Final Mason-Dixon Battleground Polls Hint At Bush Win

In what should be the final iteration of the Mason-Dixon polls that have been remarkably stable over the course of this election cycle, George Bush has a significant edge over John Kerry and appears headed to a victory on Tuesday. With a margin of error at 4%, the battleground states stack up like this:

Florida - Bush, 49-45 (27 EV)
Arkansas - Bush, 51-43 (6 EV)
Colorado - Bush, 50-43 (9 EV)
Ohio - Bush, 48-46 (20 EV)
Iowa - Bush, 49-44 (7 EV)
Michigan - Kerry, 47-45 (17 EV)
Missouri - Bush, 49-44 (11 EV)
New Hampshire - Kerry, 47-46 (4 EV)
Nevada - Bush, 50-44 (5 EV)
West Virginia - Bush, 51-43 (5 EV)
Oregon - Kerry, 50-44 (7 EV)
Pennsylvania - Kerry, 48-46 (21 EV)
Wisconsin - Kerry, 48-46 (10 EV)
Minnesota - Bush, 48-47 (10 EV)
New Mexico - Bush, 49-45 (5 EV)

What does this portend for Tuesday? Of the states outside the margin of error, Bush carries 43 electoral votes, while Kerry takes only 7. Add in those at the margin of error, and Bush picks up an additional 32, for a total of seventy-five battleground electoral votes that appear pretty firm. For states too close to call, Bush leaners hold 30 electoral votes as opposed to 52 for Kerry -- meaning that Bush right now is poised to pick up 105 battleground electoral votes while Kerry can only claim 59. Even if the leaners all break to Kerry, Bush has enough of a lead among the solid states that the 75 electoral votes in his pocket will take him to victory -- and these polls don't even include Hawaii and New Jersey, both of which have suddenly become toss-ups.

The GOP has to be happy with these results, but it still will take all of their effort in the remaining 70 hours or so to make sure they get voters out to the polls.

(Mason-Dixon polled 625 likely voters in each state, with the exception of Minnesota, where they polled registered voters instead -- which tends to favor the Democrat, especially here. The polling took place between 10/27 and 10/29, so it represents the freshest look so far in each of these states. No other demographic data was immediately available.)

UPDATE: I didn't link to this earlier, but the Newsweek results seem to dovetail with the Mason-Dixon polls:

After months of the tightest presidential election contest in recent memory, a new NEWSWEEK poll suggests momentum may be moving toward President George W. Bush. As the bitter campaign enters its final days, against the eerie backdrop of a surprise appearance by Osama Bin Laden, Bush’s lead is still within the poll’s margin of error, but larger than last week. If the election were held today, 50 percent of likely voters would cast ballots for Bush and 44 percent for the Democrat, Sen. John Kerry. (Ralph Nader would receive 1 percent.) That compares to a Bush lead last week among likely voters of 48 percent to Kerry's 46 percent.

Newsweek also reports increased support for Bush among independents, the amount of which makes Power Line's Rocket Man skeptical of the overall poll result. I think what happened here is that as the pool of undecideds has gotten smaller, the remainder has grown more volatile.

Jihad And Fashion Were Always Her Passion

With Yasser Arafat in Paris being examined by a team of doctors looking to identify his mystery illness, the London Telegraph focuses on his younger wife and her sacrifices for the Palestinian cause. It turns out that Suha Arafat has done her part for the intifada at fashion-show runways and expensive shops:

If anything was guaranteed to annoy the Palestinians, it was a comment made by Yasser Arafat's wife after the birth of their daughter, Zahwa. As Suha Arafat proudly showed off the Palestinian leader's only child at the £1,100-a-night hospital in Paris in July 1995, she declared: "Our child was conceived in Gaza, but sanitary conditions there are terrible. I don't want to be a hero and risk my baby." ...

The spendthrift image of Mrs Arafat was further enhanced when French authorities launched an investigation into claims that $11.4 million (£6.22 million) had been transferred from Switzerland to two of her French bank accounts between July 2002 and 2003.

The sums were on top of an allowance of $100,000 (£54,500) which Mr Arafat, 75, sent his 40-year-old wife each month. Mrs Arafat and Palestinian representatives in Paris described the claims as Israeli propaganda.

Mrs Arafat, however, failed to deny the transactions outright in an interview with the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Hayat. "Prime minister Ariel Sharon is responsible for this vicious leak," she said. "What's strange about the rais [president] sending money to his wife overseas, especially when I handle Palestinian matters and interests?"

Nothing strange at all, I suppose -- after all, why should the Arafats live like paupers while they drive their people deeper into poverty and misery? While the Palestinians live in shacks and worse in Gaza and the West Bank, Mrs. Arafat spends their money on multimillion-dollar condos overlooking the Champs-Elysee and a fancy house in the suburbs.

Suha insists that she's doing work on behalf of her husband's country, and indeed her schedule looks exhausting:

She is often seen in the front rows of Paris fashion shows, or shopping with the wife of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the sister of the King of Morocco. She favours the haute couture designer Louis Feraud and the upmarket shoe-maker Christian Louboutin. Her hair is expensively highlighted.

"She travels first or business class and is renowned for her business acumen," said a friend in Paris. "She is obsessed by image. Everything about her screams money. She is immaculate, from her Chanel eyeshadow to her manicured fingernails."

Hopefully her husband's recent illness won't impact all her selfless efforts on behalf of the Palestinian people. We'd hate to see her fingernails miss a manicure; after all, getting all the blood out from under her fingernails from grabbing as much of the Palestinian's money as she can is important if she's concerned about looking immaculate.

Minnesota Democrats Get Desperate -- And Disgusting

A group of Democrats in Minnesota have launched a new television ad now showing on our local ABC affiliate that uses an old Osama bin Laden tape to attack George Bush. The group, Georgethemenace.org, explains itself thusly:

A few weeks ago, with the Swift Boat nonsense all over the news (and that which pretends to be news), several South Minneapolis neighbors got together and said, "Hey, why can't we do that?"—except on the other side.

So, gathered around a patio table with coffee and muffins, we formed a 527 group called georgethemenace.org, then produced a 30-second spot, which we hope to start airing soon. We've already had coverage in the local and national press.

Our intent is to scrounge enough money to actually get the thing on TV a few times and make enough noise to—perhaps—help tip the election in our favor.

Okay -- so putting words in Osama's mouth praising George Bush and doctoring the video so that one of the terrorists holds a Bush-Cheney campaign sign somehow equates to 250 of our veterans speaking out against John Kerry? These people forgot that Bush is their opponent, while the people in the video are our enemy. They're certainly free to use bin Laden as their spokesman to attempt to discredit George Bush in the most disgustingly cynical and juvenile manner I've yet seen in this campaign -- but it practically screams out the desperation the Minnesota Left increasingly experiences as they see the North Star state slipping away from their grasp.

Who are the malevolent midschoolers behind Georgethemenace.org? They lacked the courage to identify themselves at their website, but they have some major money behind them if they're purchasing ad time on KSTP. Minnesotans should ask themselves where the funding originated and who in our state would be immature enough to stick a Bush/Cheney sign in an al-Qaeda promotional tape. It's yet another reason to make sure that the Democrats are kept from leadership positions in Minnesota and nationwide.

You can view their TV ad at their website. You decide whether you want people like these in charge.

Time out!

The Belmont Club characterizes the latest from OBL as a peace offering to the American electorate:

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

OBL’s appearance in the video provides some corroboration for Wretchard’s analysis. He’s no longer sporting the camouflage look and has put away the AK-47 assault rifle.

According to the Belmont Club, the American people get to decide whether to take or leave OBL’s truce:

The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word. The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.

Osama has stated his terms. He awaits America's answer.

Some Americans will happily cast the surrender vote, but they should remember Spain and how AQ accepted its capitulation by planning additional attacks. OBL may appear to wave the white flag, but the majority of Americans will know better than to fall for it.

UPDATE: The Captain and I posted on this at the same time, and you can read his take below.

Don't Be Fooled By His Measured Tone

Wretchard at the Belmont Club posted a provocative analysis of the Osama bin Laden tape yesterday, linked today at Power Line, which considers the measured tone and reasonableness of OBL a signal to the US of surrender:

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

That's an attractive analysis, as is Wretchard's response, in which he adheres to the Unconditional Surrender camp. However, I don't buy that Osama wants to send an "I'm OK, You're OK" offer to the Americans. Wretchard makes a great point in that the portion of the tape played by Al-Jazeera; OBL passed on the fiery rhetoric and the usual insults to take a more moderate tone. Where Wretchard and I disagree is OBL's motivation for doing so.

Far from signaling a surrender, I believe that OBL wants to influence the American elections as another demonstration of his power. He wants to depose George Bush, but he's smart enough to understand that a fire-breathing performance only helps Bush by scaring/insulting the voters. His moderate performance was designed to appeal to the reasonable leftists and centrists who tend to believe that America brought Islamist terror onto itself. His "offer" amounts to a lever with which to promote anti-Israel sentiment to undercut support for Bush, as well as give people the impression that the war is Bush's fault, despite the years of Al Qaeda attacks on American assets.

Don't allow yourselves to be fooled into thinking that Osama has retreated in his desire to reconquer Andalusia and spread the ummah across the globe, reducing the infidels to dhimmitude. He just knows when to temper his rhetoric for the best possible political result.

Brooks: Kerry Continues His Tone-Deafness On OBL

Betsy's Page directs readers to the latest David Brooks column in today's New York Times, where Brooks takes John Kerry to task for playing politics with the new Osama bin Laden videotaped message. Brooks reaches the same conclusion that I did last night after reading Kerry's response during a radio interview a few hours after the OBL tape aired on Al-Jazeera and American news outlets:

Kerry did say that we are all united in the fight against bin Laden, but he just couldn't help himself. His first instinct was to get political.

On Milwaukee television, he used the video as an occasion to attack the president: "He didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He outsourced the job." Kerry continued with a little riff from his stump speech, "I am absolutely confident I have the ability to make America safer."

Even in this shocking moment, this echo of Sept. 11, Kerry saw his political opportunities and he took 'em. There's such a thing as being so nakedly ambitious that you offend the people you hope to impress.

What has emerged about Kerry during this campaign cycle is that he is extraordinarily incautious about what he says. People used to critique Ronald Reagan for requiring round-the-clock "handling", but Reagan in fact was an accomplished extemporaneous speaker who rarely needed corralling to keep him on message. Kerry not only needs handlers, but the ones he currently employs appear to be less than competent at their job. His frequent rhetorical stumbles on the stump have handed Republicans a treasure trove of campaign material this election cycle, and his statement last night should keep his campaign somewhat on the defensive in the final 96 hours.

Brooks notes, and I agree, that these stumbles are not the harmless spoonerisms that simply cause a chuckle. They reveal the real John Kerry, the man behind the antiwar war hero facade that Kerry carefully built for this campaign. They reveal Kerry to be a man who blames others for his mistakes (remember the Secret Service "son of a bitch" who tripped him on the ski slopes?), a narcissist who cannot resist exaggerating his exploits to impress others (meeting with the "entire UN Security Council for hours") and to score political points (Christmas in Cambodia being "seared -- seared" into his memory to argue for abandoning the Nicaraguan contras), and a conspiracy theorist bordering on the paranoid ("most lying, corrupt group of people").

Given this, it's no wonder that Kerry the political opportunist weighed in last night to push his wild notions that the military allowed OBL to escape Tora Bora in some sort of Islamist version of Dunkirk. It's especially egregious since, as Brooks points out, Kerry publicly supported the use of Afghanis at Tora Bora as the effective way to handle the conflict there and encouraged the admnistration to continue that strategy at the time of the operation.

Kerry has been one of the most incompetent major-party candidates in decades, perhaps ever. People point to George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Kerry's former boss Michael Dukakis as similar or potentially worse candidates, but all three of those men stood for their beliefs and values. Kerry stands for himself and nothing else. The only thing keeping Kerry afloat is the high tide of Bush hatred among the Left and an increasingly desperate mainstream media that will do almost anything, including sacrificing their credibility, to keep Bush from being re-elected. Hopefully, that will not be enough.

Kaplan Becomes What He Debunks

Fred Kaplan at Slate is always an interesting read, a partisan who still is interested in the truth. Both sides of Kaplan are displayed in his latest article, a devastating critique of the Johns Hopkins study published by the New York Times that asserted that the American invasion of Iraq caused 100,000 "extra" deaths.

The Hopkins study sampled 33 neighborhoods in Iraq and interviews around a thousand families to determine how many Iraqis died in the fourteen months leading up to the war, and how many died after the invasion, and from what causes. The difference between the two sets of deaths (pre- and post-invasion), extrapolated for the entire country, was given as the extra deaths caused by the US invasion. This has heavy political implications, as part of the American rationale relied on estimates by te UN and human-rights organizations that the Saddam regime killed thousands of Iraqis every month, either through torture, mutilation, or deliberate starvation.

Hopkins published its study with their conclusion that 98,000 extra deaths had occurred in Iraq since the invasion. The Times, of course, published this study prominently in the week before the election, causing a wave of revulsion and anger among the reader of the Times. However, Fred Kaplan noticed a strange proviso in the study and in his article does an excellent job of explaining why not only the study's results are flawed, but the methodology is also suspect:

The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

It means that the study has no specific way to measure an accurate count of so-called extra deaths; with a margin of error that approaches 100% (1-(8K/98K)=91.8%), it's an implicit acknowledgement that the study model failed. Kaplan goes on at length about why the methodology was so poor, a detailed and impressive analysis that defies excerption. He notes that the pre-war and post-war mortality rates that Hopkins uses are probably wrong, with the pre-war rate given in the study ridiculously low, by as much as 60%.

But then Kaplan does a strange thing near the end of the article; he subtly changes the parameters of the argument. Instead of talking about extra deaths among the civilian population, he morphs into a discussion of all deaths, failing to take into account those who died at Saddam's hands before his fall:

There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very useful—a team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. Their count is triple fact-checked; their database is itemized and fastidiously sourced; and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children).

The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war—about half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May.

That would put the war-related civilian deaths at less than 1,000 per month, which falls far short of pre-war estimates of 5,000 Iraqi deaths each month from starvation from Saddam's perversion of the oil-for-food program and his regime's barbarism in general. Iraqis are still discovering mass graves of coldly executed people, thousands at a time, comprising men, women, children -- even infants still clutching their toys. In fact, if you look at the deaths since major combat operations ceased in May 2003, that figure drops to less than 500 deaths per month.

Kaplan fails to recognize that the "extra" deaths have disappeared in his argument, either by accident or design. Worse, his conclusion does exactly what he scolds John Hopkins for doing -- pulling numbers out of thin air for his own strawman purposes:

The group also notes that these figures are probably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview.

So, let's call it 15,000 or—allowing for deaths that the press didn't report—20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure—and, given that fact, no less shocking.

It's an unfortunate denoument to an otherwise sterling critique of how poor methodology leads to bad analysis and false results, and how that can be twisted for political purposes. Kaplan's ethereal calculation still would represent the death toll for six months under the Saddam regime, which I would offer as more shocking than the notion that an invasive war followed by a terrorist campaign to undermine the occupying force would cost a great deal in civilian lives. In fact, given the scope of the invasion and the predilection of the Saddam regime for staging military assets in residential areas, it's a wonder the totals were so low. They certainly are dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -- National Geographic earlier estimated several millions of Shi'a alone -- that Saddam murdered during the past 15 years.

Kerry Flip-Flops Within The Same Speech On OBL

CNN reports that John Kerry waited all of about 15 nanoseconds to use the new Osama bin Laden videotape to boost his political fortunes, even after he claimed that all Americans were united in their determination to defeat terrorism:

Reacting to a new videotape of Osama bin Laden tossed into the closing days of a hard-fought presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry renewed his claim that President Bush allowed the terrorist mastermind to escape in fall 2001.

In a satellite interview with Milwaukee TV station WISN, Kerry said, "I regret that when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan at Tora Bora, he didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden."

"He outsourced the job to Afghan warlords. I would never have done that. I think it was an enormous mistake, and we're paying the price for that today," he said.

This came after he tried to strike the right note in the same interview, a tone of national unity in the face of a fresh threat from a foreign power:

Kerry also gave a message of national unity during his interview with WISN.

"All of us in the country are completely united -- Democrat, Republican, there's no such thing. There's just Americans," he said.

I'm not suggesting that John Kerry shelve his campaign in the face of the OBL videotape. Doing so only gives the Islamofascist mass murderer a political victory. However, Kerry should have stuck to the facts instead of promoting what is, at best, mere speculation about bin Laden's whereabouts in December 2001. He also should quit promoting that intellectually lazy "outsourcing" line that has been proven false and misleading. The statement is also wildly hypocritical considering that his major policy stance in Iraq is to attempt to "outsource" the democratization of the newly liberated Iraqis to the UN, guided by the famous democracies of Syria and China, and the paragons of virtue that are France and Russia.

In engaging in rank demagoguery and using OBL's threats as an explicit inspiration, he makes bin Laden a legitimate voice in the election -- exactly what OBL intended. His empty assertions that he would have poured men and materials into Tora Bora based on hazy intelligence on one man's whereabouts, and into an area in which the US military had lukewarm expertise, instead of our partners whose intimate knowledge of the terrain and quite frankly were expendable while we kept our options open, shows the shallowness of his understanding of military strategy -- as well as the falsity of his oft-stated emphasis on building alliances.

Georbe Bush called him to task for his outburst tonight:

Speaking at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, hours later, Bush blasted Kerry's comments.

"Unfortunately, my opponent tonight continued to say things he knows are not true, accusing our military of passing up a chance to get Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora," Bush said. "It is the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy."

Earlier this week, Bush accused Kerry of making a "wild claim" that amounted to "unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field."

Bush needs to keep up the pressure on Kerry for his reliance on the appearance of America's enemies to make his case for the presidency. We knew where Hitler was in 1944, too, and Hirohito as well. Did Wendell Wilkie hold press conferences blaming Roosevelt for their continued existence in order to convince voters of his qualifications as commander in chief? No. Wilkie had what Kerry does not -- a love of country that outstripped his personal ambitions, and the class to understand that Hitler and Hirohito were the enemy, while Roosevelt was merely Wilkie's opponent. It's a lesson that the Left in this country still hasn't learned, and hopefully American voters will teach them that lesson on Tuesday.

