, and he's got pictures of the culprits. Eloise at Spitbull wants your help renaming Bill Clinton's memoirs. I'd suggest Close But No Cigar, which would describe both his affair with Lewinsky and his presidential legacy ...

Moving to some of my co-bloggers at other group blogs, take a look at Patterico's Pontifications, which regularly features great writing and a dry wit, and who also regularly holds the LA Times' feet to the fire. Patterico is one of the founders and co-bloggers at Oh, That Liberal Media, where I cross-post on media issues. On his own site, Patterico has a short list of indications of incompatibility, which I suspect may expand over the next few days. Over at OTLM, founder Stefan Scharansky keeps up the Seattle beat with an excellent slam on the Post-Intelligencer's coverage of the Brown decision. Over at Blogs for Bush, where I also cross-post, Paul discovers that John Kerry doesn't have much of a sense of humor. No, really!

Other blog-friends have gone way, way, way too long without a mention on this blog. Brant at the always-excellent Strange Women Lying in Ponds asks why we're not in a war mentality yet, and wonders what it will take. Bill at INDC Journal has pictures up from National Police Week and a funny story about protestors, as well as a not-funny-at-all story about cop killers and Cuban asylum. Venomous Kate from Electric Venom has an important post about honor killings and a book recommendation for you. Allah is on hiatus, unfortunately, but check out his archives for some of the funniest satirical blogging you'll find.

In my neighborhood, we can find DC at Brainstorming telling us that "escape is not an option," and has taken a few days off, so perhaps it's not a bad short-term strategy. Sean at Everything I Know Is Wrong provides us with an abundance of Kerryisms; in fact, he's got a whole category of them. Wanna see a body part of Fresh Bed Goodness? Well, it's not what you think. Steve Gigl, on the other hand (*snork*), is pissed. Jay Reding, downstate, has a great essay based on Michael Totten's article on the immorality of the anti-war position.

Finally, as we always do with the link-love, take a look at the Commissar over at Politburo Diktat, who believes that Atrios and Kos may have become casualties of the capitalist war. The Party demands that you investigate these disappearances, comrades!

Don't forget to keep an eye out for the excellent posts from my new partner, Whiskey, and thank you again for making Captain's Quarters one of your regular reads.

UPDATE: Holy cow, I completely forgot to send a little link-love to Robert Prather at Insults Unpunished, who wants to hit 500,000 visitors for his two-year anniversary. I'm sure you all know what to do ...

Four Held In Berg Butchery

Britain's Sky News reports from Iraq that four men have been detained in the butchery beheading of American Nicholas Berg:

Four people have been arrested over the beheading of American Nicholas Berg, Iraq sources say. The 26-year-old businessman's decapitated body was found 10 days ago in Baghdad.

His killing was shown around the world on the internet. ... The website said the execution was performed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top ally of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

It is not known if he was among the four people arrested.

Thus far, Sky News is the only outlet reporting their capture. The report is (at this time) about 45 minutes old. I'll update this post as more information comes through. (via Memeorandum)

UPDATE: From the French news service AFP:

Four people have been arrested over the beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg, whose killing was shown earlier this month in a video on an Al-Qaeda linked website, a senior Iraqi source said. Asked if more than one person had been arrested in connection with the killing, the source told AFP: "Yes, four people." ...

"We have made good progress," the source added, referring to the investigation, but declined to give any details on the identity of the four people held in detention. But it was understood that none of the four included Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who US authorities believe carried out the killing of the 26-year-old who was in Iraq to drum up business for his small telecommunications company.

So they got the four people who weren't al-Zarqawi, it seems, which if true tells us a little bit about al-Zarqawi, the terrorist cells, and the nature of the Iraq insurgency in general. First, it appears that al-Qaeda terrorist cells organize themselves in fours or fives, and al-Zarqawi wasn't a permanent member of this cell, hence his evasion of capture. That means he attached himself to this particular kidnapping in order to make as gruesome a public statement as possible, identifying himself explicitly with the murder itself. After the murder, he probably left the cell to go back to its own operation and moved to another mission.

More importantly, although al-Zarqawi was the only terrorist identified, he was the only one who got away. Why? All five had hoods on for the video and none of the others were identified. Yet it looks as if they couldn't escape the CPA. Remembering that they held Berg for almost a month, I believe a number of Iraqis in the area knew who was holding Berg and after the video of al-Zarqawi's butchery came out, at least one of the locals decided to make sure these ghouls got captured as fast as possible.

