Jimmy Insults American Military On Foreign Soil

At one time, people considered Jimmy Carter the most successful ex-president, building a far better reputation through his philanthropical work than he ever did in his single term in the White House. However, over the past ten to fifteen years, his meddling in foreign policy and continuous left-wing stridency has dimmed the luster of his charitable efforts. Despite being out of office at the time, he may wind up most responsible for North Korea having nuclear weapons.

One would think that would give him a legacy unmatched in recent times. Today he did what most of us thought impossible -- he actually made his reputation worse. Carter took an opportunity to castigate the American military for its treatment of terrorist detainees while traveling overseas ona visit to our most strategic ally:

Former President Carter said Saturday the detention of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base was an embarrassment and had given extremists an excuse to attack the United States.

Carter also criticized the U.S.-led war in Iraq as "unnecessary and unjust."

"I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A.," he told a news conference at the Baptist World Alliance's centenary conference in Birmingham, England. "I wouldn't say it's the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts."

I have covered the Guantanamo Bay dispute for the past several weeks, even before Dick Durbin attacked the joint task force of our military at Gitmo and their administration of the camp and treatment of its prisoners. Over and over again, the notion that Gitmo has done anything to "embarrass" the United States has been thoroughly debunked. The only people with egg on their faces are the politicians like Durbin and Ted Kennedy who bloviate about abuses in order to puff up their political credentials. An independent investigation confirmed that only three violations of American law and Geneva Convention standards had occurred at Gitmo in the thousands of interrogations that have taken place and the hundreds of detentions.

Carter's second notion, that Gitmo has given terrorists a reason to kill, disputes not only common sense but history as well. Gitmo didn't take in detainees until after the Afghanistan operation collected terrorists by the dozen in the field of battle. Before that had happened, Islamofascist terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center twice (1993 and 2001), Khobar Towers, two of our African embassies, and the USS Cole. Since we opened Gitmo, how many times have AQ terrorists attacked US assets, at home or abroad? And how does Gitmo explain attacks on Madrid, Istanbul, Morocco, and now London? The British should have laughed him off their island.

But even beyond the folly of Carter's assertions, the fact that he decided to attack the military and the American administration while abroad marks him as particularly despicable. He went to the soil of our strongest ally and attempted to undermine their support for the war effort in Iraq. If he succeeds, then American soldiers will wind up facing even more danger in the country at a time when we hope to be readying the Iraqis to stand on their own. No American should do such a thing during wartime, especially an ex-President -- even one as relentlessly clueless as Jimmy Carter.

Carter has long shredded his charitable reputation by reminding us how inept his grasp of foreign policy was and is. Now he has revealed himself as a man of low character and relative loyalty. That may surprise few at this point of his post-office career, but the extent of his perfidy still disappoints nonetheless.

Blowing The Federalist Society Question

Today's Washington Post reviews the issue of the possible membership of John Roberts in the Federalist Society and what it could mean for his Supreme Court Nomination. Mostly, however, Michael Fletcher attempts to explain what the Federalist Society is to a nation whose only knowledge of the group paints it as a murky, subversive, and secretive cabal -- an image the White House inadvertently underscored in the days after announcing Roberts' nomination:

Launched 23 years ago by a group of conservative students who felt embattled by liberals on the campuses of some of the nation's most elite law schools, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown into one of the nation's most influential legal organizations. The group claims more than 35,000 members, an increasing number of whom work in the highest councils of the federal government. Many Justice Department lawyers, White House attorneys, Supreme Court clerks and judges are affiliated with the group. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a close adviser to the organization while he was a University of Chicago law professor.

Not only has the Federalist Society become a source of legal talent for Republican administrations, but through its frequent on-campus seminars and forums for practicing lawyers, the group is also credited with popularizing methods of legal analysis now widely advocated by many conservatives and employed by an increasing number of judges. Theories such as originalism, which holds that the Constitution has a fixed and knowable meaning rather than an evolving meaning that should adapt to contemporary times, is an idea put forward by many Federalist members. Using that standard, some judges have challenged previous court rulings allowing broad federal control over states on regulatory and civil rights issues, and maintaining the legal wall separating church and state.

In one of the more prosaic examples of truth in advertising, the Federalist Society advocates a return to the Federalist model of government. That model empahsizes local and state control over public policy and funds, giving more freedom to Americans to shape the way government affects their lives. It also espouses a literal reading of the Constitution, which puts the responsibility for creating laws and policy on the Legislature -- the branch representing the people -- where it belongs. As one member says in the article, Federalists want courts to rule on the basis of what the law says, and not what they want the law to be.

So what's so subversive about this? Not much, even if Fletcher goes out of his way to include the Left's favorite bogeyman, Richard Mellon Scaife, in his article. That begs the question as to why the White House distanced Roberts from the Federalists at Warp Eight early after the announcement:

The eagerness of the White House to distance Roberts from the Federalist Society baffled many conservatives. They believe the reaction fed a false perception that membership in the organization -- an important pillar of the conservative legal movement -- was something nefarious that would damage Roberts's chances of confirmation.

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society?" asked Roger Pilon, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, mocking the suspicion that swirls around the group.

Put simply, the White House reaction was a mistake. It added to the notion that membership in the Federalist Society should concern American voters. Even if Roberts didn't belong, the next nominees to the bench might, and then the White House will have left the Democrats a handy, catchy-sounding club with which to rhetorically beat them. It would have reflected so much better on the Bush administration had they insisted that Federalist Society membership represented a long and honorable school of thought in American legal circles, one that had far too little representation until like-minded legal scholars formed the group in the 1980s.

Instead, as Pilon notes, their reaction gives the Federalists the same kind of emotional reaction that one gives the Masons or the Communists. That is a big mistake, and one which the Bush administration will regret not just with Roberts but with all of their succeeding judicial nominations.

Energy Bill Caps Powerful Legislative Session For GOP

What a difference a few weeks make! Less than two months after the Washington Post wrote off the second Bush term as moribund and Bush himself as a lame duck, the Post now joins the New York Times and AP in recognizing that rumors of Bush's political death are just a wee bit premature:

After years of partisan impasses and legislative failures, Congress in a matter of hours yesterday passed or advanced three far-reaching bills that will allocate billions of dollars and set new policies for guns, roads and energy.

The measures sent to President Bush for his signature will grant $14.5 billion in tax breaks for energy-related matters and devote $286 billion to transportation programs, including 6,000 local projects, often called "pork barrel" spending. The Senate also passed a bill to protect firearms manufacturers and dealers from various lawsuits. The House is poised to pass it this fall.

Combined with the Central American Free Trade Agreement that Congress approved Thursday, the measures constitute significant victories for Bush and GOP congressional leaders, who have been frustrated by Democrats in some areas such as Social Security. As senators cast vote after vote in order to start their August recess, Bush applauded Congress, saying the energy bill "will help secure our energy future and reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy."

To be sure, the GOP did not get everything they wanted. Trent Lott complained that the stripped-down energy bill had lost a lot of its meat. John McCain, predictably (and in this case correctly), complained that the highway bill had picked up far too much meat -- pork, to be precise. ANWR drilling disappeared from the energy policy, to be addressed separately after the break.

However, for the first time since Bush's election, Congress finally passed an energy bill. It passed a highway bill that took months of wrangling. The Senate extended key provisions of the Patriot Act. It also approved protections from class-action lawsuits against gun manufacturers, who looked to be the next target for trial attorneys after having picked the tobacco industry clean. Congress sent CAFTA, a key part of our Latin American strategy to boost economies and relieve economic pressure forcing migration, to the White House over one of the toughest coordinated efforts yet seen on legislation during the Bush term.

And Bush won all of these legislative victories while having the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.

The Post notes that the GOP controls both houses of Congress as well as the White House, and that these victories should be seen in that light. True enough. However, that has not stopped the Democrats from blocking most of this legislation in the past, especially the energy bill and the Patriot Act extensions. The Democrats assumed that with his poll numbers falling and their legislative stall tactics working, Bush would fold his tent and retreat.

That's what the Post expected, too, at the end of May. Now they realize that they too "misunderestimated" George Bush, to their embarrassment.