UPDATE: Read this post by Jeff Jarvis, a thinking liberal and a patriot even though we often disagree. He catches the Left in full meltdown:

BILL MAHER UPDATE: Maher tonight says the tape won't affect the election. "Americans know: Osama bin Laden does not pick our President. The Supreme Court does."

Maher says some of the stuff in the bin Laden tape "I swear to God could have come out of the Democratic National Committee or a Kerry speech." Maher starts to read; Gen Wes Clark interrupts -- sensibly -- and doesn't want to seem by silence to be agreeing with that. Maher reads some of bin Laden's statements and the audience -- amazingly -- applauds! Maher: "Sometimes you can agree with an evil person. I mean, Hitler was a vegetarian." What the F has become of us? A studio audience is applauding a mass murderer?

It gets worse. Gen. Wes says: "If George Bush had done his job before 9/11 we never would have had the strikes of 9/11." Man, I'm glad I never supported him. It ain't that simple, General.

Maher: "I don't know why the Republicans get a mulligan on 9/11. The Democrats wouldn't have." Oh, crap.

I stopped watching Bill Maher when he called American military pilots cowards for bombing Yugoslavia and said that the 9/11 terrorists were courageous by comparison. It's good to know that my choice is as valid now as it is then. As for General Clark, keep in mind that the mastermind of that same Yugoslavian campaign has been stumping hard for Kerry and likely would have a significant appointment in a Kerry administration. Is this the kind of man we want as a Secretary of Defense?

Scripps Howard Presents Ludicrous Analysis Of OBL Tape's Effect

Lisa Hoffman at Scripps Howard News Service attempts to write a balanced view of the effects that the new Osama bin Laden missive will have on our upcoming election. Reprinted by the Minneapolis Star Tribune for tomorrow's paper, Hoffman's analysis emphasizes that Islamic terrorists feel that George Bush has been "good for business", and winds up in left field:

In fact, critics of the war in Iraq and other U.S. foreign policies say, the Bush tenure has actually been a boon for bin Laden.

Those bent on global Islamic holy war see the U.S. president as the personification of arrogance and imperialism - a tailor-made poster boy for recruiting jihadis across the globe. Just because they vilify him doesn't mean they want him evicted from the White House.

"If you ask them if they are better off now than they were four years ago, (Islamic extremists) would say the past four years have been very good," said Joseph Cirincione, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "There isn't an Islamic fundamentalist alive who wouldn't say (Bush) has been big for business."

Trying to figure out who OBL prefers in our election is a fool's errand, and apparently Scripps Howard found a fool to write this so-called analysis as well as a few for resources. Asking the CEIP for an objective outlook would be equivalent to asking Michael Moore for an unbiased review of the campaign. Cirincione belongs to that class of idiots who think that Islamic fundamentalism began on 9/10/2001 and has been caused by George Bush.

Al Qaeda had launched several large-scale attacks on America and others during the 1990s while no one lifted a finger to stop them. They had a complex and effective financing network funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars to them. They had one nation, Afghanistan, which openly supported and sheltered them and had implemented their idea of governing on 24 million unfortunate Afghanis. They operated with impunity in scores of countries, including ours, and attacked at whim.

Three years after 9/11, we've captured or killed most of their leadership and a large number of their associates, negating Cirincione's supposed boon for recruitment. We've dismantled a large part of their financial network, cutting of a large part of their income. We removed the Taliban, liberating Afghanistan and allowing them to get rid of oppressive, radical Islamist totalitarianism in favor of a democratic government. We cut Southwest Asia in two by toppling Saddam Hussein, eliminating a transit point between Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank. We convinced Pervez Musharraf to fight the Islamists, making their former safe haven of Pakistan a dangerous place for them to live.

Is this how Bush has been big for Islamist business?

Osama doesn't care who gets elected, or if he does, it is a secondary consideration. He's more interested in intimidating Americans as a whole and leveraging our fear into a foreign-policy change that cuts off our alliance with Israel and a general withdrawal from the ummah. OBL 'prefers' Kerry only in the sense that OBL is a member of the Anyone But Bush contingent.

The new tape has positive and negative effects on both candidates, as I wrote earlie, and those probably cancel each other out. It helps Kerry in proving that OBL is still alive, and Bush because it reminds people that we are under attack and have to quit pretending that the war is over, or that it amounts to nothing more than an organized crime ring. Both sides will make of that what they will this weekend. However, to offer an analysis that pretends the last four years have been wonderful for Islamofascists stretches credibility far past the breaking point, and both Scripps Howard and the Strib should be embarassed to publish it.

Osama Weighs In

Just in time for the election's final stretch, Al Jazeera aired a new Osama bin Laden videotaped statement warning Americans that we will face more "Manhattans" unless we abandon Israel and bug out of Southwest Asia:

Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public four days ahead of presidential elections, said in a video aired Friday that the United States can avoid another Sept. 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.

Reading a statement, the al Qaeda leader refrained from threats of new attacks and instead appealed to Americans.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, referring to the president and his Democratic opponent. "Each state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security."

Admitting for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden said he did so because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States.

If nothing else, the tape demonstrates that Osama was alive at least this spring, when Kerry became the presumptive Democratic nominee. It also should put to rest all of the idiotic conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a Zionist/CIA/Freemason Reichstag fire; OBL admitted that AQ planned and carried out the attacks. Now, perhaps, Islamic nations will rethink their complicity in allowing radicalism like al-Qaeda to flourish rather than spread stupid rumors about the Jews.

Osama has been watching some American entertainment during his long hiatus from the spotlight. He did his best Michael Moore impression during his statement:

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

"It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

"It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God," he said.

I hope that Michael Moore appreciates his new fan.

This portends something unpleasant. That makes two videotaped "warnings" to the US, which may signal some action upcoming in the immediate future. Al-Jazeera only played one minute of the video statement, probably to minimize the possibility of inadvertently broadcasting any coded messages to remote cells. Since Madrid, we've expected to see some action from AQ to rattle us or affect the election, and it may be that the tapes are all they have -- but of course, we don't know that.

As for the effect the tape will have on the election, I think it will be negligible. It reminds people that OBL is still alive, which hurts Bush; on the other hand, it reminds people that we're at war and very much at risk, which hurts Kerry, who wants to minimize that focus as he trails Bush badly on the issue of terrorism. Partisans will play it both ways, while undecideds probably will resist allowing OBL to exercise influence on their vote.

For my part, I think we need to fight those who would use violence to intimidate us and dictate our foreign policy. That means we need to continue our forward strategy of engaging terrorists where they operate rather than wait for them to come here. OBL advertisements for Michael Moore movies won't change my mind or shake my resolve.

Harkin Embarasses Iowa

Senator Tom Harkin took on an additional role this afternoon when he appeared on behalf of John Kerry in Vinton, IA. According to the Cedar Valley Times, Harkin imparted a message from A Higher Authority when he spoke to a huge crowd of Iowa Democrats (via Drudge):

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin says John Kerry has been gaining in the polls every day since Oct. 21, and George Bush has been going down every day.

"That's how God wants it to be," Harkin told a group of about 25 people at the Benton County Headquarters in Vinton on Thursday afternoon.

Harkin was touring the state to stump for Kerry and Democratic legislative candidates. He appeared in Benton County on behalf of Mt. Auburn Mayor Dawn Pettengill, who is running against incumbent Republican Dell Hanson for the Iowa House District 39 seat.

God's newest employee either needs a bit more training, or The Lord God Of Hosts needs to have a chat with his HR department, as Harkin issued this ringing endorsement of Pettengill:

After encouraging the party faithful to get out the vote for Kerry, Harkin turned his attention to the Iowa Legislature, which he called an "albatross around the neck" of Gov. Tom Vilsack, whom he referred to as the "best governor in the United States."

"This is the worst legislature I've seen since the 1950s," Harkin said.

Harkin didn't remember the name of Pettengill's opponent, but told the group, "he has to go."

Oh, come on! Harkin can't remember the name of the opponent of the candidate he's endorsing? Maybe all those close, personal chats with God just overwhelmed his memory. Maybe Harkin can check and see if the Vikings will make the spread on Sunday, too.

John Kerry Gets Desperate

I can't find any other explanation for John Kerry's primal-scream campaigning in Orlando this afternoon except for desperation as the election blessedly winds down to its final hours. Reuters reports that Kerry went "off script" and told America that anyone not voting for him must be unconscious:

Kerry also blasted Bush on the economy, taxes, jobs and health care, saying the Republican incumbent had "walked away from the basic bargain" that Americans who worked hard should have the chance to get ahead and chosen his powerful friends over the middle class.

"Wake up America, wake up. ... You have a choice," he said. "This election is a choice between four more years of tax giveaways for millionaires along with a higher tax burden on the middle class."

Somehow I think that telling people they're asleep is not the best way to make them like you.

Blog Notes, E-Day Minus 4

I'll be hospiblogging again today as the First Mate has to undergo a minor surgical procedure. I've finally managed to get my first cup of coffee down, a Starbucks blend of Mexican Whoopee or some such. (Since when did coffee come with such pedigrees?) I'll be hijacking wireless connections during the morning as I can.

With four days left to the election, I wanted to let everyone know what plans I have for Election Day. I will be at work on the day job, but afterwards I will join the Northern Alliance to provide live updates on AM 1280 The Patriot in the Twin Cities, starting at 8 pm CT. We'll be cutting in on Hugh Hewitt's live, marathon Election Night broadcast at the commercial breaks, updating our listeners on election news in the Upper Midwest. We'll stay live until the presidential race has been determined or 3 am, one or the other. Of course, I will be live-blogging the election all night long, so if you stay up, make sure you keep checking back.

If you've been following the Al Qaqaa story, make sure you keep up with both Kerry Spot and the Truth Laid Bear. They're both doing yeoman work on this story, such as it is.

Speaking of yeoman work, how about the fill-in crew over at Instapundit? It's no surprise that it takes three people to replace Glenn Reynolds, but the three that have -- Michael Totten, Ann Althouse, and Megan McArdle -- have done a great job in filling the Professor's shoes. Glenn can relax when he's on vacation.

More later ...

Addendum: Okay, the FM just went into the procedure room, and I'm sitting in the waiting room next to a giant Charlie Brown statue.

One more note -- I will be posting the Caption Contest a little later on today, and we will close it out when the polls close on Tuesday night. If anyone wants to guest judge while we're live blogging the election results, drop me an e-mail and let me know.

UPDATE: The First Mate is home from the hospital, and everything went very well indeed. I think we're done with the "procedures" for a few months, anyway.

I will be appearing on Kevin McCullough's show in a few minutes, so if you're in the tri-state area, tune in!

Pentagon Destroyed Ammunition And Kerry's Credibility

CNN is showing a Pentagon briefing with an Army officer who is describing how the explosives at Al Qaqaa were destroyed in June 2003 after having captured it in April 2003. I'll have more as the story breaks.

UPDATE: Does the Pentagon's press conference answer the questions? Some of them, I think. First, Kerry was all wrong when he said that the Al Qaqaa site and its weapons were abandoned by the Army. By 13 April, the Army had loaded up 250 tons of explosive ordinance, including plastic explosive which could have been the RDX. The major said that the materials hauled off included crates and barrels such as those shown in the ABC video. However, ABC reported that the video was shot on 18 April, meaning that the weapons it showed were left behind, if the dates are correct.

At any rate, no one ignored warnings about Al Qaqaa, and the Army was well aware of the importance of the site. The area had been secured by the 3ID and 101st Airborne and remained pacified, making the notion that looters carted off many tons of materials extremely suspect.

IAEA Seals In ABC Report Don't Match Missing Explosives

Alert CQ reader Boaz B. noticed a detail in the ABC video that apparently has escaped the notice of their reporters and editors. According to the shot shown here, the IAEA seal on the cache found by the soldiers and filmed by the embedded crew did not match the inventory for HMX and RDX stored at Al Qaqaa:

If you review the pictures on the KSTP web site that has the ABC video everyone is using you can see a very clear picture of a seal with its number (#144322). The PDF document of the UN inspections available show the numbers of the seals and none of them have that number. Therefore, it is clear that the bunkers that ABC videoed were not the ones that held the HMX the UN inspected.

Here's a picture of the relevant page of the PDF, which I don't have a link to at the moment:

This demonstrates that the news crew didn't have any idea what they videotaped, and whatever it was, it wasn't the HMX or RDX at Al-Qaqaa. I'd like to find out exactly what was under seal #144322; if anyone has an indexed IAEA inventory, let's find out.

UPDATE: Instapundit says that the seal pictured was one of many at the Al Qaqaa complex, so it's entire possible that this means little or nothing. More as it develops.

UPDATE II: Looking at the IAEA report from its inspection on January 14, 2003, this seal did not cover any of the IAEA materials at Al Qaqaa. Here are the seal numbers that were used to keep the HMX and RDX under wraps:

50/221075
51/221074
59/221073
41/221072
49/221071
35/221076
34/221080
38/361167
37/221087

None of these numbers are even close in sequence to the number shown in the ABC report. Moreover, on page 3 of the report, the IAEA concludes that Al Qaqaa only contains 3,080 kilograms of RDX, or around 3 tons. The amount of HMX noted at the time was 194,741 kg, or about 214 tons. PETN comes in at 3500 kg, or 4 tons. Where does the IAEA come up with 377 tons of material at Al Qaqaa?

I note that some are saying that the picture of the seal is a stock photograph [confirmed, thanks to NZ Bear]. It's an incredibly misleading placement for this story, and it's not labeled as such. Having it as part of their story without mentioning where it originated certainly leaves the reader with the impression that it was photographed at the site contemporaneous to the video.

UPDATE III: During the replay of the video shown by ABC, I saw one seal that ended in either '86' or '66', which wouldn't match the IAEA report from January 2003.

Guardian Reviews Impact Of Blogs

I missed this a couple of days ago when it first appeared, but Simon Jeffery wrote a balanced look at blogs earlier this week at the Guardian (UK). Simon was kind enough to mention me and CQ after we traded e-mail last week -- and after we both took shots at each other on our blogs. Simon turns out to be a rather nice guy and an interesting correspondent, and his article presents a fair introduction to those who may not be very familiar with the blogosphere.

Simon has this to say about my analysis of blogging:

Edward Morrissey, who runs the pro-Bush Captain's Quarters - by no means the largest - is now logging 840,000 visits a month (up from 30,000 in January) to his daily Democrat-bashing.

Recent entries include the latest theft or defacement of a Bush campaign sign and the lyrics of a satirical song about John Kerry, Mekong Delta Blues, written by contacts in Minneapolis: "When I was first elected / My daddy told me son, / You gotta raise their taxes / And take away their guns."

Mr Morrissey argues that the lack of a British-style national press in the United States catering for readers across the political spectrum creates a natural audience for blogs.

He said: "American voters live primarily in cities and suburbs with easy access to only one print newspaper. They get only one point of view."

Daily Democrat-bashing? Hey, that's a fair analysis of what I've written here, although it may be a bit jarring to see it expressed that way. After all, I'm dedicated to truth, justice, and the Blogosphere Way. (Y'all can stop laughing now.) Simon also includes input from Markos Moulitsas at the Daily Kos for good balance. In fact, the only quibble I have with the entire article is Simon's description of Andrew Sullivan as relatively non-partisan. Sullivan's been partisan all along; he just switched sides, that's all.

Give the entire article a read. In fact, even though I usually strongly disagree with the Guardian, it presents well-written articles and make no secret of their political viewpoint, two qualities which lift them above most American dailies. It should be on your daily review list, at least.

Post Gets The Weapons Story Context Correct

The Washington Post injects some context and not a little sanity into the hyperventilation coming from the Kerry campaign and the left on Al Qaqaa. In fact, Bradley Graham and Thomas Ricks point out what I posted last Tuesday about the amount of explosives in question, and the fact that HMX and RDX pose little increased risk over the other explosives left over in Iraq:

U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.

Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.

"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

Not only does the amount in question (the total remains in serious doubt) at Al Qaqaa pale into insignificance against the amounts confiscated and destroyed already by the US, it turns out that the explosives themselves were not uncommon in the massive munitions hoarded by Saddam during the arms embargo that John Kerry believes kept Hussein in his box:

Whatever the case, the military significance of the loss, in a country awash with far larger amounts of munitions, is open to question.

The most powerful of the three explosives -- HMX -- can be used in a trigger for nuclear devices, which is why it was placed under IAEA seal. But HMX is obtainable elsewhere, and the chief U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has acknowledged that the Iraqi stockpile posed no particular concern in this regard.

In short, this is a non-story. No one wants to see weapons and munitions disappear, regardless of who was in charge at the time. However, the notion that having 0.06% of the total amount of explosive ordinance in Iraq outside of our control somehow represents a larger danger than having 100% of the bombs and explosives under Saddam Hussein's control is not only ludicrous on its face, it shows why those who insist on that interpretation cannot be trusted with safeguarding our national security. One web site, which I cannot remember, said the missing 380 tons equated to 700,000 Lockerbies. The same web site didn't bother to mention that had we not acted, we would have left Saddam with the capability of 1,166,900,000 Lockerbies.

The reaction from John Kerry and the hysterics on the Left has been educational. Either they believe that the 3ID and 101st Airborne were incompetent and did not search Al Qaqaa despite the 3ID's insistence that they did and contemporaneous reporting showing the discovery of suspicious materials during their search, or they have cynically seized upon the shoddy and screechy reporting by the NY Times and CBS as a lever to grab power. In both cases, they want us to believe that America was better off leaving all of this material in Saddam's hands, material that they've said for over a year didn't warrant military action, and now claim that Western civilization hangs in the balance because 0.06% of it may have gone missing.

Either they are complete fools or rank opportunists. Take your pick. Neither promises to keep us safe from the people who want nothing more than to kill large numbers of us at the first opportunity.

Kerry Admits He Lied About His Records

CQ reader Brent Busch noticed that John Kerry made an interesting admission last night on NBC Nightly News in an interview with Tom Brokaw. Despite having claimed for months that he had released all of his military records, Kerry admitted last night that he'd lied about it (emphasis mine):

Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.

Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from.