If all this conjecture comes close (and yes, I know it's conjecture), it demonstrates that the Iraqis don't identify with the insurgents or their methods anywhere near as much as people think. That's good information to keep in mind when we read about the so-called "popular uprisings" in Najaf and Karbala.

Captain's Caption Contest #10!

Most people understand that it takes a lot of effort to run for office, but so much of it happens behind the scenes. For instance, one important component of campaign preparation is to go over talking points -- making sure the candidate knows a few core themes to sound out in every appearance. These talking points should represent the basic policy positions of the candidate so that the public understands why they should vote for him or her.

In a Campaign 2004 exclusive, Captain's Quarters has discovered confidential images of Senator John Kerry reviewing his policy stances:

Yes, it's Friday, and that means it's time for another Captain's Caption Contest! We want you to serve up your best caption for this picture -- I know with this audience (with all the aces we have!), we can smash a few winners. Just lob them up into the comments section -- no e-mail please, it's out of bounds -- and we'll keep those comments open until Tuesday, May 18, at 6 PM CT. Our guest judges this week will be Dr. Kate and Farmer Joe from The Urban Farmhouse, a fun an intelligent new blog that I know you will enjoy.

Remember to keep your eye on the ball, and above all, be flexible! Very, very flexible ....

BUMP 5/15: Keep 'em coming! ...

BUMP 5/18: Just a few hours left until the judges take over -- get your entries in while you can ...

COMMENTS CLOSED: We're asking the judges to rule on the winners -- thanks for your submissions!

Homeland Security Operations Center Makes A Difference

According to the Washington Post, the new Homeland Security Operations Center has made a big difference in the war on terror, providing a focus point for intelligence and investigators working the domestic beat:

The center is critical to the government's efforts to address an issue raised by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: the failure of agencies to share information with one another. That problem has come under intense scrutiny since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

All sides have vowed to change the culture, but some skeptics doubt that intelligence agencies will share their deepest secrets with one another. The director of the CIA, for example, oversees another multiple-agency command center set up a year ago by the president -- the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. But Broderick says the two aren't in competition: His center focuses on activities in the United States, while the other has a global mission.

Tomorrow, Ridge will have to address those issues before the Sept. 11 commission. Lawmakers have slammed his department as slow-moving, disorganized and undermanned. Private citizens have derided the department's color-coded threat levels and questioned the effectiveness of airport security checks. Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, has criticized its "turtle slow" pace in hiring intelligence analysts.

But last week, asked about the operations center, Rogers had nothing but praise. The center, he said, has already brought about "unprecedented sharing."

Rogers' praise has been echoed by others as well, and after the 9/11 Commission testimony, people finally begin to understand how important information sharing will be to our security. The HSOC provides a clearinghouse of tips, alerts, and analysis for all agencies tasked with homeland security. For instance, the HSOC was behind the alerts during the Northeast blackouts last year, trying to find any evidence of terrorist involvement. (A less-than-credible site for Islamofascists tried to take responsibility, but the cause was determined to be a system failure initiated by a storm.) They provided round-the-clock support for the Code Orange alerts at Christmas, when intelligence indicated dozens of inbound international flights might be used to stage terrorist attacks in the US.

Some of the cases the HSOC and its director, retired Marine Brig. Gen. Matthew E. Broderick, handled during the day that Sari Horwitz interviewed him:

• In Miami, a man tried to board an airplane with a bizarre, handmade contraption, a vacuum cleaner hose taped to tin cans and air filters. Federal agents confiscated the hose, worried that it could be used as a lethal device. The man was stopped from boarding and was being questioned. Meanwhile, a digital photo of the device was being studied by a DHS engineer.

• Customs agents and Border Patrol officers were investigating a "tool" sold overseas -- Broderick would not be more specific -- that they feared could be used as a weapon.

• In a northeastern city that Broderick would not name, police and federal agents were working a tip that several empty suitcases had been left in bus terminals and other areas.

Read the entire article. In a relatively short time, the Department of Homeland Security has made a significant impact on preparations, investigation, and defense of terrorist attacks inside the US.

Testimony: Abu Ghraib Abuses Exceeded Orders

The New York Times reports briefly this morning that testimony in a preliminary hearing for Sgt. Javal Davis, one of the soldiers accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, demonstrates that the abuses originated with the soldiers involved and were not the results of orders from above:

Interrogators from military intelligence and other government agencies told guards at the Abu Ghraib prison to deprive detainees of sleep and food, and would strip detainees and make them sleep naked in their cells, but their orders stopped well short of the abuse at the center of the prison scandal, guards and investigators have testified at a preliminary hearing for one of the soldiers accused of abuse. ...