Passing A Test In Uzbekistan

One of the most important military bases operated by the US sits in Uzbekistan, which borders on Afghanistan. It provides strategic access to the northern part of Afghanistan, with good roads to Mazar-i-Sharif, plus long runways for heavy-load military flights. It opened shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and has been considered essential to our operations.

Unfortunately, that base will no longer remain in our control, as the Uzbeks have delivered an eviction notice to the US:

Uzbekistan formally evicted the United States yesterday from a military base that has served as a hub for combat and humanitarian missions to Afghanistan since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday.

In a highly unusual move, the notice of eviction from Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2, was delivered by a courier from the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, said a senior U.S. administration official involved in Central Asia policy. The message did not give a reason. Uzbekistan will give the United States 180 days to move aircraft, personnel and equipment, U.S. officials said.

If Uzbekistan follows through, as Washington expects, the United States will face several logistical problems for its operations in Afghanistan. Scores of flights have used K2 monthly. It has been a landing base to transfer humanitarian goods that then are taken by road into northern Afghanistan, particularly to Mazar-e Sharif -- with no alternative for a region difficult to reach in the winter. K2 is also a refueling base with a runway long enough for large military aircraft. The alternative is much costlier midair refueling.

We have other bases in the Central Asia region supporting our Afghanistan operations, notably Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, but neither country has the same strategic access as Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan doesn't even border Afghanistan, making land access a moot point, and we only use the Tajik base in emergencies. The loss of this base will create a harsh impact on our efforts in the northern regions of Afghanistan.

So what went wrong?

Uzbekistan remains under the control of Islam Karimov, one of the Central Asian strongmen running former Soviet republics. For a while, his interests coincided with ours. Karimov didn't want Islamists to foment a bloody revolution and chase him from power, and he didn't mind the millions of dollars the US paid for use of the base, either. However, with the American push for democratization, the Uzbeks began to start demanding more and more freedoms, which made the Karimov regime start to question his American ties.

All of this came to a head earlier this year, when a massive pro-democracy protest turned bloody. Karimov's security forces opened fire on unarmed Uzbek demonstrators, killing 500 people in the Andijan province. The US demanded an independent investigation into the massacre, and planned on pressing Karimov for political reforms. So far, Karimov has not agreed to either, and the final straw apparently came when the US asked Kyrgyzstan to block extradition of 439 Uzbek political refugees.

The loss of such a strategic base is undeniably a blow for the US and its effort in Afghanistan. Yet this should be viewed as a triumph for the US. It demonstrates the Bush administration's commitment to democratization, even among our allies, and shows that we will not tolerate oppression and mass murder as a prop for power, not even among our friends. It shows that his overall strategy for this war is to create democracies as a bulwark against the radicalism that creates terror -- and that will, in the end, prove many times more beneficial than the Uzbek base we just lost.

The senior official quoted by the Washington Post noted that Bush could have saved the base simply by remaining silent about the refugees and democracy. Bush and his administration just passed an important test by choosing decency and democracy over the convenience of the moment. We will find other ways to support our efforts in Afghanistan, means that don't undermine our overall strategic goals of freeing as many people as possible throughout Southwest Asia and the world.

Armstrong Williams: Many Apologies, Light On Remorse

The Hill reports today that Armstrong Williams has positioned himself for a comeback after a disastrous fall from grace at the beginning of this year. When USA Today discovered that Williams had taken $241,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind program from the Department of Education without ever disclosing his relationship with the program, his credibility took a well-deserved beating. Williams lost his broadcast jobs and his syndicated column, and his business fortunes looked bleak.

Now the Hill reports that Williams has rebuilt his column and landed a new radio show in New York. He feels good about his comeback and wants people to know that he learned from the experience. However, he holds a grudge against conservatives who joined in the fierce criticism of his actions:

The 45-year-old commentator admitted he made a huge error in accepting Department of Education contracts to promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative. But a bitterness lingers about how he was treated by the media and fellow conservatives.

Before the federal-contract flap, Williams said, “I had put everything on the line, defending the right, supporting the right. … None of the conservative [groups] came to my rescue. I was alone.”

Williams admitted that he should have disclosed the existence of the Education Department contracts in his weekly column. But he notes that there was a disclaimer about federal funding in the television and radio spots that touted No Child Left Behind.

“The media didn’t care about that,” he said. “[Reporters] can opt not to write things in order to make their stories worthy of the attention they’re giving it. I was used.”

It doesn't sound like Williams learned too much in the intervening time, except how to shift blame. Perhaps his commercials noted that some federal funding had gone into the spots, but his columns never revealed that he had joined the DoEd as a consultant. The amount of money he received -- almost a quarter-million dollars -- indicates that the relationship involved much more than a bit of funding for a couple of TV and radio spots.

Williams damaged the Bush administration and the credibility of conservative commentators while pocketing a substantial amount of cash. In that effort, he received plenty of help from the rocket scientists at DoEd who came up with the plan, of course. However, no one forced Williams to take the money or to keep it a secret from his readers, who assumed they read an independent assessment of NCLB instead of a paid PR campaign. The marketplace wondered how many others had gotten payola for their support of conservative causes, a backlash that hurt us all.

So please spare us the lingering resentment, as Bob Cusack notes Williams retains. Personally, I prefer a reinvigorated Williams than a sidelined Williams, as long as he remains credible and out of the reach of hidden funding. I can't abide a Williams who blames the conservatives for his woes -- the conservatives he stuck in the back for a fistful of taxpayer dollars. If he expected us to defend him for taking payoffs and committing flackery, then he still hasn't learned anything at all.

UN Undersecretary Scored Big Commercial Gains From OFF

The intrepid Claudia Rosett uncovers yet another sordid connection between United Nations executives and the corruption in the Oil-For-Food program. This time, she focuses on the former French ambassador to the UN Jean-Bernard Merimee, who served as Kofi Annan's special advisor during the OFF period with a rank of Undersecretary:

The 68-year-old Merimee, one of several individuals now under investigation in France for alleged involvement in Saddam Hussein’s Oil-for-Food scams, is well known for his role in the early 1990s as French ambassador to the United Nations. What investigators have not so far highlighted is that during the period Merimee is alleged to have come into commercial contact with Saddam’s regime, starting in December 2001, he was working not for the French government, but as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. ...

On these lists, the apparent mention of Jean-Bernard Merimee, transliterated from Arabic as “Mr. Jan Mirami [French]” turned up three times, noted as having been allocated 4 million barrels of oil during the last three of the U.N. program’s 13 six-month phases — a stretch beginning Dec. 1, 2001 and truncated in March 2003 when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam. ...

According to the Duelfer report, the allocations linked to Merimee’s name were “not performed.” The Duelfer report does show the Merimee allocations linked to an oil trading company, French-based Aredio Petroleum, which also appears in the report as the alleged intermediary for a number of deals with other parties, in which oil was lifted. These include oil allocations to the Iraqi-French Friendship Society, as well as a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zurequat, sometime business partner of British parliamentarian George Galloway — whose name also appears on the Al Mada and Duelfer lists, but who has denied receiving any oil allocations from Iraq.

It certainly seems that a number of people around Annan got wealthy from this program. His son Kojo got a nice if unspectacular stipend long after he supposedly stopped working for Cotecna. Iraqi documents show Benon Sevan, the head of OFF and an Annan crony, got millions of dollars in oil allocations. Canadian Maurice Strong, yet another "special advisor", had to leave the UN after his ties to South Korean businessman and Saddam beneficiary Tongsun Park came to light.

Now we have Merimee, and oddly enough, no one really knows when he stopped working for the UN. His name appeared in the directories until this year. However, when asked, the UN insisted that he had left Turtle Bay three years ago and his continued listing was an oversight. No announcements of his resignation or termination can be found, either in 2002 since -- highly unusual for such a high-ranking advisor at the UN.

