Training To Work With The Majority

Tony Blair surprised Democrats today by arranging to have his eldest son Euan take an internship with a leading Congressman in the US -- House Rules Committee chair and Republican, David Dreier:

Euan Blair is to spend three months unpaid with the Republican majority on the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, the Sunday Telegraph revealed.

He will reportedly be under the wing of Californian lawmaker David Dreier, the committee's chairman and a member of the lower House of Representatives for the Republican Party of US
President George W. Bush.

Blair obviously wants to prepare Euan for a life in politics, and apparently in particular wants him to have plenty of experience with Britain's most strategic ally. The choice of Dreier and the Rules Committee could be read in many different ways, but it's safe to say that the choice is deliberate, as the Democrats would have happily taken Euan under their wing. This has already ruffled feathers across the aisle, where they assumed that Blair's close relationship with George Bush had more to do with necessity and personality than politics.

Democrats and Labour share much more philosophically than do Labour and Republicans, of course. But what Democrats don't do is win elections -- and as a result, they don't run anything in Washington at the moment. Blair's choice for Euan, the Rules Committee, demonstrates that aspect of the choice he made. The Rules Committee is one of the most partisan and contentious arenas in the House, where power politics reaches its zenith. Blair must believe that the Republicans have more to teach young Euan than do their Democratic opponents about leadership and success in that arena.

Perhaps the Democrats should ask themselves why that is -- and then take another look at Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as their party leadership.

Northern Alliance Radio Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air today at its usual time, noon to 3 pm CDT, to discuss the political and cultural issues of the week. Certainly, high up on our topic list will be the Iranian election, the Kelo decision, Karl Rove, Dick Durbin, and much, much more. In our second hour, we'll interview Christina Hoff Summers, author of One Nation Under Therapy, which warns how our "helping" culture undermines self-reliance. And in our third hour, we will launch our first Un-Pledge Drive, where we encourage listeners to cancel their subscriptions to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune because of their increasingly delusional editorial board.

If you are in the Twin Cities, you can hear us on AM 1280 The Patriot, but if you live elsewhere, you can also listen to us on the station's Internet stream from its website. Call in and join the conversation at 651-289-4488 -- we love hearing from people outside the Twin Cities!

Making Saddam Look Like A Petty Thief

Now that the subject of Africa has re-emerged as a central issue in international politics, especially in terms of how best to get the perennially struggling continent back to self-sufficiency, the question of corruption has become a central sticking point once again. Unfortunately for those of us who would like to find a way to do something effective, the question got a big answer in today's London Telegraph, which reports that the previous leaders of Africa's most prosperous nation stole more than $400 billion dollars over the last several decades:

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa's most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent.

The figures, compiled by Nigeria's anti-corruption commission, provide dramatic evidence of the problems facing next month's summit in Gleneagles of the G8 group of wealthy countries which are under pressure to approve a programme of debt relief for Africa.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria's rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country's 130 million people - one in seven of the total African population - live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.

The sheer scale of this theft boggles the imagination. It's as if Nigeria conducted twenty Oil-For-Food scams in 39 years, between 1960 and 1999, when the money disappeared. As bad as Saddam Hussein's corruption got, it pales in comparison to the sinkhole of Nigeria -- and that's just one nation on the continent.

Where were the Western nations who fed this enormous scam? Perhaps they took too much time appeasing the do-gooders at home to put the appropriate safeguards on their aid payments. It could also be that during the Cold War, the realpolitik of the region forced both sides to issue bribes and inducements to Nigerian rulers in the form of "aid" that we knew would not reach its intended recipients. The most likely explanation lies deep under Nigerian soil to its rich fields of oil reserves, proven out at 35 billion barrels.

What cannot be argued at all is that the Western nations knew nothing about $400 billion in currency and assets simply disappearing from the economy over four decades. Even offering that argument would imply that capitalists could lose $400 billion, a laughable assertion that no one will ever accept. The industrialized nations enabled Nigeria's rulers to steal its citizenry blind, leaving the nation more destitute than ever while enabling the ruling class to tighten its grip on the poverty-stricken nation.

Now that the country has thrown off that ruling class and its leaders have attempted to give an honest assessment of its position, the G8 now tries the Captain Louis Renault gambit of being shocked, shocked! to find its generosity raided by the kleptocrats it feted and supported for access to its oil. They refuse to include Nigeria in its debt-forgiveness plan, which might be the correct action economically but appears to be a case of locking the barn door after one has helped the thieves make off with the horses, tackle, and most of the barn itself. Given that most of this money appears to have been dispersed back into the banking systems and economies of the West -- where it would have the best rate of return and most stringent safeguards -- the reluctance to assist Nigeria in at least some preliminary manner seems odd indeed.

The Nigerian scam shows the absolute necessity of on-the-ground verification of aid distribution and a requirement for the positive political reform that will make future aid unnecessary, not just for Nigeria but for all African aid. It also demonstrates that Africa's problems aren't due to Western neglect, although Western exploitation certainly didn't do anything to help. The reason why an entire continent can't feed, clothe, or shelter itself is because of the political corruption that Western aid ironically enabled. It doesn't absolve us of our need to get Africa on its feet now, but it does demonstrate that just throwing money at the poorest continent won't do anything but make the situation worse.

Roberts: Enough Is Enough On Bolton

Senator Pat Roberts, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair who has tried to act as an intermediary between the White House and the Senate Democrats on the confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, pronounced that he's had enough of Democratic obstructionism on the topic. The New York Times reports that Roberts now has urged Bush to cease negotiating on Bolton and give him a recess appointment instead:

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday that it would be a mistake for the White House to bend further to Democratic demands related to John R. Bolton's handling of intelligence material.

In an interview, the chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said he now expected that President Bush would grant a recess appointment to Mr. Bolton, whose nomination as ambassador to the United Nations has been blocked by Senate Democrats for more than a month. ...

Mr. Roberts had sought until now to serve as an intermediary between the White House and Senate Democrats in the matter. But he said he believed that the administration had gone far enough, and that a recess appointment expiring in January 2007 and perhaps renominated after that, would be preferable to the potential security risks of providing Congress with wider access to names in the N.S.A. reports.

Those risks became clear during the debate over filibusters on judicial confirmations when the Minority Leader, Harry Reid, started basing accusations of unfitness from secret FBI files on Judge Henry Saad. After that cheap shot at Saad, who not only couldn't use the file to exonerate himself but can't even look in the file to see what Reid meant, the White House has become very skeptical about providing the Senate with any classified information it doesn't explicitly need. Roberts' committee has already seen this data, in any case, and has already told the Senate that it saw no issue with Bolton's actions.

No one thinks that further concessions will change any votes on Capitol Hill. Giving in on the intercepts will then create more demands for even more information, extending Bolton's filibuster even further. As the Democrats have demonstrated, they have decided to blockade most of Bush's political nominees as an overall strategy to paint the GOP as radical and out of touch as its theme for the 2006 campaign. It's a foolish and destructive strategy, as the 2004 campaign proved, but they're sticking with it until they get grown-up leadership with enough imagination to come up with something better.

At any rate, Bush doesn't need to play into it by feeding the failures in the Senate's Democratic caucus. He should give Bolton the recess appointment that will end this particular circus, and the next filibuster that occurs -- especially on one of his political appointments -- should result in a broader Byrd option to eliminate the filibuster on all executive confirmations. If the Democrats can't learn how to operate in the proper role of the minority instead of mindless obstructionism, then the GOP needs to start playing hardball. The quest for "comity" has been completely one-sided and should be abandoned.

Class-Action Fraud Alleged At Legal Firm

The rapid growth of class-action lawsuits has created a booming industry for the legal profession, one which promises big payouts for relatively little work as defendants tend get intimidated into settlements rather than go to court. Such lucrative opportunities eventually attracts those with lower ethical bars to cut corners and create shortcuts to greater amounts of money, and the feds believe they have found just that problem at one of the most prominent class-action legal firms in the country:

Federal prosecutors here have charged a retired Palm Springs, Calif., lawyer with taking kickbacks from a prominent New York law firm in exchange for serving as plaintiff in dozens of class-action and shareholder lawsuits that earned the firm $44 million over 20 years.

The indictment against 78-year-old Seymour M. Lazar, unsealed Thursday, stems from a years-long investigation by the U.S. attorney's office into the practices of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, which before splitting into two firms last year had led the largest of the investor suits against bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. ...

Reports of the grand jury investigation of Milberg Weiss, some of whose partners have close ties to the Democratic Party, were aired in the news media in early 2002 just as one of its top lawyers, William Lerach, was taking the lead in the Enron litigation.

The charges against Lazar do not involve the Enron suits, however, but suits against Standard Oil, United Airlines, Denny's and other corporations in which Lazar or his relatives acted as plaintiffs.

The specifics of Lazar's involvement appear to be that he falsified information that made him or his family members a primary plaintiff in these well-known lawsuits that allowed the law firm to raise them to class-action status. Either that, or Lazar's family must be the most unlucky consumers in American legal history. They may also be the most lucky plaintiffs, at least in recent American legal practice.

Until all of the indictments are unsealed, the specifics will remain somewhat murky. What remains clear is that our class-action processes still exist as slot machines for legal firms, gambles that pay off more often than not and undermine the financial security of millions of investors whose retirements depend on stability in the marketplace. We need a system that protects consumers but quits providing such wildly lucrative incentives for shakedown rackets and fraud. Perhaps this three-year grand jury investigation will at least press Congress to continue working on tort reform to strike a better balance between consumers and shareholders.

Hardliner 'Wins' Iranian Election

Little-known Teheran mayor and hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the run-off for the Iranian presidency in a development that indicates the Guardian Council has had enough of negotiating with the West and appeasing the burgeoning democracy movement in Iran:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hard-line mayor of Tehran who has invoked Iran's 1979 revolution and expressed doubts about rapprochement with the United States, won a runoff election Friday and was elected president of the Islamic republic in a landslide, the Interior Ministry announced early Saturday.

Ahmadinejad defeated Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former two-term president who had won the first round of voting last week and was attempting to appeal to socially moderate and reform-minded voters. ...

With 85 percent of votes counted, a spokesman for the Guardian Council, which oversees Iran's electoral process, said returns showed Ahmadinejad leading with 61.8 percent of the vote, to 35.7 for Rafsanjani. Officials said 47 percent of eligible voters turned out, down from 63 percent in the first round.

The lower turnout is significant. The reformers supposedly planned to turn out for Rafsanjani, the former president that tried to lay claim to the modernist vote, but the drop of sixteen points shows deep dissatisfaction with the first round of voting. In fact, Publius Pundit has more evidence that the second round has just as much fraud attached to the turnout report, and therefore the final counts, as was the case from the first round of voting. Even with the fraud, the Iranians still reported the lower number, which indicates that even the Council knows that their fraud won't pass muster.

Obviously, then, the little-known Ahmaninejad was the Guardian Council's choice all along. What does that tell us? It tells us that the GC feels that Iranian culture has drifted too far away from shari'a and the ideals of Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. In fact, Ahmadinejad explicitly stated that the revolution wasn't staged to bring freedom to the Iranian people. It's not exactly the kind of rhetoric that one expects to hear from an electoral candidate.

If that's what the GC wants to communicate, it made a big mistake. With the democracy movements flourishing but willing in some part to support a character like Rafsanjani against Ahmadinejad, it would have given the mullahs the opportunity to co-opt the movement, at least to some degree. Now, however, the mullahs have clearly told these people that they will never have any hope of access to the political system. What options do the students and other pro-democracy activists have now within the system? All this will do will convince the most active that any change will require action outside of the current Iranian political system.

The mullahs fear dissension more than anything else. Unfortunately for them, they have chosen the course that almost guarantees a revolution, and probably sooner rather than later.

Time To Send A Little Reassurance To The Troops

The Emperor Darth Misha at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler received an e-mail about a soldier in Iraq who questions our support for the troops and the mission based on the media reports that our men and women have been hearing. The Emperor is starting an e-mail campaign for bloggers and blog-readers to send messages to this soldier and his friends. Take a moment to send a supportive message to the troops through the auspices of Darth Misha as soon as you get an opportunity.

Which Clinton Will Run In 2008?

CQ reader Retired Military points out an effort that has gone pretty much unnoticed for the past four months; it's not breaking news, but it is curious. In February, House Democratic whip Steny Hoyer introduced a Constitutional amendment to repeal the 22nd Amendment, co-sponsored by Berman (D-CA), Pallone (D-NJ), Sabo (D-MN) and oddly enough, Sensenbrenner (R-WI). For those who don't have their Robert Byrd Pocket Constitution with them ("Don't leave the House without it"), the 22nd Amendment put term limits on the presidency.

Why did four Democrats, including the House whip, decide to dump the 22nd amendment? Here's Hoyer's explanation:

We do not have to rely on rigid constitutional standards to hold our Presidents accountable. Sufficient power resides in the Congress and the Judiciary to protect our country from tyranny. ...

Furthermore, a ‘lame duck’ President serving in his second term is less effective dealing with the Congress and the bureaucracy than a President should be. I do not believe that the people want a popularly chosen President who will be weakened in a second term. The removal of the President from politics as prescribed by the 22nd Amendment has the effect of removing the President from the accountability to political forces that come to bear during regular elections every four years. ...

I believe the repeal of the 22nd Amendment will restore power to the people themselves and make our Constitution more democratic.

Actually, I find that argument rather compelling. If a lack of term limits creates a constant pressure for campaigning and fund-raising, at least that gets somewhat balanced by accountability for those seeking re-election. Once having won the final term of office, especially for an executive, the accountability that a free electorate provides gets severely reduced and the impulse for autocratic behavior comes under less control, at least internally. Hoyer also provides a couple of quotes from the founding fathers, notably Hamilton and Jefferson, to support his effort.

But why bring this up now? Does Hoyer and his fellow Democrats want to see George Bush run for a third term? Not exactly:

Under the resolution I offer today, President Bush would not be eligible to run for a third term. However, the American people would have restored to themselves and future generations an essential democratic privilege to elect who they choose in the future.

However, if you read the proposal, Hoyer is incorrect. Nothing in the repealing amendment excludes the current president, although it may take longer than three years for it to get ratified -- assuming it ever makes it through Congress. And that means others who have held the office for two terms could become eligible for a third term as well. Right now, it's under consideration by the House Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee.

Political handicappers have debated whether Hillary has enough support to successfully win the Democratic nomination. Maybe we're talking about the wrong Clinton.

UPDATE: The Anchoress has another theory, which hearkens back to the "two for the price of one" sales pitch of 1992. It's fanciful, of course ...

The Quality Of Debate: E-Mails Of The Week

I get e-mail from a lot of people, some of it supportive, and some of it critical. I find that most of it is well-written and open for dialogue, even those who disagree with me. Every once in a while, however, I'll get a mouthbreather who thinks that tossing insults and a few F-bombs amounts to principled and intelligent debate. Normally, I don't comment or reply to these; I calculate it as one of the costs of having a higher profile and simply keep them for my own amusement.

However, I just received two from one particular mouthbreather that I simply have to share with CQ readers. Today's messages come from a Jeff Oliver, whose first e-mail came with the subject "rove":

no room for comments eh? no room for argument. how typical.

you're a yellow fucking coward.

Obviously, Jeff has some comprehension problems, because at the bottom of each post on my site, there's a hyperlink on the word "Comment". I don't have instructions on my site, but most people instinctively understand that clicking on that link will allow visitors to leave comments, once they've logged in through Typepad. At the very least, one can read the comments that have already been posted. Since the number "91" appears next to the word "Comment", most readers could guess that we have that many comments attached to the post.

But that's not really the funny part. Within moments of receiving that e-mail, I received a second e-mail from Jeff Oliver with the subject "my bad" indicating that he had figured it out, or someone explained how blogs work -- one or the other. I assumed that the e-mail would apologize for his insulting tone. Well ...

I'm a goof. You do have comments!

So why aren't you in Iraq you fucking yellow coward chickenhawk?

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff ... If the armed forces took mildly diabetic 38-year-olds, I would have enlisted on 9/11. Trust me, they didn't need me. However, since you've asked the question, when did you decide that America should be a military dictatorship? After all, what you're arguing is that only military people should have any voice over how and when America goes to war, and that everyone else should shut up. Small wonder, then, that you don't like CQ, since we support civilian control of the military through its elected representatives, and free civilian debate over all policy and means of implementation.

But Jeff, if you want to live in a military dictatorship, you should start looking around pretty quickly. They're a dying breed, thanks to Anglo-American efforts the past three or four years. Civilian democracies are the future, pal.

If you have any more questions, be sure to leave them in the comments section. That's the hyperlink that says ... "Comments", just to remind you.

Judicial Activism: Not A New Worry

Earlier today, in the aftermath of the Kelo decision, a CQ reader reminded me that judicial activism is not a new phenomenon. In fact, some of the greatest jurists in American history have opined on its dangers for more than a century. They accurately predicted the politicization of the judiciary and the overarching reach the bench could garner through the philosophy of the "living Constitution". Here are the echoes of protest and warning that have gone unheeded until, perhaps, we are too late to stop the worst of its damage.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, in 1916: “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what judges say it is . . . .”

Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone, in 1936: “ . . . the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1930: “As the decisions now stand, I see hardly any limit but the sky to the invalidating of those rights if they happen to strike a majority of this Court as for any reason undesirable.”