But the testimony offered no evidence to back up what lawyers for the accused soldiers have said: that their clients were following orders when they threw naked detainees in a pile, stomped on their hands and feet, forced them to masturbate and photographed them.

"They would tell us to take away something from an inmate, like a pillow or something, to make him uncomfortable," said Sgt. William Cathcart, a guard in the 372nd Military Police Company, the accused soldiers' unit. "I would tell them to put it in writing. If I had sensed they wanted someone `roughed up,' then I would have said something."

Sgt. Cathcart was not the only Army non-commissioned officer to testify to the ludicrous notion that initiating circle-jerks and piling naked prisoners in pyramids had their origin in the Pentagon. Some policies, they noted, were communicated verbally at first, and later put into writing, but at no time did these orders include physical assault or photography. In line with approved interrogation techniques, the MPs used sleep deprivation and food "management plans," but that anything else would have been rejected by the non-coms as illegal.

No one asked us to soften or roughen up detainees," said Sgt. Hydrue S. Joyner, a guard with the 372nd. "Maybe `give them a little more attention.' "

But Sergeant Joyner said: "No one would have to tell me not to assault any detainees. No one would have to tell me to not allow masturbation. I would wholeheartedly want it to stop. ... If M.I. told me to make detainees masturbate together," he testified, referring to military intelligence, "I would cut off his air supply until he turned blue in the face. This is not acceptable instruction to me."

Compare that to the Taguba report, which the Times notes in a separate article today, where Colonel Pappas described the orders given to MPs:

The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason." ...

The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.

In other words, Pappas ordered MPs to strip and shackle detainees prior to interrogation, but he didn't order them to turn the prisoners into sexual playthings or centerfolds. While Pappas' orders cross the line, the testimony of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib make it clear that they wouldn't have pursued that tactic any further, nor were they ordered to do so.

One other interesting note from this article: the Pentagon has refused to declare any Iraqi detainees as unlawful combatants, despite the fact that most of them were captured out of uniform. The US, probably due to international pressure resulting from the Guantanamo detention of Afghan unlawful combatants, decided to treat all Iraqi detainees as prisoners of war, complete with international access and monitoring. I believe this is a mistake. One reason for the use of the "unlawful combatant" category is to discourage the use of such tactics. This is another example of political correctness dictating war policy, a madness which will result in dead Americans.

From the testimony, though, it seems that the Pentagon didn't order naked pyramid parties or experiments in digital or video photography regardless of detainee status. As more information comes out -- like the information that all of the abuses took place during the overnight shift, where supervision would have been more lax -- the situation obviously reflects not a disciplined response to orders, but the culmination of a lack of discipline in this unit. For this, the Army bears significant responsibility, but Congress and the media have tried mightily to allow that responsibility to slip away while they pursue a partisan agenda more naked than the unfortunate prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Abu Ghraib: The Latest Judicial-Nominee Excuse

The Washington Post reports this morning that the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal has become the latest, sexiest excuse for Senate Democrats in holding up judicial nominees. The latest victim in the judicial wars is William J. Haynes, who had already passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote -- but Ted Kennedy wants him recalled to committee before the full Senate takes up the vote to answer questions about Abu Ghraib:

Key Senate Democrats are pushing -- so far without success -- to reopen hearings on a top Pentagon official whose judicial nomination has become entangled in the scandal over abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces. The nomination of Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee two months ago -- well before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke into the open [emph. mine].

Note the phrasing on that last sentence; Congress had been apprised of the abuse scandal months ago -- in fact, the Post reported on allegations of abuse in January. Haynes appeared before the Judiciary Committee last month, which means that the committee members had adequate time to question Haynes on this issue. For some reason, they chose not to do so, probably because they wanted to score pro-choice, anti-PATRIOT Act points in front of the media. However, the pictures leaked out earlier this month, and so now the scandal carries enough heft that Democrats feel they can bludgeon Haynes with it.

Kennedy and Richard Durbin have taken the unusual step of requesting that the committee re-open hearings into Haynes' nomination, co-signing a letter to chair Orrin Hatch. Hatch had no comment yesterday, but an aide told reporter Helen Dewar that their request had little chance of approval. As Dewar makes clear, Democrats' focus on Haynes' role in Abu Ghraib plays only a small part in their strategy to block his nomination:

Democrats continued negotiations with the White House in hopes of reaching an agreement on thorny, politically charged issues that have held up action on Bush nominees for weeks. Republicans are angry at Democrats for blocking some of Bush's most controversial nominees, and Democrats are angry at the White House for using its power to put two of those nominees -- Charles W. Pickering Sr. of Mississippi and William H. Pryor Jr. of Alabama -- in office during congressional recesses.