Merimee has proven a puzzlement. If so, then we are fortunate indeed to have Claudia Rosett on the case. Read the whole thing. (via Instapundit)

An Odd Lesson In Ethics

Lawyers have a saying that warns, "Hard cases make bad law." The Miami Herald may need to adjust that for journalism after a bizarre set of circumstances led to the firing of star columnist Jim DeFede for supposedly violating the law and the ethical standards of the Herald. How did DeFede get axed? It all started with a call from his friend, who happened to commit suicide in the Herald's lobby shortly afterwards:

It seemed like a throwback to "Miami Vice": an eccentric politician, recently accused of money laundering and soliciting male prostitutes, fatally shoots himself in the lobby of The Miami Herald after an anguished phone conversation with a star columnist.

But the storyline grew even stranger on Thursday as employees of the newspaper reacted with outrage after learning that the columnist, Jim DeFede, had been fired for secretly taping his conversation with the distraught man - a possible violation of state law.

Note that the taping has not been determined to be illegal, at least not yet. Florida case law allows for a business exemption for taping conversations. Why didn't DeFede simply tell Arthur Teele, a former city councilman whose career and life had collapsed in a series of revelations about corruption, drugs, and illicit sex, that he had started taping the conversation? DeFede worried about Teele's state of mind, he says:

"The idea that he might be thinking suicide was in my mind," Mr. DeFede, 42, said Thursday. "I wanted to get what he was saying down - to preserve what he was saying - so I pushed the record button." ...

"I realized Art was headed in a direction that scared me," Mr. DeFede said, and so in the heat of the moment he turned on his tape recorder. Mr. Teele seemed more stable when they hung up after 25 minutes, Mr. DeFede said, and even calmer when he called a second time from The Herald's lobby. Mr. DeFede was working at home, and Mr. Teele said he was leaving a packet for him at the security desk.

The Herald called minutes later to inform him of the shooting.

After hearing of the suicide by a man DeFede considered a friend, he informed the paper that he had taped the conversation. DeFede claims that the editor and the corporate counsel both assured him that the Herald would stand by him. DeFede, with that assurance, started transcribing the conversation so that he could write about the tragedy and the despair that had driven Teele to kill himself. When he brought the tape to the paper, however, they fired him.

Why? The Herald claims that taping Teele without his knowledge violated the paper's sense of ethics. They also dispute the story DeFede tells, saying that editor Jesus Diaz and counsel Robert Beatty had problems with DeFede's actions from the first moment they heard about the taping. Tom Fiedler, the paper's executive editor, backs this version of events and the firing of DeFede:

"We expect our people to act in a highly ethical way, and Jim admitted that he had crossed that line, and I really didn't see an alternative," Mr. Fiedler said. "If we have that expectation and someone fails to abide by it, knowingly fails to abide by it, regardless of that person's talent it means they can no longer be a part of The Herald."

That seems like a pretty tough position to take with a longtime employee dealing with the suicide of a friend. The Herald certainly must have written this policy out for a violation to be considered grounds for termination, and perhaps we will see some evidence of that. Under these circumstances, though, termination couldn't have been the only option available to the Herald.

In fact, in a stunning and hypocritical twist, the Herald then went on to undermine their own ethical stance -- by using DeFede's notes for a story on the suicide!

Even after knowing Mr. DeFede had taped Mr. Teele without his consent, the newspaper published portions of the conversation as described by Mr. DeFede.

It seems that the Herald has a flexible concern for ethics. They fire DeFede for getting the conversation on tape, and then use the work product of the tapes to publish their paper. Either DeFede shouldn't have taped the conversation and it shouldn't get published, or he should have taped it and it should get published. The Herald wants us to believe that they enforce a high ethical standard, when in fact they're publishing information that they themselves assert was collected unethically and they never should have possessed.

Jesus Diaz, Tom Fiedler, and Robert Beatty have a very strange sense of ethics indeed. Or maybe not; it sounds like the ethics of "whatever we can get away with", one that on further reflection doesn't seem all that unique in the Exempt Media.

See Mark in Mexico for further thoughts.

Air America Rethinks Its Position

The transfer of public funds earmarked for poor children and Alzheimers patients to Air America by the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club board -- which included Air America founder Evan Cohen -- did not disappear into oblivion, as Piquant Media obviously hoped it would with its initial statement on Wednesday. Thanks to fine work and dogged pursuit by Brian Maloney and Michelle Malkin, Piquant has adjusted its tone ... somewhat:

If the allegations of mismanagement and corruption at Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club are true, it is absolutely disgraceful.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal and the HBO Documentary, Left of the Dial‚ the company that the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club officials gave money to, Progress Media, has been defunct since May 2004. That company was run at the time by Evan Cohen who has not had any involvement in Air America Radio since May 2004.

The current owners of Air America Radio have no obligation to Progress Media‚s business activities. We are very disturbed that Air America Radio's good name could be associated with a reduction in services for young people, which is why we agreed months ago to fully compensate the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club as a result of this transaction.

Piquant doesn't state whether they have actually paid the money back, only that they agreed to do so "months ago". Even though we hear the same "don't blame us" point about Evan Cohen and previous ownership, at least they have decided that shrugging their shoulders at their benefit from monies intended to help kids and sick elders won't play very well in the press.

Not that they have much to worry about on that end. No major media outlets have bothered to look into Air America's role in the misdirection of federal funds at a time when they struggled to stay afloat. The only mention it gets comes from the editorial pages of the Washington Times. The Times keeps its eye on the blogosphere -- it has mentioned CQ a number of times -- and rightly credits Brian and Michelle for doing what the Exempt Media either couldn't or wouldn't do:

Did Al Franken's liberal radio network Air America divert city money for the elderly and inner-city children to itself? That's the question people should be asking this week after the revelation that the New York Department of Investigation is looking into whether hundreds of thousands of dollars were illegally transferred from a Bronx community center to Air America. Only a community paper and a few Internet bloggers seem interested in what could be an egregious case of illegal funneling of tax dollars to a private, partisan organization. ...

Most of the mainstream newspapers have ignored this story. We only found out about it through the reporting of Brian Maloney, who pieced a story together on his blog "The Radio Equalizer" which was picked up by syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. The New York Daily News buried an item at the end of a column of news briefs. There was nothing in the New York Times, which has heaped flattering coverage on the flailing network.

Air America is struggling to find listeners, leaders and reliable funding. But should it take money from children and the ailing elderly? Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, ever the defenders of the "little guy," should explain this one.

I doubt that Franken will ever comment on this story in his role as on-air personality. If he decides to run for office here in Minnesota as rumored, however, we should ask him about this scandal and what he did to correct it once it became known. Voters should shun candidates who manage to demonstrate a callous disregard for spending government money without even being in office.

Shots And Explosions Heard In London Raid (Updates: Captures!)

Londoners have heard shots and explosions -- as many as six -- coming from a raid which British authorities say is connected to the July 21 bombing investigation:

Officers carrying machine guns and wearing gas masks moved in and a loud explosion was reported in the Ladbroke Grove area. ...

Witnesses said the police swooped at 11.30am and sealed off Tavistock Road and the adjoining crescent.

Tavistock Road runs close to Westbourne Park Tube station where the man who attempted to blow himself up on a train near Shepherd's Bush on July 21 got on to the network.

Agence France-Presse reports that the six explosions came from the Notting Hill region, apparently part of the same raid. Further details to follow ...

UPDATE: Police arrested two women in a queue at a transport station in London, in "dramatic fashion," as the Telegraph puts it in its update. Fox News reported on air that the police had asked the media to turn off its cameras at the scene of the standoff, perhaps to keep the people inside from seeing the police deployments on TV. More ...

UPDATE II: The BBC now reports that police arrested two more of the July 21 bombers in this raid:

Two more of the failed London bombing suspects are believed to have been arrested as police carried out a number of armed operations in west London.

They were thought to be the men wanted for the Oval Tube and No 26 bus attacks of 21 July, said a BBC correspondent. ...

In Dalgarno Gardens officers were continually shouting at someone in a flat to come out. They were addressing him as "Muhammad".

The police asked him: "What is the problem? Why can't you come out?

"Take your clothes off. Exit the building. Do you understand?"

The police now say that no firearms were discharged during this raid, which means that the noises heard by the neighbors likely came from flash-bang grenades. Police use these to stun and disorient suspects while rushing them to get them in custody. Using them near explosives such as those used for the Tube bombings seems like a high-risk strategy, but it beats giving a terrorist time to set them off deliberately.