Justice Robert H. Jackson, in 1953: “Rightly or wrongly, the belief is widely held by the practicing profession that this court no longer respects impersonal rules of law but is guided in these matters by personal impressions which from time to time may be shared by a majority of Justices. Whatever has been intended, this Court also has generated an impression in which much of the judiciary that regard for precedents and authorities is obsolete, that words no longer mean what they have always meant to the profession, that the law knows no fixed principles.”

Justice Felix Frankfurter, in 1949: “Because the powers exercised by this Court are inherently oligarchic, Jefferson all of his life thought of the Court as an ‘irresponsible body’ and ‘independent of the nation itself.’ The Court is not saved from being oligarchic because it professes to act in the service of humane ends. As history amply proves, the judiciary is prone to misconceive the public good by confounding private notions with constitutional requirements, and such misconceptions are not subject to legitimate displacement by the will of the people except at too slow a pace.”

Justice John M. Harlan, in 1970: “ . . . the federal judiciary, which by express constitutional provision is appointed for life, and therefore cannot be held responsible by the electorate, has no inherent general authority to establish the norms for the rest of society. It is limited to elaboration and application of the precepts ordained in the Constitution by the political representatives of the people. When the Court disregards the express intent and understanding of the Framers, it has invaded the realm of the political process to which the amending power is committed, and it has violated the constitutional structure which it is its highest duty to protect.”

As my reader writes, the high court has elevated itself to the point it is highly reminiscent of, "L'etat, c'est moi" ("I am the State!), the reply given by Louis XIV to his parliament when they dared to challenge his authority. The high court's message is a no less simple, and, certainly, no less regal, self-aggrandizing, and self-empowering.

US Acknowledges Torture, And Prosecution Of Those Committing It

The United States has submitted a report to the United Nations that acknowledges its personnel has committed isolated acts of torture on detainees, the French wire service AFP reports. Its unnamed source says that the American report was very forthright and involved a handful of cases which the US military intends on prosecuting as crimes:

Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

"They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN," the Committee member told AFP. ...

"They haven't avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture," the Committee member said.

"They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished."

The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

While I suspect that the hysterical Gitmo=gulag crowd will jump all over this, it does serve to remind people that regardless of how intent we are on acting under the highest principles, it takes good management and a lot of discipline to keep interrogators and jailers from crossing the line. That was the lesson at Abu Ghraib, one that most people missed in their rush to smear the entire chain of command with the absurd notion that naked pyramids and leashes had been approved at the top levels of the Pentagon. Those involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses -- which probably have been included in this report -- belonged to a unit with poor discipline and excessive fraternization, both of which directly led to the abuses in that prison.

The report also shows the difference between America and (I can't believe I even have to write this) Nazi Germany, the Soviet gulag, and the Khmer Rouge. Our policies and aims do not accept torture, and when it occurs, it is treated as a crime and punished appropriately. We also do not imprison people arbitrarily and have the appropriate process to determine their need for detention. The latter three examples ran prisons and camps for the express purpose of torturing and killing people strictly for their ethnicity, religion, or political speech, and succeeded in killing millions upon millions in doing so.

If Americans have tortured prisoners -- and that means really tortured prisoners, not just left them in cold or hot rooms or humiliated them by having women rub themselves on them -- then they should be tried and imprisoned for their crimes. The American military appears capable of investigating these problems and holding the guilty accountable. Perhaps that will quell the hysterics from declaring the US a fascist state ... but somehow I doubt it.

Guess Who's Paying Zarqawi?

According to the US News and World Report, Islamist terrorist groups in Iraq not only get support and funding from dispossessed Saddamites and disgruntled Syrians, but also have a stream of donations coming from Europe itself. David Kaplan discovers that "liberal" Europe has a network of donors stuffing spare euros into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's pockets:

Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism."

The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

Given the rhetoric we've seen coming from rallies sponsored by International ANSWER and other such groups, expanding the reach of the Euro-Islamist Bund doesn't seem far-fetched. Most of them preach outright support of the so-called "resistance", even after the Iraqis themselves elected a government at great personal risk that not only supports the foreign troops, but has traveled to Washington to keep in place. For these people, elected representatives like Ibrahim al-Jaafari amount to nothing but puppets for Western capitalists, while Zarqawi and his bloodthirsty, head-chopping gangs of lunatics represent the real Iraqis. At least, they represent the real Iraqis still left after the Islamofascists kill as many as they can until they grab power.

Principled opposition to war has its place, although I disagree with it. This is different -- it's aiding and abetting mass murderers. (h/t: CQ reader Joe Goat)

Martin Pulls Off Another Political High-Wire Trick

Prime Minister Paul Martin reached into his parliamentary bag of tricks again last night and outfoxed Tory leader Stephen Harper, allowing the Liberals to set a late-night vote on a crucial budget amendment that keeps them in control of the government:

The contentious budget amendment bill passed 152 to 147 in the House of Commons Thursday in a late-night, snap vote.

In a move that caught the Conservative opposition off guard, Liberal House Leader Tony Valeri proposed a rarely-used time allocation motion in the House of Commons, cutting off debate on Bill C-48.

The motion passed easily. And as the clock ticked close to midnight ET, MPs voted on the bill's third and final reading. ... "It bushwhacked the Conservatives. They didn't see this coming," said CTV's Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife.

Martin took advantage of a rarely-used procedure to call the vote unexpectedly at 11:30 PM. He also managed to peel Bloc Quebecois away from Harper to get the procedural motion past the stunned and short-handed Conservatives, who erupted in anger and frustration at both their Liberal foes and their supposed BQ allies. Harper and his deputy Peter McKay didn't mince words:

"When push comes to shove, the Liberals will make any deal with anybody,'' said Conservative Leader Stephen Harper. "And it doesn't matter whether it's with the socialists or with the separatists or any bunch of crooks they can find.''

"They'll do anything they have to do to win," added Conservative deputy leader Peter MacKay. He described the manoeuvre as "a menage a trois between separatists, socialists and power-hungry Liberals."

The BQ probably went along with Martin and NDP leader Jack Layton in order to avoid summer elections. With the Liberals recovering their primacy in national polling, BQ probably would prefer to avoid the rare summer campaign in favor of a longer-range strategy to bolster their own standing in Quebec. Before this week, Giles Duceppe may have safely assumed that Harper felt the same way. After all, Harper saw the same polling numbers and had already announced plans to hit the trail in an effort to improve his image with Canadian voters.

However, at the start of the week, that suddenly seemed to change. With C-48 waving in front of them like a red cape, the Tories appeared to transform into the Toros and charged, announcing their intention to attempt a no-confidence motion that would force new elections. As last night's hastily-arranged deal demonstrates, BQ obviously disagreed with Harper's strategy.

For the Tories, it means another trip to the drawing board, and yet another battle in which Harper finds himself outgeneraled by Martin. That cannot help Harper in building confidence in his leadership for his fellow Conservative MPs.

Mugabe Takes Revenge On Urban Poor For Supporting Opposition

Robert Mugabe has set out to chase the poor out of the cities and into concentration camps, the London Telegraph reports, by bulldozing their houses and leaving them homeless. Unfortunately for a few Zimbabweans, Mugabe's bulldozer squads don't feel particular about checking to see if the houses are empty first, resulting in the crushing deaths of at least two babies in the past two weeks:

"The police came. They had been sent to destroy the house," said Herbert Nyika, Charmaine's father. "They knocked down the building, the walls; they smashed everything. This was when our child was trapped inside. She died there." Her mother, Lavender, said: "I blame the government because it is they who instructed the police to do what they did. It is terrible. I have lost my daughter in such a strange way."

She added: "Of course they have managed to clean up the city but at the same time they have brought suffering to the people - property destruction, homelessness and now the death of a child."

The family is poor and their home was a small building in the back garden of a bigger house.

The Zimbabwean government has spent the past few years targeting white farmers, those with land and wealth; now it seems to be picking on the poor.

The Zimbabwean press yesterday admitted that two toddlers had died in the demolition drive - Charmaine, two, who died two weeks ago, and Terence Munyaka, 18 months, who died on Sunday from head injuries. As outrage rose around the world, the Zimbabwean police called on its officers to exercise more care. In London Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said on behalf of the G8 countries: "We call on the government of Zimbabwe to abide by the rule of law and respect human rights."

Every day in Harare, in Bulawayo, in the towns and cities of Zimbabwe, police in riot gear are systematically moving from suburb to suburb forcing people from their homes. Bulldozers with their buckets raised are silhouetted on the skyline.

The scale of the clearance is so great there is too much work for the police to do - they are now forcing the people to destroy their own homes, or charging them a fee for demolition. On the roads are wheelbarrows piled high, trucks overloaded with cupboards, beds, mattresses - thousands and thousands of people making their way somewhere, but there is nowhere to go. Many are living in the open - their furniture arranged around them as if the walls were still there.

With the poor transformed into homelessness by Mugabe's decree, the local charities and churches have been overwhelmed by refugees, while the cities must use force to push the newly destitute off of what used to be their land. The Telegraph followed some of them as they went off to farms seized by Mugabe from white landowners and where the agricultural basis for the nation's economy has since died. The motive isn't to restart the farming system that Mugabe destroyed by chasing off the farmers who knew what they were doing, but apparently to create refugee camps that will keep any rebellious movements away from the cities, where they could coalesce and create a real survival problem for the dictator.

Like so many modern dictators, Mugabe has decided to simply kill or dislocate as many of his potential opponents as possible. Whether they die of malnutrition, exposure, disease, or other means matters little, just as long as they die and do so as invisibly as possible. If that means that a few toddlers have to get crushed to death under his bulldozers ... so be it.

A Suggested Site For New York's Football Stadium

Michael Bloomberg need look no further than a site for New York's controversial new football stadium than the offices of the New York Times, or perhaps the home of its publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger. In today's editorial, the Paper of Record cheers the Supreme Court decision in the Kelo case yesterday and its attack on property rights:

The Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that the economically troubled city of New London, Conn., can use its power of eminent domain to spur development was a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest. It also is a setback to the "property rights" movement, which is trying to block government from imposing reasonable zoning and environmental regulations. ...

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor lamented that the decision meant that the government could transfer any private property from the owner to another person with more political influence "so long as it might be upgraded." That is a serious concern, but her fears are exaggerated. The majority strongly suggested that eminent domain should be part of a comprehensive plan, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing separately, underscored that its goal cannot simply be to help a developer or other private party become richer.

I suppose I should not be surprised that the New York Times argues that the ends justify the means, but the fact that they so baldly buy into this shows just how badly they've slid into the statist mindset. What they endorse is the notion that people must live in their homes at the whim of city governments, who only have to justify their seizure by creating a plan that asserts that another private developer will put their land to better use than the homeowner.

The Times laughably argues that even though government acting as an unwanted arbiter between two private property owners is a serious concern, the fears that a government will choose the one with deeper pockets is "exaggerated". Oh, yeah, sure. In fact, that's exactly what happened with New London. No one argued that the houses being condemned were "blighted"; the neighborhood was working class but maintained well. Some of the people arguing their case had, in fact, recently put a lot of money into renovations, money that they now will never see. Most had lived in the neighborhood for decades, and one house had remained in the same family for over 100 years, with the current resident having lived there for 60 of them. New London decided that the waterfront view had more value as commercial property than for the people who actually owned it, and sold out for a few extra tax dollars.

Of course, the New York Times has new land for its new offices through eminent domain, so they're happy with this ruling. I'd say that if Bloomberg wanted to take back that land for something that would generate more jobs and revenue than the New York Times -- perhaps that football stadium, or a mall, or even a real newspaper -- the editorial position would suddenly change to rail against the arbitrary seizure of property and the damage it does to the community and the economy.

Iraqi PM: No Timetables

With Democrats renewing their calls for an exit timetable for American troops in Iraq, the head of the Iraqi government traveled to the United States to confirm what the Bush administration and the Pentagon have said all along -- that so-called "exit strategies" amount to little more than retreat plans in the face of terrorists:

The U.S.-led multinational force must stay in Iraq until Iraqi forces are fully prepared to defend the country by themselves, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Thursday.

Setting of a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces would be a sign of weakness, he said. "The country would be open to increased terrorist activity," he said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ahead of his White House meeting Friday with President Bush, al-Jaafari said Iraq's insurgency consisted of a "very, very limited minority" of people.

The Iraqi sees this issue for what it is. Dictating a deadline only tells the world that we have no patience for the hard work that this war requires. Osama bin Laden has often bragged that he can outwait the United States because we have no stomach for the kind of existential warfare that al-Qaeda wages, a lesson he learned through several American administrations of both parties. We abandoned our embassy staff without any fight at all in 1979; we bailed out of Beirut in 1983 after a single attack killed 243 Marines; and we hightailed out of Somalia in 1993 after winning a battle that resulted in a dead American being dragged down a street for the benefit of TV audience nationwide. Even after attacking a Navy ship in 2000, America refused to fight back, pursuing terrorists with indictments and handcuffs instead of bombers and ground troops.

Iraq also knows this history, and one can't blame al-Jaafari for getting nervous seeing it come around again. We walked away and left Saddam in place in 1991 instead of finishing the job, leaving the native populations to get slaughtered without us lifting a finger to stop him. Why? Because we worried that the world might not approve of the US using its power without UN permission, an attitude that applies to both the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations. And absent 9/11, as Jack Straw reportedly observed in the overblown Downing Street memos, the US probably would still be watching as Saddam emerged triumphant from the sanctions that were collapsing as the towers fell.

No one could be in a better position to tell Americans that our help is needed and appreciated. He represents the voters in Iraq, elected by popular vote to the National Assembly and then to the head of state by his fellow parliamentarians. Jaafari represents those Iraqis who braved the terrorists, their purple-stained fingers branding them with their courage and their defiance, to create the hope of a stable, secure, and free society. They trusted us to help them see that mission all the way through to success.

Who wants to get up and tell Jaafari that he and his people simply aren't worth the effort, and that we'd rather retreat and leave the Iraqis a second time to the tender mercies of the terrorists?

The Crying Game Continues

The one Republican that Democrats hate more than George Bush appeared in New York yesterday to talk about the opposition party and how they failed to heed the lessons of 9/11. Karl Rove's criticisms enraged Democrats, who today demanded a retraction:

Karl Rove came to the heart of Manhattan last night to rhapsodize about the decline of liberalism in politics, saying Democrats responded weakly to Sept. 11 and had placed American troops in greater danger by criticizing their actions.

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble." ...

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

While many of us on the Right think that this analysis is spot on, especially given all the hue and cry (literally, from Dick Durbin) over detaining terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, these words have Democrats steaming. Despite the fact that Senator Durbin still has not retracted his original statement analogizing the military's management of Camp X-Ray to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, Democrats now want Rove to apologize for being ... divisive?

Democrats are demanding that White House adviser Karl Rove immediately retract and apologize for comments that liberals responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes by wanting to "prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." ...

Schumer said Democrats were drafting a letter asking Rove to retract his remarks. Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also called on President Bush to "immediately repudiate Karl Rove's offensive and outrageous comments."

Would this be the same Harry Reid who called George Bush a loser and a liar, and later said that he would only retract the "loser" comment? Could this be the same party that has its chairman calling Republicans people who never did an honest day's work in their lives, the party of "unfriendly ... white Christians" and who "hates Republicans and everything they stand for"? Surely the party that has stood up and demanded civil trials for captured terrorists instead of the military detention they require and bemoaned the loss os sympathy that the world had for us on 9/11 cannot have taken offense at Rove's assertion that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

What we have here, in this demand for a retraction after a season of personal attacks from Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party is pusillanimity at its most hypocritical. Talk about dishing it out and not being able to take it! That the party of Harry Truman has descended to this jaw-dropping level of political cowardice and sheer crybaby status boggles the mind.

Small wonder that the American electorate has shut Democrats out of power during this epic period of national security crises. Who would trust these wimps to defend themselves, let alone anyone else?

UPDATE & BUMP TO TOP: I got this from anonymous CQ readers. Why did Rove say the liberal response was to beg for moderation and restraint? Perhaps it has to do with MoveOn.org and its petition drive less than 48 hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers (emphases mine):

Petition 1: "We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of the United States of America and of countries around the world, appeal to the President of The United States, George W. Bush; to the NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson; to the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi; and to all leaders internationally to use moderation and restraint in responding to the recent terrorist attacks against the United States. We implore the powers that be to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction."

It could also have been these quotes:

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), 10/1/01, Roll Call: "I truly believe if we had a Department of Peace, we could have seen [9/11] coming."

Al Sharpton, 12/1/02, New York Times, on the 9/11 attacks: "America is beginning to reap what it has sown."

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, 3/1/2003, Toledo Blade: "One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped cast off the British crown."

Have the Democrats actually retracted any of these statements? It sounds to me like truth is an absolute defense for Rove.

UPDATE II: Spare me the faux outrage, e-mailers. Look at the links I've provided and tell me how Rove said anything inaccurate. Howard Dean told radio audiences during the primary campaign that he thought it was possible that George Bush conspired with the Saudis to cover up their involvement in the 9/11 attacks -- and you all made him the chairman of your party, so he could continue calling Republicans evil. Ted Kennedy keeps talking about how Bush cooked up the entire war on terror at his Crawford ranch, and no one's asked him to step down. None of you had anything to say when Dick Durbin, the #2 Democrat in the Senate compared Camp X-Ray to Dachau, the gulags, and the Cambodian killing fields. And now Rove's echoing the words of MoveOn, Al Sharpton, Neil Abercrombie, and others to audiences in New York is "despicable"? Pathetic.