As Brent points out, that hardly squares with Kerry's rhetoric earlier on military records. Ever since Kerry and the Democrats launched a full-scale attack on George Bush's military experience and his discharge from the National Guard, calls have come for Kerry to sign a Form 180 to completely release his own records. Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth have asked repeatedly for this release. Kerry has responded repeatedly that all of his records have been made available at his website. For instance, here's Kerry on Don Imus on September 15th:

IMUS: A Freedom of Information Act request by "The Washington Post" regarding your military records produced six pages of information, while a spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command said there were at least 100 pages of information available, but he was not authorized to release them. Why can't we see this stuff?

KERRY: We've posted my military records that they sent to me, or were posted on my Web site. You can go to my Web site, and all my -- you know, the documents are there.

IMUS: So is -- everything's available?

KERRY: To the best of my knowledge. I think some of the medical stuff may still be out there. We're trying to get it.

Kerry was also explicitly unequivocal on "Hardball" last April when discussing Bush's military records, before the Swiftvets began their public campign showing how much Kerry had deceived people about the nature of his service:

MATTHEWS: OK. You did that today, Senator. You went after, you put out a statement in your campaign, asking tough questions, documented questions—you had all the material there—about President Bush‘s — President Bush‘s participation.

KERRY: I have not—I don‘t—I haven‘t seen what went out.

MATTHEWS: What went out, it basically tracks what you did the other day on “Good Morning America.” And the question your staff put out, under your name, is, is Bush telling the truth, President Bush, when he said he had no special privileges or favoritism in jumping 150 places to get in the Air Guard in Texas?

What do you think about that? Is that something you care about? You want to know the truth?

KERRY: He ought to answer that question.

MATTHEWS: Why?

KERRY: Because I‘ve answered the questions. I released all my military records. Mr. Gillespie thought it was important enough to go travel to another state, make a big speech, demand that I release my records. I did. Everything. All of it. Including my officer fitness reports.

Now, I have received tons of e-mail on the IQ study, and quite frankly, I think IQ testing is a load of horsecrap. IQ is the study of potential, not accomplishment. At the age when we elect Presidents (50s - 60s, usually), debating intellectual potential is ridiculous on its face. If they haven't realized their potential by that time, they have no business running for dogcatcher, let alone President. IQ measurements are not terribly precise anyway, and the couple of points of difference in this study are meaningless. In polling terms, it's well within the margin of error.

However, Kerry's bristling at the question reveals the narcissism that has broken to the surface during this campaign, which explains the stupendously embarassing response he gave. After maintaining for months that he had released all of his records, he admits on a nationwide prime-time news broadcast that he lied about that all along. Kerry not only hasn't released all of his records, he knows it and he knows specifically what hasn't been released.

It's yet another lie and another dodge from the candidate who can't be trusted.

UPDATE: And we can't trust NBC, either -- as I show in this post, NBC has edited out the statement on its updated transcript. Instapundit readers may want to check out my update there ...

NEA Gave Over A Million To Kerry, Faces IRS Audit

The National Education Association has been busy this election cycle, the Washington Times reports. The teachers union has spent over a million dollars in direct support for John Kerry and $2.78 million supporting Democrats overall, prompting the IRS to investigate its tax-exempt status:

The National Education Association (NEA) pumped more than $1 million into 67 mailings for the Kerry-Edwards presidential ticket and against President Bush in the past four months, Federal Election Commission reports show.

Twenty-one NEA mailings in behalf of the Kerry campaign, produced by an Arlington firm whose clients include the Democratic Party, went out to hundreds of thousands of public school employees across the country this month at a cost of $468,333. The union paid for all the mailings from its general operating budget, not its political action committee, the reports show.

Now that presents two problems. First, using the same production firm as the DNC indicates possible collusion (termed "illegal coordination" by McCain-Feingold) in advocacy efforts. Second and more to the point for the IRS, spending the money out of the NEA's general budget instead of its political-action committee violates campaign-finance regulating the influence of corporations and unions, I believe. Conservative teachers have called for reform of the union's political activities as well:

In a July interview, NEA President Reg Weaver said about one-third of the union's 2.7 million dues-paying members are Democrats, one-third are Republicans and one-third are independents.

FEC reports show that only four Republican congressional candidates received money from the NEA's political action committee from April through July — Sens. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Reps. C.W. Bill Young of Florida and Jim Kolbe of Arizona. ...

"We need to look toward spending political action committee funds more equitably between the political parties," said Diane Lenning, an English teacher from California and past chairman of the NEA Republican Educators Caucus. "The NEA's teachers speak of fairness, diversity and free speech. Therefore, we need to look toward equal representation of funds spent among candidates across the country from local to national levels," Mrs. Lenning said.

The NEA's almost-complete Democratic support comes as no surprise, and its motivations are easily understood. The efforts at educational reform have unnerved union leaders due to the administration's determination to hold schools responsible for their performance -- a philosophy that threatens to undermine the ridiculous "tenure" model that makes removal of ineffective teachers an almost impossible task.

But what they truly fear is an effort to implement a school-voucher plan that would for the first time create a competitive market for educating the children of working families instead of just the richest families in America. Competition would either force public schools to reform themselves and their evaluation processes or face obsolescence. Good teachers, of course, could find work in a boom of private-school openings that vouchers would create or negotiate better conditions for themselves at the public schools that would want to hang onto them. The effect of the NEA's opposition to change is to protect the least competent among them, a fact not lost on several teachers I know personally.

The NEA has gone all out to prevent any meaningful reform of our public education system, and they have done so by overwhelmingly supporting John Kerry and other Democrats. That should tell you all you need to know about which party can be trusted to bring change and improvement to the education of our children.

NY Times Still Gets Al Qaqaa Wrong

Our local ABC affiliate ran a videotape purporting to show the existence of HMX, RDX, and PETN at the Al Qaqaa storage facility, and the New York Times ran a new story heralding this videotape as the confirmation it desperately needs to rescue its credibility:

A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.

Well, at least that's the lead in the Times' story. Fifteen paragraphs into the story, the Times finally tells its readers that it cannot even confirm that the video was shot at Al Qaqaa:

The Minneapolis television crew was with an Army unit that was camped near Al Qaqaa, members of the crew said. The reporter and cameraman said that although they were not told specifically that they were being taken to Al Qaqaa by the military, their videotape matches pictures of the site taken by United Nations weapons inspectors, according to weapons experts.

The boxes on the videotape carried markings that say "Al Qaqaa", but take another look at the boxes as shown in the videotape capture here. What do you see? An American soldier prying the crate open. Why would an American soldier pry the box open? Perhaps to check to see what's inside? I don't know what color the sky is in the New York Times' world, but that looks like a search to me.

In fact, that's what the Times' caption states:

A videotape from April 18, 2003, shows a soldier prying open a box in a bunker in Al Qaqaa.

Take a good look at the box itself. How many pounds do you suppose that crate could hold -- maybe 50 pounds, tops? Same with the barrels in this second photograph. At that rate, you'd need 40 crates of this stuff for a single ton of material, and more than 15,000 crates for 380 tons. More likely, these crates contained the vials that the 3ID reported finding at Al Qaqaa, and not the massive amounts of HMX and RDX previously reported by the IAEA to have been stored there.

But the collapse does not end there. The Kerry Spot notices something else about the crates that indicate some other material was contained in them. They're labeled as Explosive 1.1 D 1, a classification that includes HMX, RDX, and PETN -- but only when diluted by 15% water, a condition that clearly does not exist with the crated materials:

So - this orange 1.1 D is the label we would look for on HMX, RDX, or PETN. But did those explosives in these containers have 15 or 25 percent water or other dilution liquid in them? Or did they look pretty dry in that desert?

And as we look at the rest of that chart, we see that a lot of other explosives that fall in the 1.1 D category.

Specifically there are 79 other substances and types of explosive material and supporting equipment that would get the 1.1 D label, including gunpowder, flexible detonating cord, photo-flash bombs, mines, nitroglycerin, rocket warheads, grenades, fuzes, torpedoes and charges. And few of them require any liquid dilution.

Is what’s on this news report video HMX, RDX, or PETN? Possibly, if the material inside is some sort of diluting liquid that we didn’t see on the tape, or if the Iraqis were storing these high-grade explosives in an unsafe manner. Or it could be one of the 79 other substances. Or some containers could have the big three, and some could have others.

But that's not all, either. The ABC report that originally started this meme contains this curious statement:

On the April 2003 visit, our crews witnessed soldiers using bolt cutters to get into bunkers. Inside, they found many containers marked "explosives." At least one set of crates carried the name "Al-Qaqaa State Establishment."

Military personnel told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the area visited was secured by an outside perimeter. Our crew said the area felt more like no-mans-land.

Bottom line? The materials shown in the video could have been any of 80 different materials, with the three from the IAEA actually being among the least likely to have been stored in this manner. The reporters say that the military told them at the time that the area had been secured at an outer perimeter, a sensible approach for a military on a lightning-quick advance. And the Times cannot even verify that the video was taken at the ASP in question.

Another example of brilliant reporting by the Gray Lady ...

Kerry: Iraq Is Equivalent To Bay Of Pigs

If you could imagine the most foolish analogy anyone could use in terms of our efforts in Iraq, you couldn't possibly beat the one John Kerry chose at a rally in Toledo, Ohio today. Kerry used his idol John Kennedy as an example of how Bush supposedly can't admit mistakes, and equated Iraq to the disastrous betrayal at the Bay of Pigs:

Kerry recalled how President John Kennedy took the blame for the bungled Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961.

"Can you imagine President Kennedy ... standing up and telling the American people he couldn't think of a single mistake that he had made? When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say to America 'I take responsibility, it is my fault."'

Challenging Bush, Kerry said: "Mr. President, it is long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes that you've made."

Good grief. As a military and political historian, John Kerry is every bit as incompetent as he is a presidential candidate. The Bay of Pigs was a military and diplomatic disaster of the first order. Kerry's favorite president arranged to have a large group of Cuban ex-pats invade Castro's Cuba with the promise of air support and political cover. At the last moment, Kennedy chickened out and withdrew the promised Air Force cover, allowing Castro to annihilate the bewildered invading army and defeat the United States. The operation was widely condemned by our friends and foes alike, the latter for the attempt and the former for the incompetence with which it was carried out.

Further, Kennedy never did take complete responsibility, although he did make that speech. At first he tried to deny that the US had any part in it. Later on, he and his staff maintained -- and still do, to this day -- that Eisenhower had put the invasion plans in motion and that Republicans hamstrung Kennedy with political threats if he canceled it of being painted as "soft on Communism".

I'd like to know how John Kerry sees the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein as analogous to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We haven't lost as many men in the nineteen months since our invasion than were killed or captured in a single week at the Bay of Pigs. In Iraq, Bush resolutely pushed forward until our objective was achieved -- the fall of Saddam -- and insists on staying until a democratic and representative government is established. He didn't chicken out and turn tail, even when the Left kept crying out that, in the words of Janeane Garofalo, we would be "doomed, doomed!" and tens of thousands of American soldiers would lie dead in the desert of Mesopotamia.

Only John Kerry, the cut-and-run candidate, could possibly compare the Bay of Pigs favorably to the remarkable victory in Iraq. It's yet another example of Kerry hysteria, and another reason why Kerry cannot be trusted with the position of commander-in-chief.

UPDATE: Val Prieto shares his family's connection to the Bay of Pigs betrayal and has a few eloquent and choice words for Senator Kerry.

Terror tape authenticated

According to the Drudge Report, the Al Qaeda video tape obtained by ABC in Pakistan has been authenticated by the CIA and FBI. Drudge reports:

ABCNEWS obtained the tape from a source in Waziristan, Pakistan over the weekend. The network has withheld airing it, initially citing concerns over its authenticity.

One senior federal official alleged ABCNEWS is now holding back from broadcasting any portion of the video out of fear it will be seen as a political move by the network during election week.

One ABC source, who demanded anonymity, said Thursday morning, the network was struggling to find a correct journalistic "balance."

"This is not something you just throw out there while people are voting," the ABC source explained.

A second ABC source told DRUDGE Thursday morning: "ABCNEWS has shared this tape with both the CIA and the FBI as part of our reporting process. ABC News is committed to accurate, credible and complete journalism and is applying the same scrutiny to this tape that we apply to all raw information. ABCNEWS continues to report this story aggressively."

According to Drudge, the tape portrays a man with his face concealed by a headdress speaking with an American accent. The man warns, "The streets will run with blood," and "America will mourn in silence" because they will be unable to count the number of the dead.

I concur with ABC's decision not to immediately run with this story, waiting for the CIA and FBI to authenticate the tape. But if Matt Drudge is correct and it has been authenticated, ABC cannot play hide the ball from the American voters.

Abortion No Longer A Liability For The GOP?

The Washington Post runs a fascinating report today, analyzing its daily tracking poll on one of the issue points -- the appointment of Supreme Court justices. In a revelation that challenges the conventional wisdom of gender politics, th Post reports that a narrow plurality puts more trust in George Bush to appoint SCOTUS justices than John Kerry:

The survey found that 49 percent of all likely voters surveyed said they had more confidence in the president to choose future Supreme Court justices while 42 percent favor Kerry -- preferences that were sharply shaped by party identification. Three in four Democrats -- 76 percent -- believe Kerry would do a better job filling future vacancies while 89 percent of Republicans chose Bush. Political independents split equally between the two candidates. ...

The gender gap on Supreme Court appointments is smaller for women but larger for men than it is on the overall vote, the survey suggests. Women are two percentage points more likely -- 47 percent to 45 percent -- to have more confidence in Kerry to fill court vacancies. Men trust Bush more than Kerry, 54 percent to 37 percent, a 17-point gap.

Traditionally, women have supported Democratic presidential candidates over the GOP, usually by wide margins; Gore topped Bush among women by eleven points in 2000. That gap usually gets explained by Republican policy stands on reproductive rights, especially abortion. However, in this election, Bush has essentially tied Kerry among women (some polls put Bush in a narrow lead).

Speculation about the cause of the shift usually centers on "security moms" -- those who consider national security a more pressing issue than abortion. However, that doesn't apply to a specific question about appointing Supreme Court justices, while abortion rights impact directly on it. Seeing no change among women supporting Bush tends to imply that abortion no longer carries the same strong backing it previously has with women. In fact, the gap between Bush and Kerry on this question is actually narrower than it is on general support overall for election. Having almost half of all women trust such an explicit right-to-life candidate more with judicial nominations is a paradigm shift of stunning scope.

Kerry has assured voters that he will not nominate any justice who does not support abortion rights, an explicit litmus test that was designed to bolster his sagging numbers with women. However, if the Post poll is any indicator, Kerry may be doing more damage than good among female voters with his pandering position on abortion.

You don't say

AP actually titled a story "Mideast May Again Become Major U.S. Issue." Obviosly, we haven't been concerned at all about what goes on there. That's why Iraq has been the primary campaign issue.

AP hastily inserts a Kerry campaign promise: "We'll do a better job of protecting the state of Israel."

And a word from an "expert":

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was former President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said in an Associated Press interview that "any administration will have to come to terms with the fact the absence of progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace front contributes to intensified conflict and hostility."

Does the label "President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser" sound ironic to you too? I was so distracted I missed what he actually said, so I had to go back and read it again. I think he used too many words for "I don't have a clue."

And finally, there is this:

Richard Holbrooke, who advises Kerry on foreign policy and could be his secretary of state, told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week that Kerry would appoint an envoy to the region — not to force Israel to make concessions but to pressure Arab governments to stop sponsoring terror.

I'm sure that will work. IF Kerry is elected.

Did 'Starving Soviets' Back The Moving Van Up To Al Qaqaa?

The Financial Times follows up on the remark made yesterday by John Shaw, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, suggesting that the Russians took the heavy tonnage of high-tech explosives out of Al Qaqaa and transported them to Syria:

The controversy over Iraq’s missing explosives intensified on Wednesday as the Bush administration rejected charges of incompetence and a senior Pentagon official claimed the munitions may have been removed by Russians before the US-led invasion. ...

But in a further development, John Shaw, a deputy under-secretary of defence, suggested that “Russian units” had transported the explosives out of the country.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Shaw said: “For nearly nine months my office has been aware of an elaborate scheme set up by Saddam Hussein to finance and disguise his weapons purchases through his international suppliers, principally the Russians and French. That network included. . . employing various Russian units on the eve of hostilities to orchestrate the collection of munitions and assure their transport out of Iraq via Syria.”

The Russian embassy in Washington rejected the claims as “nonsense”, saying there were no Russian military in the country at the time.

I'm skeptical. I doubt that the cash-strapped Russian military, with its own Islamist problems in Chechnya and elsewhere, would have acted as a hire-out moving service for Saddam Hussein in March 2003, with the US poised to invade. No one really knew how US forces would come into Iraq and running the risk of having a Russian unit captured by the Americans after Russia's opposition to enforcing UNSC Resolution 1441 seems far too big a gamble. Besides, Sadda hardly needed Russian assistance to simply move the materiel into Syria; Iraq had trucks and forklifts and knew how to use them. [UPDATE: Whiskey and I posted on this at the same time, and she draws a different conclusion.]

In light of the new ABC report showing that most of the material supposedly missing disappeared a year or two before the invasion, the question is no longer what happened in March and April 2003. The new question is how the IAEA managed to hoodwink the New York Times, CBS, and the John Kerry campaign into thinking it did its job in securing the weapons from Saddam. Far from providing stable security, they actively fought to keep the HMX and RDX from being destroyed by UNSCOM, and then watched as it disappeared without a trace in 2001 and 2002. They claimed to have "sealed" the materiel in place, but now we find out that the secure containers have vents on their sides that can quickly be dismantled to gain access to the contents, without ever breaking the seal.

These are the people John Kerry entrusts with American national security. The gross incompetence of the IAEA to understand the nature of the materials -- they allowed Saddam to keep them for civilian construction, as if Saddam didn't have enough conventional explosives laying around for that -- and to comprehend the basics of security disqualifies both them and the UN that employed them from any input over our foreign-policy initiatives. It's easy to understand why the Bush adminstration refuses to support Mohammed ElBaradei for another term at the helm of the IAEA; he obviously cannot be trusted in terms of honesty or competence.