UPDATE III: Now police are saying that they arrested three men in this raid:

Heavily armed police wearing gas masks and reportedly using stun grenades raided two west London apartment blocks Friday, and officials said they arrested three people connected to the failed July 21 transit bombings. ...

Police said they raided two residences Friday in west London and arrested two men at one address and one at another, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity. Police were "securing the area and treating it as a crime scene."

An eyewitness at the scene told the media that he recognized one of the men as a bus driver for London's transport system:

In addition, a witness told The Associated Press that a man wearing what appeared to be a bus driver's uniform was led away by police in handcuffs.

The witness, Osama Ahmed Ali, saw a Somali man whom he recognized as a bus driver.

"He was in a purple-and-yellow bus driver uniform," said Ali, 16. "I've been on a bus with him a couple of times."

That seems significant. If Islamists have infiltrated the London bus and subway systems as employees, then they could have had much bigger plans for its destruction. London police may have to investigate all transport-system employees for possible connections to radical Islamist mosques and activities. That will prove unpleasant for all concerned.

UPDATE IV: The updated BBC report now says that all four July 21 bombing suspects have been arrested. The fourth one was apprehended by Italian police in Rome:

The fourth suspect, wanted for the attempted Shepherd's Bush Tube attack, has been arrested in Rome and named as Somali-born UK citizen Osman Hussein.

Those British passports came in handy to the terrorists, didn't they? It makes the lightning-quick captures of the AQ operatives and a good portion of their network all the more amazing.

Senate Democrats Demand Abortion Litmus Test

Six women from the Senate Democratic caucus demanded an answer from John Roberts as to whether he would overturn Roe v. Wade if such a case presented itself, and committed to opposing his nomination if he answered yes or refused to answer. Barbara Boxer led the press conference and said she would find it "impossible" to vote for Roberts:

A group of female Democratic senators said yesterday that they will vote against Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. unless he vows to uphold abortion rights. ...

"Thousands of women a year died in back alleys," Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, said of the days before Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion rights. "For more than 20 years, Sandra Day O'Connor has been an important vote in upholding Roe v. Wade," she said. "Will Judge Roberts be that same important voice?"

Senators Patty Murray, Barbara Mikulski, Debbie Stabenow, Maria Cantwell, and interestingly Hillary Clinton all joined Boxer for this statement. None would answer when asked if they could support Roberts even if he even said that Roe was wrongly decided. Mikulski said that the women cared about more than just abortion rights, but clearly this statement meant to deliver the message that without a clear statement of support for Roe, Roberts would not get their votes.

Cantwell did not even bother to dispute the notion that they wanted a litmus test that demanded a prior agreement to prejudge cases towards particular outcomes. She told reporters that it might well be considered a litmus test, but that "over 60 percent of the American public believe that it is the job and role of the Senate to advise and consent on nominees, and it is very appropriate to ask nominees about their judicial philosophy."

Asking about judicial philosophy is certainly appropriate, but demanding a loyalty oath to a particular court decision is not only inappropriate but entirely odious. First, it violates the rules of ethics for judges to preconceive how they will rule on cases before they are heard. Second, it creates an undue political pressure from the legislature onto the judiciary, which supposedly is independent and co-equal. Third, as Cantwell obviously doesn't know, the only oath that a Supreme Court justice takes is to the Constitution itself, not the majority decisions that prior courts have delivered.

Besides, only sixty percent of the American people feel it is appropriate for the Senate to provide advice and consent on executive nominations? That should be 100%, as that is clearly a delineated responsibility in the Constitution. The lack of unanimous mandate on this point should serve as a warning signal to the Senate that they have undermined their credibility, largely through overt political demands of judicial nominees such as attempted by the women at this press conference.

Elections have consequences. The American people elected a Republican president and a Republican Senate that campaigned openly and strenuously on judicial nominations. Clearly they want to see more conservative jurists on the federal bench. The Senate minority needs to quit obstructing the will of the people and allow the President to appoint and confirm qualified jurists to the bench. Roberts' politics are not an appropriate subject for debate.

Poland's Pressure Gets To Belarus

Poland has started to put pressure on the dictatorship running Belarus, attempting to use its deep cultural ties to lend moral support to a burgeoning democratization movement. In response, the Lukashenko regime has seized a building near their shared border that provided community services to the Polish minority in Belarus:

A bitter row between Poland and Belarus over human rights, alleged espionage and democracy escalated yesterday when Belarussian police special forces stormed and seized a Polish community building near the country's border with Poland. The Polish government responded by withdrawing its ambassador from Minsk.

The dispute between the two countries pits the authoritarian regime of Belarus's president, Alexander Lukashenko - dubbed Europe's last dictator - against Nato and EU member Poland, which is crusading for greater democracy in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Mr Lukashenko - fearful of the pro-democracy tumult that unseated regimes in Ukraine and Georgia - claims Warsaw is spearheading a western plot to destabilise Belarus and foment a revolution to forestall his re-election next year.

Lukashenko wants to get his ersatz elections completed without disturbances, like people demanding an actual election as happened in Ukraine. His re-election will give him some breathing space to complete a planned reunification with Russia, allowing Lukashenko to hold onto power by using the Russians to tamp down opposition and dissent. The increasingly autocratic wants Belarus as a further buffer against the wave of democratization and liberalization coming from Eastern Europe -- the very people that Russia once oppressed, and George Bush's biggest proponents of the tranformative power of democracy.

To demonstrate that he means business, Lukashenko had security forces surround the community center and arrest everyone inside. Those detained were interrogated and, according to the Guardian, convicted on the spot. That may demonstrate remarkable efficiency, but it reveals the police state which Lukashenko has maintained since Belarus won its independence in the early 1990s.

Known as Europe's last dictator, the last of a long and notorious line of despots in the region, Lukashenko should look to history to see how each met their fate. Those who allowed for the will of the people to exercise an orderly transition of power lived their lives in relative unmolested peace. Those who fought against the historical inevitability of liberty wound up on the end of a gibbet, or worse.

Disengagement From Reality

Today's Washington Post publishes a column from an Al-Jazeera reporter who got miffed that Israel denied her entry from Gaza so that she could attend a reception in the West Bank. After that experience, Laila el-Haddad tells us that Israel's pullout from Gaza amounts to nothing more than a plan to keep the West Bank under its thumb, and that Israel's protection of its borders is the biggest obstacle to peace in the region:

I spent eight hours at Gaza's Erez border crossing with Israel last month, waiting for Israeli approval to attend a reception in the West Bank, only to be denied entry based on dubious "security reasons."

I'm a Palestinian mother of a stir-crazy 16-month-old boy, a journalist and a Harvard graduate. I'm not sure exactly what's threatening about me, though my son might disagree, if he could sit still long enough to do so.

Being Palestinian is enough, an Israeli army spokesperson told me.

"As a Palestinian from Gaza, you are considered a security threat first, a journalist second."

And that equation is not set to change anytime soon, not even after disengagement.

Haddad notes that the Israelis plan on controlling Gaza's borders after pulling out and have declared that they will still respond to attacks coming from the region -- and asserts that this policy makes Gaza little more than an open-air prison. She goes on to note that nothing has changed since Oslo, and that the Israeli security wall disrupts Palestinian lives and causes aggravation and inconvenience.

Where does one start with this nonsense?

Haddad must know about the recent case of a Palestinian woman to whom Israel granted access. The Israelis allowed Wafa Samir al-Biss to cross over into Israel for medical treatment to correct burns and scars so she could lead a more normal life -- and she repaid them by attempting to set off a bomb belt. In fact, she later told the Telegraph that she wanted to kill Israeli babies at the hospital.

But she wasn't a mother, Haddad could argue. True enough, but she could talk to Kahira, another inmate interviewed in the same article. Kahira had a husband and children and still managed to help set up a suicide bomber who killed a pregnant Jewish woman, among others. Manuela Dviri talked with a number of Palestinian women who crossed into Israel, probably many of which told guards that they wanted to go to the West Bank from Gaza or the other way around, only to attempt to kill Israeli civilians instead.