If no deal is struck by today, Republicans plan to force a vote on limiting debate on a noncontroversial district court nominee -- Marcia G. Cooke, an African American lawyer from Florida -- to put Democrats on the spot. But Democrats have fended off similar attempts to break their filibusters against other nominees and have indicated they are likely to do so again unless a compromise is reached before the vote.

Senate Democrats have played obstructionist games led by Kennedy and Tom Daschle during this entire session, and then act enraged when George Bush took the Constitutional route of recess appointments to bypass their unprecedented filibustering of appellate-court nominees. They continue to throw tantrums over losing power in both electoral branches of the government and demonstrate why they're incapable of providing measured, intelligent leadership even in peacetime. Having started the judicial-nomination wars in the mid-80s with their unconscionable and slanderous attacks on Robert Bork, they now intend on using any excuse they can, including isolated acts of shameful conduct by American servicepeople, to deny nominees an up-or-down vote in the Senate.

I can think of no better domestic issue for a reason to vote against Democrats for the Senate in 2004.

Minnesota Senate Sneaks Out After Partisan Cheap Shot

The Minnesota Senate closed its session early Sunday morning on a legally mandated schedule, but snuck in a final cheap partisan shot by firing Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke. Yecke's sin was not malfeasance nor gross incompetence, but her pledge to enact Governor Tim Pawlenty's policies for education -- the same policies that won him the election in 2002:

When the smoke cleared from the education wars at the Capitol early Sunday, Minnesota had one fewer commissioner but a brand new set of requirements for social studies and science. Cheri Pierson Yecke was fired by the Senate on a 35 to 31 vote at 3:40 a.m. that followed strict party lines, after a day virtually devoid of any education action. ...

Yecke's firing was effective immediately, without so much as a two weeks' notice. Yecke, who hosted reporters at a Sunday afternoon news conference in her Blaine home, said she was already canceling appointments or parceling them out among staff members. She began by citing her accomplishments over the 15 months she served as commissioner and said she was "shocked" at the vote totals and felt betrayed by legislators who said they would vote for her, then flipped to the other side. As for the future, Yecke said she is polishing up her job search skills.

"I asked the governor this morning, I said something I do need from you, governor, is a letter of recommendation for my next job. I have my Rolodex, I have my résumé and so I'll be shopping my résumé around starting next week."

Although both Pawlenty and Yecke had thought they'd lined up enough DFL votes to keep the Senate from removing her, several DFL Senators changed their minds in the wee hours of Sunday morning. In fact, they didn't change their vote because they felt Yecke was intolerable as a commissioner -- they voted her out because they wanted to pull off a despicable power play:

Indeed, even DFLers weren't sure they had the votes to dump Yecke until after midnight, said Sen. Steve Kelley, DFL-Hopkins. But in numerous caucuses in which the DFLers privately discussed their positions on the issues, Yecke critics hammered away at what they felt was the commissioner's bad effect on Minnesota schools and education.

Plus, DFLers were irked at what they considered to be continuing efforts to divide them over the gay-marriage issue. In the end, Kelley said, DFLers rejected Yecke not only because they thought she was bad for schools, but because they also wanted to show a united front.

Executives in Minnesota, just as at the national level, nominate people to fill Cabinet-level roles for state agencies. The state Senate has the duty to hold hearings and confirm them. Normally, this takes place expeditiously, but in Yecke's case, the nomination dragged on for almost 18 months. Only recently, when the legislature considered new educational standards, did the Senate exhibit any urgency in consideration of Yecke, and only because she supported both the No Child Left Behind Act and objective educational standards and testing -- both policies that Pawlenty included in his election platform.

Unable to completely control education policy for the first time in decades, since the Republicans control the House and the executive, the Senate essentially had a temper tantrum and torpedoed Yecke despite the absence of any malfeasance or evidence of incompetence. They used her as a straw-man for Pawlenty's policies, a corruption of the advise-and-consent role envisaged for the Senate. Whether you like Yecke or Pawlenty has become a secondary consideration now. The Senate has established a precedent for usurpation of the executive's privilege of nominating people that intend on implementing his policies, a precedent that they will live to rue, I'm sure, as soon as the situation is reversed.

Besides, what happens now is that Pawlenty will nominate a new Education Commissioner, but still one who will implement Pawlenty's policies. The Senate's action is, in the final analysis, an empty and bitter gesture. If the Senate doesn't care for the administration's policies, then let the DFL win the gubernatorial election and quit playing childish partisan games that only introduces delay and extra cost into an educational system that can afford neither.