John Kerry's insistence that these same people should judge our national-security policies as part of a "global test", as well as his hyperventilating about Al Qaqaa before all the facts were known, should serve as an eminent disqualifier for the position of commander in chief. Rather than acting in a mature and statesmanlike manner, Kerry instead starting denigrating the performance of the two military units for conducting an incompetent search and George Bush for not guarding the sites thoroughly enough -- as if Bush did sentry duty with 3ID. He still hasn't changed his tune, even though contemporaneous reports (by CBS!!) show that 3ID did check the facility, and ABC's revelation that the materials weren't there for months when we showed up.

In short, we cannot afford to elect a hysteric as commander-in-chief. We need calm and mature leadership, not someone who screams and blames everyone around him when bad news comes. Kerry has demonstrated none of the calm and resolute temperament required for the position.

Addendum: Be sure to read Hugh Hewitt's excellent Weekly Standard column today on this same topic.

Putin, you've got some 'splainin' to do

According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the U.S. invasion:

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

You get two guesses where the Russians shipped the goods. According to Mr. Shaw:

Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.

Mr. Gertz further reports that the Iraqis didn't just abandon the site after these shipments. The Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units until the US forces defeated them on or about 3 April.

The Russians weren't just acting as UPS drivers, either.

A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.

The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.

The Russians didn't just spirit away some weapons haphazardly.

Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.

Mr. Gertz concludes:

Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Right. Sure they will explain. I'll just wait here and report back . . . .

UPDATE: I had forgotten about this. Hat tip: The Corner.

ADDITIONAL REMARKS: This story makes the whole missing/partially non-existent explosive story and the Kerry instant talking points (take shoddy reporting and add water) look rather silly. While waiting for the Russians to 'fess up, I'll also be waiting for the MSM to turn its attention to this bombshell. Maybe I should order a pizza . . . might be awhile . . . like 3 November.

The Incredible Shrinking HMX/RDX

ABC News reported late last night that the amount of high-tech explosives at Al Qaqaa has been wildly exaggerated by Iraqi officials, the New York Times, and CBS. Rather than the 380 tons of explosives which cannot be located, new documents put the amount stashed at Al Qaqaa at around 3 tons instead (via Instapundit):

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the United States launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003.

This is the type of research that one would have expected from a news organization that considers itself professional -- doing research before reporting on something in order to avoid decontextualizing it, or getting critical facts incorrect. In short, one would expect the geniuses at the Gray Lady to understand the difference between 3 tons and 380 tons, and to get the numbers right before publication.

ABC also reports that the IAEA "seal" hardly guaranteed security on these dangerous weapons at Al Qaqaa:

The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.

Let me get this straight. The IAEA has screamed that the materials it inspected remained secure under its control until the Americans came bumbling into Iraq. However, their secure environment included holes in the walls covered by easily-removable slats -- and now they wonder how the materials could have possibly disappeared? Who are these people at the IAEA, the Keystone Kops? The most frightening aspect of this story isn't that the terrorists may have had the HMX in their hands for years now. It's that people like Mohammed ElBaradei and his staff have been entrusted with securing nuclear weapons and materials.

If anything, the attempted hit piece on President Bush by the NY Times has turned out to be quite the public service. Thanks to the extraordinarily incompetent misfire by the NYT and CBS, we now see the overwhelming bias of two major news organizations, the desperation and gullibility of John Kerry, and the incredible failure of the UN to provide any kind of security in an age of Islamist terror and state sponsorship.

A Voice From The Front, Part III

The final part of the interviews with "Mike".

Q. How much play is our upcoming presidential election getting in Iraq?

A. It’s huge. It’s critical. The left-wing media has been spewing a lot of crap about how the Iraqis want us out of there as soon as possible. We all want to get out of there as soon as possible – which is going to be several years from now. Anyone who wants to be realistic about the whole situation knows that it’s not going to happen in a few months, it’s going to happen in a few years. At the point where Iraq is finally on its feet and rebuilt, able to keep terrorists out and any other despot that might want to take control of the government, then we’ll leave. But right now, what’s really happening is that the Iraqis who want to provide a better life for themselves – the majority of the people – they not only don’t want us to leave right now, they’re petrified that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The reason for that is that John Kerry keeps saying we never should have been there in the first place – wrong war, wrong place, all the stuff you heard during the debates.

It’s wreaking terror in the hearts of the good Iraqis who want to come forward and govern their country the way it should be governed. Their perception is that we could just leave; we could just leave as soon as Kerry gets elected. Then the murder rate, which is already through the roof right now, would skyrocket. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the victims are not Americans, but ordinary Iraqis who just want to come to work for us and with us, and stepping up to take charge of their country. That’s the majority of people getting killed over there by terrorists. Once we leave, their fear is that retaliations will begin and they’ll be slaughtered. They’re exactly accurate about that.

Q. It’s been suggested that we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to provide a stable security situation there. What’s your opinion on that?

A. It’s a complex topic. The simple response is – we don’t. We don’t have enough troops to provide absolute security. We probably would have been better off if we’d declared martial law as soon as the war was over, but we couldn’t do it because we didn’t have the people to enforce it. How is that the current sitting president’s fault, when Clinton is the one who cut our military down to two-thirds of what it was prior to his coming into office? So now this hypocritical argument that Kerry uses – “Well, we should have had more troops, we should be having this, we should be having that” – thanks to the Democrats, we don’t have enough troops to go into every country and take full control. We also have the rest of the world to cover. We need people in Afghanistan, and we’ve got them. We need troops on the ground in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the other fifty different places around the world where we have a presence we need to maintain. We can’t just strip one area and send the forces to Iraq.

Besides, our whole mission in Iraq is to turn it over to the Iraqis, so our role right now is to train the Iraqis to take control of the situation. And they’re doing a great job. I’m actually surprised that as many Iraqis are continuing to come forward to be police officers in their own country or enlist in the new Iraqi Army when they are being targeted by terrorists, some of which don’t even come from Iraq, for doing exactly that.

Q: What are the real sentiments of the typical Iraqi? What’s it like for Iraqi civilians?

A: Most of my interpreters – actually, all of my interpreters were educated Iraqis. Usually they were English professors from Iraqi universities, which made them perfect for interpreters. They made three dollars a month from Saddam, and now teachers and professors make two to three hundred dollars a month there. When they work for us, they make six hundred dollars a month as interpreters. So I was dealing with the intelligentsia of Iraq; a couple of these guys were doctors, medical doctors trained in Iraq, and they would work a week for us as interpreters and then a week in an Iraqi hospital, making nothing.

For four weeks I was in An Najaf, which is 100% Shi’ite, and after that I was in Tikrit and Fallujah, which are mostly Sunni with a few Shi’ites and Kurds, all working together, all getting along, working on the job with us. None of them wanted us to leave – quite the opposite; they’re terrified we’re going to leave because of idiots like Kerry saying we never should have been there in the first place.

I don’t know why anyone comes forward to help us, or help themselves really, because they become a target. Most of the people getting killed now are Iraqis trying to do something with their lives and cooperating with us. They love us. Far from hating us and wanting us to leave, most Iraqis love us. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking with Shi’ites, Sunnis, whatever. That’s the fact that doesn’t get reported.

Q. It’s been claimed that the US has lacked a plan for winning the peace in Iraq. Is that what you’ve seen on the ground there?

A. No, there were great plans. [Chuckles.] I mean, there are 18-wheelers by the thousands pouring into Iraq to rebuild that place. I don’t know if you noticed or not, but up until about March, we did a pretty good job of securing that country. There were isolated incidents before, but after March it got worse, and it got worse for a couple of reasons. One, predictably, [the terrorists] are turning up the heat just before the elections, so they can overturn the elections in Iraq and they can overturn the elections here in our country. I’m going to be very surprised if there isn’t a major cataclysmic event that takes place in our country just before the election, just like they did in Spain.

Naturally, you’d expect them to be turning up the heat right now. But one other thing took place, and that was Abu Ghraib. I have no doubt that the low-level Army guys were way out of line, and they’re going to be court-martialed and their lives and careers are over. But the amount of media attention that that one event received, that’s what our president was not prepared for. He was not prepared for an American senator running for office, saying the kinds of things he is. I mean, the terrorists could not be writing a better script for John Kerry if they tried. He and all the people like him are giving comfort to the enemy. Boy, he’s exceeding himself.

Q: Sounds like a replay of 30 years ago.

A: I didn’t even know he existed until this year, but throwing his medals onto the White House lawn and whatever he said thirty years ago is nothing compared to the damage he’s doing right now.

A Voice From The Front, Part II

The second part of the interviews with "Mike".

Q. Obviously, the Iraqis got this ammunition hand over fist before our invasion, and as you said, a good portion of it wasn’t deployable by the Iraqi military. Was any of this disappearing into terrorist hands before the war?

A. Of course! There’s the terrorist side of it; the Wahhabi Muslim terrorists, who see their role in life as to blow up unbelievers that they think are attacking Islam, specifically Israel. The end state for Muslim terrorists is to get the Jews out of Israel, and anyone supporting Israel has got to go along with them. But money is what it was all about in Iraq. There was a minister for everything. There was a land mine minister, an RPG minister, a free-rocket-over-ground minister; for every type of explosive ordinance that exists, there was some minister for it. And he made money by buying the stuff and bringing it into the country, and of course he’d make a profit off of it.

Saddam Hussein believed he was the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, or at least that’s what he told people. He planned on using it all to blow up Jerusalem.

Q. One of the issues in this presidential campaign has been weapons of mass destruction and whether or not they were present in Iraq. Now obviously what you’re describing is massive weapons of destruction, as you’ve told me before, which probably had more destructive power than some of the WMD we’ve been concerned with in the run-up to the war. What can you tell us about WMDs in Iraq?

A. Did I actually see any WMD? The only thing I can tell you about that is if I saw any. At the right time and the right place, it will be revealed to the American public, because as far as I know, there’s nothing official coming from the United States government that we found any since we invaded Iraq. However, I can tell you that the large amounts of it that we know exist are not in Iraq now. That definitely is true, that the gigantic stockpiles of sarin gas and VX in artillery rounds and the other stuff is nowhere to be found.

That leads to the next question: where is it? There’s no question that the President had good reason to invade Iraq, for all the reasons he gave. I mean, Saddam bragged about all of his WMD and what he was going to do with them against us, so we had more than one just provocation to go in there and find the WMD. If it’s not there, and there’s no inventory and no destruction worksheets or anything, to show he disposed of it in any way, then why is the left-wing media not more interested in finding out where it all went? Because we may just find out in our own country where all that WMD are.

Q. That’s a good point, Mike. You just don’t go out in the desert and blow up a bunch of sarin gas containers; you have to do that in a controlled environment. You’d expect there to be some kind of record that the stuff got destroyed because you have to make certain preparations to make sure it doesn’t get out and contaminate the countryside.

A. Right. And why would he do it anyway? He was thumbing his nose at us the entire time. He was violating every UN sanction, everything that the UN told him to do. What would he have to lose by offloading it onto terrorists?

Q. The story you hear from the press is that he didn’t have the stuff, and he lied to his own people. Telling them he didn’t have it would have undermined his power, leaving him more vulnerable to being overthrown by his own people. That’s the story we hear right now.

A. Part of that is true. There was a lot of bravado in the things he told his own people. Still, it doesn’t mean – it actually validates our invasion. If he’s telling that to his own people and we think he still has it, then that’s all the more reason to invade when we did. Obviously, he didn’t have it the moment we walked in the door, most of it was gone. But we know he had thousands of tons of it at a certain point in time, because he used it on his own people. There were inspectors who saw it and gave him a time frame to get rid of it, and somehow it was gone – but where did it go?

That brings me to my next point. So there’s not a lot of WMD being used against us – in fact, it hasn’t been used against us at all. What they’re using is low-tech weapons. They’re using 155mm artillery shells, and basically the entire Saddam arsenal is being used against us from Iraq to Israel, and who knows where else? It’s a project which needs to be seen all the way through to its end state. We’re setting aside a small percentage of it that will be usable for the new Iraqi Army, and detonating or open-burning the rest of it.

In the final part, Mike discusses the effect the presidential election is having on the situation in Iraq and his experience with the Iraqi people.

A Voice From The Front, Part I

A good friend of mine has served in the Navy as a SEAL, both active-duty and reserves, since the Vietnam War. “Mike” most recently spent the better part of the past three years in Iraq before, during, and after the war. After serving as an active-duty SEAL handling Arabian Gulf interdiction missions, he took a leave of absence to work as a civilian security contractor inside Iraq, including some of the toughest areas in the Sunni Triangle, such as Fallujah and Tikrit. As a private contractor, Mike spent most of his time securing and destroying captured enemy ordinance at ammunition supply points like Al Qaqaa, which has found itself the center of attention during this presidential election. However, Mike worked on sensitive missions during his time in the Gulf, and for the safety of his family has asked that he not be identified by name.

I interviewed Mike twice, once for Captainsquartersblog.com and once on the Northern Alliance Radio Network Network in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve combined the two interviews to share Mike’s first-person perspective on his missions, the ongoing American effort, and the effect our election is having on the Iraqi people.

Q: When did you first to go to Iraq and in what capacity?

A: I got called up to Enduring Freedom in November 2001, from my civilian job. I’m a reservist with a naval Special Warfare unit. I’m a SEAL corpsman, and my first assignment was to train up SEALS to deploy, and then I was put in an active-duty role to go forward with a special boat team that does ship takedowns in the North Arabian Gulf.

What we’re doing is stopping smuggler vessels in the middle of the night that were smuggling for Iraq prior to the war. We did 32 direct-action missions against blacked-out ships that were trying to get away from us. They were loaded with every kind of contraband you could think of. Everything coming out of Iraq was carrying illegal oil. Anything coming in was carrying weapons and other kinds of things.

Q. Mike, you and I were talking about that earlier. Where did these illegal weapons come from that you captured on these interdiction missions?

A: Anything that came into Iraq in the mid-90s, no matter where it came from, was illegal because of the embargo, which leads to my next job. Russia, China, France were all the countries that were supplying Iraq in the last decade or so.

Q. When you were running these missions, that’s what you were finding, and the weapons were coming from those three countries?

A. Some. You know, it’s difficult for me in my SEAL role to know where a lot of it comes from. If you have AK-47s all over the place and they’re made in Russia, you can only assume at some point it came from Russia. You don’t know at what point the smuggler got hold of them. The smugglers were either merchants from India or Pakistan or various other places, or some of them were terrorists. There were a couple of high-value targets that we actually did stop – they weren’t all just people trying to make a buck on terrorism. That was pretty interesting.

Q: What else besides oil got smuggled out of Iraq?

A: Most of the time they’d be smuggling oil. My group alone got 9,000 metric tons of oil that was smuggled out in violation of the trade embargo.

Q: Who kept the oil?

A: We would either confiscate the ships or send them back up to where they came from. In the middle of the night, you can’t always get people to come baby-sit, and once we take them down, we’re not going to just sit there for hours until morning. Usually [the Navy] sends someone out to take care of the ship. If they can’t do that, we send them back. The smugglers tell us, “Oh, Saddam will kill us if we go back,” and we tell them that’s not our problem, and if you don’t go back, we’ll kill you ourselves. That was our mission, nighttime black-out interdiction. During the day, the Coast Guard would stop anyone stupid enough to try it during daylight. At night, they sent SEALs out to do it.

Q: What did you do after that?

A: For the last year, I was a contractor in Iraq, and my role was to be a “shooter” or security guy, along with being a primary medic. I frequently would be the only medic for about a hundred people, most of which were Iraqis who were injured or severely sick. Our project was captured enemy ammunition. Our job, the Captured Enemy Ammunition Project – which is still going on today, it’s not classified – is very underreported in the left-wing press because it’s an example of something that’s going very well over there and it absolutely needs to be finished before we leave. It won’t be done for another two years, I’m guessing, at the very least.

When I first got over there, a year ago September, there was an estimated two million tons of captured enemy ammunition. What I mean by ammunition is bombs, missiles, land mines, RPGs, tank rounds, artillery rounds – all the kinds of things terrorists are using for IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. All of it is usable for terrorists. Very little of it was usable for the Iraqi Army even when we went to war with them, because we had taken away the Iraq Air Force, so all these 2,000-pound bunker busters were of no use to their army; they were only of use to terrorists. That arsenal is still there today. I’m guessing we haven’t even blown up half of it yet.

Our job would be to go get the ammunition from different cache sites, take it to forward operating bases, and detonate it to the tune of over 100 tons in a single shot.

More on ammunition destruction later ...

Coming Later Tonight: Interview With "MIke"

Over the past two weeks, I posted a five-part series of letters from my friend "Mike", a Navy SEAL and private contractor who served in both capacities in Iraq, to his young sons. I spoke at length with Mike during two interviews (one of which was on our Northern Alliance radio show), and Mike gave a fascinating look into his experiences in Iraq and what they taught him about the war on terror and Iraq's liberation. Mike spent the better part of two years there, and here's an example of what's coming up:

For the last year, I was a contractor in Iraq, and my role was to be a “shooter” or security guy, along with being a primary medic. I frequently would be the only medic for about a hundred people, most of which were Iraqis who were injured or severely sick. Our project was captured enemy ammunition. Our job, the Captured Enemy Ammunition Project – which is still going on today, it’s not classified – is very underreported in the left-wing press because it’s an example of something that’s going very well over there and it absolutely needs to be finished before we leave. It won’t be done for another two years, I’m guessing, at the very least. When I first got over there, a year ago September, there was an estimated two million tons of captured enemy ammunition.

I'm spending the evening transcribing the two interviews and piecing them together into a coherent narrative. As you can read from that short excerpt, his experiences have special significance given the news this week from Al Qaqaa and the Kerry campaign's response to the NYT/CBS hit piece. Check back later as I will post this before midnight.

UPDATE: This should be coming in the next hour (before midnight CT), but I will probably post it in sections as it's rather long.

FBI Investigating Bin Laden Sighting In Pakistan

CQ reader Bill W, who works homeland security in the private sector, sent me this article from the South Asia Tribune that reports that the FBI is investigating sightings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, near the borders with India and China:

Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been spotted in the Tibet-Laddakh region, close to the North-Eastern tip of Pakistan, bordering India and China, Indian and US officials believe.

A high-ranking official of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) flew from Islamabad on Sunday to meet top Indian officials here in Delhi after reports of Bin Laden’s presence in the region.

According to sources, following the meeting between Indian security bosses and the FBI, the New Delhi Government has put its security forces in the North Western region, specially the Kashmir Valley, on 'red alert.'