Haddad needs to spare us the outrage act. The Israelis have damned good reasons to look suspiciously on people crossing the border, and the Palestinians have no one to blame for that but themselves. The same holds true for the security fence. It has turned out to be the one non-lethal defense strategy that actually saves Israeli lives; suicide bombings have become almost non-existent in areas protected by the fence. Whether the ICJ like it or not is moot, as the Israelis do not participate in the court of "justice", which never attempted to address the terrorism that created the need for the fence as part of its deliberations.

If the Palestinians feel like Oslo gave them nothing, they can look to Yasser Arafat and the terrorists of the PLO, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad for the cause. For the past eleven years, Israel has waited for the Palestinians to demand peace and an end to terrorism. Instead, they launched two intifadas since Oslo and the Palestinian Authority has refused to act against terrorists, breaching their responsibilities under Oslo and a host of succeeding agreements. By electing the terrorist lunatics of Hamas to important posts in the last elections, the Palestinians have made clear their choice for war. They shouldn't weep at the same time that the people they target for that war won't grant them immediate, unfettered access to the interior of their country.

Haddad and her people need to grow up, and the Washington Post needs to rethink its editorial page access to this kind of disingenuous tripe.

Sloppy Work At State

John Bolton's nomination ran into another stumbling block yesterday when Senator Joe Biden asked Condoleezza Rice, seemingly out of the blue, to reaffirm Bolton's denial that he had been interviewed as part of any investigation for the past five years. At first this resulting in an unequivocal denial, but by the end of the day, the denial had transformed into a grudging admission:

John R. Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, failed to tell the Senate during his confirmation hearings that he had been interviewed by the State Department's inspector general looking into how American intelligence agencies came to rely on fabricated reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa, the State Department said Thursday.

Reacting to a letter from Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said Mr. Bolton had not disclosed the interview with the inspector general because Mr. Bolton had forgotten about it. Mr. McCormack said the interview, on July 18, 2003, had nothing to do with a federal investigation into who leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. official to reporters, a potential crime.

"When Mr. Bolton completed his forms for the Senate he did not recall being interviewed by the inspector general," Mr. McCormack said in a telephone interview Thursday. Mr. McCormack reiterated that Mr. Bolton had not been questioned by the grand jury in the leak investigation. ...

In a form submitted for his confirmation hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Bolton said he had not been interviewed or asked for information in connection with any administrative investigation, including that of an inspector general, during the last five years.

I'm not naive. I know that the Democrats have had the long knives out for Bolton ever since Rice got confirmed as Secretary of State. In my opinion, the central point of contention amounts to a tempest in a teapot; no one really thinks that an interview with the inspector general amounts to anything significant. If Bolton had any involvement in the Iraq intelligence probe, he would have testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Biden wouldn't have had to ask Rice about it.

Nevertheless, this shows a foolishness that borders on recklessness, on either Bolton's part or that of State. If Bolton truly had not been interviewed by anyone other than the singular incident with the inspector general over the past five years, it's hard to imagine that he simply forgot about the experience. The Iraq intelligence probe at State wasn't just an administrative dispute, either; the political importance of that issue should have made that fairly memorable. The most charitable analysis would have us believe that John Bolton had such little regard for an issue that controversial that it completely escaped his memory ... not exactly a ringing endorsement for his confirmation or recess appointment.

I have enthusiastically backed Bolton for this appointment, but the last thing this administration needs heading into a Supreme Court confirmation fight is a track record of this kind of sloppiness. It only gives ammunition for the Democrats to use in publicly questioning the veracity of other executive nominees, including John Roberts and anyone else nominated for subsequent SCOTUS openings. If Bolton has any more land mines awaiting us, clear them up now or withdraw him.

Democrats Eat Crow Over Lame Duck Claims

After declaring George Bush a lame duck in the opening months of his second term, the media has had to backtrack after the last couple of weeks. Instead of being a lame duck and despite sagging poll numbers, two separate media analyses now acknowledge that Bush has done remarkably well in pushing his legislative agenda. The New York Times reports in tomorrow's edition that Congress continues to bend to his will:

In a flurry of last-minute action as it prepared to recess, Congress on Thursday passed or stood at the brink of final action on several hard-fought measures that had been at the top of Mr. Bush's summer to-do list and that at times had seemed to be long shots. The House narrowly approved a new trade deal with Central American nations early on Thursday morning, the final hurdle for a pact that was one of the administration's top economic priorities this year.

The House and Senate were wrapping up work Thursday on an energy bill that more or less conforms to what Mr. Bush has sought. And the two chambers were moving toward final passage of a transportation bill that contained enough pork to please lawmakers as they headed home, but with a price tag acceptable to the White House.

Even as the legislative wheels turned in Mr. Bush's direction, the White House was watching with satisfaction as the president's choice to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Judge John G. Roberts, continued to win support from all wings of the Republican Party while leaving Democrats with little that might threaten his confirmation.

"You can disagree with the merits of individual things, but there's a lot that's been done," said John B. Breaux, the former Democratic senator from Louisiana who often worked across party lines.

The president's record over the past few weeks, combined with generally good economic news and word that the budget deficit is shrinking, suggests that Mr. Bush has hardly lapsed into the lame-duck status that Democrats had been hoping to assign him.

The AP sounds a similar note in their overview of Bush's first six months of his final term:

On Thursday, the House approved a Bush-backed energy bill loaded with $14.5 billion in tax breaks, designed to boost U.S. production. The Senate was expected to approve it on Friday and the White House said Bush — who has been urging a major change in U.S. energy policy for five years — will sign it.

The House also moved toward expected approval of a Bush-backed $286.4 billion highway and transit bill, hailed by Republicans as capable of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In his hardest-fought victory, Bush won House approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement — previously passed by the Senate — late Wednesday night, on a 217-215 vote, overcoming heavy Democratic opposition and some GOP defections. The win was achieved only after last minute dealmaking and arm twisting by Republican leaders, and a roll call held open for an hour.

While the economic impact of the pact is expected to be relatively small, the political symbolism was large. Bush lobbied vigorously, including last-minute in-person appeals on Wednesday, and portrayed the measure as central to his goal of spreading democracy and freedom to combat terrorism.

Democrats remained combative — but outmaneuvered.

It doesn't stop with the laundry list of legislative wins covered by the New York Times and the AP -- two media sources hardly sympathetic to Bush -- but earlier this week he finally forced the Democrats to give a substantive response to his proposed Social Security reforms. Not only did Bush make the Democrats stop playing their faux-Gingrich strategy of yelling "No!" over and over again, but in their haste they put forward a plan which changes nothing in Social Security ... but emphasizes private retirement plans, an endorsement that has privatization opponents shaking their heads.

Less than two months ago, Jim VandeHei and the Washington Post had written Bush off. An unnamed but "influential" Republican Congressman told VandeHei of a "growing sense of frustration". Leon Panetta went on the record crowing that Bush had "really burned up whatever mandate he had from that last election." The media, such as the Detroit News and even US News & World Report as late as two weeks ago, continued to press the notion that Bush had lost control of his agenda due to his insistence on forging ahead on Social Security and the war in Iraq. Even the British press jumped in on the act.

Instead of roast duck, however, these critics will have to eat a supersize helping of crow. Presumed to have little native intelligence by his critics, Bush once again shows that he understands how to outmaneuver his political opponents, regardless of whether Karl Rove gets distracted by the Plame investigation. If they want to keep thinking of Bush as unintelligent and impotent, they will wind up losing yet another election cycle to the GOP in 2006.

Durbin Inspires Hatred Of America

When Dick Durbin got up on the floor of the Senate and compared the detention center at Guantanamo Bay with the Nazi deathcamps, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the Stalinist gulags, we warned that he had handed our enemies a huge propaganda victory. When Ted Kennedy blew up over the Abu Ghraib abuses and turned them into a prime-time spectacle, we warned that publicizing them so widely would enrage our enemies. We suspected that Al-Jazeera had already looped the speech and the pictures and might play them continuously whenever the news got too slow.