Sarin Artillery Shell Discovered In Iraq

It looks like the death of the WMD justification has been somewhat exaggerated:

A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported. "The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.

Jon at QandO (one of my favorite blogs) points out that only one shell has been found, and it's likely of older manufacture -- so, he argues, it's insufficient to re-energize the WMD argument all by itself. Fair enough, and after numerous false alarms, rhetorical caution should be the order of the day anyway. However, as the AP report notes, Saddam Hussein's regime was supposed to have accounted for all of its WMD of prior manufacture after the first Gulf War, and his failure to comply with repeated UN resolutions demanding that also was one of the justifications for military action. This find certainly demonstrates that rather than the "phantom WMD" argument made earlier -- where Saddam's scientists just lied to him about having them -- is almost certainly false.

Interestingly, John Kerry attacked the Bush argument just three weeks ago on Hardball by arguing contradictorily that WMD had not been found, but even if it is found, it wouldn't be in artillery shells:

It appears, as they peel away the weapons of mass destruction issue, and --we may yet find them, Chris. Look, I want to make it clear: Who knows if a month from now, two months from now, you find some weapons. You may. But you certainly didn't find them where they said they were, and you certainly didn't find them in the quantities that they said they were. And they weren't found, and I have talked to some soldiers who have come back who trained against the potential of artillery delivery, because artillery was the way they had previously delivered and it was the only way they knew they could deliver. Now we found nothing that is evidence of that kind of delivery, so the fact is that as you peel it away I think it comes down to this larger ideological and neocon concept of fundamental change in the region and who knows whether there are other motives with respect to Saddam Hussein, but they did it because they thought they could, and because they misjudged exactly what the reaction would be and what they could get away with.

It appears that Kerry has some backpedaling to do -- as well as other leading opponents of the war.

While I agree with Jon that one shell does not represent a massive weapons program, one shell is enough to know that Iraq had produced WMD as stated before, since no one manufactures a single, unique shell for one use, especially one as complex as a binary-mixture shell. Since we never received any data on their destruction, we are back again to the reasonable conclusion that none of them were destroyed -- which definitely supports the military action we took to depose Saddam.

I'm curious to see how the media treat this revelation. Anyone believe that CBS will use it as its lead story tonight?

UPDATE: The BBC also carries the story, and notes:

Gen Kimmitt said the dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as the homemade bomb was "limited".

"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," he said.

However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity. He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

If ignorance was at play here, then it means that the shell was plundered from a weapons cache somewhere, probably local to that area. CNN says that this is not the first chemical-weapon shell discovered, either:

The general said the Iraqi Survey Group, headed by Charles Duelfer, would determine if the shell's discovery indicated Saddam possessed chemical weapons before the U.S. invasion last year. Officials in Washington said another shell -- this one containing mustard gas -- was found 10 days ago in Iraq.

It appears that the WMD question is still very much on the table. As our inspections (and the insurgents) deplete the standing weapons stocks in Iraq, likely we will find much more. Even if the material turns out to be old, it still demonstrates that the UN inspection process was about as reliable as their administration of the Oil-For-Food Program.

UPDATE II: From Fox News:

"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said 'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.

"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've known ... that he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mad destruction that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the state of California." ...

Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News that he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.

George said the finding likely will just be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons. ...

Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin. "I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did ... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing blister" agents with other gases and substances," George said.

The shell was built for a 155-mm howitzer, the biggest artillery piece in Iraq's arsenal. A 155 can toss shells as far as fourteen miles, and the shell itself can contain as much as five litres of sarin -- enough to kill thousands of people.

Early Iraqi Elections -- Kaus v. Zakaria

Mickey Kaus and Fareed Zakaria debate the wisdom of early Iraqi elections -- or any elections at all -- due to the current security environment in occupied Iraq. Zakaria argues that the current lack of a reasonably secure and stable environment means that any elections will make the results meaningless, and possibly self-destructive:

Some in America are now urging elections even sooner than January 2005. This is not a democratization strategy. It is an exit strategy. But it will not work. Elections held in an uncertain security environment with militias running around the country will produce contested results and a renewed power struggle—in other words, a road neither to peace nor to pluralism. ...

In the Kurdish regions, the United States has allowed the two parties and their peshmerga military force free reign, which has included some ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Kirkuk. In Fallujah, the Army has agreed that an ex-Baathist group will run the city. In Najaf, the Coalition has been willing (finally) to confront Moqtada al-Sadr. But it can only do so because it has the tacit support of other, more important Najaf clerics. (Even so, al-Sadr has been able to rally backing for his cause. A poll shows him with 45 percent support in Baghdad and a staggering 67 percent in Basra—the latter figure is even more striking when you consider that Basra is not al-Sadr's geographic base.)