Sources in New Delhi suspect that bin Laden may have made his way into the disputed Kashmir region in recent weeks with help from sympathetic elements within the Pakistani Army. They recently noted increased chatter between Islamist terror groups, with radio traffic urging major operations against military and civilian targets within Kashmir and Pakistan. If bin Laden has arrived there recently, it would indicate that AQ and related organizations may be planning something big -- something that could touch off a shooting war between the two regional nuclear powers if misunderstood.

All forces in the area have gone to a "red alert" status. If Osama pokes his head up, a number of people would like to get their shot at it. More as this develops ...

The Big Apple Takes Two Bites Out Of CQ

It's great to have friends, and two good friends in the New York media world gave Captain's Quarters prominent mention today. The New York Sun and the New York Post, both of which have published my work in the past, reference posts I wrote yesterday regarding two separate subjects.

John Podhoretz writes in today's Post about the late hit that the New York Times and CBS attempted to deliver on George Bush, a transparent and terribly clumsy way of trying to get John Kerry elected. Podhoretz actually expresses sympathy for the instinct to look deeper into the Al Qaqaa story but disdainfully critiques both the research done on it and the decision to publish at this time:

It's hard to fault the Times for pursuing the story aggressively. In an official document sent to a U.N. agency two weeks ago, the Iraqi interim government said the explosives had disappeared during the looting that followed Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003.

That official Iraqi communication makes the story news, no matter the source or the motive behind the document being leaked.

The problem is that the story drew unsupported conclusions about how the explosives had disappeared while the United States military should have been guarding them.

And that's why it's a late hit — designed to do maximum damage to the president's re-election effort and designed as well to give John Kerry a weapon to use against George Bush in the closing days of the campaign.

For that reason, the Times spun its own story, even though the evidence that its conclusions were unsupported is right there in the story itself.

Podhoretz reviews the "Omar letter" that Whiskey mentioned earlier, noting that even if the letter that initiated the report was legitimate (which some question), it never included any assertions of post-Saddam looting at Al Qaqaa. Contemporaneous reporting shows that the material did not exist at Al Qaqaa when our 3rd Infantry Division arrived on April 3, and so we can be reasonably sure that the materiel was moved by Saddam, pre-invasion. Even if we can't pinpoint that, Podhoretz points to the analysis done by Cpt. Ian Dodgson here at CQ to show how unlikely it is that looters could have carted this stuff off:

Nobody knows what happened to the stuff. It's theoretically possible that it was looted after the war's conclusion — though, as Ed Morrissey points out at captainsquartersblog.com, it would have taken 100 men working 12 hours a day for two weeks to shlep the stuff away. And that would surely have been spotted by somebody.

It seems far more likely that Saddam had the materiel moved. According to one report, the United Nations last visited the facility on March 8, a week before the war began. But the U.N.'s major report on the facility came out two months earlier. Saddam could have been moving the materiel out over the course of the two months before the war began — maybe into Syria. Who knows? That's the point. Who knows? Certainly not the Times. Certainly not John Kerry. But they'll both do or say what they feel they need to do or say to secure the result they want on Nov. 2.

The Sun publishes a house editorial today as a follow-up to Thomas Lipscomb's excellent work in uncovering documentation revealing the extent to which the Viet Cong followed and supported John Kerry's work in the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Titled "The Amateur," the Sun invokes the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie Foreign Correspondent as a parallel to John Kerry's experience as a dupe for enemy totalitarians:

One of our favorite movies is the film Alfred Hitchcock made in 1940 called "Foreign Correspondent." It's about how civilization's enemy in what became World War II sought to manipulate a peace movement dubbed "well-meaning amateurs" and through them, the press. We wouldn't want to draw exact parallels to the Vietnam era - or our own wartime drama today - but we couldn't help think of it as we read Thos. Lipscomb's dispatch, issued on our Page 1 yesterday, on how the communists in Hanoi were viewing the activities of John Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

It's impossible to excerpt this editorial and do it justice; it's really a perfect companion piece to Lipscomb's article. The Sun agrees with my conclusion:

Certainly, Mr. Kerry himself has placed Vietnam at the center of his campaign - not only by emphasizing it at the Democratic convention in Boston, but by pledging, as recently as this weekend, to "hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists" with the same energy that he put "into going after the Viet Cong." Our favorite rejoinder to that boast came from Captainsquartersblog.com, which, commenting on Mr. Lipscomb's dispatch, remarked, "The only conclusion that one can draw from the historical record is that John Kerry will chase them to Paris to negotiate our surrender on their terms."

It's quite an honor being mentioned in one of these great newspapers, but twice in one day pretty much guarantees I'll have to butter my head to fit through the office doors today. Be sure to read both articles, and again, if you're not subscribing to the New York Sun, you're not only missing out on some terrific journalism but also an opportunity to support those who support bloggers. (Hat tip: my friends at the Sun.)

Iran Sees John Kerry As Monty Hall

According to Reuters, the Iranian mullahcracy not-so-secretly looks forward to a John Kerry presidency, thanks in part to Kerry's "Let's Make A Deal" rhetoric in regards to Iran's nuclear ambitions:

Iranian officials like to portray U.S. presidential elections as a choice between bad and worse but there is little doubt they would prefer Democratic challenger John Kerry to win next week.

Since President Bush took office the Islamic state has been dubbed an "axis of evil" member, seen U.S. forces mass on its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan and faced concerted U.S. accusations that it has a covert atomic arms program.

In other words, Bush's foreign policy regarding Iran is firmly rooted in reality. Iran has long been the strongest support for Islamofascist terror groups, directly funding Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank/Gaza Strip territories. It had links to al-Qaeda, although no one is sure whether or not those were operational links or strictly diplomatic contacts yet. More ominously, the oil-rich country has pursued nuclear technology which it claims it needs for domestic energy production -- at the same time it launched its new ballistic missile program, which now can hit targets 1,200 miles away.

Kerry, on the other hand, proposes more appeasement:

But the Massachusetts senator's emphasis on a multilateral foreign policy approach and hints he would negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program appeal to the country's bazaar-rooted instincts to bargain its way out of a crisis.

"Logically speaking, everything points to Iran supporting Kerry," said Tehran-based political analyst Mahmoud Alinejad.

"If Bush is re-elected it will be on a platform of a radical strategy to democratize the Middle East, if necessary by force. At least what Kerry has hinted at provides the possibility for Iran to get out of this deadlock, to buy some more time."

The question is, time for what? Enough time to build its nuclear devices so that it can effectively deter any attempt to stop its spread of Islamic terrorism? The Iranian mullahcracy is deeply dangerous to the region and to the security of the West. Giving them more time to perfect and implement their strategies does not sound like an intelligent foreign policy; it smells of surrender. The Iranians can smell it from half a world away. Hopefully, Americans will notice the stench before November 2nd.

Florida Unions, Attorneys Argue Minorities Are More Incompetent

People need to understand the difference between disenfranchisement and incompetence in terms of voting and registration. Disenfranchisement results from direct government action in denying valid voters the right to cast their ballots. Incompetence is a potential voter who isn't bright or thorough enough to fill out a ballot or registration card correctly. Florida unions and attorneys were disappointed yesterday to find this out in federal court, where they offered the odd and specious argument that minorities are more incompetent than others:

Florida election officials will not be required to process incomplete voter registration forms for the presidential election, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King said the three prospective voters for whom the lawsuit was filed did not have the legal standing to pursue the case, which was backed by the AFL-CIO. ... Attorneys with the Washington-based Advancement Project said the plaintiffs would appeal by Friday. The group argued that the rejections disqualified more than 14,000 people across the state, with a disparate effect on minorities. Nearly 45 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks.

It makes no difference if the registrations came from blacks, whites, Greens, or left-handed mauvish CPAs. If the registrant didn't complete the form correctly, they need to refile their registrations. Part of voting is the responsibility to make sure one is registered to vote properly. With registration requirements as lax as they are these days, how much of a hurdle does that present?

Playing the race card is especially despicable and condescending. Does the AFL-CIO really intend to argue to an appellate judge than minorities are inherently unable to take responsibility for their own voter registration? Perhaps they will tell the judge that filling out a form with check boxes presents too difficult a challenge for the African-Americans in Duval County, an argument that minorities throughout Florida should detest. It's nothing more than an incitement for Democrats to arftificially undermine the results of the election.

If a voter of any ethnicity cannot be trusted to properly fill out a voter registration card, especially with the relaxed requirements now in place, we surely cannot be better off by allowing them to pull the lever on November 2nd.

Happy (Belated) Blogiversary To The Commissar!

I missed this when it occurred, but it's never too late to sa yHappy Blogiversary ... or at least I hope not! The Commissar at Politburo Diktat celebrated his first blogiversary, or as he put it, the October Revolution. The Commissar has been a great friend to me in blogging, and has developed the Politburo Diktat into not only one of the best satirical political blogs but also one of the best for flat-out analysis. Both of us started at the same time, and we both have had tremendous success, and he's sent a lot of encouragement (and readers) my way.

All of the proletariat salutes you, Commissar!

Another Attack On GOP Offices

In yet another attack on a GOP office, classy Democrats sprayed vulgarities on a large campaign sign in front of the Hollister, CA headquarters and have stolen Bush/Cheney signs throughout San Benito County (hat tip: Drudge):

Sometime between Oct. 12 and Oct. 16 unknown suspects vandalized a large Bush/Cheney campaign sign posted in the 700 block of McCray Street, spraying vulgarities denouncing the president, according to a Hollister police report.

Volunteers found the sign on Saturday, Oct. 16 and immediately took it down, said Jeannie Glass, San Benito County Republican Party volunteer.

Including several obscenities splashed across Bush and Cheney’s name, at the bottom the vandals sprayed the “F” word followed by the words Texas and Florida.

“To combine that word with Florida and Texas, someone understood the past election and where Bush is from, which is what made it interesting,” Glass said. “It wasn’t just kids.”

As Michelle Malkin has written extensively, this appears to be a coordinated, nationwide effort on the part of some Democrats to intimidate Republican activists and voters. It's not likely to work in Hollister, with which the Captain has more than a passing familiarity. Jeannie Glass is the Captain's cousin, and her family has been in Hollister for generations as cattle ranchers. She and her neighbors deal with much tougher issues than a couple of F-words written by classless and immature cretins.

I suspect that what Democrats around the country have done by their strong-arm tactics is create a silent movement towards Bush. People may be less likely to post their lawn signs or put bumper stickers on their car, but they're going to be determined to make sure that the goons don't get elected. I don't know the people of Hollister very well, but if my family up there are representative at all, the Democrats' methods in San Benito will damage them for years to come.

NY Times Asks The Wrong Commander

The New York Times busily attempts to shore up its sagging reputation by tracking down the commander of the 101st Airborne unit that arrived at the Al Qaqaa weapons bunker in April 2003. Col. Joseph Anderson tells Jim Dwyer and David Sanger that his troops did not inspect the bunkers at Al Qaqaa, but that's no longer the issue:

White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.

But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

First of all, the issue is whether they secured the site and the ingress/egress to it, since the argument from the Times and IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei has been that lax security on the part of Americans led to 380 tons of materiel being looted. Second of all, two contemporaneous reports show that the 3ID had already investigated the Al Qaqaa site and found nothing under IAEA seal. The CBS report -- the Times' reporting partner on this story -- makes clear that the 3ID knew that the site had been suspected of WMD production and/or storage; the Fox report confirms the same information and gives even greater detail. Both articles were published on April 4, 2003, six days before Col. Anderson showed up at Al Qaqaa.

The Times continues to flail desperately to keep from drowning, but like anyone who panics in deep water, they're doing more damage than good. It's now clear that Sanger and Dwyer have no clue as to which American military units showed up first at Al Qaqaa, even though the information obviously exists in Lexis-Nexis and probably could be found through Google. Hell, their CBS partners wrote one of the stories, and it still hasn't occured to either to read the earlier reports.

This demonstrates the desperation that the mainstream media -- CBS and the New York Times in particular -- feel about the election and their fading impact on it. Journalistic incompetence can't explain all of the elements of this debacle; editors supposedly exist to keep this from happening, but just like Rathergate, the editors appear to be up to their eyeballs in the muck. For instance, 60 Minutes intended to air this bit of yellow journalism two days before the election, interesting timing for a news organization supposedly dedicated to truth. If the danger to America and its military forces is so acute, why wait a full week to report it?

The American media have plenty to answer for at the end of this election cycle. When the Paper of Record and Edward R. Murrow's news organization both reveal themselves as whores for the Democrats, the entire industry that takes their cues from them becomes suspect.

Surprise! Media Treated Bush Worse Than Kerry In The Stretch

Editor and Publisher reports that an independent study of the media shows that George Bush got more than twice the negative coverage than John Kerry did in October, and that only one in seven stories reported about Bush cast him in a positive light:

A new study for the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism suggests that in the first two weeks of October, during the period of the presidential debates, George W. Bush received much more unfavorable media coverage than Sen. John Kerry.

In the overall sample (which included four newspapers, two cable news networks and the four leading broadcast networks), more than half of all Bush stories were negative in tone, during this period. One-quarter of all Kerry stories were negative, according to the study. ...

In the final accounting, 59% of stories that were mainly about Bush told a mainly negative story, while 25% of Kerry stories played out that way. One in three stories about Kerry were positive, one in seven for Bush.

Editor and Publisher downplays any presumed media bias, saying that part of the negativity related to Bush's performance in the debates and from continuing violence in Iraq. However, the reporting that pushed the idea that Bush lost all three debates when only the first seemed to favor Kerry (until the "global test" line started resonating) demonstrates the bias inherent in the media as well. Regarding Iraq, the media covers the violence well but hardly gives any coverage at all to the massive rebuilding effort that the US has made throughout the entire country. "If it bleeds, it leads" -- that's SOP, but in Iraq it gives a very distorted view of the work the Administration has done there. It would be difficult to accept that some bias is not at work in those editorial decisions as well.

Newspapers tended to be the worst -- their coverage ran 46% negative overall, as opposed to 28% for the broadcast networks and 30% for cable news shows. Compare all of those numbers to the 59% negative rating for President Bush, and the notion that bias plays a small role begins to appear ridiculous. It's supposed to be a coincidence that when covering the President, these outlets suddenly get twice as negative as they do with John Kerry? Doubtful.

CBS Reported Suspicious Powder At Al Qaqaa In April 2003

Alert CQ reader Samuel Silver sent me this article from the archives of CBS News -- the same organization that helped prepped NYTrogate with the New York Times -- which shows that the Third Infantry Division had reached Al Qaqaa and discovered thousands of vials of a mysterious powdered explosive by April 3, 2003 (coincidentally, my birthday):

U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex just south of Baghdad. ... The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa [emph mine -- CE].

Troops of the 3ID discovered thousands of boxes, each with three vials of white powder, the form in which the explosive agents that the IAEA claim went missing were stored. From this description, it sounds as if the material left at Al Qaqaa would have only been samples or starter materials, as storing 380 tons of powdered explosive in vials would have taken most of Baghdad to store.

Nevertheless, the contemporaneous CBS report showed that the 3ID knew what they had at Al Qaqaa and did more than just a cursory look around the joint to go sightseeing. They suspected that the facility held WMD or chemical-weapons manufacturing capability. A bottle labeled "tabun," a nerve agent, was found with a small amount of the chemical inside. The troops also discovered atropine stored at the bunker, an antidote for nerve agents, making them very suspicious of the shells stored at Al Qaqaa.

With all of the pressure on the Bush administration to find WMD, does anyone seriously think for a moment that they left Al Qaqaa without checking for UNSCOM and/or IAEA seals? From the description that CBS gave at the time, the Army took a very close look at the materiel at Al Qaqaa:

The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.

"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said. ...

The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.

The idea that various Army units showed up at the weapons facility and strolled around a few minutes before moving up the road to Baghdad, leaving the lights on and the front door unlocked, looks more and more ridiculous. The Army knew very well what it had found, and it searched the bunkers carefully looking for the most dangerous and high-priority items.

Shame on CBS for not even checking its own archives in order to research their hit piece on Bush. Shame also on the NY Times for not reviewing the embeds for the units in the area during the invasion to verify the contemporaneous reporting. Even if one wants to write a hit piece, doing the proper research should be a basic part of the job.

UPDATE: Several CQ readers also found this story at Fox from April 4, 2003:

U.N. weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex -- most recently on March 8 -- but found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 25 miles south of Baghdad.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-by-5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

Initial reports suggest the powder is an explosive, but tests are still being done, a senior U.S. official said. If confirmed, it would be consistent with what the Iraqis say is the plant's purpose, producing explosives and propellants.

Again, it appears that the 3ID performed much more than a cursory search and came up with laboratory samples of the HMX and/or RDX, but not the massive amounts the IAEA claimed was stored at Al Qaqaa. Fox reported that the Army had plenty of suspicion about that site and thought it likely that the Iraqis had either manufactured or stored WMD there.

Cheney Nails Kerry's Armchair Generalship

All day long, I wondered when the Bush campaign would come out swinging, if not to defend themselves against the spurious charges that the IAEA threw at them with an assist from the New York Times, then to speak out on behalf of the 101st Airborne, whose reputation got trashed in John Kerry's zeal to attack George Bush. Tonight Dick Cheney reminded us yet again why Bush picked him for the Vice Presidency in his pointed response to Kerry's hysterical rantings:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday rejected John Kerry's criticism of the loss of hundreds of tons of explosives in Iraq, saying the toppling Saddam Hussein took thousands of times of that amount of potentially dangerous material out of the former dictator's hands.

"If our troops had not gone into Iraq as John Kerry apparently thinks they should not have, that is 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that would be in the hands of Saddam Hussein, who would still be sitting in his palace instead of jail," the vice president told supporters in his first comment on the controversy that erupted Monday.

So far, though, the campaign and the media still have not addressed the underlying issue of the explosives themselves. If Mohammed ElBaradei thought that 380 tons of HMX and RDX were so dangerous, why did they leave it in Saddam's control? Why, if the material has nuclear-technology implications, did UNSCOM leave it in place without destroying it? The only explanation we've heard to this point is that Saddam promised to use it for civilian construction ... all 380 tons of it. Riiiiiight.