Perhaps we should also have pointed out that other people might want to use it for their own propaganda purposes. The Moscow Times has taken Durbin's correlation of Gitmo to the gulag to heart and used it to deliver the strangest and most venomous media attack on the American government outside of the Arab press:

Last week, we wrote of the Bush Faction's increasingly successful drive to establish the principle of unlimited presidential authority -- beyond the reach of any law or constitutional restriction -- as the new foundation of a militarist American state. This relentless push toward autocracy gained even more strength in recent days, in two cases centering on what has emerged as the very core of President George W. Bush's authoritarian philosophy: torture. ...

Cheney brought hard words from on high for the tepid trio: Bush will veto any attempt by Congress to place any fetters on his arbitrary power over the captives in his worldwide gulag. The grim-visaged veep put it plainly: Such legislation would "restrict the President's authority" to conduct the terror war as he sees fit, and thus cannot be tolerated. The whole defense budget will be tossed into the toilet if the amendments are attached, Cheney thundered.

This would be the first veto of Bush's presidency: a mark of the supreme importance he places on his ability to seize people without charges, hold them indefinitely, break their bodies and their minds, then dispose of them as he pleases. This power is obviously more important to him than the defense of the nation itself. But what's most striking about this case is the fact that the amendments -- sponsored by ersatz "maverick" John McCain, among others -- are actually part of the process of establishing an open, "legal" structure for Bush's unrestricted "commander-in-chief state."

And the upshot of Chris Floyd's screed? What does the Moscow Times thinks is our ultimate goal for Guantanamo Bay?

This is the power that Bush declares cannot be restricted by courts or Congress or any law on earth: the power to torture, to murder, to terrorize -- and to rape children. This is the dark, filthy heart of his militarist state.

With each new atrocity on every side in the hydra-headed "war on terror," you think that now, perhaps, we've reached the bottom. But never believe that comforting notion. The evil that has opened up beneath our feet is bottomless, and we are falling deeper, fathom by fathom, into the pit. The worst, far worse, is yet to come.

Child rape? That's what Floyd insists the unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib shows, even as he lies about the outcome of the investigation. Floyd maintains that "in all the show trials of low-ranking "bad apples" the Bushists have staged -- not a single person has been charged or even reprimanded for these abominations." Floyd has not paid much attention, as all of the guards involved in the abuse have been convicted or pled guilty. No matter; Moscow Times doesn't let the truth stand in the way of good propaganda.

This is what happens when our bloviating leaders try to score political cheap shots by blowing a few isolated incidents out of all proportion. It hands idiots and malicious twits like Chris Floyd to paint America as the land of child-rapists and torturers, ironically in the land that gave us the gulags in the first place.

When our politicians learn that wartime puts great responsibilites on public debate, perhaps the Dick Durbins and Ted Kennedys will take those responsibilites to heart. Until then, expect to see more of this drivel shoveled out to Muscovites, Parisians, Berliners, and many, many more. (h/t: Pat A. in Phoenix)

Dafydd: A Climate Pact Even I Can Applaud

This one caught me totally by surprise: China, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States (we led the effort) have just signed an international agreement, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, to "keep climate-changing chemicals out of the atmosphere, especially carbon from fossil fuels." But rather than the Kyoto-Protocol method of setting target goals for emissions reductions that force de-industrialization among complying nations (of which there are actually very few among the Kyoto signers), this new pact aims to reduce emissions by jointly developing new pollutant-control technologies. (Power Line's John Hinderaker, the only "SuperLawyer" currently blogging in the 'sphere, is on the story.)

In a move to counter the Kyoto Protocol that requires mandatory cuts in so-called greenhouse gas emissions, [President Bush] is making the technology pitch as part of a partnership with five Asian and Pacific nations, including China and India. The idea is to get them to commit to cleaner energy production as a way to curtail air pollution that most scientists believe is causing the Earth to warm up.

The administration announced late Wednesday that it has reached an agreement with the five countries to create a new partnership to deploy cleaner technologies whenever possible to produce energy.

I'm one of the most rabid despisers of the global-warming mob (globaloney, that is) and their ham-fisted, Luddite attempt to force industrial Western societies back into the past, the pastoral, preindustrial golden age when everyone was treated with love and respect, and lions lay with lambs in arrangements other than prandial.

So why am I wildly approving of this new greenhouse-gas pact, agreement, whatever one calls it? Well, do the obvious...!

The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol has been a colossal failure for three distinct reasons: first, the treaty insists on reductions so draconian (7% below the signatory's greenhouse-gas emissions in 1990, though the treaty was signed in 1997) that the only way an industrialized nation can be in compliance is, in essence, to dramatically de-industrialize, cutting carbon and carbonoid emissions by cutting energy production itself -- thus severely damaging the economy, leading to job losses (job loss particularly among the elected officials who actually implement such a boneheaded policy). The natural result of this inexorable logic is that nations typically sign Kyoto -- but intend to cheat from the very beginning: the signing is purely symbolic, which of course produces an equally symbolic reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The second major flaw is that the Kyoto Protocol consciously and with malice aforethought excluded developing nations -- including China and India, the two largest-population countries in the world, accounting for a third of all the humans on this planet -- from any emissions-reduction requirements at all, at least until 2013. This was the reason that the U.S. Senate, in a non-binding test vote, voted unanimously (97 to 0) against the treaty in 1997.

The United States rejected the 1997 Kyoto pact, which requires reductions by industrial nations of greenhouse emissions. Bush said earlier this month he recognizes that human activity contributes to a warmer Earth, but he continues to oppose the Kyoto treaty that all other major industrialized nations signed because developing nations weren't included in it.

(This is clumsily written, of course; the Times here implies that Kyoto was first rejected under Bush; in fact, although Bill Clinton signed it, he never formally submitted it to the Senate. Nevertheless, the Senate indicated it would reject it if it were presented. When George W. Bush became president, he formally withdrew from the previous administration's signing of the treaty.)

But the most important reason the Kyoto Protocol was doomed from the start is that it was never anything but science by table-pounding: from the initial findings announced by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 2nd Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, to the subsequent IPCC findings, to the Conference of Parties III in Kyoto, Japan, to this day, the treaty was always a political, not a scientific, entity. (Resource: A Brief History of the Kyoto Protocol, on Greenpeace's website.)

Decisions were made by votes, often votes of politicians, not scientists; scientific dissent was squelched. Evidence of other causes for warming besides industrial activity were dismissed; criticisms of the flawed "global circulation models" that were the driving force behind predictions of runaway greenhouse warming were mocked or suppressed; legitimate questions about the extent of "damage" caused by slight warming, mostly occurring during winter nights in the coldest parts of the Earth, were met with hostile accusations instead of hard science; and even evidence of the huge increase in crop growth and resistance to disease and pests that occurs in climates with higher levels of CO2... all were waved away as irrelevant to the urgent task of reducing industrialization in the West. (Strangely, for the New Left, no matter what the problem -- global warming, a new ice age, air pollution, food shortages, food gluts -- the answer is always the same: smash the looms!)

Nor did the Kyoto Protocol ever indicate how a signatory was supposed to reduce its emissions to 7% below their 1990 level (which for the United States today would mean a reduction of more than 20%, because greenhouse gas emissions rose 13% from 1990 to 2003; see p.3 of the linked pdf). Since the primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions is burning carbon-based fuels like oil, gasoline, natural gas, and coal, the only method of reducing emissions by the target goal of Kyoto -- with today's technology and yesterday's political climate, pardon the pun -- would be to stop producing so much energy. But that 13% rise in emissions from 1990-2003 was accompanied by an increase of forty-six percent in gross domestic product over that same period... and it is simply a fact of life that energy use and GDP are inextricably intertwined.

Enter the New Bush Pact

The qualifiers in the preceding paragraph, "today's technology and yesterday's political climate," are not simply weasel-words: there is a solution to the "problem," to whatever extent it may exist, of carbon emissions that does not require de-industrialization with the corresponding drop in GDP and employment. That solution would be to develop new and better technology... primarily energy-producing technology that does not depend upon burning things.

Here is the point: an object that is alive (like wood, other plants, animals, or people), or that used to be alive (coal, oil, and natural gas, which are the remains of prehistoric plankton and plants), contains carbon-hydrogen molecules. When you burn such an object, you tear apart these molecules, combine the carbon with oxygen, and you get carbon dioxide, CO2, plus a whole bunch of energy. It's that energy we use, and it's the carbon dioxide (also formed when we breath) that global-warming phobics fear. There is no way to burn organic materials without producing CO2; the best you can do is try to capture it as it emits from the smokestack.