And courtesy of GOP.com, here are a couple more from the Democrats who now claim that Rove has gone beyond the pale:

Senator Joe Biden, 10/22/01: ‘How much longer does the bombing campaign continue?’ Biden asked during an Oct. 22 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘We’re going to pay every single hour, every single day it continues.’ (Miles A. Pomper, "Building Anti-Terrorism Coalition Vaults Ahead Of Other Priorities," Congressional Quarterly Weekly, 10/26/01, no link)

Senator Joe Biden, 10/22/01: “The Bombing Campaign, [Biden] Said, Reinforced Existing Stereotypes Of The United States As A ‘High-Tech Bully …’” (Ibid.)

Representative Dennis Kucinich, 9/30/01: Sitting In His Capitol Hill Office Last Week, Near A Window Where He Could See The Smoke Rising From The Pentagon On Sept. 11, Kucinich Insisted He Is More Optimistic Than Ever That People Worldwide Are Ready To Embrace The Cause Of Nonviolence.” ... “Afghanistan May Be An Incubator Of Terrorism But It Doesn’t Follow That We Bomb Afghanistan …” (Elizabeth Auster, “Offer The Hand Of Peace,” [Cleveland, OH] Plain Dealer, 9/30/01)

Senator John Kerry, 4/19/04: "I will use our military when necessary, but it is not primarily a military operation. It's an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort," he said. "And we're putting far more money into the war on the battlefield than we are into the war of ideas. We need to get it straight." (Washington Times, 4/19/04)

Like it or not, that's the rhetoric we've heard from the liberals since the towers fell. It's not a misrepresentation, and the reason for all this manufactured outrage is (a) the Democrats needed a distraction from Dick Durbin, and (b) they've been proven wrong and don't like that Karl Rove reminded people about it.

We're From The Government -- We're Here To Move You

The Supreme Court has ruled that cities can seize property under eminent domain, even if that property has been put to productive use and maintained properly, for commercial as well as public use as long as one can stretch an argument about "public use" to its breaking point. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS upheld the confiscation of private homes in New London, CT, so that the city could build a new facility for Pfizer Labs:

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people's homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.

A group of homeowners in New London's Fort Trumbull area had fought the city's attempt to impose eminent domain, arguing that their property could be seized only to serve a clear public use such as building roads or schools or to eliminate blight. The homeowners, some of whom had lived in their house for decades, also argued that the public would benefit from the proposed project only if it turned out to be successful, making the "public use" requirement subject to the eventual performance of the private business venture.

The Fifth Amendment also requires "just compensation" for the owners, but that was not an issue in the case decided today because the homeowners did not want to give up their property at any price.

Unsurprisingly, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that they had deferred to legislative action in this case, a position with which Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer agreed. However, the other four justices argued -- correctly, in my opinion -- that eminent domain should not be used to transfer property from one private owner to another. The power of the government should not overrule the private marketplace unless the land goes for a specific public -- i.e., not private -- use. Not surprisingly, the court relied on a 1954 Warren Court decision which broadened the term "public use" to include blighted areas that required public funds for urban renewal.

This does a tremendous injustice to the property owners of New London and everywhere in the United States. This puts the entire notion of property rights into jeopardy. Now cities can literally force people off their land in order to simply increase their tax base, which is all that New London accomplished in this smelly manuever.

I recall the words of Mark Twain, who famously lost a copyright case involving a bootleg publication of one of his novels despite having the law clearly on his side. (Unfortunately, I cannot find the reference -- perhaps a CQ reader can locate it.) Upon his loss, he remarked that since the judge was so cavalier with Twain's property, Twain planned to offer the Judge's house up for sale -- and if he got a good enough offer, he might let the buyer take the contents as well.

Can anyone come up with a good use for Justice Stevens' house? A bowling alley or a Bennigans, anything that improves the tax base for his community? We could urge its confiscation under eminent domain and perhaps put in a Mark Twain Museum instead. Now that would be justice.

UPDATE II: CQ reader bRight and Early found the Twain reference here. And because I could only dream of even approaching Twain's gift for prose, here's the original from the master himself:

It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make a good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.

Brilliant, of course. The entire letter, in fact, is a masterpiece of sarcasm from one of America's most accomplished practitioners of the art.

But The Chemicals Came Out Of Nowhere, Apparently

Instapundit and Trey Jackson link to a Washington Post story about a trial of 13 terrorists who attempted to stage a massive chemical attack on Amman, Jordan last year. Jordanian intelligence caught the Zarqawi-led ring before they had a chance to detonate chemical weapons on a scale that could have killed thousands:

Islamic militants planned to detonate an explosion that would have sent a cloud of toxic chemicals across Jordan, causing death, blindness and sickness, a chemical expert testified in a military court Wednesday.

Col. Najeh al-Azam was giving evidence in the trial of 13 men who are alleged to have planned what would have been the world's first chemical attack by the al-Qaida terror group. The accused include al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, and three other fugitives who are being tried in absentia.

Jordanian security services foiled the plot in April last year. Jordanian officials say that had it been carried out, thousands of people would have died.

This attempt received quite a bit of press last year when the plot was discovered and the terrorists arrested. The Jordanians released pictures of the mass amounts of chemicals involved, including hydrogen peroxide, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, and others. Given the efforts in Iraq of Zarqawi and his lieutenants, the likelihood of the chemicals coming from old Ba'athist stocks there at least ranks as high as getting them from Syria or other adjacent states.

Zarqawi issued a statement at the time denying he had chemical weapons or intended them for the attack on Amman, although he took credit for planning it. The only ones buying that explanation are the defendants themselves, but even one of them confessed to conspiring to use the crude but effective WMD materials for the attack on Jordan's intelligence service. (He later recanted his confession.) It appears to me that the terrorists got caught red-handed, so to speak, but don't want to generate questions about where they got the chemicals for the attack -- and whether any more exist elsewhere, too.

May Your Wishes Come True

USA Today reports that a terrorist on Saudi Arabia's most-wanted list was killed in an American attack on an al-Qaeda stronghold in northern Iraq. A message from terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi confirmed that Abdullah Mohammed Rashid al-Roshoud "got what he wished", which is to say, he died with a gun in one hand and the Qu'ran in the other:

The Web statement said Abdullah Mohammed Rashid al-Roshoud was killed in fighting near Qaim, on the border with Syria. It was signed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most notorious terrorist leader in Iraq.

The statement did not say when al-Roshoud was killed, but U.S. forces have launched a series of offensives near Qaim in past weeks against militants coming across the border. ...

"When the Crusaders could not enter the area, the only thing they could do was bombard the mujahedeen with warplanes," it said. "Our sheik (al-Roshoud) got what he wished" — martyrdom.

Al-Roshoud had been No. 24 on a list of the 26 most-wanted terrorist leaders put out by Saudi Arabia two years ago and was one of only three militants on the list still at large. He was one of the main theologians for al-Qaeda's network in Saudi Arabia, calling for a holy war against the Saudi royal family and Western interests in the Persian Gulf.

This news comes as a series of bombings by AQ ripped through Iraq, killing dozens. So far, Zarqawi has led an eight-week offensive with increasingly more effective shape-charge IEDs, although he continues to primarily target civilian and police facilities rather than military assets, where his attacks have been much less effective. Losing the leadership of Roshoud and the resources at his command will impact the ability of this network to maintain that kind of forward momentum.

So will the actions of the Americans and Iraqis in neutralizing the less senior members of the Zarqawi AQ network. Iraqi police captured 50 insurgents in and around Baghdad in their efforts to squeeze the terrorists out of the capital. It creates an intelligence opportunity that will allow the Iraqis to track down more of the leadership. American troops killed seven more after the terrorists tried attacking a patrol in western Baghdad and seized a large cache of weapons as a result.

The Iraqis are becoming a much more effective force in their own defense as time and training goes along. While we will need to stay around until they have the ability to maintain order on their own, they have made good progress and they will garner more and more support from their own people. The radical Sunni and Wahhabi dead-enders tossing the bombs, on the other hand, have left all pretense of supporting Arabs behind them, along with the 1200 or so civilian casualties they have caused during this offensive. They don't want to free Arabs from foreign domination; they want to place Arabs under the domination of terror, and the Iraqis, at least, see that clearly.

If the Zarqawi fanatics can't achieve that, they wish as Roshoud did to die at the hands of their enemies. May those wishes come true, and quickly.

The Latest Ohio Post-Mortem -- No GOP Fraud Or Suppression

The Democrats' long-awaited study on the presidential election in Ohio produced plenty of complaints of long lines and malfunctioning machines, but did not come close to proving any fraud or suppression by Republicans, despite claims to the contrary by DNC chair Howard Dean:

A five-month study for the Democratic National Committee found that more than one in four Ohio voters experienced problems at the polls last fall, , but the study did not find evidence of widespread election fraud that might have contributed to President Bush's narrow victory there.

The detailed report, released Wednesday, said that disproportionately high numbers of blacks and young people had complained about long lines, intimidation and malfunctioning machines. But Democratic officials said they could not conclude that Mr. Bush's Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, would have won in Ohio even if voting had gone smoothly. ...

But Dr. Dean said the volume of problems reported by blacks and young people suggested that Republicans had tried to suppress the vote in heavily Democratic districts.(NYT)

What the New York Times failed to include in its article is that when Dean made that accusation, the report's author immediately released a statement saying that the study did not support that conclusion and that he would disassociate himself from any such analysis:

"Where the partisan bias came from, where it went, we really have no basis for making any assertion about that and I don't believe the report makes any statements about that," said Cornell University professor of government Walter Mebane Jr.

Dean was forced to backtrack, saying that it at least had the appearance of unfairness for African-Americans in Ohio. Dean blamed the problems for black voters on Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, an African-American himself.

The Washington Post curiously also omits the backtrack of Dean and the protest of the study's author. They quote Mebane extensively, however, as stating that the issues could not have changed the outcome in Ohio and that no "large-scale misallocation of vote" occurred to anyone's benefit from the problems encountered. Dan Balz also allows Blackwell's response into its report of the issue:

Blackwell's office in Ohio disputed the claim of voter suppression and said the report contained a number of errors. "The facts do not support their conclusions," said Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office.

LoParo said census data showed that African American turnout reached record levels last year, increasing by 84,000 from 2000.

He said that the number of provisional ballots issued in 2004 was proportionally about the same as in 2000 and cited an Electionline.org analysis that found Ohio had counted a higher percentage of provisional ballots (78 percent) than either Pennsylvania (49 percent) or Florida (36 percent).

The Washington Times finds its own nuggets of information that the Paper of Record and the Post deem unimportant to its readership. An earlier independent audit of Ohio's vote conducted by election attorneys for the state legislature did find some evidence of fraud. Not surprisingly, given the source, the DNC's audit appears to have missed this:

In a stinging reply to the report, Mr. Mehlman agreed that there were numerous election abuses that took place in Ohio last year, but said they were perpetrated by Democrats or their political allies. In one instance, he said, "Democrat allies attempted to disenfranchise Ohio voters by submitting registration cards for Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Michael Jordan."

In March, a group of Ohio election law attorneys conducted a review of the state's election for the House Committee on Administration. It found, among other things, that "thousands of false and fraudulent voter-registration cards had been discovered and became the subject of numerous investigations by boards of elections, actions by local law enforcement and many media reports."

"Overwhelmingly," this report said, "these problems were reportedly traced primarily" to four Democratic political allies who supported Mr. Kerry: ACORN, America Coming Together, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP National Voter Fund.

So, yes, Virginia, there was voter fraud in Ohio. What the Exempt Media wants to keep from us is that it occurred on behalf of the Democrats. The race, unlike in Wisconsin and Washington, wasn't close enough for it to make a difference. For that, Ohioans can be grateful.

Preparing The Next Obstructionist Target

Senate Democrats have selected their next target for their new obstructionist tactics of demanding more and more documentation as an excuse to filibuster an executive nomination. In this case, however, they won't demand documentation on the nominee, but on the man whom the nominee will replace:

The senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee has warned the Pentagon that he may block the nomination of a new defense policy chief unless documents involving the departing policy head -- Douglas J. Feith -- are turned over for review.

The action by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) threatens to hold up another important presidential appointment as lawmakers remain deadlocked with the Bush administration over the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. That dispute, too, involves Democratic requests for documents the White House has refused to surrender. ...

Levin has criticized Feith for portraying the relationship as more extensive and significant than U.S. intelligence agencies thought at the time. Administration officials have defended Feith's prewar efforts as reflecting a legitimate attempt to provide an alternative analysis. The Pentagon produced many documents that Levin requested, but has withheld others, citing confidentiality and legal concerns.

The Pentagon insists that it has complied with most of Levin's requests, even though the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the same documents and concluded that nothing illegal occurred. Two documents have been withheld for security reasons: one is a legal analysis of the policy, which presumably Levin could hire an attorney to perform himself. The Pentagon describes the other document as material to be used in prosecuting foreign nationals when the need arises and wants to keep it quiet, for obvious reasons. Both apparently have been seen by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which as I said found no impropriety.

Levin simply wants to hold his own probe, and so far the Administration has been remarkably cooperative, even though Levin's probe has no official status within Congress. It's a leftover of the 2004 presidential election, when the Democrats demonized Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and other "neocons" for supposedly warping American foreign policy. However, the American people voted on policy in late 2004 when they re-elected George Bush to the presidency. Levin and the other Senate Democrats simply cannot believe that they lost that election and that the American people endorsed Bush's foreign policy, and they're trying to do anything they can to thwart the will of the electorate.

In the case of John Bolton, the filibuster represents the Democrats' attempt to derail Bush's stance on the United Nations. That is bad enough, but this new effort targets the war effort while we have men and women fighting overseas, and in any case only has the effect of keeping the man they dislike in the very position from which Democrats want him gone. It makes little sense, except as partisan gameplaying, using the Department of Defense as a pawn. It's time to consider the broader application of the Byrd option to all executive-branch confirmations, as the Democrats have clearly shown themselves to have committed to playing obstructionist games all session long.

Addressing The Symptom And Not The Disease

The House passed a Constitutional amendment that will guarantee Congress the power to regulate how the flag is treated, including the power to outlaw "desecration" of the American flag, on a fairly bipartisan vote. The measure now goes to the Senate, which has killed it in years past on a more partisan basis, but the Washington Post reports that may change this year:

A constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to ban flag burning passed the House yesterday, and congressional leaders said it has a strong chance to clear the Senate for the first time, sending it to the states for ratification.

The House has passed the measure four times before, but it has always fallen short of the two-thirds vote needed in the Senate. But several changes in the Senate shifted several votes to the bill's supporters, and a lobbyist who leads the opposition said the absence of one or two senators could mean that the measure would pass.

"There are too many scenarios where we lose," said Terri Ann Schroeder, senior lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're very concerned." Schroeder counts 65 solid votes in favor of the amendment of the 67 needed for passage. "We still have a number of folks that have never voted, and we still have a potential problem if 100 members do not . . . vote," she said.

The issue has been a favorite of conservatives since a 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling in 1989 that protected flag desecration as free speech.

Normally, I would favor almost anything the ACLU opposes just as a guidepost to common sense. In this case, however, the proposal has two major flaws, both of which I believe are ultimately fatal to the intent of the amendment, which is to stop people from burning the flag at protests. And while I'll wind up on the side of the ACLU as far as this amendment goes, their approach to the subject comprises at least a major part of one of its flaws.

First, practically speaking, the amendment doesn't necessarily create a ban on flag desecration; it merely gives Congress the opening to do so to counter the Supreme Court's decision determining that desecration is political speech. Congress can then pass laws on a majority basis to enable and enforce a ban. However, questions about what constitutes a flag, what constitutes desecration, and how law enforcement should enforce it will dog Congress. It's easy to posture, but given the ability, I don't see this as a practical or pressing law-enforcement issue, especially when the terrorists are probably the least likely to out themselves by lighting up Old Glory in public -- at least not in the US.

Can it be done? Sure, but all that will wind up happening is that a lot of people will get hauled into court to get their hands slapped, and since it will be a federal crime, the cases will jam the federal courts. Instead of burning "real" flags, people will start burning paper representations. Will that fall under the ban, or does the flag have to be cloth to be desecrated?

Second, and in my mind more important, the push for this amendment comes from Congress' (correct) impulse to push back against an activist court that creates new rights and laws out of thin air. In this case, we have a court decision that made arson equivalent to political speech and untouchable by law, while a subsequent court ruled that actual political speech could be subject to prior restraint when conducted in conjunction with an election, thanks to the BCRA, John McCain, and Russ Feingold. The amendment in this case shouldn't be that narrow -- it should recognize that speech doesn't consist of anything else but the verbal or written publication of actual speech, not arson, nude dancing, or blowing up buildings, which is the logical extension of the 1989 decision. Everything else should be left to the Legislature to regulate.

In fact, the solution here isn't even an amendment. It is to nominate and confirm judges that not only will stop looking for emanations from penumbras that don't exist in the Constitution and will respect the division of powers instead of creating laws themselves. We need justices who understand that the so-called "living document" only means that it can be amended by the people when so desired, but otherwise means what it says. These ideas aren't radical, despite recent partisan mudflinging to the contrary.