The Bush administration up to now has played this one very cautiously, preferring to defer to the Pentagon. While I understand their reluctance to get nasty in the final seven days, it's time to fight fire with a little fire. No one needs to apologize for passion, and the President could use a little more in his own defense.

The Agenda

The Kerry Spot connects the dots and concludes that IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei’s conveniently-timed memo was motivated by job security concerns. The Kerry Spot notes ElBaradei has held his position since 1997 and his tenure will expire in 2005. When the US government opposed his bid for a third term under the premise that heads of international organizations should not serve more than two terms, ElBaradei penned his 1 Oct 2004 memo pressing Iraq to account for nuclear-related materials once supervised by the IAEA. Guess what happens next!

Then, in a memo that appears to be dated Oct. 10, the Iraqis respond that the explosives are missing… and it just happens to show up on the front page of the New York Times eight days before Election Day. An article that quotes a European diplomat as saying “Dr. ElBaradei is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.”

The Kerry Spot speculates on ElBaradei's motivation:

He’s so concerned, he felt a need to make this issue that he’s been quiet about since spring 2003 and press the Iraqi government for an immediate answer that he knows will make the Bush administration look bad!

One has to wonder - has John Kerry or a member of his staff indicated they would keep ElBaradei around for another term? We know ElBaradei wants a change in U.S. policy on his third term.

ElBaradei is doing everything he can to help Kerry. What’s in it for ElBaradei?

I agree that ElBaradei’s sudden concern is suspect, especially considering the overwhelming evidence that the explosives had been removed from the Al-Qaqaa military base before the US troops arrived. (See Captain Ed’s excellent post below for more on this topic.)

We can guess what’s in it for ElBaradei, and I think we know what’s in it for Kerry.

Insurgents Hauling 380 Tons Of Explosives Not Exactly A Covert Act

Unfortunately for the New York Times, no one gave a thought about the logistics of the notion that small bands of insurgents made off with 380 tons of explosives under the noses of the Coalition with no one noticing. CQ reader and retired Army Reserve Captain Ian Dodgson got paid to think about logistics, and he did some "cocktail-napkin" math that escaped the geniuses at the Paper of Record:

We're familiar with the NY Times story and the IAEA accusations that the "missing" explosives were looted from the Al-Qaqaa military base due to US negligence in securing the facility.

If I were a guerilla "looter" and I was planning such an operation from a military standpoint, here's what the task would require:

Assumptions:

-Each "looter" could haul comfortably about 25 pounds per trip to a truck. (of course after 12 hours that would require superhuman endurance)

-I'd allow 5 minutes per round trip to the truck

-Work day 12 hours

-assume security breaks down 1 week after war starts (that allows 2
weeks before the US troops arrive)

-each pickup truck can carry about 1/4 ton of explosives (I did a quick calculation based upon the dimensions and weight of a block of C-4 and the dimensions of an average small pickup) and it takes 15 minutes to either load or unload the truck.

-the secure hiding place for 380 tons of explosives is 30 minutes away.

Calculations:

-380 tons / [((12hrs/dayX60min/hr) / (5 min per load)) X (25 lbs per load) X 14 days] = 15 loaders X 2 = 30 loaders/unloaders

-30 loaders/unloaders times 200% for breaks, rest, inefficiency, etc. = 60 loaders and unloaders.

-380 tons / [(12hrs/day / 1 hr/round trip,load,unload) X (.25 tons per trip) X 14 days] = 10 trucks and drivers X 1.5 (contingency) = 15 trucks and drivers.

-4 trucks + 10-15 men to supply water, food and other logistical
requirements

Total = 19-20 trucks, 90 men working continuously for two weeks to "loot" facility.

Bottom line this operation would take the resources of AN ENTIRE COMPANY (approx. 100 men) OVER TWO WEEKS, good Intel to know exactly where the "right" explosives were hidden and a means of breaching huge steel doors and concrete of an ASP.

And all of this would have to be done in an area with numerous intel overflights that would be looking for exactly this kind of activity in the combat zone, and not get noticed at all. Like so much of what the New York Times, CBS, and the Kerry campaign feeds us ... it just doesn't add up.

UPDATE: Cpt. Ian just got on Hugh Hewitt -- congratulations!

Massachusetts Legislator, Democrat, Catholic: Vote Bush

In an interesting opinion piece for today's New Hampshire Union-Leader, Massachusetts legislator Brian Golden (D) endorses George Bush for President. Golden explains that he simply cannot support Kerry as a practicing Catholic:

The Democrats offer Sen. John Kerry, a professed Catholic. You may have heard that Kerry’s own Democratic colleagues, by some creative measure, call him the “most Catholic” senator. That’s like calling Tony Soprano a devout Catholic because he shows up at Mass most Sundays and throws some bills in the collection plate. Catholics know better.

For 20 years, on matters most fundamental to Catholics, Kerry has been consistently wrong. Kerry was one of only 14 senators to vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. This year, he opposed the federal marriage amendment, which would give the American people a voice in the definition of marriage, rather than leave it to the whims of activist judges like those in Massachusetts. Kerry has even castigated church leaders for weighing-in on the marriage issue, calling it “inappropriate” and a breach of the “separation of church and state.”

In his first Senate campaign, Kerry promised that he would vote against “any restrictions on age, consent, funding restrictions, or any law to limit access to abortion.” That’s a promise he’s kept. He is among the most fervent supporters of abortion in the Senate, repeatedly voting for taxpayer funding of abortions, against parental notification for a minor’s abortion, and against a ban on partial birth abortion. He voted against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which treats a violent crime against a pregnant woman as a crime against two people—the unborn and the mother. Even in Massachusetts, Kerry’s positions are far from the mainstream.

That's some record for a presidential candidate whose stump speech of the week insists that his faith informs everything he does. As Golden correctly notes, Kerry's faith has been AWOL during his 20-year Senate career. Golden isn't the only one who's noticed this, either; Planned Parenthood issued its first-ever presidential endorsement to Kerry this year.

As I wrote last week to a book editor of a major newspaper, it would be different had Kerry not told us earlier that he was a faithful Catholic and believed life begins at conception. For one thing, being a faithful Catholic means supporting the basic doctrines of the Church, especially the core beliefs about life and its value. Had Kerry positioned himself as more of a libertarian with a fundamental disagreement about the nature of life, then he would be a Catholic in name only -- which would be his choice, and not one to fault. But Kerry instead tried to eat his cake and have it too, and that's fundamentally dishonest.

If he stated an ambivalence about the beginning of life or a clear belief that it doesn't start until birth, then votes to legalize abortion or take a laissez-faire approach to it would be consistent and understandable. It wouldn't be Catholic, but it would be logical. However, Kerry professes to believe that life begins at conception and that he is a faithful Catholic, a combination which would require him to use his votes to protect life. Refusing to do so is sinful, according to the Church, especially if one professes to believe in the Church.

My admiration and respect goes to Brian Golden, who must feel himself a lonely voice indeed in Massachusetts. He put his faith and his convictions ahead of party politics and endorsed the man who he feels most closely matches his own values.

Did Kerry Plagiarize Parts Of "The New War"?

The New York Sun reports in its second blockbuster of the day that John Kerry plagiarized at least 11 passages in his 1997 book, The New War that he has used as a campaign reference for his presidential bid, as well as in other campaign materials:

An academic researcher has found 11 passages in Senator Kerry's published writings that appear to have been taken from other works without attribution, though experts disagree about whether the copying should be considered plagiarism.

Six of the passages come from Mr. Kerry's 1997 book, "The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's National Security." All bear some similarity to news accounts that preceded publication of the book.

The Sun's Josh Gerstein lists several suspicious passages from both Kerry's 1997 book and the Kerry/Edwards campaign book, "Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home and Respected in the World," which presumably was written at their behest by staffers. In the latter, this pairing caught the eye of a graduate student who declined to be indentified, saying only that he had no political affiliations:

"In many states, individual farmers and ranchers lease their property to wind power companies and receive an annual payment for having wind turbines on their property. With the right leadership, this could become a 'cash crop' for many other farmers and ranchers from around the country and stabilize rural economies," they wrote.

An Energy Department fact sheet published in January 2003 reads, "In many states, individual farmers and ranchers lease their property to wind power companies and receive an annual payment for having one or more wind turbines on their property. This could become a predictable 'cash crop' for many other farmers and ranchers across the country, and help to boost farm and ranching incomes and stabilize rural economies."

Of course, quoting passages from government fact sheets is perfectly permissible, as is doing the same from any other published source -- as long as you attribute the work. In Kerry's case, however, both books appear to have lifted whole paragraphs and arguments straight out of outside sources that never were acknowledged or footnoted, a practice that would get one expelled at Yale and most other reputable colleges. It represents at best an intellectal laziness that belies his image of a supposedly superior intellect, and at worst underscores a fundamental dishonesty that has erupted numerous times on the campaign trail, with Cambodian Christmases, magic hats, and phony meetings with the "entire UN Security Council".

When Senator Joe Biden -- a rabid Kerry partisan -- lifted parts of Neil Kinnock's speeches for his own without attribution, the Delaware Democrat's presidential ambitions quickly headed for oblivion. Too bad today's Democrats have neither the intellectual toughness nor the moral character to hold Kerry to account for his dishonesty.

Black Rock Dodges A Bullet This Time

In a story rich with irony, the Los Angeles Times reported last night -- before NBC made the Al-Qaqaa story moot -- that CBS had the story first but couldn't nail it down before the New York Times published it:

CBS News' "60 Minutes" landed a major story last week: the disappearance in Iraq of a large cache of explosives supposed to be under guard by the U.S. military. But the network nevertheless found itself in the journalistically awkward position of playing catch-up when it wasn't able to get the piece on the air as soon as its reporting partner, the New York Times, which made the report its lead story Monday.

Breaking the story would have been a welcome coup for CBS News as it seeks to emerge from the cloud cast by its use of unverified documents in reporting on President Bush's 1970s military service.

Unnoticed in all of the attention given to the NY Times was CBS's broadcast of essentially the same story, based on its own reporting, which turned out to be just as incomplete as the NYT. The Gray Lady graciously gave its partner some of the credit/blame:

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it."

"That's what happened, and it was only fair to credit them," said Lawrie Mifflin, executive director of television and radio for the New York Times.

I suppose that Andrew Heyward felt appreciative of the gesture yesterday morning. Today, he must be grateful that his network didn't break the story as planned, as it would have forced Viacom to step in once again to rescue its once-golden news division from complete ignominy. Isn't it funny how congratulatory fluff pieces like this one at the LA Times can so quickly become journalistic autopsies?

In the future, the grown-ups should make CBS and the New York Times sit apart from each other. It's obvious that they can't work together without someone getting hurt.

Viet Cong Approved Of Kerry's Hunting Methods

Thomas Lipscomb reports for the New York Sun on the discovery of Viet Cong documents that show the VC had its eye on the young John Kerry, and not because he was second to no man in hunting them down. The documents, first archived in 1971, show that the Communists at the least followed Kerry's antiwar activities with approval and encouragement:

The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.

The documents - one dubbed a "circular" and the other a "directive" - were captured in 1971 and are part of a trove of material from the war currently stored at the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Originally organized by Douglas Pike, a major scholar who is now deceased, the archive contains more than 20 million documents. Many are available online at the Virtual Vietnam Archive and, as the election has heated up, have been the focus of a scramble for insights into Mr. Kerry's anti-war activities. The Circular and the Directive are listed as items numbered 2150901039b and 2150901041 respectively. Their authenticity was confirmed by Stephen Maxner, archivist at the Vietnam Archive. ...

The CDEC Viet Cong document titled "Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US" notes, "The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly (VC/NVN) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks." It also notes that "The seven-point peace proposal (of the SVN Provisional Revolutionary Government) [the Viet Cong proposal advanced by one of its envoys, Madame Binh, operating out of Paris] not only solved problems concerning the release of US prisoners but also motivated the people of all walks of life and even relatives of US pilots detained in NVN to participate in the antiwar movement."

John Kerry made two trips to Paris to meet with Madame Binh (he acknowledges only one), and the Communists who at the time were our enemy believed that they were providing material assistance to Kerry's antiwar organization, among others. Kerry's groups, the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and the Winter Soldier investigation, also actively sought out relatives of US pilots as described in the document. Kerry personally led demonstrations in 1971 on behalf of Binh's seven-point peace proposal, publicly castigating Richard Nixon for disregarding it:

On July 23, 1971, The New York Times reported that Mr. Kerry held a demonstration in Washington in support of the "seven-point peace proposal" and, according to the Times, "Mr. Kerry, who is 27 years, introduced wives, parents and sisters of prisoners to plead for support."

The Times's dispatch stated that Mr. Kerry charged "...the latest Vietcong peace offer in Paris, which promises the release of prisoners as American troops are withdrawn, is being ignored by Mr. Nixon..."

Does this mean that Kerry accepted marching orders from the Viet Cong in 1971? No, or at least the documents discovered so far don't reach that conclusion explicitly. It does show, at the least, that John Kerry was a dupe of the VC/Hanoi Communists of the first order. The best one can conclude from the record is that the VC used Kerry as a pawn to undermine American resolve to fight the war, which allowed them to push the US out of Southeast Asia and eventually resulted in a Communist bloodbath in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Kerry told us last week that he would go after terrorists with the same enthusiasm that he went after the Viet Cong. The only conclusion that one can draw from the historical record is that John Kerry will chase them to Paris to negotiate our surrender on their terms.

UPDATE: Mr. Lipscomb was kind enough to drop me an e-mail with a link to the Virtual Vietnam Archive, an online repository of all sorts of documents regarding the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The Circular and the Directive are listed as items numbered 2150901039b and 2150901041, respectively.

The Gray Lady, Caught In Amber

Like most paleolithic creatures whose fossilized remains come to the light of day, the New York Times' integrity gets put on display in its own editorial page today as the Gray Lady pontificates about the Theft That Never Was:

James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in Iraq that the United States failed to secure. The United Nations inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United States took over the job. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so bent on proving his theory of lightning warfare that he ignored the generals who said an understaffed and underarmed invasion force could rush to Baghdad, but couldn't hold the rest of the country, much less guard things like the ammunition dump.

Iraqi and American officials cannot explain how some 760,000 pounds of explosives were spirited away from a well-known site just 30 miles from Baghdad. But they were warned. Within weeks of the invasion, international weapons inspectors told Washington that the explosives depot was in danger and that terrorists could help themselves "to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

And as we know now, and as the Times should have tried to find out before embarassing themselves on their own front pages and editorial section, that story has been proven false. NBC's embedded reporters confirmed that all of the material about which Pinch's partisans wrote had already disappeared before American troops arrived at Al Qaqaa. Unfortunately for the Times, that story broke around 9 pm ET, which was too late for the Times to pull either its editorial or David Sanger's follow-up piece that continued the hysterical and false trope.

But let's step back from the stench of the Times' reporting on this subject for a moment. If this material was so damned dangerous, why doesn't the Times' editors ask why UNSCOM and the IAEA allowed it to remain in Saddam's hands? They lead off with this statement:

President Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

But the UN allowed Saddam to keep these dangerous weapons, which the Times reported breathlessly on Monday could be used as shape charges for nuclear weapons and one pound of which could bring down an airliner. Why leave such material in the hands of a man who had committed genocide, invaded a neighboring state to corner the market on oil, and had established ties to terrorists? The IAEA claimed that Saddam told them he would use it for civilian construction projects, that's why.

If we are to follow the Times' logic, the weapons were not dangerous at all and would have never ended up in the hands of a madman while the IAEA allowed Saddam control of the explosives, but removing Saddam's control suddenly made them doomsday weapons and their availability a dire threat. If that makes sense to you, your name is Joe Lockhart or Pinch Sulzberger.

Al-Qaqaa demonstrates the ineffectiveness and incompetence of UNSCOM's "inspections" regime. They left highly dangerous explosives in the hands of a genocidal dicatator with ties to terrorists, who took his last opportunity to spread the wealth to God know who before we finally ended the 12-year Iraqi quagmire in March 2003. The Times' late and rather self-serving crocodile tears over the failure of UNSCOM to destroy these high-tech explosives in the twelve years they had before the invasion sound as false as their reporting.

Kerry Campaign Keeps Running With Discredited Story

One can understand the reluctance of the New York Times to backpedal on what it thought was a sure-fire takedown of George Bush, eight days before the election, even though their reporters and editors wound up only doing a half-ass job of research. (They undoubtedly did not plan on having NBC make them look like idiots.) It's difficult to understand, however, why the Kerry campaign and especially Joe Lockhart continue to push such an egregious and thoroughly demonstrable lie, as CNN reports in its update to the Al Qaqaa debacle:

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The Bush campaign fired its own salvo at the Kerry campaign after NBC's report late last night, scolding Kerry for having run with the Rumor Of The Day without also having done any checking to see if the story was true. Kerry had called the missing explosives "one of the great blunders of this administration" without explaining how he would have done anything differently or guaranteeing that he would have secured 100% of the loose munitions in Iraq.

And here's where the Kerry campaign gets stupid. Joe Lockhart issued a quick reply to the Bush campaign which demonstrates that (a) Lockhart can't read, and (b) the Kerry campaign concerns itself with rumor and innuendo rather than facts and truth:

But Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart fired back with a statement of his own, accusing the Bush campaign of "distorting" the NBC News report.

"In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame," Lockhart said. "It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report.

Unless Lockhart is a practicing ironist, which might be a side effect of working for Bill Clinton, that statement contains more projection than an IMAX theater. Kerry and Lockhart got caught up in yet another media meltdown, and as with Rathergate, having jumped on the bandwagon within milliseconds of its publication find it difficult to jump off now that it's headed over a cliff. Instead, Lockhart accuses Bush of not admitting a "disastrous" mistake and oddly asserts that they distorted the NBC report. NBC stated flatly that the explosives weren't there when the troops showed up at Al Qaqaa, and its own reporters confirmed it. So who's distorting what?

Lockhart, Kerry, and the port side of the blogosphere can continue their deathgrip on the failing reputation of the Paper of Record in order to keep from drowning in this debacle, but witnesses on the ground at the time -- disinterested, third-party witnesses -- have proved the Gray Lady to be little different than a common streetwalker, with the DNC as its pimp.