But there are many methods of producing energy that do not require burning anything... the most effective of which, in the short-to-medium term (0 to 50 years), are hydroelectric generators and nuclear power plants. Since the former are limited by the number of rivers you're willing to dam (which causes rather significant environmental change, to say the least!), we should probably concentrate on the latter. Recent radically improved technologies for nuclear fission, including Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (gas-cooled) and Integral Fast Reactors (liquid-metal cooled), already exist in prototype but lack either funding or a favorable political climate for wide-scale development; this new pact may spur such technologies forward, allowing much cheaper, safer, and more reliable electrical generation that does not require burning organic materials and producing either carbon dioxide or pollution.

(Long-term solutions might include solar-power satellites beaming energy via microwaves back to earth, geothermal energy production that taps into the residual heat at the core of the Earth, nuclear fusion instead of fission, and theoretically, at least, the annihilation of matter-antimatter pairs... though we would have to find a ready-made source for the last, since creating antimatter would of course use up more energy than it would produce; could be useful as a sort of "battery," however, to store large amounts of energy.)

More minor partial-solutions, which by themselves would not help much but wouldn't particularly hurt, either, would include earthbound solar power, windmills, pure hydrogen (from fuel cells, say), and simply more efficient burning of carbon-based fuels -- for example, by the use of high-temperature ceramic engines, which I discussed on Patterico's Pontifications.

All of these would be dramatically helped by the new Asia Pacific Partnership; in other words, while the globaloney crowd pounds the table and simply insists that we somehow magically reduce carbonoid emissions, President Bush is actually offering solutions to the problem: improved technology in the area that matters most -- energy production -- along with ancillary technologies that will help scrub emissions of all sorts (inluding garden-variety pollution) from smokestacks and tailpipes.

And of course, there is always the "Tang and Teflon" phenomenon: any significant investment in scientific research, especially in applied research, will produce technological spinoffs that cannot be predicted, and whose effects cannot be anticipated. Space and missile research produced this little spinoff call personal computers, for example -- and regardless of what Walter Mondale thinks, I don't believe the PC is a passing fad.

Finally, the Asia Pacific Partnership is entirely voluntary: the nations agree to share technology because each country believes it's good for itself; sharing research means quicker and better results. So the pact is self-enforcing: nobody cheats because the incentive is captialism, which entirely favors continuing the partnership.

In the Power Line piece, Hinderaker bemoans the fact that nobody seems to be paying any attention to the numerous ways in which George W. Bush proves his genius by contributing solutions rather than wallowing in problems, as we saw in the last two Democratic administrations.

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

But I believe that Bush honestly doesn't care whether he gets credit or not, so long as long-festering problems are solved. In this sense, George W. Bush is Reaganesque. For that reason, and because of Bush's willingness to think not only big but sideways, he is destined to be remembered as a great president. If this pact helps the human race to think its way out of the many problems associated with fossil fuels (including pollution, poor engine efficiency, and the finite nature of organic byproducts), then Bush may well be remembered for helping to give future generations the gift of limitless clean energy.

Was Menezes In Britain Illegally?

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the man shot in the London Tube after fleeing pursuing plainclothes police, took a strange turn this afternoon. The British Home Office released a statement that his visa had expired, and that the indefinite-leave stamp entered into it di not match that used on the date shown:

The student visa of Jean Charles de Menezes expired two years before he was shot by police, the Home Office says.

Officials said they wished to end speculation over his immigration status but added it was "not intended" to influence any investigations.

A passport stamp apparently giving him indefinite leave to remain "was not in use" on that date, added officials.

Home Office officials quickly noted that they did not intend to make a judgment on the validity of the lethal force used in his capture. However, it does shed some light on why Menezes may have fled police in the first place. It also raises some questions. Why would an electrician have stayed in London on a student visa, and why wouldn't his employer have checked the visa to determine his eligibility to work? Who forged the stamp on his visa, and why?

These questions may all result in mundane answers. Until British investigators find those answers, though, the public should keep an open mind about the circumstances surrounding his death. At the very least, we now know Menezes had reason to flee into the Tube, even if those reasons may or may not have had any connection to al-Qaeda. (via USS Neverdock)

AQ Religious Firebrand Gets 75 Years

A New York court sentenced Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad to seventy-five years in prison for providing funds, arms, and assistance to al-Qaeda and Hamas. A jury convicted the sheikh despite one of the government witnesses setting himself on fire earlier this year in protest of what he felt was unfair treatment by the US government:

A Yemeni cleric who claimed to have ties with Osama Bin Laden has been sentenced to 75 years in prison in New York.

Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad was convicted on charges of conspiring to support the al-Qaeda network and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

At a meeting with two FBI informants in Germany, he was recorded promising to funnel more than $2m (£1.1m) to Hamas.

He was arrested by German police in January 2003 and extradited to the US.

For each of five counts, Moayad received 15-year sentences, each to be served consecutively.

Contrast this to the ridiculously light sentence handed down by Judge John C. Coughenour to Ahmed Rassam, who attempted to kill hundreds if not thousands of people at LAX for the millenium celebration. For smuggling a trunkful of bombmaking materials into the US, Ressam will only have to serve as little as fourteen years. It seems that the lesson we need to learn from this is that we treat the bombers much better than we treat the financiers.

One strange footnote to this case is the attempted self-immolation of Mohammed Alanssi last November. After his almost-literal meltdown, the prosecution dropped him as a witness. However, the defense then called him as a hostile witness for their presentation. Big mistake. According to the only report I could easily find about his testimony in February, Alanssi dropped a bombshell on the defense regardless of how he felt about the US government:

Mohamed Alanssi, called as a hostile witness for the defense, testified Thursday that Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad told him he gave $20 million to bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks and $3.5 million to the terrorist group Hamas. ...

Defense attorney Howard Jacobs asked whether al-Moayad, who runs religious charities in Yemen, explicitly stated he funneled money to Islamist fighters.

Alanssi replied that it wasn't necessary.

"The charitable work of Sheik Moayad is a front, and the money he gets is for mujahedeen," a militant group whose name means holy fighters, Alanssi said.

Jacobs asked to strike the response from the record.

"No," Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. replied. "You asked it."

One suspects that al-Moayad will appeal this conviction, as I predicted in February, on grounds of legal incompetence. This strange case has not seen its last headline yet.

Roberts No Activist, Says Senate Dem

I don't know which side will feel more relief with this development. Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), one of the Gang of 14 and a highly-vulnerable red-state Democrat, says that John Roberts convinced him that he will not be an activist jurist after a personal interview earlier today:

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts gave assurances he wouldn't be an activist if confirmed, a key Democrat who already was leaning toward supporting him said Thursday.

"I don't see anything that's going to be disturbing" in his record, Sen. Ben Nelson told reporters after a 30-minute meeting with
President Bush's choice to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the high court.

Democrats have been pushing to review as many of Roberts' writings as possible, hoping to gain a better understanding of his personal views and the extent to which he might seek to inject them into his judicial rulings.

"He said he would not be an activist judge," Nelson said.

Nelson faces the fight of his life in Nebraska in 2006, a state that went for George Bush in a big way last year. He joined the Gang of 14 to keep from facing political disaster; another filibuster, and he knew he would join Tom Daschle on the dinner circuit. He cannot afford another round of obstructionism , and so he has some heavy motivation to take Roberts at his word.

On the other hand, with every endorsement that Roberts gets from across the aisle, the GOP hardliners will get more and more nervous about the appellate jurist with a small track record. By this point, no one really believes that Roberts will transform into the second coming of Souter, but another Anthony Kennedy doesn't sound out of the question. While most Republicans want to see a quick and relatively controversy-free confirmation, some will prefer a floor fight of unprecedented proportions to clear the air once and for all -- and to eliminate the judicial filibuster for good. Roberts' confirmation should avoid that, unless the Democrats really get foolish and agree in sufficient numbers to Estradify Roberts.

Nelson's preliminary endorsement makes that possibility much less likely. Which side suffers the most disappointment from that will be a toss-up.