The fact that two-thirds of the Senate appears to be ready to vote to approve this amendment shows a bipartisan recognition of the problem. Those who vote to approve this mistake should be held accountable for their inability to approve justices that would correct the actual problem of judicial activism and will reverse the most egregious examples of its implementation when the opportunities arise, starting with that 1989 decision that kicked this entire battle into high gear. Otherwise, what we will have will be hundreds of amendments addressing narrow issues that will create massive confusion and complications for legislatures and law-enforcement efforts. We will have the EU Constitution instead of the compact framework that has served us so well for the last two centuries.

Tories Ready To Try Again?

CTV reports that the Conservatives may try again to topple the Liberal government, this time focusing on the NDP budget amendment C-48 which gave PM Paul Martin a tie in the Commons, saving his grip on power by the single vote of the Speaker. The effort reverses an agreement reached earlier with the Liberals to delay action on C-38, the gender-neutral marriage proposal, until after the summer recess:

Ottawa is buzzing over word that the Conservatives may once again try to bring the minority Liberal government down before the end of the month.

The showdown could happen at the end of this week, or early next week, when the government's top priority budget add-on bill, Bill C-48, comes to a final vote.

"I expect we're going to have every member in our caucus here whenever the vote is," B.C. Conservative MP John Reynolds told CTV News on Wednesday. "Whether it's tomorrow or next week ... we will have every member here, and this government deserves to be defeated."

Known as the "NDP budget", C-48 would add $4.6 billion in social spending to the government's original budget. The shaky minority Liberals agreed to the extra spending in exchange for the support of the New Democrats.

It's an agreement that the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois staunchly oppose.

Reynolds told CTV that the two major parties had agreed to allow C-48 to pass through unscathed if the Grits delayed any action on C-38, although it doesn't seem that the Liberals should have wanted to speed up consideration of the latter. More than two dozen Liberal MPs have expressed their opposition to gender-neutral marriage, at least as structured in this particular act. Extra time for fine tuning would appear to help the Liberals more than the Tories, and a faster vote should have helped Harper in attempting to peel off enough Liberals to perhaps get his no-confidence motion, eventually.

And yet, the Liberals made the effort to extend the session instead of proroguing it in order to squeeze in C-38. According to Reynolds, that broken pledge has re-energized the Tory caucus, although it's still unclear why. Obviously the Tories oppose C-38 (and C-48, for that matter), but with the entire Commons riding on the edge of a knife, numerically speaking, the longer session could give them more opportunities to unseat Paul Martin, if they choose to try.

It appears to me that the Tories planned on escaping into recess, hoping to use the time to have Stephen Harper tour the country and build up his popularity, or at least rid himself of the negatives that have attached themselves to him. The longer session delays that, but it won't eliminate it altogether. However, if they can put the votes together to defeat C-48 when it comes up, the Tories can avoid the gay-marriage debate altogether and instead initiate the summer election they want. They'd better hope that the polling numbers are off if they get what they want, though.

British Link To 9/11 Held In Mexico

The London Telegraph reports today that a itinerant Lebanese-born British pilot has been held in Mexico, suspected of having a link to the 9/11 attacks in the US. Mexican and US intelligence services jointly arrested Amer Hykel near the resort city of Cabo San Lucas, but have yet to give any specifics on the role he may have played:

A Briton who described himself as a wandering pilot has been detained by Mexican authorities and could be linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, officials have said.

Amer Haykel, 45, identified as a British citizen of Lebanese descent, was arrested on Monday at the volunteer fire station of Todos Santos, on the Pacific coast about 35 miles north-west of Cabo San Lucas.

Mexico's federal attorney general's office said US authorities linked Haykel "to extremist groups believed to be involved with September 11 attacks in New York". It did not say if he faced any charges or if he was believed to be involved in any terrorist actions. Haykel told acquaintances that he was a pilot wandering the world. He seemed like "a straightforward person", said Gabriel Garcia, of the Cabo San Lucas fire station.

The mysterious wanderer had attracted official attention before. Mexican intelligence had tracked him down in Cancun two months ago, but he disappeared until a tip placed him at the Cabo fire station, looking for shelter and complaining that someone had been following him. Ironically, however, apparently he has successfully evaded surveillance to that point.

No one has any more details than that at the moment. The AP reports that US officials have concerns that al-Qaeda may try to stage attacks on the US from Mexico or Central America by air, and perhaps this mystery pilot could have been working his way through various staging areas masquerading as a migrant worker. Last week, Mexico handed over another suspect, a Pakistani that was charged with trafficking in jet-engine parts.

It appears that Mexico may have already become an AQ staging area. Perhaps now would be a good time to start getting serious about border control.

UPDATE: No threat from Haykel -- it turned out to be a clerical error.

Why Detain Terrorists? Maybe This Will Explain It

According to a Congressional study on the proliferation of WMD and the threats posed by state and non-state actors, the likelihood of an attack on a civilian population using WMD runs between 50-70% over the next ten years. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee surveyed a group of 85 security analysts from around the world to reach this gloomy prediction:

The study was commissioned by committee Chairman Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose nonproliferation efforts in Congress have been credited with helping the states of the former Soviet Union lessen their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

"The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Lugar said in a statement.

Committee aides sent out surveys asking respondents the percentage probability that a biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological attack would occur over the next five and 10 years.

"If one compounds these answers, the odds of some type of WMD attack occurring during the next decade are extremely high," the report said, using the acronym for weapons of mass destruction.

These same analysts agreed that the most likely of all scenarios would be a radiological attack by terrorists, rather than a state-on-state attack. This differs from a nuclear attack in that the weapon would not necessarily produce a fission reaction but instead spread radiological waste in a densely populated area to kill or injure as many people as possible. The probability for this kind of attack was described as "significantly higher" than any other kind of WMD attack scenario.

Given these predictions, how would people propose handling those terrorists captured in open combat or operating active networks to plan and stage attacks on the US and elsewhere? Releasing them will only allow them to return to their planning. Creating public trials for such unlawful combatants will necessarily draw the resources needed to catch their co-conspirators and fellow terrorists into civilian courts designed for criminals, not for foreign saboteurs and terrorists in time of war. This will also create massive legal headaches for the soldiers who capture the lunatics, imposing civil requirements for arrest rather than the flexibility needed to capture those who shoot and bomb them in the field.

We tried the civil-court system in the 1990s, and it didn't work. That's why we need a Gitmo, regardless of wherever we put it or what we call it. We have to understand that this is a war -- and it has been since the first attack on the World Trade Center, at least. It isn't an organized crime family with Osama bin Laden as a Muslim capo di tutti capi. The only way to get those odds reduced is to capture and keep as many terrorists away from the opportunities to attack us. Once we've identified who they are, then we need to keep them locked up. And even though we haven't addressed this specifically, the most secure option is to throw away the key.

This bothers civil-rights advocates who believe that everyone deserves due process. As Michelle Malkin notes, however, under the rules of war as defined by the Geneva Convention and US regulations, they get the due process to which they're entitled. Nothing requires us to go beyond this, and given the existential nature of the threat, nothing should compel us to do so with these murderous thugs.

If life imprisonment at Gitmo seems like a harsh punishment for unlawful combatants captured during a time of war, keep in mind that we could have just lined them up against the wall and had them shot instead, after their tribunal. Keep in mind that big hole in lower Manhattan where their comrades slaughtered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. And keep in mind that unless we start taking this seriously, those probabilities mean that they will succeed in doing the same, or worse, and possibly in your community.

Personally, I think life at Gitmo is too good for them.

A Reminder For Senator Durbin

Italy has just concluded a trial based on World War II atrocities committed by Nazis after Italy switched sides during the war. Italian authorities convicted ten former Nazis in absentia for the massacre of over 500 civilians in Sant'Anna di Stazzema, men whom the Italians believe to be alive and living in Germany to this day:

In August 1944, about 300 SS troops surrounded the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, which had been flooded with refugees, ostensibly to hunt for partisans. Instead, they rounded up and shot villagers, according to survivors. Others were herded into basements and other enclosed spaces and killed with hand grenades.

Historical documents are not clear on the precise number killed, but the most commonly cited number is 560 people. ...

The slaughter was one of the worst in a series of atrocities by Nazi troops in central and northern of Italy during World War II. Italian authorities began investigating the massacre a few years ago when officials found reports on the killings drawn up by Allied forces at the end of the war.

The Nazis took their revenge for the faithlessness of their Italian allies on civilian populations unable to defend themselves. This was not a unique case; the SS wiped the town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia off the map when two British-trained partisan commandos assassinated "Hangman" Heydrich, the author of the Final Solution, earlier in the war. They slaughtered the men and some of the women, sent the survivors to labor camps and the children to Germany to be raised as Germans, and plowed the buildings under.

And these were hardly the worst of the Nazi depredations during the war.

A question for Senator Durbin and his apologists: do you think that the American military operates in this fashion?

UPDATE: Read Michelle Malkin's Townhall column for more perspective on Gitmo and the due process given the detainees. It makes Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal look like a saint for not slapping his German hosts in this anecdote:

The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? "You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?" Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts.

Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. When I offered that, as a journalist, I had encountered no restrictions on press freedom, he cut me off. "That's because The Wall Street Journal takes its orders from the government."

By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

The German "diplomat" (scare quotes not reflective of Mr. Stephens but the Germans who gave him his status) has this much in common with a good chunk of the American public -- he hasn't bothered to check his facts:

Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called "Combatant Status Review Tribunals," are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as "enemy combatants" is based.

Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration's failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, "the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the 'Article V' hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case.

Since these detainees do not qualify as POWs, having been captured out of uniform bearing arms against us in a time of war, that's all the process to which they're entitled. Politicians who bemoan a lack of a "trial" do not have the faintest clue about how these people have been processed.

A Frontrunner Only The Exempt Media Would Select

Ron Fournier exposes the lack of insight most of the media have into the GOP with his soon-to-be-an-embarrassment column on the 2008 presidential race today, naming John McCain as the Republican frontrunner for the nomination:

If you want to be the next president, it's time to start running — unless your name is Hillary Rodham Clinton or John McCain. They can wait. And wait, as front-runners tend to do.

"They're 800-pound gorillas," says Democratic consultant Jeff Link of Iowa. "They're well-known, well-liked and will be heavy favorites in their respective parties." ...

McCain has the opposite problem. He is favored by a majority of Democrats and independents who would vote in a general election, but his support among Republicans is less than ideal.

If he seeks the presidency, McCain's challenge would be maintain his appeal to moderates while highlighting in the GOP nomination fight his support of Bush on Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Fournier and Link must have discovered comedy. John McCain might have trouble getting re-elected in Arizona, thanks to his George Soros backing through the Reform Institute and other unusual funding links through that non-profit and his sponsorship of the BCRA. McCain's early defection on the filibuster has guaranteed that the party will never support his candidacy, as well as the "maverick" monicker that every two-bit journalist uses to describe him. "Maverick" means unreliable, in relation to his commitment to follow the party's goals and objectives.

The true issue with McCain is not his fairy-tale status as frontrunner; it's whether his inability to achieve that status will lead him to run as an independent. He has long been an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, and he could go Bull Moose on the GOP just to spite the current leadership. However, he has a couple of strikes against him. Most prominently, the debacle of on-line censorship that his BCRA has brought upon political speech has finally been shown, and bloggers across the entire spectrum have rebelled against McCain and Russ Feingold for curtailing the First Amendment. His commitment to opposing abortion won't attract many Democrats, either.

The only way that John McCain will wind up as the GOP frontrunner in 2008 is if no one else runs for the spot. His actions over the past few years have pushed him to the sidelines of the party, a development which has gone unnoticed by the Exempt Media in their zeal to put him on TV, which is pretty much all McCain ever wanted. They've missed the fact that McCain has destroyed any sense of trust between himself and GOP voters nationwide. His candidacy wouldn't survive past Iowa in the primaries. (via Michelle Malkin, who is just as skeptical)

Snort Cocaine And Fund More Bombings

The BBC reports that Ecuador has broken up a drug ring that explicitly existed to fund terrorist operations for Iranian-backed and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. The ring specialized in providing cocaine for users in South America, the Middle East, and Europe:

Police in Ecuador say they have broken up an international drugs ring which was raising money for the Islamic militant group, Hezbollah.

The authorities have declined to give details of the gang's alleged links with the group, but say it was sending Hezbollah up to 70% of its profits.

Ecuadorean officials say the drugs network was run by a Lebanese restaurant owner in the capital, Quito. ... The police investigation, codenamed Operation Damascus, led to the arrests of a further 19 people Brazil and the United States.

Whoever got arrested in the US for participating in this trafficking scheme should face charges of treason, if the suspects hold American citizenship and two witnesses can attest to their knowledge of the ring's purpose. Funding Islamist terrorism abroad while we engage them as enemies qualifies as giving aid and comfort. Regardless of European willful naivete on Hezbollah's purposes, they operate as a terrorist organization under the direction of Damascus and with Iranian funding, and they have no problem using terror inside and outside Lebanon to further the Islamist goals of their al-Qaeda compatriots.

People who use cocaine and other recreational drugs should see this as a wake-up call in more ways than one. That little vial or baggie you buy to feel hip and cool doesn't come out of nowhere. Even without the Middle Eastern connections, most "distribution channels" rely on extortion and murder for market control. Add in the Hezbollah funding, however, and you can draw a direct line between the party animals who do a little blow and the pro-democracy activists getting blown up.

Just say no.

Abbas Defies Sharon On Disarming Militants, Qurei Discovers Why He's Wrong (Updated)

The Israeli-Palestinian summit between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas collapsed into bitter recriminations yesterday, as Sharon insisted that the peace process cannot continue until Abbas and the Palestinian Authority disarms the militias and takes control of security. Abbas refused, a position he would later have reason to regret:

A rare meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ended bitterly Tuesday after they failed to reach new agreements on issues related to Israel's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and on measures to rein in violence by Palestinian radicals.

Less than two months before the scheduled Israeli evacuation, the leaders clashed over Abbas's efforts to confront such militant groups as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the release of additional Palestinians from Israeli jails and the reopening of the Gaza airport that Palestinians see as key to the future of the local economy after the pullout. Agreement on those issues could have bolstered a four-month-old truce now severely strained by fresh violence.

Palestinian officials described the nearly two-hour meeting, the first in Jerusalem between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, as "difficult." They said it was dominated by Israeli demands that Abbas disarm the militant groups. Israeli officials said Sharon pledged to implement previous agreements, which Israel has yet to fulfill entirely because of what it says are lingering security concerns, but made no new deals.

The Israelis won't make any new deals because the Palestinians have yet to deliver on any of their old agreements. The PA had the responsibility to centralize security under one civilian authority going back to the Oslo Accords. In fact, that has always been one of the baseline prerequisites for statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinians haven't even started to address it more than a decade later.

A functional state cannot operate without having control of the organizations which use violence as a means of security. Without that control, states rapidly decline from nations to mere geographic entities with warlords competing for control, much like Somalia. The chaos that ensues spreads through the regions in which the states exist and even beyond that, as we have seen with the rise of al-Qaeda. Having a nation fall into that status is bad enough, but creating a new sovereign state under those conditions is suicide, especially for Israel.

It might also be suicide for Ahmed Qurei, as Abbas' ally ironically discovered after Abbas blowing off Sharon. Qurei and his entourage visited a refugee camp in the West Bank but had to flee when those gunmen that Abbas so ably defended against Sharon took potshots at him:

Disgruntled Palestinian gunmen have shot at a building in a West Bank refugee camp where Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei was speaking.

Mr Qurei was not harmed but had to flee the Balata camp in Nablus amid more gunfire. An explosive device also went off, but nobody was injured. ...

"This is the kind of chaos we do not want," Mr Qurei, who was accompanied by several cabinet ministers, said after the shooting.

"They want to impose their will but we will not bend to them," he added.

Ahmed, I think you will discover that Ariel could not have said it better.

I'd like to think that the Palestinian oligarchy could have a road-to-Damascus conversion about disarming the militants after that experience, but that would give them too much credit. Abbas needs the gunmen as a bargaining chip for the final stages of any Israeli-Palestinian negotiation -- Jerusalem -- and he won't risk his position or his life to disarm them until that point gets resolved to his satisfaction. Without disarming the militias, however, that point will never even come up between Israel and Abbas. The former will never allow it, and the latter may not live to see it even if it does.

UPDATE: I had the names mixed up -- Qurei took fire, not Abbas. I've edited the post to reflect that. (h/t: CQ reader Jill)

All In The Family, Part Two

Another UN scam has come to light, according to a Fox News report I missed yesterday, one in which a father-son pair may have combined to ensure access to plenty of cash through the UN's auspices. This time, the Annans are not directly involved, but a Russian involved in the UN's Procurement Department with access to over a billion dollars in funding that he directed to a firm which hired his son as a requirement for the contract:

The staffer in question is Alexander Yakovlev (search), a dapper Russian who is possibly the longest tenured member of the U.N. procurement department — which last year alone spent more than $1.3 billion buying supplies and services for the United Nations. ...

Yakovlev’s job includes such sensitive matters as vetting potential U.N. contractors and processing their bids. In the 1990s, Yakovlev was deeply involved in the hiring of inspection firms for Oil-for-Food, including Cotecna Inspection S.A. (search), the Swiss firm for which Kojo Annan worked. After Secretary-General Annan reluctantly concluded that the more than $110 billion Oil-for-Food scandal was worth investigating, Yakovlev popped up as a key witness in two interim reports released earlier this year by the Volcker investigation.

In the Volcker version of events, Yakovlev emerged as a champion of integrity, portrayed as having fought a losing battle for fair bidding procedures on two major contracts under Oil-for-Food. Based in part on Yakovlev’s testimony, the Volcker committee censured another U.N. official, Joseph Stephanides, whom Kofi Annan last month fired. ...