NY Times Keeps Running With Discredited Story

Despite the NBC News report that told America that its own reporters verified the HMX and RDX had been removed from the Al-Qaqaa bunker in Iraq before American soldiers ever got there, the New York Times continues to push its discredited "gotcha" on its front page:

The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as "one of the great blunders of Iraq" and said President Bush's "incredible incompetence" had put American troops at risk. ...

Yet even as Mr. Bush pressed his case, his aides tried to explain why American forces had ignored a series of warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, which was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times.

In several sessions with reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, alternately insisted that Mr. Bush "wants to make sure that we get to the bottom of this" and tried to distance the president from knowledge of the issue, saying Mr. Bush was informed of the disappearance only within the last 10 days. White House officials said they could not explain why warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency in May 2003 about the vulnerability of the stockpile to looting never resulted in action. At one point, Mr. McClellan pointed out that "there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Times write David Sanger never bothers to mention the fact that NBC's report earlier tonight essentially negated the entire thrust of their argument (also at Drudge):

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

As I posted earlier, this confirms that the materials had already been moved or looted from the site before American troops arrived at Al-Qaqaa. After finding the IAEA seals already broken and no high-priority materiel on site, the Americans moved on to more pressing problems -- like combat and securing lines of communication.

The bigger question we should ask is why the Times feels the need to push this story so hard. It's not exactly like Rathergate in that no fraudulent documents have been used to rationalize the story, but it feels like the Times may be trying very hard to find anything that will embarass the President in the final week of campaigning. In this case, the Times rushed a story to its pages without doing any proper research on the underlying facts, and wound up getting smacked down by NBC.

It's not the first time the paper has gone on a political crusade, although Pinch Sulzberger assured us that the dark days of Howell Raines were long gone, along with obsessions like the Augusta Masters. It appears that managing editor Jill Abramson has indulged another obsession -- defeating George Bush. This agenda-driven journalism threatens to deflate the Paper of Record's reputation just as surely as Rathergate did CBS, fake documents or no.

The Times needs to place a moratorium on further articles on missing weapons until it does proper research, and it owes its readers and the Americans in Iraq working munitions demolitions a big apology.

UPDATE: Lori from Polipundit wants your help in naming the scandal.

CNN/Gallup: Bush Up By Eight In Florida

In what looks like an outlier from an otherwise fairly reliable polling group, Gallup and CNN report that George Bush has opened an eight-point lead over John Kerry in Florida and moved past the 50-point mark:

President Bush outpolled Democratic challenger John Kerry by 8 points among likely Florida voters surveyed in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday, but other polls indicated a tighter race.

In the CNN poll, Bush had 51 percent and Kerry 43 percent among likely voters interviewed. The result was similar among registered voters: 51 percent for Bush and 42 percent for Kerry. Independent candidate Ralph Nader drew the support of 1 percent of respondents in both categories. ...

The results were consistent with the last poll Gallup conducted in Florida, which found in late September that 52 percent of respondents chose Bush and 43 percent Kerry. Yet it was notably different from three recent statewide polls, all of which showed differences well within the margins of error, indicating no clear leader.

The sample on this poll is larger than most statewide polls, with a pool of 768 likely voters among a total of 909 registered voters. It clashes with polls done at the same time by SurveyUSA with a similar sample, and smaller ones by Zogby and Rassmussen. Gallup hasn't posted its internals yet, but these results would mean that the race hasn't moved at all in the past month in the Sunshine State, a remarkable proposition.

Earlier this week, I theorized that polls would start showing significant shifts; methodologies will get tweaked to ensure the best final prediction of the outcome. The pollster who comes closest to the eventual outcome gets bragging rights for the next two years, and despite whatever biases may or may not have been in play before, the only prize that matters this week is getting it right. Watch the major polls this week to see how much convergence this competitive pressure creates.

Just A Little Too Convenient

Egypt claims that the mastermind of the Taba bombing inadvertently killed himself in the attack's biggest blast, the AP reports tonight:

A Palestinian refugee plotted the coordinated bombings targeting Israeli tourists at resorts in the Sinai and accidentally killed himself while carrying out the deadliest blast, Egyptian authorities said Monday.

Discounting the theory of al-Qaida involvement, an Interior Ministry statement said Ayad Said Saleh was motivated by the deteriorating situation in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, which his relatives fled in 1967, and carried out the attack with the help of local residents.

But security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press they believed the Oct. 7 attacks on the Taba Hilton and two beach camps packed with Israelis may have been carried out with help from Islamic groups based outside Egypt, though not necessarily Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida group.

It certainly makes Egypt's investigation easier if they can lay the entire enterprise on a dead Palestinian and not, say, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or an al-Qaeda operative. One of the latter conclusions would lead to uncomfortable questions as to how badly infiltrated the Egyptian security apparatus has become with Islamic terrorists, or at the least call into question their competency. No, having a dead man at the head of the operation makes everything a lot simpler for Hosni Mubarak.

Of course, one question that would go unanswered is how a Palestinian terrorist freedom fighter got so much explosive into Egypt, and why he decided to attack Egyptian assets rather than an Israeli target.

380 Tons Of Explosives Missing -- But When?

The New York Times has created a storm of controversy with its lengthy and detailed reporting of 380 tons of high explosives that disappeared from the Al-Qaqaa munitions bunker in Iraq (also CNN):

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

However, that last statement isn't quite accurate. The Administration acknowledged that it disappeared after the last IAEA inspection, which occurred before the invasion. After the US invaded Iraq and visited Al-Qaqaa, they checked for but saw no IAEA seals and bypassed the bunker for more critical missions. That difference is critical, as it directly impacts on who moved the munitions, when, and to where. Many have speculated that the WMD Saddam supposedly retained made its way to Syria in a series of truck convoys spotted just before the invasion began, and Syria has not allowed weapons inspectors to determine whether they have Saddam's WMD. If the WMD did not exist, the trucks could have hauled the contents of Al-Qaqaa just as easily, and far less traceably.

No one doubts that 380 tons of high-tech explosive is a big, big problem. But the Times article fails to put the issue into its proper perspective; the US and its coalition partners have been securing and destroying loose munitions ever since the invasion, as fast as they can. My friend Mike, a Navy SEAL and a contractor in Iraq, worked on this mission during his time there, and described the process in his letters home to his son:

When Daddy first came to Iraq it was estimated that there was more than 2 million tons of ammunition stored in hundreds of storage places called ‘caches’. We may not have that much ammunition in our own country.

Most of this ammunition could not even be used by the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein and most has no use to the new military of Free Iraq. Saddam’s corrupt government sold or gave lots of it away to terrorists. Today terrorists try to steal the ammunition, so they can use it to kill innocent people.

Some of it is used to make bombs that they plant in places where there are a lot of people. Other ammunition, like this rocket, is ready to launch right out of the container. These kinds of rockets are launched on our bases and convoys by bad people every day.

So Daddy’s team goes to where the ammunition is and we keep it safe until big trucks come. Then we go out to the desert far away from people and stack the ammo close together, we ‘prime’ it with special explosives ... and then we blow it up.

So let's keep in mind that when we're talking about 380 tons of ammunition, it represents 0.019% of the estimated amount of explosives and munitions that confronted the US at the beginning of the invasion. As Mike makes clear, it will take years to find, secure, and destroy all of these caches, and the Coalition had to prioritize the sites very quickly on their arrival. Absent any IAEA seals, they did what common sense dictated: the US moved its troops into positions where they could fight the enemy and secure communications.

Most egregiously, the failure to protect less than 0.02% of the total estimated munitions in Iraq has been seized upon by Kerry's campaign as an example of "incompetence":

Reacting to the IAEA announcement on Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry said the "incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be."

These hysterical ravings from the Democrats should convince voters that anyone this panicky cannot possibly be trusted with any kind of command authority over our military, let alone guide us in an asymmetrical war with Islamic terrorists and the countries that sponsor them.

UPDATE: The guys at Pandagon have a rather juvenile response:

Only .02% of all explosives...wow. In 2001, there were 5,967,780 flights. The September 11th attacks constituted four of those. That constitutes a proportion so infinitessimally small that it's almost like none of the flights in 2001 were hijacked at all - it's like the attacks never happened.

Why doesn't anyone ever focus on the fact that 99.9999994% (or so) of all flights in America in 2001 were perfectly safe? Why are we so preoccupied with those oh-so-few flights that killed a few thousand people?

Um...yeah, congratulations, Jesse -- now you understand why playing defense against these terrorists is so frickin' stupid. You can't possibly guarantee total security in such a vast aviation industry, so rather than wait for the terrorists to come after you, you go after them first -- the terrorists and everyone who funds and shelters them. You force them to come out in their backyard to minimize the chances that they'll come into yours.

Putting aside the fact that no one knows when these munitions disappeared, the fact that they were still there after 12 years of UN inspections and sanctions establishes the futility of the entire UNSCOM process. (They left them piled up in these bunkers because Saddam told them he would use them in civilian construction projects. Really.) And if we hadn't invaded Iraq, we wouldn't be faced with 380 tons of missing munitions -- we'd be facing the entire stockpile of 2 million tons, distributed to whomever Saddam pleased.

If we capture, control, and destroy 99.98% of all the munitions in Iraq, I'd say we'd done a pretty good job. I'd like it to be perfect, and I'd like to hear specifically how the Pandagon gang would guarantee that.

UPDATE II: Goodness, I love being proved right:

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

So we were there on April 10, 2003, and the HMX and RDX were already gone -- which was why the IAEA seals were broken. And why do we know this? Because NBC was embedded with the troops and saw it for themselves.

Do you suppose the New York Times will run a front-page article with that information for tomorrow's edition? Doubtful.

Down The Stretch

CQ reader Alex N. wrote me last night with a passionate plea:

Despite the fact that I will be defending my PhD dissertation in the next 2 weeks, I will volunteer for the Bush/Cheney campaign in the days before the election. That's why I'm still at work at midnight on a Sunday. I have never been active in any political campaign before, but this one is just too important to lose. I think - barring a terrorist attack, an October surprise, and massive election fraud - this election and its aftermath will be decided by whoever wins the voter turnout battle. That's why I'm going to be volunteering in the 72 hours before the election.

As the Captain of this ship, you have the ability to influence your loyal crew. I certainly respect your opinion a lot. So, to get to the point: I was wondering if you could write a story pointing out the importance of conservative voter turnout, and encouraging people to do what I did, that's to say, donate some of their time despite the fact that we are all really busy? I, for one, would really appreciate it to see the results of my own efforts multiplied a thousand fold.

Alex nails this point. Folks, we have eight days to do whatever we can to deliver the vote for George Bush and whomever we support in our local races. We can donate more money, but at this point in the race, personal effort means more than cash. We need to start finding ways to get our fellow conservatives to get to the polls on November 2nd. On Saturday, after our radio show, Mitch, Saint Paul, The Elder, and I all went to our local Bush/Cheney HQ and made phone calls to get volunteers for the GOP's 96-hour push. Elder and I signed up fifteen people in two hours, and Mitch and Saint Paul did the same. We multiplied our effort by seven, and that's the kind of force multiplication we will need to get people to the polls on Election Day.

Here's the order -- find your local Republican campaign headquarters and volunteer your time for the 96-hour plan. You can deliver door hangers, make phone calls, drive people to the polls who can't get there on their own, or serve as poll watchers on Election Day. You can bet that our opponents have their ducks in a row for the final week, and if we want to compete we all need to sacrifice some of our time. I don't know about you, but I'd hate to wake up to find out that we lost the election and say to myself, "I could have done a couple of hours making calls instead of watching the Vikings last Sunday."

Work hard, get the vote out, participate -- that's how Republicans win elections. Good luck.

UPDATE: If you're not sure how to volunteer, start here. The campaign will then contact you to get you scheduled to help out in the final three days before the election.

UPDATE II: Via my good friend Patrick at Georgewbush.com, he suggests going here instead of the earlier link. It may take you to the same place. If it's not working, try doing a white pages search for your local GOP office, and call to volunteer.

Chrenkoff: The Iraq That Goes Unnoticed

Arthur Chrenkoff has a great column in today's OpinionJournal (also on his blog) that he e-mailed to me this morning regarding the progress in Iraq. When you read his column, you won't recognize the Iraq he describes if your information has come strictly from the mainstream media:

There are two Iraqs.

The one we more often get to see and read about is a dangerous place, full of exploding cars, kidnapped foreigners and deadly ambushes. The reconstruction is proceeding at a snail's pace, frustration boils over and tensions - political, ethnic, religious - crackle in the air like static electricity before a storm.

The other Iraq is a once prosperous and promising country of twenty-four million people, slowly recovering from physical and moral devastation of totalitarian rule. It's a country whose people are slowly beginning to stand on their own feet, grasp the opportunities undreamed of only two years ago, and dream of catching up on three decades of lost time.

His post is far too complex to excerpt here. Go read the whole thing, and ask yourself why we're not hearing this from our media in the run-up to the presidential election.

Redstate Explains Why Kerry Story Matters

Quite a bit of the blogosphere has reacted with a shrug to the Washington Times article this morning about John Kerry's UNSC Fantasy Camp. The general reaction thus far is, So what? We all know that Kerry lies. Another verified instance of this seems to appeal less to the hardened political junkies than it should. The blog that helped break the story, Redstate.org, explains why this matters to America:

After a public lifetime of anti-Americanism and fecklessness, Kerry knows that he needs drive home the five points listed above in order to convince the American people of his fitness to represent and lead our nation abroad. How to square this with that? How to explain the big lie? How to dismiss the appropriation of -- and believe us, the insult to -- these nations with whom Kerry will purportedly work and ally? How to pretend that this is the act of a man laying claim as a central campaign theme the pretense to superior diplomacy, and yes, honesty? How to explain that nettlesome Iraq war resolution vote now? What does John Kerry say? Does he forthrightly acknowledge his error? Or, like the loudmouthed teenager caught bragging about romantic conquests never made, does he simply pretend it never happened?

Redstate has an extensive list of the occasions that Kerry trotted out this lie in order to increase his sense of importance in foreign affairs and a much longer analysis of why they say this lie matters to the presidential election. They also note that Kerry threw Germany in at one point in his claims, forgetting that Germany didn't join the UNSC until well after the vote on Resolution 1441.

I agree with Trevino on this, and I want to emphasize again why I believe this story matters. We have a presidential candidate who has repeatedly accused George Bush of lying to the American public on the thinnest of evidence, and yet Kerry felt no compunction about telling this lie directly to the cameras during a presidential debate. Kerry spent the past week accusing Bush of using scare tactics to get re-elected, and yet Kerry has spent the past several weeks spreading the lies that Bush has secret plans to start a military draft and to steal the pensions of senior citizens. Kerry and his allies have made wild accusations about Bush's military record but have squealed like schoolgirls every time people ask him to sign a Form 180 to release his own complete military file.

Yes, it reveals nothing that we haven't seen before, but in this case the lie is particularly egregious in that he's using it to undermine our foreign policy and diplomacy in a time of war. It's another indication that nothing, not our security or the lives of our troops, comes before his own overwhelming ambitions to seize power and live out the life of his boyhood idol, John Kennedy. And the fact that he's established a firm pattern of deceit and self-aggrandizement shouldn't be treated with a round of indifference; it should be heralded to the American electorate so that they can see Kerry for the prevaricating narcissist that he so clearly is.

MoveOn, Left Wing Now Treat Robertson As Unimpeachable

The Los Angeles Times notes that MoveOn has a new television ad coming out today that uses Pat Robertson's ridiculous statement that George Bush thought there would be zero US casualties in an invasion of Iraq:

Narrator: "On the eve of war with Iraq, the Rev. Pat Robertson said he warned the president to prepare the American people for casualties. He said George Bush told him, 'Oh no, we're not going to have any casualties.' No casualties? This is the same president who said: 'Mission accomplished in Iraq … millions of new jobs … lower healthcare costs.' Now this president wants four more years?"

Oh, please. Since when did the Left start treating Pat Robertson as a holy Oracle? Robertson is a TV preacher who regularly says the nuttiest things, such as that God told him Bush would get re-elected. At first, Robertson said that God told him it would be a landslide, but later modified it to say that it would be close but Bush would pull it out. Apparently, God likes to play it safe.

Robertson has always been a couple of bricks shy of a load, and what's more, people like those at MoveOn have made careers out of making fun of Robertson and those like him. Their sudden embrace of the fringe preacher looks a lot like opportunistic hypocrisy, unless MoveOn has suddenly decided to also back Messianic propositions like this:

And in the end days there is going to be a coalition between Iraq and Syria. So the events that are taking place right now are extremely significant. I can see a coalition, a federation. We are not talking invasion, but it could happen. This area right now is stirred up with hatred and bitterness. This would encompass modern day Lebanon, which the Syrians have occupied illegally.

Syria is a creation of one of the big powers just like Iraq was. Iraq was a keystroke of Winston Churchill. He formed Iraq. It used to be Mesopotamia. And now it's Iraq. And the same thing with Syria. There was a big fight over whether the British or the French would get it, and the French got it. Syria has a ba'athist regime just like Saddam Hussein.

But they will join together. You can see the geography from Egypt through Israel into Assyria. According to the Bible they're going to be at peace with one another.

Will MoveOn also endorse the invasion of Syria and Lebanon to allow the US to create Greater Assyria and hasten the Second Coming of our Lord? Or perhaps the conversion of all Muslims and Jews in Southwest Asia to Christianity as our new Middle East peace policy? If so, I look forward to their next advertisements...

Caption Contest Winners!

The Elder has finished an extensive review of the huge number of entries we had in the Captain's Caption Contest, and he's selected the winners. It took him quite a while, allowing all of the great selections to bounce around his head so he could pick the cream of the crop. I'd bet The Elder may have had an expression on his face like this:

On second thought, I doubt that The Elder looked much like this. For one thing, his Botox specialist does a much better job than John Kerry's ...

Here are the winners!

Captain's Award (Flights Of Fancy, Part XXXVII) - Stephen Macklin:

I learned how to do this while I was playing on the 1978 U.S. World Cup Team. We could have made the finals that year but I had to take time off to train for the marathon.

You Have The Conn #1 (Sex Education, Kerry Style) - LRFD:

John Kerry, Presidential candidate of the Communist Soccer Girl Party, shows his "O-face" to amused supporters.