Zakaria argues that the CPA presence in Iraq must be significantly strengthened and the insurgencies destroyed before meaningful election results can be derived from an Iraqi electorate. However, Kaus argues that nothing but elections will reverse the trends from which Zakaria bases his frustrations:

There are two trends Zakaria identifies in Iraq. One is that the militias which "owe their primary loyalty to religious" or ethnic groups are "on the rise" and "[w]hen elections are held they will use force and money to ensure that the results come out their way." The other trend is rising dissatisfaction with the occupation, now at such a pitch that an interim government can gain legiitimacy, Zakaria argues, "only if it shows Iraqis that it can stand up to the occupying power."

Here's the thing: Neither of these trends is getting better with time. They're both getting worse. The militias are growing stronger. The Iraqis are growing angrier (which in turn fuels the first trend). How does it help to wait, then? ... Zakaria says there can be no democracy without security, and notes that in order to provide security any Iraqi government "will need not just power but legitimacy." But he seems oblivious to the argument that legitimacy comes from democracy, not the other way around.

It seems to me that both arguments have put the cart before the horse. For one thing, you cannot have representative democracy without taking a census of the electorate, something which cannot have been completed in the current environment. And who takes such a census? The Americans? I doubt that an American census would satisfy many of the occupation's critics; we can't even do one in the US without a lot of rancid debate about undercounts and political shenanigans. In Iraq, where the CPA might have good reason to undercount in difficult areas such as the Sunni Triangle, Najaf, and Kufa (even legitimate ones, such as lack of access while bullets are flying), you can bet your last dinar that any result would have zero credibility.

The only authority that could attempt a census with any measure of credibility is a reasonably independent Iraqi government, transitional or not. With Americans and British troops providing security, such an effort will still take months, meaning any national or regional elections before then would be hopelessly flawed. I don't even know if anyone has promulgated voter qualifications, such as what constitutes an Iraqi citizen, what kinds of documentation are needed for identification, and so on. It's easy to call for elections when your whole life has been spent in a stable democracy -- most of those questions were answered before you were born.

On the other hand, I agree with Kaus about rolling elections. Let's establish control where we can, conduct censuses under the auspices of the Iraqi Governing Council, and demonstrate to those areas currently experiencing insurgencies that democracy can work in Iraq. Successful elections will put more pressure on the militias to disband as Iraqis see how normative representative government can be. Rather than dropping democracy like a philosophical bomb on the entire country at once, establish it where it's most likely to succeed and let it grow into the rest of the country.

(via Instapundit)

Brown v Board of Education: Declining Legacy?

This month marks the 50th anniversary of what some consider the most influential Supreme Court decision of the 20th century: Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled legal structures for the "separate but equal" doctrine for public schools to be unconstitutional and helped to set in motion the Civil Rights Movement. However, as CNN notes, city public schools such as the celebrated Central High School in Little Rock have seen a progressive trend towards resegregation as white students move to the suburbs or into private schools:

But while Central High students sound upbeat about harmony in the hallways, legal and social activists warn that a problem from the past may return to the classrooms in Little Rock and the rest of the nation.

The percentage of white children enrolled in America's public schools -- 60 percent in 2001-2002 -- is 7 percentage points less than a decade before, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. ...

Educators, federal monitors and civil rights activists are warning that an unequal educational system -- one based on wealth and cutting along racial lines -- is returning to classrooms in Little Rock and the rest of the country, creating a skills gap between white and minority students.

"It's an elephant under the rug: It's an obvious problem we're ignoring," says Gary Orfield of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project. "We've abandoned the tools we had."

CNN goes on to discuss the differences between now and 20 years ago, when the US had achieved its best mixture in public-school enrollment and point to a 1991 SCOTUS decision that allowed the return of "neighborhood schools" and ended busing. But CNN misses the main point, which is that the issue no longer is government-mandated apartheid but rather government insistence on blocking market-based solutions to public education through school vouchers that keeps poor children of all colors captive to inner-city schools.

It's no secret that fifty years ago, even before the Brown decision, that wealth began to flow to the suburbs. Fresh from World War II and Korea, the US economy had exploded and new families, especially including the veterans, found cheap land there. That economic dynamic continues to this day, but it obviously favors those with capital. Private schools have long been a haven for the scions of the rich, especially since an average family pays thousands of dollars each year in taxes to support their local public school, and can't afford to pay for both public and private schools. The key to both is that they are market trends, not government-imposed mandates such as the apartheid that Brown overturned.