But from material obtained outside the narrow focus of the Volcker reports, FOX News has learned that in matters of U.N. business, Yakovlev apparently had his own ideas involving proper procedures where it concerned a major U.N. supplier, IHC Services, Ltd., which at his request employed his son — Dmitry Yakovlev, now 23. ...

The son’s first job at IHC lasted through August, according to the resume, when he returned to university. The following year, the resume states, he returned to IHC as an intern, again from May through August. He then joined IHC full-time in December 2002 and worked there, according to the resume and confirmed in a brief and reluctant telephone interview with Dmitry, until December, 2003. Throughout this period Dmitry lived with his parents, as he still does, at their spacious brick home in the New York suburb of Yonkers—as he confirmed to FOX News.

Dmitry’s full-time employment at IHC was arranged at the specific request of Alexander Yakovlev, according to IHC’s CEO, Testa, who told FOX News that he had known the senior Yakovlev “for many years. I would see him at [U.N.] procurement services every week.” Testa agreed to hire the younger Yakovlev full-time in 2002, he related, after Alexander Yakovlev talked to him in the corridors of the U.N. procurement offices and said, according to Testa's recollection, “My son is graduating. He’s looking for an international environment.” Testa replied: “Let me see what I can do.”

Yakovlev’s request would seem to violate an important provision of the U.N. staff regulations that declares, “Staff members shall not use their office or knowledge gained from their official functions for private gain, financial or otherwise, or for the private gain of any third party, including family, friends and those they favour.” A senior U.N. procurement official, when asked by FOX News about the propriety of such a request, described it as a “total no-no, completely inappropriate.”

Dmitry, it appears, has had his hands on contract bids involving his father and the UN in a major example of conflict of interest. The close connection between IHC as a middleman and the UN's Procurement Department means that everything that the UN purchases has to be run through Dmitri's employer, which puts Alexander in the position of at least indirectly benefitting from each and every purchase he approves. It also might put pressure on the subcontractors to cough up a little something extra for Dmitry in order to ensure that their bids get approved.

The Congressional probes into the Oil-For-Food scam wondered why Stephanides got thrown under the bus so abruptly by Kofi Annan. It looks like Stephanides could testify to these unusual Bring Your Son To Work And Set Him Up As Bagman Days at Turtle Bay, and they wanted to discredit him before he could talk by claiming his involvement in OFF. But Stephanides held such a low rank and had so little connection to the scam, the action created a stir that attracted more attention than it diverted.

Obviously, senior UN management have a lot to hide, including their progeny, in a trend of corruption that starts at the top and cascades downwards. The UN needs an independent audit -- but before that, it needs new management in order to keep the guilty from trying to misdirect investigators in this manner. It's far past time for the US to insist on Annan's resignation and that of his senior deputies in order to start rebuilding the integrity of the UN, if such a project has any hope of success at all.

The Four Forbidden Words Of Iranian Elections

George Carlin practically built his career around his famous comedic protest against American broadcast censorship, "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV". The Iranian Guardian Council, which is not known for its sense of humor, apparently has its own list of dirty words that will get your electoral material destroyed -- words like "democracy" and "freedom":

Iranian security officials on Tuesday confiscated more than half a million wallet-size cards and posters endorsing Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for president from a printing house in Tehran, according to employees of the shop.

Employees said the posters and cards contained the words "repression," "terrorizing," "freedom" and "democracy."

"They said, 'The words you are using are offensive,' " said Mahmmoud Reza Bahmanpour, managing director of Nazar Printing House in downtown Tehran. He and other employees said several plainclothes agents, displaying a handwritten letter bearing the seal of Iran's judiciary, carried away 500,000 wallet-size cards and 70,000 posters. The material endorsed Rafsanjani, the former president whom Iran's reformers have rallied around in order to defeat the clerical establishment's apparent favorite in Friday's runoff ballot. ...

Bahmanpour, the printing shop's managing director, said he asked the agents if the cards could have been printed if the words "democracy" and "freedom" were omitted. They said yes.

Of course, this makes perfect sense. Perhaps instead of censorship, this just represents an effort by the Guardian Council to enforce Iranian truth-in-advertising laws. Who would be foolish enough to use the words "democracy" and "freedom" in conjunction with an Iranian election? Besides Jack Straw, that is.

The Washington Post's Karl Vick reports that the mystery of Teheran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's surprise second-place finish to Rafsanjani may be solved. The low turnout apparently gave the mayor and the Guardian Council an opening for the Revolutionary Guard to do some major ballot-stuffing on his behalf, leading him from single digits to the runoff election. The hardliner has already made his feelings about democracy well known; he was quoted during the election as saying that the Islamic Revolution didn't occur to bring democracy to the ummah.

The Guardian Council obviously agrees. They engineered the candidate list in the first round to keep reformists out, and they stuffed the ballot box and then simply made numbers up out of thin air to get the two most acceptable candidates for the runoff. Now they have outlawed the mention of freedom and democracy during the final election campaign -- where Iranians get to choose between a man who openly disdains democracy and a former president whose previous term in office demonstrated his lack of passion for it.

They can destroy all the signs they want at the printers' shops. It doesn't take a big effort to read the writing on the wall.

New, Improved Heritage Foundation Panel For July 8th!

As many of you already know, I will appear at the Heritage Foundation on July 8th to speak at a symposium on bloggers, journalism, and the convergence of the old and new media. Mark Tapscott, the Director for Heritage's Center for Media and Public Policy, has titled the presentation as "Are Bloggers and Journalists Friends Or Enemies"? Originally, Mark had lined up Jim Hill, the managing editor for the Washington Post Writers Group, as my counterbalance for the presentation. Now Mark has upped the ante (and my flop sweat) by adding Daniel Glover, the managing editor for National Journal's Technology Daily.

Here's the description from the Heritage Foundation invitation:

American blogger Ed Morrissey has broken story after sordid story on Canada's multi-million dollar Adscam scandal. But are bloggers "real" journalists? Are bloggers and journalists natural enemies or allies in reporting the news? Or are bloggers a completely new kind of media force that defies all traditional classification?

Morrissey has built a blog with enormous public policy influence in less than two years. Hill's career spans The Arizona Republic, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Glover is an editorial leader of one of America's most venerated publications. Come hear how three savvy voices of the Old and New Media answer these and many related issues.

The forum will start at 10:30 AM EDT on Friday, July 8th. If you can't watch it in person, the event will be televised through Heritage's web site. I'm looking forward to not just speaking at such a prestigious venue, but meeting Jim and Daniel and the people who will attend both the symposium and the lunch afterwards. (Fortunately for bloggers everywhere, I don't believe they'll be televising me eating lunch.) If you catch the speech, I hope to hear from you to get your feedback.

Britain: Rafsanjani No Reformer

Britain issued a warning against trusting Ali Akbar Rafsanjani as a reformist voice, reminding people of Rafsanjani's role in implementing some of the most repressive of the policies of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The unusually harsh diplomatic language comes as Iranian reformist groups debate whether to boycott elections altogether or band together to keep hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the presidency:

The wily cleric, who served as president from 1989 to 1997, has cast himself as a centrist, and has dropped several hints that he was open to dealing with America.

But a senior British diplomat dismissed Mr Rafsanjani's reputation as a "pragmatist", and cast doubt over whether he would make it easier to resolve the crisis over Teheran's nuclear programme.

"It's important that people do not see Rafsanjani as a white knight. He has been president for eight years, and a lot of bad things happened in those eight years," he said. "He does not have a record of reform, co-operation with the West or abiding by international standards.

"We hear what he says, and we like it. But there is a difference between talking the talk and walking the walk."

Britain's warning is well taken. The Telegraph reminds its readers that Rafsanjani used to run the Iranian secret police, and may have ordered the killings of scores of dissidents during the worst days of Khomeini's reign. No one at Downing Street apparently buys into the notion that Rafsanjani has mellowed into a democrat.

For that matter, they're not buying into Jack Straw's analysis of Iran as an "emerging democracy" any more, either. The obviously rigged election has revealed Straw's wishful thinking as hopelessly naive. The only benefit this election has had is to make clear that the Guardian Council rules Iran just as absolutely as the Politburo once did the Soviet Union.

Earlier today, I recommended that reform-minded Iranians should just boycott the polling centers if they wanted to send a message. According to Publius Pundit, they actually did that during the first round -- but the Guardian Council simply published bogus numbers instead. If people find that hard to believe, Robert Mayer has the photographs.

Durbin Apologizes Weakly A Week Later (Updated!)

Fox News, AP, and other outlets report that Senator Dick Durbin has apologized for his comparison between the American military and Nazis, Khmer Rouge, and Stalinist genocidal maniacs:

Under fire from Republicans and some fellow Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin apologized Tuesday for comparing American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to Nazis and other historically infamous figures.

"Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line," the Illinois Democrat said. "To them I extend my heartfelt apologies."

His voice quaking and tears welling in his eyes, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate also apologized to any soldiers who felt insulted by his remarks.

"They're the best. I never, ever intended any disrespect for them," he said.

At least this is an apology, instead of a "statement of regret". However tearfully delivered, though, it still contains qualifiers that shift the responsibility to everyone but Durbin. "Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line, and to them I extend my heartfelt apologies."

No, no, no.

Your remarks did cross the line, Senator. Why can't you just admit that, without qualification? This is yet another halfway dodge in putting the onus onto those whom you offended instead of taking responsibility for your own actions and comments.

Color me unimpressed. His fellow party members will now ask us all to move along. I'll consider doing that if they now will admit that Durbin's original statement slandered the military and debased the memories of those millions of victims that truly experienced what genocidal maniacs do with their innocent captives. If not, then they are just playing word games until they discover the right combination to climb out of the box in which Durbin has put them.

UPDATE: Why did Durbin feel the need to make this half-baked apology today after holding out for a week? Mayor Richard Daley, the man behind Durbin's power base in Chicago, refused to play along with Democrats in minimizing Durbin's original comments:

Mayor Richard Daley said Tuesday that even though U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin is a good friend, the fellow Democrat should apologize for comments comparing the actions of American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulags and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

"I think it's a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military act like that,'' Daley said. ...

Daley made his remarks in response to questions at a news conference after a graduation ceremony for new police officers. Last year, his son Patrick enlisted in the Army.

The mayor said he is a history buff and that Durbin was wrong to evoke comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust or the millions of people killed in Russia under Stalin and in Cambodia under Pol Pot. He became angry when a reporter said he thought Durbin's remarks were being mischaracterized.

"If you really believe that those men and women in Guantanamo Bay are Nazis, you better rethink what America is all about,'' Daley said. "... You go and talk to some victims of the Holocaust and they will tell you horror stories. And there are not horror stories like that at Guantanamo Bay.''

That should answer those who think that outrage over this slander remains the exclusive purview of the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio. Plenty of military families are Democrats, and I'd be willing to bet that they wouldn't cotton to the suggestion that Durbin's words had been "mischaracterized". Kudos to Mayor Daley for having the integrity to publicly call out his friend and political ally. Too bad Durbin still couldn't follow his advice.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin has a nice roundup of reaction to Durbin's latest refinement of his message, along with a new Weber grill. Rusty says that he'll give Durbin the benefit of the doubt -- for now. Matt May says "apology not accepted", and explains why at length. Rick Moran at the Right Wing Nuthouse threatens to break into song, but doesn't think Durbin was being sincere.

Poll Shows Gitmo Support Extends Beyond GOP, Bush

CNN/USA Today/Gallup released its latest poll numbers among adults, not voters, and not surprisingly it shows that George Bush has not made much of a rebound since last month's poor showing. His negatives outweigh his positives, and support for the war also has ebbed to its lowest levels in months. Without getting into hyperanalysis of the polling sample and methodology (Gerry always does that well, as does ABP), it's clear that Bush needs to get back in front of the American people and start talking about the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Arthur Chrenkoff and even Kofi Annan can do it, certainly we should be hearing more of it from the Bush administration.

However, as Michelle Malkin points out, the polling does show something very interesting -- and should lead to a quick change in the public debate. Even with Bush's numbers dropping, the public supports the detention at Guantanamo of Islamist terrorists by a wide margin:

George Bush: Approve - 47% Disapprove - 51%

Detainees: Treated properly - 52% Not treated properly - 37%

Those numbers show a significant and bipartisan support for the operation of Gitmo and the continued detention of dangerous terrorists at Camp X-Ray. Almost a third of the people who disapprove of George Bush don't think that detainees are being abused and don't want Gitmo shut down. While more people are unsure of detainee treatment, that doesn't transfer to a belief in mistreatment, and in either case Gitmo has majority support.

Democrats have hammered on Gitmo for a month now, and the numbers still show a 22-point gap for those who think it should be closed. That 36% -- among adults, not voters, mind you -- represent less than any Democrat would rely on in a national election, let alone a mandate for change. And after Dick Durbin's idiotic remarks on the Senate floor last week, those numbers will probably decline slightly over the next few weeks.

In other words, as a political play against the Bush administration, Gitmo's a loser. As this poll gets absorbed by the Democrats, expect to hear less and less about Gitmo. It's turning into an albatross for Durbin and Reid with absolutely no return for their party.

Chirac Signals Surrender On French Farm Subsidies

After taking a beating in the world press and in French public opinion that blames him for the collapse of the EU budget process, Jacques Chirac suddenly changed course today and signaled his surrender on French agricultural subsidies. Tony Blair, emerging victorious over his French rival, agreed that the annual euro rebate Britain receives should also be reconsidered as part of an economic normalization:

The French President said he would after all accept the latest compromise to solve the deadlock, even though it would cost his country £6.6 billion.

Last week's Brussels Euro summit collapsed when Britain refused to give up its rebate worth more than £3 billion a year unless France cut back farming subsidies worth almost £7bn a year.

Mr Chirac refused to do so despite strong pressure from Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean Claude Juncker, who holds the presidency until Mr Blair takes over on July 1. But today Mr Chirac said he was ready to compromise.

It followed Mr Blair acknowledging after a breakfast meeting with his Swedish counterpart, Goran Persson that the rebate was "an anomaly that has to go".

It remains to be seen if Chirac's reversal will win him any political support at home. However, Chirac clearly saw that his petulant outburst at last week's budget summit, where he openly insulted Blair and the British delegation, garnered him no laurels but instead widespread scorn. Le Monde declared the British victorious and scolded Chirac for his childish behavior, while the rest of Europe made it clear that Chirac had abdicated his leadership for the continent with his obstinacy. French farmers will not cheer the elimination of their price supports, of course, but that may not matter much in the long run for a politician whose popular support has dropped to the low 20s.

This gives the EU another opportunity to prop up its sagging currency and to create something closer to a true free-trade zone. Now that the big boys have finished their directed-urination contest, perhaps they can also prop up the EU's sagging credibility as well.

Bush Derangement Syndrome Claims Another Victim (Updated)

Michelle Malkin points out an obituary from Tucson which should embarrass the family, except that they apparently wrote it. They claim that living with conservatives caused Corwyn William Zimbleman's death through a series of heart attacks from the political stress:

An avid atheist, he studied the bible and religion with more fervor than most Christians. He had strong political opinions and followed Amy Goodman's radio broadcast "Democracy Now." Alas the stolen election of 2000 and living with right-winged Americans finally brought him to his early demise. Stress from living in this unjust country brought about several heart attacks rendering him disabled. Cory, a great man, so very talented, compassionate and intelligent, dedicated to the arts and humanities and the environment, will be greatly missed by his wife, family, and friends.

While it's never a good idea to speak ill of the dead -- and after all, Cory Zimbleman didn't write this himself -- the above passage just begs for a good fisking. First, if living with conservatives caused this sensitive artist so much pain and anguish, why not just move to San Francisco, or the closer option of Taos? That doesn't sound terribly "intelligent" to me. If political stress consumed him, then listening to Amy Goodman doesn't sound like a very healthy pastime -- not that I'd recommend it under any circumstances. And for a man who studied the Bible fervently, apparently neither he nor his family learned the lessons of humility that the book teaches.

Regardless of his atheism, I'll pray that Cory is in a better place today. His family should check themselves into a clinic for the perpetually dyspeptic, however. The bitterness of this screed and the effort they put into insulting everyone they obviously hate shouldn't stand as anyone's obituary. If that's the way they want Tucson to remember their loved one, the Zimblemans must be sad, lonely, and incredibly petty people, who (if their premise is correct) will soon be following Cory into the hereafter as victims of heart failure due to Bush Derangement Syndrome.

On the other hand, perhaps this might be good news for the Left. They could use it to explain how Dick Durbin lost his mind, and the rest of the Democratic leadership lost their judgment in supporting Durbin. It sounds as reasonable as any of their rationalizations over the past week.

UPDATE: I see from the trackbacks that one of the Kos denizens objects to Michelle and I criticizing this obituary. Perhaps the outrage should be directed to Zimbleman's family members who went out of their way to insult people in his valediction. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism.

UPDATE II: Let's not wish death on anyone here, OK? My answer to the phrase, "The only good Moonbat is..." is "one that Bill at INDC photographs in its native habitat." Otherwise, pray that they receive wisdom and enlightenment, and while we're at it, pray that for ourselves, too. I wouldn't mind more of it.

UPDATE III: Today, I received this e-mail from Mike Zimbleman, Cory's brother and apparently a CQ reader. I offered to reprint the e-mail in its entirety without comment as a rebuttal to my post and the comments made by CQ readers, and Mike graciously agreed.