You Have The Conn #2 (History Lesson) - New Manifesto:

"Watch as I decisively head this ball in a fashion reminischent of Genghis Khan"

You Have The Conn #3 (I'm So Confused) - Charles Austin:

"This is how I taught Manny Ortez to hit the ball."

Report to Sick Bay (He Had Us At Bonjour) - RightWingDuck:

Kerry and Politics. It's all about taking balls to the face... and wiping the chin afterwards.

The David Strom Short-But-Sweet Award - Infidel:

Owwwwwww!!!!!

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, here 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 The Elder's intellect and/or 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!

Kerry Lied About UN Meeting

John Kerry recently asserted that he would handle foreign relations much more effectively than George Bush and used as an example a meeting he claimed to have held with representatives from every country on the entire UN Security Council before voting to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 2002. The meeting, which Kerry claimed lasted "hours", also offered Kerry an out for his supporting vote for the war among his base. However, the Washington Times' Joel Mowbray reports in tomorrow's edition that the meeting never took place:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

Kerry actually made this claim a number of times. He originally told the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2003 that he had met with the entire Security Council to help forge a united front against Saddam Hussein, a strange thing for a senator with no portfolio from the White House to do. The unusual nature of Kerry's assertion was not challenged at the time, probably in part because Kerry at the time still publicly defended the war in Iraq. However, Kerry also pulled this story out during the second presidential debate two weeks ago, this time to argue against the war in Iraq.

Now Mowbray has done what the press should have done last December -- he asked the people with whom Kerry claimed to meet, and a number of them denied ever having met with the Massachusetts Senator at all:

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either. The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.

Ambassador Andres Franco, the permanent deputy representative from Colombia during its Security Council membership from 2001 to 2002, said, "I never heard of anything." Although Mr. Franco was quick to note that Mr. Kerry could have met some members of the panel, he also said that "everything can be heard in the corridors."

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's then-ambassador to the United Nations, said: "There was no meeting with John Kerry before Resolution 1441, or at least not in my memory."

So who did Kerry meet with before the resolution was adopted? Mowbray can only confirm meetings with Singapore, Cameroon ... and France. The French representative, now Ambassador to the US Jean-David Levitte, also thinks that Kerry met with the British representative, although Mowbray could not confirm that.

In other words, we have yet another wild exaggeration by John Kerry in a key component of the credentials he says qualifies him to be president. Just like his Christmas in Cambodia and his lucky hat, Kerry's prevarications once again demonstrate that he will say anything to puff himself up and make himself more important than he is.

But the reality of his paltry and meaningless diplomacy also shows what a lightweight Kerry is on the world stage. He went to the UN to meet with diplomats about Iraq, and who did he choose? Singapore, Cameroon, and France: two countries that could have no earthly effect on enforcing the UN resolutions, and one that Saddam had bribed into submission. He didn't bother with Bulgaria, one of the nations that Bush convinced to support the liberation of Iraq and one with troops on the ground helping to support its democratization.

It appears that Kerry won't even try to put America's actions to a "global test": he'll just ask a couple of minor nations (one just a city-state) and France before knuckling under. This episode underscores Kerry's odd personality deficits of self-aggrandizement, exaggeration, and defeatism. In any other campaign, his lies would bury him, but I suspect that this will only cost him a couple of points in the final week. Hopefully, that will be enough.

Language Is Highest French Priority

For an example of why the French have made themselves irrelevant in the modern world, the London Telegraph reports on what the French see as their highest national priority -- forcing everyone in Europe to speak French:

A campaign to make French the official language of European law has been launched in an attempt to show the world that France will not bow to the ascendancy of English without a fight. ...

Teaching unions and politicians have reacted with indignation to a report calling for English to be obligatory in the school curriculum, while one of President Jacques Chirac's objections to Peter Mandelson as an EU commissioner was that his French was not up to scratch.

The foreign ministry has called for a spirited campaign for the language in Brussels while the Académie Française, which campaigns relentlessly for pure French, says defence of the language should be "the major national cause of the 21st century".

English became the primary language of international trade and diplomacy not because governments imposed it but because of the ascendancy of American and British diplomatic and economic power. French influence has steadily declined since the collapse of the Republic in 1940. Instead of freeing the French to create an economic dynamo by abandoning socialism and embracing capitalism, the French have decided to just use Gallic arrogance and insist that everyone speak French because ... well, because they don't want to have to speak English.

The fact that France thinks that a popularity contest of languages is their most pressing national issue while Islamic terrorism threatens the West and their own exponentially-growing Muslim population causes increasing conflict at home demonstrates the essential irrelevancy of Paris. How can anyone take them seriously as a leader in the war on terror while they focus on their language obsession?

Telegraph: Kosovo Vote Shows UN Leadership Failure

For those who prefer to leave issues of global leadership up to the United Nations, the London Telegraph reports that five years of UN governance in Kosovo has left the disputed province more deeply divided and hostile than ever, and no closer to a resolution:

Early results from the weekend's general election showed that five years of UN rule had only deepened ethnic divisions as Kosovo's voters signalled their despair with the Balkan province's administrators.

Barely more than half of Kosovo's 1.4 million voters went to the ballot box. While the province's majority ethnic Albanians were struck by apathy, its 130,000-strong Serb minority was seized by anger and completely boycotted the poll.

Only a handful of Serbs voted, following calls from Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian Prime Minister, and the Serbian Orthodox Church to stay away. Mr Kostunica described the election as a "failure".

American politicians, notably John Kerry, have repeatedly called for UN leadership in the newly-liberated countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that elections without an imprimatur from Turtle Bay deligitimizes the outcome. However, the UN has run Kosovo since 1999, when the Clinton Administration allowed them to take over the project of determining Kosovo's status and negotiating betweent the ethnic Serbs and Albanians who populate the territory. The result of five years of UN leadership? Elections that neither side took seriously and one side boycotted entirely.

Five years later, no one knows what form a Kosovar government will take: a province, an independent nation, or another partition along the lines of Bosnia. The UN has dithered, unwilling to take any action at all to reach a resolution, exhibiting an overwhelming preference for the status quo:

The provisional result equates to a maintenance of the political status quo by default, as both Kosovo's bitterly opposed ethnic Albanians and Serbs signalled their dissatisfaction with foreign rule. ...

Long happy to do nothing, Kosovo's international administrators were stung by riots in March that made clear that maintaining the stand-off was counterproductive. Now Kosovo appears deadlocked.

Long happy to do nothing -- that's a perfect description of UN intervention wherever it occurs. The UN was happy to do nothing when Srebrenica was overrun by the Serbs when the UN had thoughtfully herded the Bosnians into one spot for them. They were just as happy to do nothing in Rwanda and Darfur as well. Having the UN take charge anywhere is a recipe for doing nothing except freezing time, when the problem in Southwest Asia is exactly that -- nothing has changed in a century, and the people still live under oppressive kleptocracies and mullahcracies that inspire and encourage radicalism and terrorism.

In Afghanistan, American insistence on pushing change resulted in the first democratically-elected government in that nation's long, troubled history. We didn't listen to the naysayers that said the Afghanis couldn't govern themselves, nor did we stop when people kept harping on the old canard that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside. (Tell that to Japan.) The universal impulse for all humans is to exercise control over their own government and to be free to choose their own fate. The Iraqis will prove that once again in January.

And had the UN been in charge of either country, they would have suffered the same fate as the Kosovars -- bitter, divided, with no end in sight of the UN's indifferent governance. We simply cannot afford to allow that to happen in the future.

Blue Hawaii Swinging Red?

The AP reports on a recent poll in Hawaii, usually a slam-dunk blue state, which shows Bush edging ahead of Kerry among likely voters:

The poll of 600 likely voters, conducted October 13-18 for the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, gave Bush 43.3 percent and Kerry 42.6 percent, with 12 percent saying they were still undecided. The poll had a margin of error of four percentage points.

Hawaii has only four of the 270 electoral votes, awarded state-by-state, needed to win the election. But with a closely fought election battle, even small states have found that their votes could be decisive.

Even more, losing Hawaii could be a bellwether of an Electoral College landslide. Al Gore won Hawaii by a whopping 19 points in 2000, and now two different polls show Bush edging ahead of Kerry this past week. While Hawaii doesn't command a lot of electoral-college impact, its votes equal New Hampshire, considered a strategic state in any election. If Hawaii slips from Kerry's grasp, it's hard to see how he can compete among the previously-identified swing states.

Explaining Why We Fight To Our Children, Part V

This is Part V in a continuing series by my friend "Mike", a Navy SEAL who spent most of the last couple of years in Iraq as both an active-duty participant and a private contractor. "Mike" explains the war in Iraq to his young sons, and has graciously allowed me to share his letters with you.

IRAQ PICTURE LETTER TO MY SON
PART 5. THE COALITION OF MANY NATIONS

Some people say that our country is fighting this war and helping Iraq by ourselves. This is far from the truth. Our President has done an excellent job of leading many other brave countries in helping Iraq. You may have heard the term ‘coalition troops.’ Well ‘coalition’ simply means ‘partnership.’ Daddy has worked very closely with many partners in our coalition and most of them are very motivated to stamp out terrorism and fight for freedom. Some of them from Eastern Europe are especially motivated because they come from countries that only gained their freedom recently.

Now we will see some of the countries that came to Iraq to help. I will show you the people and you see if you can find their countries on the World Map and point them out to Mommy. (See extended entry for these pictures -- CE.)

Daddy can show you many more pictures when he gets home and tell you stories of the brave deeds of our coalition partners. In the meantime take a look at this plaque. It has the flags of all the countries that first came to help with Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Can you count how many countries came to help?

Although many other countries are helping, our country is leading the fight because we are the most powerful country in the world and we are using our might to light the way. It is very appropriate that we should be the leader because the people in our country represent all of the cultures and religions of the whole world. Remember in school when the teacher told you that the United States is a “melting pot?” See if you can explain to Mommy what that means.

These young men are United States Marines from the First Marine Division. They did most of the hard fighting that won the War in Iraq last year.

These young men are United States Army Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division. They did most of the rest of it.

American Army and Marine troops are the foreigners who are making most of the sacrifices to keep the peace over here at the moment. The rest of us “special operations” & contractor people support their mission.

However most of the real sacrifices and hard work is now being made by the people of Free Iraq. You see lasting Freedom will never be
free of cost for any country.

No matter what you hear or see on TV or in this letter or in future letters, you should not be afraid. Terrorists are cowards who will keep doing sneaky evil things if they think they can scare people. You should also not be afraid because God is on our side and he is giving strength to our President and our country to stay the course and not back down.

You go to a great school that reinforces the morality and the need for the war we have to wage for freedom. Remember the last line of the national anthem you sing throughout the year? Well the United States of America really is the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” and many other countries are realizing that if they want to stay free, they must be brave too.

It makes me happy every time you say you love me on the phone. The best thing you can do to show your love for me is to help your Mommy and always show her love and respect. Mommy is the real patriot of our family while I am gone.

I love you and miss you and I am glad you are my son.

– Daddy

I will be transcribing interviews I did with Mike later on today, and hope to have them posted tonight. Keep checking back!

Australia

Great Britain

Poland

Italy

El Salvador and Honduras

Bulgaria

Hungary

Macedonia

South Korea

Free Iraq, the newest Coalition member!

Afghanistan Elects Its First President - Karzai

Afghanistan has its first popularly-elected leader as Hamid Karzai has been declared the winner and his main rival conceded defeat. Yunus Qanuni told his countrymen that he accepted Karzai's election, allowing for an orderly transition to a representative government for the long-oppressed Afghanis:

The main rival of President Hamid Karzai has conceded defeat in Afghanistan's presidential election with less than six per cent of the vote left to be counted.

Yunus Qanuni said he would accept Mr Karzai's victory despite an investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in the poll on Oct 9.

Mr Karzai required more than half the vote to win the election and had polled 55.3 per cent of support after 94.4 per cent of the more than eight million ballots had been counted.

Qanuni finished a distant second to Karzai's 55% as multiple candidates ran for president, so the concession actually came rather late. It does show that the Afghanis have bought into the democratic process, though, allowing that despite some unavoidable irregularities that come with any first attempt at free elections, the people have spoken and overwhelmingly chose Hamid Karzai as their first constitutional president.

Qanuni's concession may, in fact, represent a larger milestone than the election itself: an acceptance of a democratically-achieved result by the loser. Without that precedent, democracy itself cannot survive. If the loser resorted to extra-democratic means to reverse the result, Afghani democracy would have died at birth.

Qanuni's concession is a brilliant lesson for those in supposedly mature democracies to follow. Next to his support for his country and his dedication to the democratic process, the Kerry campaign's pledge to ignore the voting results on November 2nd and declare themselves the winners regardless appears especially petty and small. What is it about democracy that the Kerry campaign cannot bring itself to support?

FBI Disputes CIA's Election-Terror Conclusion

Earlier this week, the CIA expressed its doubts that terrorists planned any kind of operation against the US to impact our elections, a conclusion heralded by the Left as an indictment against the administration for employing "scare tactics". However, the AP reports today that the FBI has drawn the opposite conclusion based on a large number of interviews and ongoing investigations:

FBI investigators have made new arrests and developed leads that reinforce concerns that terrorists plan to strike around the presidential election, officials said Saturday, even though the CIA has discredited a person who told its agents of such a plot involving al-Qaida.

A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some of the leads were culled from interviews with thousands of individuals that agents have conducted in the Muslim community. The official would not be more specific, but said the FBI continues to have misgivings about possible al-Qaida intentions to launch an attack with the goal of affecting the elections.

Several people have been taken into custody recently on charges not related to terrorism, but officials are investigating whether they may have been involved in terror activities, said another law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

I never understood either the CIA's position or the general acceptance of its statement among those who normally array themselves against the CIA. The CIA based its conclusion on one source who wound up being discredited, but apparently never checked with the FBI, which was pursuing its own sources and leads. Nor did it take into account simple common sense; in major Western elections this year, al-Qaeda attacked the assets of the countries just short of their elections (Spain and Australia). How could the CIA so easily dismiss the pattern?

Nor does the left's sudden embrace of the CIA make much sense, either. After castigating them for the better part of a year over its conclusions that Saddam had maintained vast stockpiles of WMD, all of a sudden Langley has become for them the new location of the Delphi Oracle. As with most of us, the left likes a source when it affirms their beliefs, but a little critical thinking would go a long way. It underscores their belief that our "struggle" with terrorists, as the Star Tribune put it yesterday, doesn't amount to war and therefore our enemies have no strategic vision, a conclusion belied in the Madrid attack and the bombing of the Australian embassies the week before their election.

Hopefully, our national-security agencies will intercept and disrupt any attempt to target Americans at home or abroad in the next nine days and make the entire argument moot. The CIA's position that no threat exists does not fill me with confidence that they are positioned to do that. Having the FBI with its eye on the ball may not be enough, especially for our assets overseas. Langley should consult with Quantico as soon as possible to ensure that nothing slips through the defenses.

John Kerry, Cong Hunter?

At rare moments, candidates on the campaign trail make statements that defy rational thought, where the only possible reaction one can have is to wonder, slackjawed, what the candidate was thinking when he spoke. John Kerry gave us one of those priceless moments yesterday, when he assured the American people that he would go after the terrorists -- exactly as he went after the Viet Cong!

Democratic presidential nominee and Vietnam War veteran John Kerry tried to burnish his national security credentials on Saturday by vowing to hunt down terrorists with the same energy he used to pursue the Viet Cong. ...

"With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us," Kerry said. "And we will wage a war on terror that makes America proud and brings the world to our side."

Okay, let's recap. John Kerry went after the Viet Cong for only one-third of his commitment, bailing out by using a little-known regulation that allowed a reassignment after three in-theater Purple Hearts, which he collected for uncommonly minor wounds (and at least one of them under less-than-honest circumstances). He was the only Swiftboat officer to leave the theater before one year without suffering a disabling injury. After his return, he attacked the United States and its soldiers in Vietnam, publicly siding with the Viet Cong and denouncing our efforts to "go after" them as mass murder. He rejected the fight against the Viet Cong so thoroughly that he organized massive demonstrations against it, even publicly repudiating his own service by tossing his medals/ribbons/whatever over the White House fence.

In fact, this is one campaign promise that Kerry has already kept. After supporting the war on terror and the Iraq phase, he has backpedaled for a year. First he voted to cut off funding to the troops, and since he has called the war in Iraq the "wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place," a "grand diversion" that nonetheless he'd like to get several countries to commit troops towards to replace American soldiers and Marines.

He's implementing the same playbook he used in the fight against the Viet Cong now. Kerry undermines public support for the war, claims it's unnecessary, fights to cut off funding and demands that the US retreat from the combat theaters. His statement yesterday may be the most ironically truthful position he's taken all year long.

It's Like The Regular Climate -- Wait 5 Minutes...

I got an interesting e-mail yesterday from CQ reader Chris S, who works with Project Deliver The Vote, a Houston PAC dedicated to grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts for Republicans nationwide. Chris wrote:

Hello Captain, I have been a *big* fan of your site ever since I got into the blogosphere. I know you live in Minnesota, and I was wondering if you could give me any advice. I’m a member of Project Deliver the Vote PAC, an offshoot of the Houston Young Republicans. We have a team of 80 volunteers coming to the Minneapolis / St. Paul area next weekend (Thur – Sun) to help swing the state in our favor!

We are divided into several teams covering various counties. What’s the political climate like up there (other than the race being very close)? What should we expect?

That's a question that I and my fellow Northern Alliance colleagues have been sweating for a number of weeks. Minnesotans have a reputation for being exceedingly polite; "Minnesota Nice" is a long-standing catchphrase in the Upper Midwest. We're the kind of people that even when we disagree with each other, we just keep finding other topics to discuss. That can make it difficult to get a good read on the political temperature. Usually.

This election cycle appears to be different. When AFL-CIO thugs burst into GOP campaign headquarters to terrify volunteers and scare off people looking for tickets to a Bush campaign rally, we probably have lost Minnesota Nice. When campaign signs get defaced and stolen on a regular basis, it's gotten more tense than a lye shortage at a lutefisk festival. (Don't ask.)

I think you'll find that you won't get overt hostility from people, except in certain neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul proper. In the exurbs, you'll find more sympathy and support -- just like anywhere else. Those are the votes we need to get to the polls on November 2nd. Good luck, and let us know where you'll be!