The key to fixing the problem of Little Rock's "resegregation" problem is to offer more choice to Little Rock's residents, not taking away the choice from the families that surround it. Forced busing from suburban public schools takes away local control of education from those parents whose children are bused, it will only exacerbate the problems of community within the schools; CNN's report covers the lack of shared community already within Central High, and forcing suburban students to attend there will mean more divisions, not less. Moreover, suburban parents who have been satisfied with their local schools may at that point decide to send their children to private schools instead, where they will be outside the reach of forced busing -- leaving just the poorer students to shoulder the load of busing.

Instead, the government should look at the true problems of inner-city parents and allow them the freedom that wealthy parents already have -- the ability to opt out of the public-education monopoly. School voucher programs can be targeted for those districts where demographic representation markedly differs from the population of the area in order to place some limits on their use. Vouchers allow parents the choice of continuing in a local school within their own community or to place their children in private schools of their choice, where the parents can influence the course of their education as any other paying customer would. Allowing for this privatization will create a competitive market, forcing public-education institutions to adapt by becoming more responsive to their customers to retain funding.

The answer to further desegregation of our schools is not more government mandates, but a commitment to more choice for parents regardless of their economic status. It is ironic that in celebrating the end of government-enforced racial programs this month, some people insist on replacing them with another.

The Magical World of Michael Moore

Michael Moore, whose new film Fahrenheit 911 was rejected by Disney over a year ago for distribution, continues to claim that Disney actually refused to distribute the film due to pressure from a "top Republican" in the White House:

The White House tried to halt the making and release of Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11, the film-maker alleged in Cannes on Sunday. The director told a Cannes audience the Bush administration wanted to keep the film off screens in the run-up to November's US election. ...

He has given no evidence to substantiate his allegations, but said "someone connected to the White House" and a "top Republican" had put pressure on film companies not to release the film.

The BBC fails to note the London Independent's report from two weeks ago, Moore knowingly lied about Disney in order to promote his new film:

Less than 24 hours after accusing the Walt Disney Company of pulling the plug on his latest documentary in a blatant attempt at political censorship, the rabble-rousing film-maker Michael Moore has admitted he knew a year ago that Disney had no intention of distributing it.

Far from being a Conservative bastion, the Independent aims at exactly the same audience as Moore. According to Moore, however, his movies have the power to magically tranform otherwise unsuspecting individuals to Democrats, which led to the White House panicking and convincing Disney to bury the film and put a horse's head in Moore's bed:

The director has already shown the film at test screenings in the Midwest of the US. "The reaction was overwhelming," he said. "People who were on the fence - undecided voters - suddenly weren't on the fence."

Moore launched his film at the Cannes festival, where I suspect he considers many of the attendees to be sitting on the fence, so that when they see his latest documentary and decry the Bush administration he can claim that he's made new converts. It's all part of the magic of Michael Moore, which is nothing more than some misdirection and hot air.

Posted by Ed Morrissey at 9:52 PM | TrackBack

Post: A Confusion of Chaos and Purpose?

The Washington Post reports today on the continuing investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, reducing the story to two somewhat contradictory themes. The first theme, and the one which grabs the headline, says that the abuses resulted from decisions made within the command structure to allow for harsh interrogation techniques and the conflating of MP and intelligence roles, something that the military normally avoids. The second theme lays the blame on a lack of discipline that extended even to casual dress within the prison facilities themselves.

On the first theme, R. Jeffrey Smith names Col. Thomas M. Pappas as the author of the first theme by his insistence that Army reservists assigned MP duty at Abu Ghraib set the table for interrogations:

But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon -- suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.

While the Army has blamed the physical abuses documented in soldiers' photographs on a handful of night-shift soldiers at Abu Ghraib who ignored rules on humane treatment, government officials and humanitarian experts say the order indicates the abuses could instead have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment that had been approved.

They suggest in particular that military intelligence officials may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them. According to a hypothesis now being explored by members of Congress, this stage was set through a directed collaboration between two units of military police and intelligence officers, virtually unprecedented in recent Army practice.

I'm not sure how "unprecedented" this truly is. "Recent Army practice" is a dangerous qualifier to use for a military force which hasn't had this kind of mission for over thirty years, at least. At any rate, while I don't have experience in military service and don't have a good handle on detention practices either, I can see where merging the two functions could cause some concern, especially if the MP brigade has no solid training in intelligence work and its limitations. On the other hand, I can also recognize that having the two units working at cross purposes could keep valuable intelligence from flowing to the trained interrogators.