Captain Ed-

Mike Zimbleman

Abramoff Got OK From House Lawyers On Trips -- Including An FEC Commissioner

In another setback for the efforts to "get" Tom DeLay by attacking lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his firm has produced documentation from Congress itself that advised Abramoff that his actions were legal. House lawyers advised Preston, Gates, & Ellis in 1996 that it could pay for trips taken by Representatives as long as clients eventually reimbursed the firm:

A law firm under scrutiny for its role in arranging overseas trips for members of Congress says House ethics lawyers advised the firm several years ago that it could pay for some Congressional travel, an assertion that may bolster the argument of Representative Tom DeLay that he did nothing wrong in accepting lavish trips organized by the firm's star lobbyist.

Internal memorandums and e-mail messages from the Seattle firm, Preston Gates & Ellis, say that the firm contacted two lawyers on the House ethics committee in 1996, when it began organizing large numbers of trips, and was told House rules probably allowed lobbyists to pay for a lawmaker's travel, as long as a client reimbursed the firm.

The memorandums and e-mail messages report that the ethics committee specifically addressed trips that the firm's chief lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, arranged for Mr. DeLay and other lawmakers to the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth in the Pacific that was among Mr. Abramoff's clients.

In 1997, a year after the firm's contact with the ethics committee, Mr. Abramoff arranged trips for Mr. DeLay to the Marianas and to Russia.

The implications for the ethics case against DeLay could be significant. It shows that Abramoff went out of his way to check the validity of his interpretation, and that Congress through its lawyers endorsed it. If Congress' attorneys misrepresented the law or the rules, then the onus falls on their legal staff and not Abramoff -- and therefore, not on DeLay or the other hundreds of Representatives that this probe has highlighted.

Interestingly, one of the lawyers that offered PGE that advice in 1996 was Ellen L. Weintraub. Her work on the Ethics Committee may be a bit obscure, but not her current position as an FEC commissioner. Weintraub, CQ readers will recall, favors the regulation of Internet speech to enforce the McCain-Feingold BCRA, one of the worst incumbent-protection and free-speech restrictions ever passed into law. Her concern over money in politics appears to be a recent conversion, as she appeared to have little problem in approving the lobbying firms' ability to channel money for these expensive trips. Asked about the advice now, Weintraub says she has no recollection of the conversation, but claims that lobbyist reimbursement wasn't controversial back in 1996.

Just when it seems that the misguided attempt by Nancy Pelosi to torpedo Tom DeLay has backfired to its maximum extent, something else pops up to create even more questions. We'd certainly like to know why Weintraub felt that enabling lobbyists to pour money into the pockets of incumbents did not trigger any controversy in her mind, but that the possibility that people might use the Internet to fund their opponents in 2005 causes her such angst.

Frist Keeps Heat On Durbin

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist kept the heat on Dick Durbin yesterday, demanding that Minority Leader Harry Reid push Durbin to apologize to the American military and the Senate in a formal apology while in session. Reid rejected that request, stating that he stood by Durbin and his remarks:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist yesterday demanded that Sen. Richard J. Durbin make a "formal apology" on the floor of the Senate for comparing U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazi and Soviet regimes and that he strike his remarks from the Congressional Record.

In a letter to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Mr. Frist, Tennessee Republican, said previous bids by the Senate's No. 2 Democrat to clarify his remarks didn't go far enough.

"Subsequent statements by Senator Durbin indicate only that he was regretful if people misunderstood his remarks," Mr. Frist said. "We do not believe his remarks were misunderstood."

In fact, Reid's office attacked Bill Frist's remarks as "pathetic", a phrase which Reid never used in connection to Durbin's equating the American military with Nazis, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Reid never said a word to disassociate himself with that analogy, and now considers a request for an apology to be contemptible. It points out an odd set of priorities for the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate -- he gets more offended by a letter than he does with his deputy calling American servicemen murderous thugs.

The Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman pointed out that the last two Senators to make stupid Nazi analogies in the Senate, Rick Santorum and Robert Byrd, both got up and offered apologies in session, and wondered why Durbin couldn't even bring himself to actually apologize -- rather than "regret" that people misunderstood him. Chuck Schumer refused to respond, ignoring reporters' questions about the ADL's statements after trying to defend Durbin's non-apology statement.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have received reinforcements from the lunatic Left, who think that calling our troops Nazis is just fine as long as it involves criticizing George Bush. Case in point: the serially demented Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board, which not just excuses Durbin's statement but practically seconds it:

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., set off a firestorm last week when he compared U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo to practices employed by Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot and their ilk. His remarks were condemned by the White House, the Pentagon, the Christian Coalition, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Newt Gingrich (who called for his censure by the Senate) and by the entire right side of the talk radio/television/blog world. The heat got so bad that, late in the week, Durbin apologized if his remarks had been "misunderstood." They weren't, and Durbin should not have apologized.

Instead, the senator should have hit back hard, just as the Amnesty International did when its comparison of Guantanamo to the Soviet gulag was attacked. By caving in, Durbin did just what the orchestrated right-wing smear effort required to succeed: It made him the story rather than focusing further attention on the outrageous violations of international law and human rights being perpetrated in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the name of the American people. ...

Durbin was spot on in his assessment of Guantanamo. That's why he was so roundly attacked. He told the truth.

Remember, this is a meme for the Left that goes back forty years. It's practically a dogmatic belief for them that the American military is no better than the enemies it faced, probably ever. It's part of the multicultural moral equivalence that has turned a respectable philosophical discipline -- liberalism -- into a form of mind rot that the American Left exemplifies. Whether it is John Kerry equating Vietnam veterans to the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan in his stentorian Boston tones or Durbin picking up the hat trick in the Senate by using Nazis, Soviets, and the Khmer Rouge all wrapped up together, they want to argue that any kind of interrogation that results in uncomfortable conditions equates to the deliberate physical torture and slaughter of millions.

Why does the Left need to argue this? They want an end to the fighting, regardless of what that means to American security. They want a return to the failed policies of the 1990s, when we treated terrorism like an international crime, and for a couple of reasons. First, they want the US to give up part of its sovereignty to the UN and the World Court in order to impose on the US policies that they cannot achieve through the ballot box domestically. Second, they value the veneer of reasonableness over the reality of what it takes to keep the nation secure, and if we get attacked, they want the holiness and martyrdom that comes from being a victim. Why else do they stand on their soapbox and bemoan the loss of the "sympathy" given to us on 9/11? That, to them, is the pinnacle of achievement.

Well, fine for them, but I'm not gambling my security and my family's survival just so they can wallow in victimization. If Durbin and the Democrats insist on standing by their assessment of American military personnel as Nazis and worse, then they can feel victimized at the ballot box.

UPDATE: Power Line has a letter from Col. Joe Repya, a soldier's soldier from my town, who has a suggestion for the Strib's lunatics:

As a soldier in Iraq, I was highly insulted by the comments of Senator Durbin and his pathetic excuse of being "misunderstood." So I offer a suggestion. Let's divide up these victims of "the hellhole America's military has created" at Guantanamo and allow them to spend a weekend at the homes of the Star Tribune Editorial Staff and Senator Durbin. America's military will anxiously await the report on the impression they will make on you and your families.

As long as our Minnesota National Guard could ensure that the Islamofascists couldn't escape into the Twin Cities, I'd second this motion.

UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll notes that Durbin hasn't always been unmindful of the effects of partisan rhetoric on enemies abroad. However, in this instance, I'd qualify that point by noting that some in the GOP were specifically impugning Bill Clinton's motives in shooting missiles at the Sudan, not comparing the action to Nazis or Stalin. (In fact, they were comparing him to a movie, Wag The Dog.) Ed's point is worth noting, but isn't strictly analogous to this situation, where Durbin is criticizing the conduct of the war by calling the military administration of Camp X-Ray reminiscent of cocentration camps run by genocidal regimes.

FBI Chief: No Experience Necessary For Leadership

As I reported here on Sunday, the FBI has ignored people with Middle East and counterterrorism experience while promoting others to leadership positions within the bureau for those units that handle the defense against Islamist terrorists. New testimony in the Bassem Youssef lawsuit shows that the attitude starts at the very top:

Director Robert Mueller says he doesn't believe his counterterrorism supervisors need to have a background in Arabic, the Middle East or international issues.

"Let me tell you that we want to develop that within the bureau, but making that an absolute requirement — if you do not have it you would be precluded from advancing in counterterrorism — no," Mueller testified recently in an employment lawsuit.

Mueller described his own expertise in Middle Eastern terrorism as having been "relatively limited" when he took over the FBI a week before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mueller also testified he didn't give any guidance to his top managers to seek out the bureau's most experienced counterterrorism agents to work on the war on terror immediately after Sept. 11, saying he expected those managers to make good choices.

"It was in their hands as to how they did that," Mueller said in a wide-ranging deposition obtained by The Associated Press. Some supervisors were brought in without any terrorism training while some al-Qaida agents who were more knowledgeable about al-Qaida were brought from New York to work on the suicide hijackings investigation, officials said.

Most of the men Mueller appointed to run the war on terror testified that they didn't believe Middle East and terrorism experience had been important for choosing the agents they promoted, the AP reported Sunday.

Not only did they not make it an "absolute requirement", as Mueller put it, it almost appears to disqualify agents from promotion. The Director's approach to leadership sounds like that taken by most companies about salesmen -- that the product doesn't matter, only the talent for selling. Mueller's attitude towards leadership has cascaded downward through the organization that he created, post-9/11, to tackle counterterrorism. Here's exactly what Mueller had to say in that regard:

Mueller described his top anti-terror managers' knowledge of dealing with foreign governments, Middle East history, international terrorism and al-Qaida this way: "Helpful, not essential."

"Leadership ability is transferable," he said. "And often you can pick up the subject matter if you've got leadership skills."

Even the 9/11 Commission knew better than this. They pointed out that a knowledge deficit at the leadership level on Middle Eastern affairs, especially Arabic language and experience with al-Qaeda, could cause serious problems in directing resources properly and determining which leads needed immediate attention. Instead of heeding this rather obvious bit of advice, the FBI put people in charge of counterterrorism who can't tell the difference -- even after three years of on-the-job training -- between a Sunni and a Shi'ite Muslim. The man now in charge, Gary Bald, admits that he still doesn't have a grasp on Middle Eastern culture and history, although he allows that it would be "nice" if he did.

If the FBI had no agents with any experience in this work, these failures could be explicable. However, when agents like Youssef get passed over for promotion in favor of people who clearly know too little about our main enemy in the war on terror, it calls the FBI's leadership into question. Members of Congress from both parties want some answers on why the FBI has not cleaned up its act, and based on this lawsuit, they have a point. The line of defense that the FBI represents is far too critical for the old-boy network to operate as usual.

The Syrians Send Another Message

After watching control of Parliament pass out of the hands of their collaborators and into the hands of their oppponents, the Syrians sent a message to Lebanon this morning. Instead of congratulating them on their successful, free elections, Bashar Assad reminded them of their previous vassal status by blowing up another anti-Syrian public figure:

An anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon was killed on Tuesday when a bomb ripped through his car, two days after parliamentary elections brought victory for an alliance opposed to Damascus's role in the country.

George Hawi, a former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party, died instantly in the blast in the Wata Musaitbi neighborhood of Beirut, witnesses and security sources.

"The car kept going and then I saw the driver screaming and he jumped out of the window. We rushed to the car and saw Hawi in the passenger seat with his guts out," Rami Abu Dargham, who owns a sandwich shop nearby, told Reuters.

The bomb was placed under the passenger seat of Hawi's Mercedes and detonated by remote-control, security sources said. The driver apparently escaped serious injuries.

It was the second killing of an anti-Syrian figure in Beirut this month. Newspaper columnist Samir Kassir was killed on June 2 when a similar explosion destroyed his car outside his home.

The Bush administration warned that it had acquired a Syrian hit list through its intelligence sources after Kassir's assassination, and it wouldn't come as a surprise if Hawi's name appeared on it. Either Syria has its security agents still in the country -- which the UN promised to investigate but has yet to report -- or its collaborators, such as Hezbollah, have been conducting these murders on their behalf.

Bashar Assad seems intent on sending messages to the Lebanese people. Perhaps the time has come for the United States to send a message to Assad. He appears to want insurgencies operating within both countries on his borders. We should keep him too busy at home having to deal with one of his own to continue meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. It's time to take a much more active role with democratization within Syria and to open the former opthalmologist's eyes as to the limits of his power.

The Form 180s

Power Line has the SF-180s signed by John Kerry releasing his military records posted at their site. Each one authorizes the release of Kerry's complete military record to only one entity each -- the AP (Glen Johnson), the LA Times (Steve Braun), and the Boston Globe (Michael Kranish). A Power Line reader got copies of the 180s through a Freedom of Information Act request, which got him the signed forms but not the records themselves.

It would appear from these forms that the three news outlets have access to the complete records, if they got them straight from the Navy, as the release form authorizes them to do, one time only. Interestingly, none of the three has released Kerry's records in PDF or any other format -- only written articles reviewing the data that they have found. It would appear that the Globe, Times, and AP have access to the answers for questions that have been left unanswered from Kerry's own dossier of published material, such as his original discharge and the circumstances, the exact dates of his command assignments (re the January 29th action for PCF-94 and whether Tedd Peck commanded the boat or Kerry), and other data related to various questions raised by the Swift Vets.

Their reluctance to supply those records in their unexpurgated form suggests that Kerry reached an agreement with the three organizations regarding how much information could be released and in what form. If so, the three should disclose this agreement, or if not, they should have scanned the material and made it available to the public. Playing cat and mouse with the material, especially more than a year after George Bush released his to all media sources requesting the data, indicates that Kerry still cannot risk total exposure.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Palestinian Edition

The title of this post is a proverb that keeps proving its wisdom over and over again, in large things and small, but in this particular case it has taken on a despicable hue. The Israelis agreed to admit a Palestinian woman to its country in order to treat her for severe burns after a kitchen explosion left her scarred and in great pain. What did they get for their compassion and generosity? A suicide bomber -- but fortunately, an incompetent one:

A badly burned Palestinian woman was alternately defiant and tearful Monday after Israeli soldiers caught her trying to enter Israel with 22 pounds of explosives hidden on her body.

The woman, who suffered serious burns on her hands, feet and neck in a kitchen explosion five months ago, had been granted permission to cross into Israel from the Gaza Strip for medical treatment when she raised the suspicion of soldiers at the Erez checkpoint. ...

At the Shikma Prison in Israel's Negev Desert, where the Shin Bet security service allowed Israeli TV reporters to interview her, al-Biss said she was determined to carry out a suicide attack against Israel because of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

"My dream was to be a martyr," she said, adding that she was recruited by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement. "I believe in death."

Biss later changed her story, claiming that she had no idea that she carried 22 pounds of explosives until she was asked to undress for a security inspection at the border. Perhaps she thought she had put on weight, or maybe she likes to lift weights 22 pounds at a time. Either through her incompetence or that of her dressmaker, the Israelis discovered and dismantled the explosives before she could detonate them, sparing the lives of the people who had opened their arms to her to relieve her pain.

In its twisted way, it provides a perfect microcosm of the entire Palestinian conflict. No matter what happens, no matter how much the Israelis and the West work to get the Palestinians what they need to heal and live peacefully, the Palestinians only appear interested in killing everyone involved, including themselves. They have sold themselves on death instead of life, and reason and compassion hold no attraction for them. (via the Corner, and Power Line also addresses this story)

Ronnie Earle's Shakedown

Travis County DA Ronnie Earle has been gunning for Tom DeLay for years, trying to tie the long-time GOP House leader to political corruption -- and coming up empty, at least so far. However, NRO's Byron York notes that Earle has found others in violation of the law along the way, notably large corporations who have donated to DeLay campaign, forbidden by Texas law. Does he prosecute the corporations? Apparently only if they don't comply with the Ronnie Earle Clemency Program, which consists of demands for huge cash contributions to his own pet causes:

Ronnie Earle, the Texas prosecutor who has indicted associates of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in an ongoing campaign-finance investigation, dropped felony charges against several corporations indicted in the probe in return for the corporations' agreement to make five- and six-figure contributions to one of Earle's pet causes.

A grand jury in Travis County, Texas, last September indicted eight corporations in connection with the DeLay investigation. All were charged with making illegal contributions (Texas law forbids corporate giving to political campaigns). Since then, however, Earle has agreed to dismiss charges against four of the companies — retail giant Sears, the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, the Internet company Questerra, and the collection company Diversified Collection Services — after the companies pledged to contribute to a program designed to publicize Earle's belief that corporate involvement in politics is harmful to American democracy.

Some legal observers called the arrangement an unusual resolution to a criminal case, at least in Texas, where the matter is being prosecuted. "I don't think you're going to find anybody who will say it's a common practice," says Jack Strickland, a Fort Worth lawyer who serves as vice-chairman of the criminal-justice section of the Texas State Bar. Earle himself told National Review Online that he has never settled a case in a similar fashion during his years as Travis County district attorney. And allies of DeLay, who has accused Earle of conducting a politically motivated investigation, called Earle's actions "dollars for dismissals."

Earle wants to fund a program at Stanford University that engages in deliberative polling, run by a personal acquaintance of Earle's, James Fishkin. In order to do that, Earle has used the indictments he has gathered in various political corruption cases to strongarm companies into donating large sums of money to the program in exchange for Earle dropping the charges. The amount of money that Earle wanted from Sears was so high that the company initially offered Earle the chance to pound sand. Eventually, the four corporations agreed to fund the program with an understanding that the result would not simply be an anti-capitalist screed.

For most people, this would appear to be nothing less than extortion, although certainly Earle has set up this scam well enough to avoid that charge. However, Texans can certainly smell the corruption this entails. All Ronnie Earle has to do is to file charges against any corporation that donates to a non-profit that might have a political connection. From that indictment, Earle can demand a hefty "donation" to Stanford's program in return for a clean bill of health. Most large corporations won't spend the money to fight off a determined DA, especially where politics are involved, and Earle gets his money. In fact, it's reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's corporate shakedowns exposed by Kenneth Timmerman two years ago.

One other fact that will rankle Texans: Sears offered to donate to the University of Texas at first -- and Earle refused to agree to it, insisting that the money go to California's Stanford University and his friend's program instead. He later relented when he found a similar program at UT run by a Fishkin protege.

I've documented the strange career of Ronnie Earle several times here at CQ. No one can doubt that Earle may be one of the most openly partisan district attorneys in the US. This revelation calls into question not only his motivations but his ethics as well. It may be that this is all perfectly legal -- but allowing a law enforcement officer the latitude to file charges against people or entities and then negotiating payoffs to his friends to get charges dropped smells bad no matter what the law allows.

Technical Difficulties Today (Updated)

After the deluge of traffic from a Drudge Report link, the comments at CQ appear to be off line. That usually indicates some problem with the Movable Type activity log and a runaway process at Hosting Matters, the excellent service that hosts CQ and many other fine blogs. It does not seem to be a Typekey issue, as a couple of readers asked by e-mail.

We will work diligently to restore comment service this afternoon. Keep checking back; I will update as best as I can. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: Comments have been restarted by Hosting Matters. The script was dragging down the server for CQ, and since I share a server with other HM users, it was only fair for HM to suspend the process until traffic returned to normal. Fair play -- and they've responded very quickly to restart it.

French Don't Buy Chirac's Blamethrowing

Jacques Chirac appears to have run out of options in deflecting blame for the collapse of the EU constitution last month. After his insistence on holding a referendum blew up in his face as political opponents across the French spectrum lined up to torpedo the pact, Chirac attempted to lay off the failure on the British annual euro rebate. That strategy caused the EU summit to collapse in a hail of recriminations across the continent, but for some reason Chirac expected to return home to cheers for protecting French agricultural prerogatives.

Instead of cheers, however, the French president has been savaged by the French press, who haven't been fooled at all by Chirac's theatrics, at least according to The Guardian (UK):

Swollen with Gallic pride after denouncing Tony Blair's "pathetic" performance at the European summit, the president probably wondered whether the Champs Elysées would be full of adoring crowds.

As he awoke to a summer heatwave on Saturday morning, after a dawn flight from Brussels, Mr Chirac was instead greeted with headlines depicting him as the principal loser of the summit.

Le Monde, the grand old tribune of France's intelligentsia, declared the summit a "double victory" for Tony Blair. Downing Street officials could barely believe their luck as they read that Britain had buried the EU constitution and succeeded in highlighting the "anomaly" of how the EU spends seven times more on farmers than it does on "future" projects, such as science and research.

"This new failure on Europe risks affecting his credibility in the world arena and having the ricochet effect of further weakening him on the domestic scene," Le Monde said.

The problem comes from Franco-German blindness to the fact that most European countries don't want to tie themselves to a system that benefits the Franco-German center at the expense of their own economies -- among other worries about further integration. The Dutch have recently found out what multiculturalism might bring with the Islamist murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, while the Eastern European nations have firsthand experience with the Socialist economic model and hardly want to support yet another country's pensions with their own GDP. Britain also falls into this latter category, even with its own social spending levels far above that of the US, for instance.

In fact, EU integration seems destined for failure in an area more well known for its insistent nationalism and sovereignty than in any impulse for unification (at least, peaceful impulses). Chirac can find budgetary minutiae such as the EU rebate for debate fodder, and he might even have had a point if Chirac exhibited any flexibility on the agricultural protections and subsidies on which France insists. All of these remain secondary to the real issue of EU unification -- which is to say that Europe simply doesn't have an appetite to unite politically in any meaningful way.

Apparently, Chirac thought he could fool the French into thinking that his lack of insight somehow equated to defending the French prerogative. Instead, the French realize that his insistence on shading his eyes has made their country lose a tremendous amount of prestige, and his petulant ranting at the EU budget summit might result in a complete collapse of the portion of the EU that has actually worked for Europe's benefit. It turns out that Abraham Lincoln's warning about the folly of attempting to fool all the people all of the time even applies to the French.

Geldof Defends Bush On Africa

Sir Bob Geldof took the unusual position in the entertainment industry of defending George Bush on African aid, according to the London Telegraph. Geldof, speaking to Time Magazine, asserted that the empirical evidence shows that Bush has done more for Africa than any other American president:

The Live 8 organiser said he had recently defended Mr Bush on the issue in France.

"They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American president for Africa," Geldof told Time magazine. "But it's empirically so."

Geldof made headlines this weekend when he told Live-8 stars appearing at the concert series that he didn't want partisan rhetoric on stage, especially regarding George Bush and the United States. That's a smart move from a smart man who understands the need to work with people like Bush and Tony Blair, rather than rail against them in public.

In the conversation we had during our blogger telecon on Live-8, Geldof stressed the need for nonpartisanship for any hope of success in getting the G-8 to agree to their platform. During that call, he also emphasized the opportunity he sees with Bush at the reins, as he gave Bush credit for actually accomplishing something in Africa. Both Geldof and screenwriter Richard Curtis said during that telecon that the increased aid Bush released to Africa saved 200,000 lives. While Curtis said that more should have been done, both said that no one could diminish the positive impact Bush has had -- and that previous administrations had done "f*ck-all" after talking a good game for years.

Will the Left listen to Geldof, or will they remain in their BusHitlerHalliburtonRove-a-GoGo conspiracy theory mindset and shrug their shoulders at Bush's efforts? While I think that Geldof (and Bono, who sounded a more critical note but acknowledged Bush's efforts) has enormous credibility, the anti-Bush antipathy has curdled into a belief system so irrational that even Geldof won't make a dent in it.

And that has enormous implications for the success of Live-8; if Bush and the GOP see that no amount of effort in this direction will generate any support while it whittles away at the GOP base, eventually the GOP will press Bush to walk away. That's why Geldof wants to engage the Left to look "empirically" at the Bush administration -- to encourage the establishment that efforts to improve Africa's lot hold out some long-range political return for them. It's an uphill battle, and Geldof knows it.

Sean's Home

For those of you who have been kind enough to include Sean from Everything I Know Is Wrong in your prayers, I have a good-news update to the story. The hospital discharged Sean on Father's Day after a remarkable improvement in his condition, and he spent the day quietly at home with his wife Karen and his two children, Allison and Connor. I hear that Sean felt especially cheered by your thoughts, prayers, and comments, and for that I thank you so much on behalf of my friend (and brother-in-law twice removed, or something along those lines).

Sean will return to blogging again soon, and looks forward to re-engaging the blogosphere. I'll let you know when he's ready for the relaunch of EIKIW.

Perhaps Neil Kinnock Is Writing Again

Inexplicably, disgraced former presidential candidate Joe Biden, the senior Senator from Delaware, has tossed his hat into the ring for 2008. In an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation", Biden answered the question most people wouldn't have bothered to ask:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said yesterday he plans to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 unless he decides later this year that he has little chance of winning.

"My intention is to seek the nomination," Biden said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I know I'm supposed to be more coy with you. I know I'm supposed to tell you, you know, that I'm not sure. But if, in fact, I think that I have a clear shot at winning the nomination by this November or December, then I'm going to seek the nomination."

After reading this piece by Dan Balz, Post subscribers will be forgiven if their first impulse is to check the masthead to see if the date says April 1. Biden's faux-honesty on his desire to run stands in stark contrast to his previous, abortive run at the presidency in 1987-8, which Balz mentions towards the end of his article. Even among a lightweight group of candidates that eventually produced the ill-considered Michael Dukakis as its standard-bearer, Biden didn't generate much interest. The only notable development of the Biden campaign was the discovery that Biden plagiarized the speeches of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair's predecessor. After the revelation of intellectual dishonesty, Biden retired from the race in shame.

Now, twenty years later, the same man wants to give it another go. Perhaps this time, he'll either hire a competent speech writer or learn to plagiarize someone more obscure. However, he still won't be doing anything more than tilting at windmills, especially if Hillary Clinton decides to run, as expected. There's a reason the Biden campaign never took off in 1987: the man is a well-spoken fool who frequently mangles facts and confuses events. On the stump, expect Biden to be Howard Dean's gift to the GOP, when Dean himself takes a break from that position.

For instance, now that he's openly running for president, every speech and soundbite coming from Biden can legitimately be seen as nothing more than presidential politicking. Experienced and intelligent politicians wait to get stuck in that position, which is why they don't announce their intentions three and a half years prior to the next election. The only way Biden could have been more foolish is to pick Dick Durbin as his running mate.

Iran Vote Rigged, Reformers Stuck With Rafsansjani

Iranian voters interested in serious reform have found themselves locked out of the presidential election, a suspicious result given the fervor for change among the electorate. The weekend's elections produced two candidates from the slate approved by the Guardian Council -- those candidates with which the mullahs decided they could live -- neither of which hold much hope for reform. As a result, frustrated Iranians ponder a boycott of the runoff, while the former darling of the mullahs warns such an action could result in "totalitarianism":

Iran's reformist camp, suffering a devastating defeat in the first round of the presidential elections, is divided over a call to boycott the second round. ...

The liberals have an awkward choice on Friday: vote for the pragmatic Rafsanjani or urge a boycott.

"Between bad and worse, it's better to select bad," said Morteza Fallah, the managing editor of the reformist Eqbal daily newspaper, labelling Rafsanjani as the lesser of two evils.

Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani served as president once before, a few years after the resolution of the American hostage crisis, in which he was principally involved. Now he speaks of pursuing normal relations with the US in order to attract the burgeoning reform vote, but his very appearance on the runoff ballot shows that the mullahs do not fear contradiction in any meaningful manner from the Shi'ite cleric. His competition, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came as a complete surprise to outside observers, who expected "reformist" candidate Mustafa Moin to challenge Rafsanjani in a runoff. While election monitors ponder how Moin dropped off the radar screen so soon after polling showed him running a close second to Rafsanjani, the former president urged Iranians to avoid a totalitarian government by supporting his candidacy:

The front-runner in Iran's presidential runoff sought to rally moderates Sunday by warning that his hard-line opponent would run a totalitarian regime. The statement from the campaign manager for Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani came amid suspicions the powerful Revolutionary Guard would rig the runoff vote for conservatives.

Rafsanjani's campaign manager, Mohammed Baghir Nowbakht, said Friday's runoff was crucial because hard-liners would not tolerate differences of opinions if elected and would run a "totalitarian" regime. ...

Rafsanjani — president in 1989-1997 — finished first in Friday's balloting with only 21 percent of the vote. That was barely half the 40 percent most political analysts had predicted he would get.

But an even bigger surprise was the emergence of Tehran's hard-line Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a former Revolutionary Guard commander — as the voters' second choice. He received more than 19 percent.

Ahmadinejad, 49, is unabashedly conservative, resurrecting the fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy."

Ahmadinejad comes closest to speaking the truth in this situation. The entire election is a fraud, a sham to keep the Iranians harping at each other instead of removing the Guardian Council and its Revolutionary Guards which have controlled political life since 1979 for Iranians. The Council exercises strict control over which candidates qualify for the ballot, allowing the Council to define acceptable levels of "reform" for the electorate. Even Moin won acceptance, at least as a candidate, although it appears that the Council had no intention of allowing him to actually challenge for the position.

In reality, a boycott would probably be the best idea for the reformers. It would delegitimize the Guardian Council's elections and defy the hard-line imams who tried to shill for the Council by demanding that their congregations turn out for the vote. One could argue endlessly about the merits of Rafsanjani as opposed to the nutty Teheran mayor and newcomer Ahmadinejad, but in truth the only people running Iran after the election will be the same ones running it now -- the unelected and unaccountable Guardian Council.

Reformers don't need to give that system any more credibility, and lack of participation costs them nothing in the end. They should walk away. Let them vote with their feet.

Lebanon Stands On Its Own Two Feet

Despite the efforts of Syria and its ally Hezbollah in the south, the reformers in Lebanon have delivered a historic victory in parliamentary elections this weekend. Saad Hariri took his revenge for his father's assassination by driving out the pro-Syrian politicians from northern Lebanon, capturing three-quarters of the contested seats and defying traditional clan-based electoral politics:

Opponents of Syrian domination claimed a stunning majority victory in the final round of Lebanon's parliamentary elections on Sunday night in a rebellion touched off by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri four months ago.

An anti-Syrian alliance that tried to bridge religious lines and was led by Mr. Hariri's son, 35-year-old Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, won at least 21 of 28 contested seats in northern Lebanon, the last polling area in the elections that have been staggered over the past four weekends. That gave the alliance a majority in the next 128-seat Parliament.

It was a startling change in the way politics have usually been carried out here - along strict clan and religious lines and long under the control of Syria - and perhaps an example of a greater yearning for democracy in the Arab world.

The election was the first to be held in nearly 30 years without the presence of Syrian troops, who arrived in 1976 early in Lebanon's civil war and were forced to leave under international pressure in April.

"According to incomplete results, we are headed to total victory," one of the opposition candidates, Boutros Harb, told Future television, which is owned by the Hariri family, one of the wealthiest in Lebanon.

Suleiman Franjieh, a Maronite Christian who is a former cabinet minister and the scion of a major clan allied with Syria, conceded his side was heading for defeat in the north. Reflecting Christian worries over increased Muslim political strength, he told Lebanese television, "What we feared is happening."

The previous weekend, it appeared that the pro-Syrian forces had all the momentum. Michel Aoun had won in that regional balloting with his alliance to pro-Syrian forces, despite his earlier iconic status as a resister to occupation. Most expected the north to follow suit, and some openly wondered if Syria's intelligence services still had the ability to penetrate Lebanon's electoral process.

Now Hariri will have the majority in the legislature, if the numbers hold up, and will control government policy regarding their former occupier. That doesn't make Aoun happy at all. After accusing him of vote-buying and exploiting sectarian differences to win his elections, Aoun announced that his faction will refuse to cooperate with Hariri in the new parliament:

Aoun accused Hariri of buying votes and playing on sectarian differences to secure victory in northern Lebanon, ruling out any chance of teaming up with him in parliament.

"We will be in the opposition. We can't be with a majority that reached (parliament) through corruption," he said.

Saad Hariri will be the new Prime Minister, if he wants, although he has not yet announced whether he will seek that position. Of greater consequence will be the election for Speaker of Parliament, a position that has gone to a Shi'ite by tradition. Hariri has already announced that his bloc will not support the re-election of the current speaker, the pro-Syrian Nabih Berri, who allied his Amal party with Hezbollah in the south and represents a strong pro-Syrian position in Parliament.

The course of the next four years appears to be set, as the Hariri-led government will pursue policies which pull away from Syrian influence -- and Lebanon has its own elected government for the first time in decades. It's an amazing and dramatic result for a country who appeared to be prostrate under the Syrian thumb until the US/UK-led Coalition "destabilized" the Middle East and parked itself on Syria's eastern border. May this lead to even more "destabilization" and the furtherance of the wave of democratization to a region parched of freedom.

Did Lucy Ramirez Find The Downing Street Memos?

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.

Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):

The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.

Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible. The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.

This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.

Besides, as the AP report makes clear, the two governments sincerely worried about the deployment of WMD despite the allegations of those who fixate on one sentence of one memo. The latest issue coming from the memos, according to its proponents, is the alleged statement by Blair that WMD programs had not progressed. However, it also points out why 9/11 made all the difference in the approach to Iraq:

The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.

"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."

All of the Western nations had intelligence that matched with the Bush/Blair determination that Saddam had not disposed of his WMD stocks. Prior to 9/11, the Western approach of waiting Saddam out appeared adequate. After 9/11, the existence of those WMD stocks clearly was intolerable, given Saddam's involvement with terrorist groups in the past -- including hosting an al-Qaeda convention, of sorts, in 1999.

Even if these memos could be authenticated, they're still meaningless. They could only excite the kind of idiots that would hold mock impeachment hearings with four witnesses and no authority whatsoever.

UPDATE and BUMP to top: Welcome to Instapundit and The Corner readers! I'll let this ride to the top all morning today.

UPDATE II: Marc at USS Neverdock says that the story gets even more bizarre at Rawstory:

“I first photocopied them to ensure they were on our paper and returned the originals, which were on government paper and therefore government property, to the source,” he added. [...]

“It was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them shortly before we went to press on Sept 17, 2004,” he added. “Before we destroyed them the legal desk secretary typed the text up on an old fashioned typewriter.”

Why an old-fashioned typewriter? Why not just retype them on a computer, if you've already decided not to work from the originals? It looks like an attempt to fake people into believing that the documents produced by Smith were the originals.

This story gets nuttier and nuttier.