Reviewing the Post's litany of orders and directives, I am struck by the caution taken in them to ensure that physical injury to detainees be avoided. For instance, two of the memos explicitly state that detainees must be treated humanely. The one which Smith reports contains an OK for dogs to be present also says they must be muzzled at all times, rendering them only psychologically threatening. It appears that throughout the chain, intelligence and other officers tried to lay out boundaries for gathering critical information without crossing over the line into torture or abuse.

More compelling is Smith's reporting on the breakdown of discipline, which current and former members of the services have told me is the much more likely cause of the abuses than conflation of mission:

All of the Iraqi prisons were understaffed because promised civilian contractors never appeared, Karpinski said. Unlike the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which has 800 police guarding 640 detainees, Karpinski had one soldier available to guard every 10 detainees in a prison population that included men and women of varying ages, criminals, terrorists and mentally ill persons.

"It's like being in Dodge City in the 1870's without speaking the same language," said a newsletter home last summer from the 372nd Military Police Company, the Cresaptown, Md., unit assigned in October to guard Abu Ghraib. "The prison 'detainee' climate is becoming more strained as the months drag on," the December newsletter said. "We take each day as it comes, do our jobs, and wait for the day when we all get to go home."

Discipline among the soldiers slumped over time, according to internal Army reports. Military police were permitted to wear civilian clothes to boost morale, but it contributed to sloppiness about other rules, investigators concluded; platoon leaders encouraged some of their soldiers to carry concealed weapons while walking among the detainees, a violation of regulations. Punishments for minor offenses were rare; a climate of leniency developed.

Discipline is essential to maintain mission, and that's true outside of the military as well as within it. Discipline has to be the first task of command. If true, this indicates laziness in the immediate command structure in this unit, and all other problems flow outward from there. If you put a brigade of reservists, who (as a milblogger told me yesterday) are primarily involved in the military one weekend a month just to get some money for college, in charge of prisoners for months on end and fail to maintain discipline, you will wind up with the types of abuses we've seen and heard described by members of Congress. A well-disciplined unit does not have its members conducting sexual relations in the hallways of Iraqi prisons and cheerfully photographing it for posterity.

Instead of focusing on who wrote to whom regarding interrogation techniques that obviously attempted to work within a legal framework, we should be focusing on the lack of discipline in a few reserve units in the theater of war and determine how that can be expeditiously reversed.

Stop the rush to justice

I've warned several times on this blog that rushing the prosecution of the Abu Ghraib offenses would cause more harm than good. It will cause hard working JAGs to lose these cases. The military justice system works, but like the federal court system, litigation takes time. The stakes are high. If the military does a sloppy job on these cases and loses, hysteria will rule the day and Congress could take away the armed forces' ability to try their own.

Barry D. Halpern, a former JAG, makes this exact point (albeit more eloquently) in the new issue of the Weekly Standard. Subscription is required to read the entire thing, but here are some highlights:

"The upcoming court martial trials in the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse cases may have consequences neither intended nor anticipated by the military and civilian authorities who are pushing for a quick and decisive resolution of the affair. These trials--the first is scheduled to begin May 19 in Baghdad--will not be drumhead proceedings with preordained guilty verdicts. Unless the investigations that preceded the public disclosures of abuses result in early plea agreements, the cases may get ugly, complicated, and tedious."

"Military defendants enjoy essentially the same rights as civilian defendants. The Uniform Code of Military Justice provides defendants with military counsel (often selected by the defendant), access to civilian defense counsel, broad discovery rights assuring access to the prosecution's exculpatory information, and multiple levels of judicial and administrative appeal. Military juries, composed of service members, bring to the courtroom stronger educational backgrounds than a typical civilian jury and, in most instances, a professional ethic that assures adherence to the law regardless of the presumed expectations of the commander who convened the court martial."

"A race to the courtroom to showcase the "swift justice" promised by the president could have unpredictable and potentially damaging consequences. Unless the military prosecutors have ironclad cases or have secured plea deals, the Abu Ghraib courtrooms could become yet another vexing campaign in an already tough war. Dismissals or acquittals resulting from procedural errors would hardly enhance the world's impression of the American system of justice."

Mr. Halpern concludes, like I do, that those hoping to see a quick and decisive end to the prison abuse hysteria via the court-martials will be dissapointed. However, it is far better to let the system run its course. We hope the Abu Ghraib scandal will go away. But we will need our military justice system if we are serious about pursuing the War on Terror.