UPDATE III: Despite what Truck says in the comments, a lack of protest from Downing Street after being asked to authenticate retyped copies of alleged minutes of secret meetings does NOT constitute verification. The same exact argument came up with the Killian memos in Rathergate and the Newsweek Qu'ran-flushing report last month. In both cases, the documents or sources turned out to be fakes. It's the reporters' job to provide verification, not simply a demurral by officials to opine on their authenticity. If that isn't obvious, then centuries of evidentiary procedure in American and English common law have gone for naught, as well as traditions of journalistic responsibility and professionalism. After all, this argument just means that reporters can type out anything they like and the burden of proof shifts from the accuser to the accused in proving them false -- hardly the process endorsed in libel and slander cases in the US, at least.

UPDATE IV: The port side of the blogosphere seems a bit unhappy to hear that the DSM are fakes, but I'm not making this up. The reporter himself says that he retyped the memos on an old-style manual typewriter and destroyed either the originals (AP) or working copies from which he worked (Rawstory). In effect, he created mock-ups -- and that means the memos provided by the Times in PDF format are fakes.

John at Power Line says that the memos would make more ridiculous claims if they were fakes. However, there's a difference between fakes and frauds. Giving Smith the full benefit of the doubt and assuming the originals really exist and that he transcribed them perfectly, they're fakes but the information could, indeed, be accurate. The problem is that we can't authenticate them, and a series of demurrals from Tony Blair and other British officials don't amount to authentication, either. It doesn't help that Smith went to such weird lengths -- such as the manual typewriter and artificially aging the appearance through multiple copying -- to produce the information.

The Killian memos were both fakes and frauds, as even CBS's expert stated in their final report, although laughingly Kevin's commentors continue to argue that they're neither. We know for certain the DSMs are fakes -- and because of that, we can't help but assume the DSMs are fraudulent absent positive authentication.

Jonah Goldberg also finds the "wingnut" charges less than credible.

UPDATE V: Welcome to Drudge Report readers! Please take a look around and bookmark/blogroll CQ.

UPDATE VI: Check out Strata-Sphere for more questions about the artificial aging attempted on the Smith copies prior to PDF scanning.

AP: FBI Doesn't Require Terror Expertise For Counterterrorism

The AP reports this morning on testimony in a civil lawsuit against the FBI by one of its counterterrorism experts that indicates the agency still does not place the appropriate value on terror-related expertise when assigning agents to terror-related duties. Bassem Yousef has sued the FBI for bypassing him for promotions in favor of less-qualified agents, and the depositions promise to inspire some questioning of the FBI's top brass on Capitol Hill:

In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs. And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe.

"A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. "A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board."

The FBI's current terror-fighting chief, Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, said his first terrorism training came "on the job" when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago.

Asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, Bald responded: "I wish that I had it. It would be nice."

The bureau, as well as the CIA, came under harsh criticism from Congress and the 9/11 Commission for not having enough personnel with Arabic language skills and terror experience working on al-Qaeda and similar cases. That lack of depth was one of the problems the FBI was supposed to correct in the aftermath of 9/11. However, it appears even with the personnel who held that kind of experience, the bureau obstinately refused to put them in positions where their skills could best be put to use.

Bassem Yousef appears to be one of those cases. He received praise for his role in establishing links between the FBI and recalcitrant Saudi law-enforcement agencies after the Khobar Towers bombing. He speaks Arabic and is the leading expert in conducting polygraphs on Islamists in custody. Yet Yousef only received offers for lateral moves within the counterterrorism unit rather than leadership roles, while the head of the unit, Pat D'Amura, brought over agents without any experience to fill those roles after 9/11:

Pat D'Amuro, one of the FBI's most experienced senior managers in terrorism, testified that when he was brought to Washington to oversee the Sept. 11 investigation. Eventually promoted to executive assistant director, he brought lots of agents with him from New York who had terrorism backgrounds.

But rather than a systematic search for the bureau's most talented Middle Eastern and terrorism agents worldwide, D'Amuro testified he brought to Washington the agents he personally knew had worked successfully on al-Qaida and other terrorism cases.

He said that in later promotions, Middle East and terrorism experience was helpful but not mandatory, noting the FBI also must deal with terrorism from domestic sources and the
Irish Republican Army.

Granted, counterterrorism covers a lot of ground, including domestic groups such as Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. So far, however, the priority has been on Islamofascists, especially since their goals have always been to kill people by the thousands or millions, if possible. It seems reasonable that at least some of the people running that program should have in-depth experience with Islam and the region. Instead, we get testimony such as this from a supposed FBI specialist in charge of the effort:

Watson, who oversaw the first two years of transformation, testified he could not recall a single meeting in the aftermath of Sept. 11 in which FBI leaders discussed the type of skills or training needed for counterterrorism.

Youssef's lawyer, Steve Kohn, pressed further.

"What skill sets would they need to better identify, penetrate and/or prevent a future Osama bin Laden-style terrorist attack?" Kohn asked.

Watson answered: "They would need to understand the attorney general guidelines for counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigation."

"Anything else?" the lawyer inquired.

"No," Watson answered. ...

When asked whether he, as the FBI's former counterterrorism chief, could describe the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Watson answered, "Not technically, no."

He also said that his assertion a few years ago that bin Laden had been killed — a declaration that conflicted with CIA assessments and fresh video evidence — was not based on fact. "It's my gut instinct," he answered.

The FBI needs to address this foolishness immediately. We should not be sidelining the agents who have the most talent to bring to our security while "specialists" who can't tell the difference between the Sunni and the Shi'a continue to get promoted. Alberto Gonzales needs to make it clear that this is unacceptable.

Gray Lady Can't Distinguish Between Fact And Fiction (Part 37-B)

An alert CQ reader, Roger H, noticed a strange comment in an otherwise silly column on parenting in today's New York Times. Randy Cohen -- "The Ethicist" for the Paper of Record -- was aked by a reader about his recent trip to the Caribbean with his young children, where he planted coins on a beach to allow them to find "buried treasure" on their vacation. After doing so, doubts about this action began to plague him. Cohen writes back:

It's a fine thing to play with your kids but a dubious thing to lie to them. ... With kids, it's trickier, a problem every parent grapples with when deciding how to answer a child who asks if there really is a Santa Claus or if the coin under the pillow really comes from the Tooth Fairy. Is the child eager to continue a kind of game, or is he or she requesting honest, if game-ending, information? Such a question requires intimate knowledge of a particular child's thinking, development and desires. To answer it requires all the insight and understanding a parent can muster. ...

If it's any help, when my own daughter asked about her tooth money, I looked her in the eye, thought about her cognitive development and told her that I won it in a poker game with Spider-Man, a unicorn and Jesus. And I'm sure that with a few more years of therapy, she'll be just fine.

Heaven forbid that a mere blogger should point out what the Paper of Record's many levels of professional fact-checking seems to have missed, but Jesus of Nazareth is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. Whether or not one believes Jesus to be divine, His existence as a person is in no doubt. Josephus, who hardly could be considered a source friendly to either Christians or Jews, wrote contemporaneously of Jesus in a short portion of his writings on the Roman Empire considered to be reliable and accurate.

Equating Jesus with unicorns and Santa Claus not only shows remarkable insensitivity to the paper's Christian readers, but also betrays the NYT's multicultural posings as a sham. Can you imagine anyone writing for the Times making this same mistake with, say, Mohammed? Why, Dick Durbin might have called them Nazis and worse. But apart from multicultural sensitivities, we expect newspapers to get basic historical facts correct, even if Senator Durbin couldn't find them with both hands and a flashlight. Randy Cohen and the editors at the Times appear to belong in that same category.

The Hanoi Hello

For the first time since the end of the Viet Nam War, the US will receive the head of state for the Southeastern Asia nation on an official visit to Washington DC. President Bush will meet with Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to discuss further normalization of relations. Khai will tour several US cities on this trip, which should create plenty of tension between the Communist Party apparatchik and the Vietnamese ex-patriate community here in the US:

Khai, who is due to meet President George W. Bush at the White House on Tuesday, is expected in his landmark trip to push for closer ties with the United States and in turn face demands for progress on human rights.

Accompanying Khai on the week-long trip is Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan, Finance Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung and other senior officials, as well as 80 entrepreneurs.

His visit caps a series of reconciliation moves since the Vietnam War which claimed the lives of more than 58,000 US soldiers and one million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers before it ended in 1975.

Specifically, Viet Nam wants to gain entry to the WTO and take advantage of the lower barriers to trade that membership would provide. The Communists have found out in Viet Nam what all such systems eventually discover -- without profit motive, production can never meet demand. That's why Khai's entourage includes more than 80 "entrepeneurs", although such people still must work within the restrictions of a centrally-planned economy and the oppressive political regime of Hanoi.

In fact, that last issue will get plenty of attention for Khai, as Bruce Kesler of the Augusta Free Press pointed out in an e-mail to me this morning. Besides the Vietnamese who escaped the horrors of the Communist takeover of the South in 1975 in boats bound for the US, others have already demanded that Bush hold Khai accountable for Viet Nam's embarrassing human-rights record before granting further economic assistance to the Communists. Our own State Department report on Viet Nam from 2003 makes this point rather clear:

The Government's human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit serious abuses. The Government continued to deny the right of citizens to change their government. Police sometimes beat suspects during arrests, detention, and interrogation. Several sources also reported that security forces detained, beat, and were responsible for the disappearances of persons during the year. Incidents of arbitrary detention of citizens, including detention for peaceful expression of political and religious views, continued. With some exceptions, prison conditions remained harsh, particularly in some isolated provinces, and some persons reportedly died as a result of abuse in custody. Prisons usually required inmates to work for little compensation and no wages. The judiciary was not independent, and the Government denied some citizens the right to fair and expeditious trials. The Government continued to hold a number of political prisoners. The Government restricted citizens' privacy rights, although the trend toward reduced government interference in the daily lives of most citizens continued. The Government significantly restricted freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association. The Government continued its longstanding policy of not tolerating most types of public dissent and stepped up efforts to control dissent on the Internet. ...

The Government restricted freedom of religion and operation of religious organizations other than those approved by the State. In particular, Buddhists, Hoa Hao, and Protestants active in unregistered organizations faced harassment as well as possible detention by authorities. The Government imposed some limits on freedom of movement of particular individuals whom it deemed threatening to its rule. ...

There were reports that children worked in exploitative situations. The Government recognized child labor as a problem and attempted to address it. Trafficking in women and children for the purpose of prostitution within the country and abroad continued to a serious problem, and there were reports of the trafficking of women to China and Taiwan for arranged and forced marriages.

Nothing much has changed in Vietnam in the time since the State Department wrote that damning set of allegations. Nor are they the only ones making these allegations. Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British non-profit watchdog that reports on oppression of Christians worldwide, reports on the case of a Protestant pastor that Khai's government holds in a mental hospital despite being perfectly sane, reminiscent of the Soviet manner of dealing with dissidents:

The story, which sounds much like a 1950’s Soviet-era script, begins when the Rev. Than Van Truong of the Baptist General Conference house church organization, wrote some religious articles and sent some Bibles as gifts to Vietnam’s top officials. He was subsequently arrested for “crimes against the state”, and imprisoned without trial in May 2003. After his release, he was re-arrested for trying to leave his residence in the south to visit his ageing and ailing mother in the far north of Vietnam. Officials had refused to reply to his several requests for permission to visit his mother, which is still required in this communist country.

In September 2004, the public prosecutor of Dong Nai Province diagnosed Pastor Truong as “mentally ill and delusional”, and had him committed to the Bien Hoa Mental Hospital in Dong Nai Province. Injected with drugs, he was at first reduced to a lethargic state, but after a time medication was reduced and he improved. In March of this year, he began writing lucid petitions about his case and asking for intervention. His case became well known after visitors to Mennonite prisoner-of-conscience Ms. Le Thi Hong Lien, also committed to the mental hospital, helped bring his situation to light.

The Rev. Truong’s case was initially presented to the EU, to Canada and the US, after which some countries engaged in quiet diplomacy on his behalf. A lawyer also agreed to help him. The lawyer obtained an admission from authorities that the criminal investigation had found nothing on him and was closed. He also got an agreement from the hospital to stop giving the pastor unidentified psychotic medications. The lawyer requested the hospital to give Pastor Truong an independent medical examination, which would clear him, and then release him. After an American diplomat tried to visit Pastor Truong on May 27, hospital authorities summoned Pastor Truong to a “medical examination” the following week.

The examination took the form of an interview with some eight people, some doctors and others unknown. They questioned the Rev. Truong mostly about his religious beliefs and his credentials as a pastor, which his interviewers refused to accept. The director of the hospital, a Dr. Tho, led the interview. During an earlier interview, Dr. Tho had confirmed twice to Pastor Truong that he was in the mental hospital because he had “committed a crime [and] broken the law” even though the public prosecutor of Dong Nai had confirmed that the investigation against him had found nothing and was closed. According to Pastor Truong, Dr. Tho acted more like a public security branch officer than a doctor. In what was apparently sometimes a bizarre argument between several Marxists and a lone Christian that had nothing to do with mental health, the doctors’ perspectives dominated the discussion. They decided his firm Christians beliefs and his evangelistic attitude toward them qualified him as being delusional.

While open dialogue on normalization can still be helpful, it will be important for Bush to recognize that Khai represents everything that we have fought against for the past 65 years. Despite Dick Durbin's idiotic speech on the Senate floor, this is the true face of fascism and oppression, and the efforts of John Kerry and John McCain to create the necessary groundwork for this meeting should be called into question by anyone who finds this kind of oppression intolerable. Not only that, but Bruce Kesler's sources question whether Khai even has the power to make the kind of changes we would find necessary for further normalization. Kesler forwarded me this insight from a recent ex-pat with close ties to senior officials within Viet Nam:

The western media is most of the time wrong when thinking about Khai (or any other Prime Minister) as "reformists". By their own function, when a hi-ranking party member is working in the government and interacting with the local civil society or the international environment, they have to talk and to think pragmatic. But the real decision makers are party leaders in different party committees. They are similar to the Board Directors who never live and/or work with the society but give directives to the CEOs.

Khai is a Southerner bureaucrat and not an ideologue, as corrupted as anyone in the system, was under the leadership of Linh, then Vo Van Kiet, never is or was a rival of Kiet or Linh. Has no real power with the system that is still controlled by the North. The North-South competition is one - but not the only one - rationale of the local politicking.

In 1987, when Linh became the General Secretary of the VCP he had to live in Hanoi. He brought with him six staff members, three of them were rejected and sent back to Saigon. Instead, his personal secretary, someone like the Chief of Staff in the US, was an assigned conservative member from the North, later on the Party boss of Hanoi. Conclusion: the number one of the Party is still prisoner of the collegial system and is not free to move. How about Khai, the number three and ready to go next year? Can we seriously deal with him?

Just before this trip, Khai proposed the liberation of Pham Hong Son, to show a good gesture to the US, the request was rejected. In 1999, when the Security guys imprisoned a Vietnamese-Dutch successful businessman to confiscate his assets (the famous case of Trinh Vinh Binh), Khai sent a note to the Minister of Public Security: "Release him, he is innocent". The guy was instead tried and had a harder sentence: 11 years of imprisonment! After escaping for Vietnam likely thru bribery, Trinh Vinh Binh fought back. He is now drafting an American law firm in DC to attack the VN Government - under the international law and the bilateral trade agreement Hanoi signed with the Dutch government - for a stake of USD 100 million.

Conclusion: It is ridiculous for President Bush to meet Khai. A loss of time with no decisive consequence. As usual, our Embassy in Vietnam is not doing their job.

Or a case of two Senators doing some grandstanding to make themselves look farsighted and magnanimous at the expense of thousands of victims of oppression.

Nazi Alert For Senator Durbin!

When Senator Durbin stood on the Senate floor and compared American troops to genocidal maniacs based on our treatment of Islamofascist terrorists at Gitmo, he revealed a wealth of ignorance on his behalf. Not only did Durbin show his historical illiteracy about the Nazis, Soviets, and the Khmer Rouge, not only did he demonstrate an ignorance of the meaning of abuse -- let alone torture -- but Durbin also failed to recognize the true monsters of this war. The New York Times doesn't make that same mistake in this report by Sabrina Tavernise:

Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily populated by insurgents - like Falluja, where the anti-insurgent assault last fall uncovered almost 20 such sites. But rarely have they come across victims who have lived to tell the tale.

The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed.

If Senator Durbin wants to get up on the Senate floor and rail against torture, perhaps he could start with these torture houses, where real cruelty took place, not the humiliation tactics at Gitmo that tried to save American lives. What Fathil experienced was the same torture as that given out by Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athists during his decades-long reign, only Fathil had the good fortune to survive his encounter with the Islamofascists outside of Gitmo. Others, as the Times notes, did not fare so well.

The Islamofascist torturers even have their own instruction and philosophy manual to guide them through their depravity. The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy by Abdel Rahman al-Ali gives the so-called insurgents instruction and guidance on how to conduct war and interrogations on behalf of Islam. Durbin might want to see if he can borrow a copy from the Marines in order to educate himself on the differences between our men and women in the armed forces and our enemies, if not the earlier enemies with which Durbin confused our troops. With instructions such as "How to Select the Best Hostage" and "The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidels' Heads", the difference should be rather clear, even to someone of Durbin's limited intellect.

The Gitmo detainees are the genocidal, sadistic, bloodthirsty freaks, Senator, not their jailers or the interrogators who try to protect the United States by getting them to talk. If you can't recognize that -- and so far, it appears that you lack the ability or the will to do so -- then you have no place in the Senate, especially during a time of war. Time for you to offer your resignation and salvage what's left of your honor.