Air America Dodges Responsibility

Brian at Radio Equalizer, who first broke the story on Air America's grasping of funds meant for poor children and Alzheimers patients, now posts the official response from the liberal talk-radio network on the scandal:

"On MAY 24, 2004 the newly formed PIQUANT LLC acquired the principal assets of AIR AMERICA RADIO from the prior ownership entities. PIQUANT has owned and operated AIR AMERICA RADIO since that time. The company that had run AIR AMERICA RADIO till then no longer had anything to do with the network.

"PIQUANT had no involvement whatsoever with funds from GLORIA WISE BOYS &GIRLS CLUB. PIQUANT neither received nor expended any of the sums that are the subject of the City's investigation of the CLUB.

"PIQUANT is not being investigated by the City, which is investigating a transaction that took place before PIQUANT existed."

Unfortunately for Piquant, when they bought Air America, they bought its liabilities along with it. They may not have broken any laws themselves, unless they've managed to keep Evan Cohen hidden from view, which given his popularity even at AA seems highly unlikely. However, if Air America did take money from Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club illegally -- by having its chief executive officer transfer specially-earmarked funds from a non-profit on which he sat as a board member -- then Air America has to return that money.

Has it done so? One would presume that Piquant would have disclosed that in its statement if it did. Therefore, one can safely presume that Piquant hasn't returned the funds.

How long does Air America intend on keeping money from poor kids and Alzheimers patients? And exactly how does that fit in with their liberal political positions? And while we're asking, why did Air America start promoting Gloria Wise after getting this loan? I'm not an expert at FCC law, but that kind of undisclosed financial transaction sounds an awful lot like payola to me, as Michelle Malkin notes.

If Piquant thinks that it can wash its hands of the mess Evan Cohen left behind, they're very much mistaken. As long as they hang onto that money and leave the poor kids in Brooklyn holding the bag, their leftist pap about taking care of the little guy will sound even more hollow than ever.

UPDATE: Hey, Al Franken's alter ego noticed Captain's Quarters! (Yes, this is a joke ...)

Stop Me Before I Violate Godwin's Law!

Dick Durbin disgraced himself and the Senate by comparing our detention facility at Guantanamo Bay with the deathcamps of Auschwitz and the killing fields of Pol Pot, and the resulting chorus of derision should have warned anyone else from following suit. Some people cannot learn from experience, however. Today's violation of Godwin's Law comes from the Washington Post, with Richard Cohen giving us the worst of theatrical reviews and political analogies in a single column:

I need to be very careful here, to say precisely what I mean and leave nothing to chance. I have just seen the play "Primo," which is performed by a single actor, Antony Sher, with material taken from Primo Levi's incomparable "If This Is a Man," the book that made the obscure Italian chemist an international literary sensation. It is an account of his time spent in Auschwitz. I could not help but think of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

Of course, Cohen writes, he would never compare American soldiers to Nazis. Never, never, never (emphasis mine):

One must never compare anything to the Holocaust. One must never invoke Nazism except in reference to the Nazis. One must isolate that era as a way of honoring the victims, keeping it pristine and removed from all other human experience because it was so uniquely awful. I know all this -- and I believe it, too. What's more, I am not likening what happened at Auschwitz and the other camps to what's happening or happened at Guantanamo and other places where America's enemies -- real or supposed -- are kept. Our purpose is not to murder. We do not engage in slave labor. We are not evil, and our intent is to safeguard the innocent both here and abroad, not to kill them for whatever reason. I hope I have made myself clear.

Having made himself clear, he then goes on to do exactly what he says he won't do -- make an allegory between Primo and its explicit setting of Auschwitz and our detention facilities in Guantanamo and elsewhere. He decries the treatment of the character in this one-man play as an "inventory tag", a mere number intended for nothing but destruction. Primo has to avert his eyes as his fellow inmates ("the recalcitrant and the brave") get executed and tortured while he remains silent. He shames himself by following the Nazis' commands while they torture him, either explicitly or implicitly in the slave labor and utter neglect and contempt with which they treat him.

I'd like to ask Cohen what part of this made him think of Guantanamo Bay and the detention of terrorists. After all, the Jews did nothing wrong, while the people held at Gitmo got captured in open combat with American forces, out of uniform. The Jews (and others, the many others) at Auschwitz and other deathcamps were rounded up because of their religion and ethnicity and sent to their torture and degradation without any hint of process. The detainees at Gitmo have all received military hearings to determine their status, and some have been released (and went on to rejoin the jihad, too).

So if their status has nothing in common, then what evokes Gitmo from this play? The inventory status? Perhaps Cohen would like to explain the difference between the common practice in American prisons of identifying inmates by number instead of name and whatever he imagines happens at Gitmo. Maybe that's not it; maybe Cohen believes that our servicepeople have made the detainees watch while they execute and torture other terrorists held at the facility, heaping even more shame onto their heads.

Or maybe Cohen just decries the shame the terrorists must feel, having been captured by infidels and living under their control after attempting to kill as many of us as possible. Well, boo hoo for them. Cohen wants us to feel pity because we've shamed terrorists? He wants to stoke our outrage because their self-esteem has suffered?

Take a look at Ground Zero, Mr. Cohen, and think about 3,000 people who lost more than just their self-esteem. Take a drive past the Pentagon, where one of our officers on duty that day barely survived the plane crash that carried his ten-year-old son, who had been on his way to a Little League championship. Watch the tapes of the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings, and the ongoing terrorist actions in Iraq intended on enslaving an entire nation under Islamofascist rule.

It's hard to remember when I've read such an intellectually dishonest and patronizing column in a major publication. Cohen should be ashamed of himself instead of projecting his shame onto Islamist terrorists as a means to turn them into the victims of this war.

The Latest Roberts Hysteria

The Miami Herald adds fuel to the hysteria on the Left generated by the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Herald reports that Roberts did significant background work for the Bush campaign in Florida during the recount melee -- and predictably, the Left has jumped all over it:

U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts played a broader behind-the-scenes role for the Republican camp in the aftermath of the 2000 election than previously reported -- as legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation's highest court, according to the man who drafted him for the job.

Ted Cruz, a domestic policy advisor for President Bush and who is now Texas' solicitor general, said Roberts was one of the first names he thought of while he and another attorney drafted the Republican legal dream team of litigation ''lions'' and ''800-pound gorillas,'' which ultimately consisted of 400 attorneys in Florida. ...

''He's one of the best brief writers in the country. Just like a good journalist or a novelist, he can write with clarity, concisely and can paint a picture with words,'' said Cruz. Roberts, a constitutional-law expert in a top Washington law firm at the time, is now a federal appeals court judge in D.C. Roberts was a no-brainer for the recount effort: His win-loss record at the U.S. Supreme Court was one of the most impressive. And, like Cruz, he was a member of a tight-knit circle of former clerks for the court's chief justice, William Rehnquist -- a group jokingly referred to as ``the cabal.''

So how has the port side of the blogosphere taken this news, seeing as how the recount effort remains one of their favorite myths of Democratic victimhood? Josh Marshall, in a failing attempt to remain rational, declares that it's "[n]ot quite disqualifying, perhaps." John at Americablog smells a payoff. So does Susie Madrak. Lambert at Corrente, meanwhile, suspects that Roberts played a key role in a conspiracy involving Rehnquist, or possibly Antonin Scalia for some weird reason, to corrupt the Court -- and then accuses the Republicans of wanting to fight Florida 2000 all over again.

Kool-Aid spill, aisle 1!

Well, let's see what Roberts actually did for the Republicans in Florida for the recount, according to the Miami Herald. He reviewed some of their legal briefs for their appellate arguments in federal court, and he may have helped write some of them. He took part in a moot court to practice the oral arguments. He gave advice to the Republicans, apparently on a pro bono basis although that isn't certain from this reporting. He didn't short his other clients by ignoring court dates; he left Florida to argue two Supreme Court cases in the middle of the effort, winning one and losing the other.

In short, he acted as an attorney on a case that comes along once in 128 years, a case in which any attorney would love to take part. He conducted himself well, did fine work, and represented his client ably in a background role. His client eventually won the case, and later, three recounts (including one captained by the Miami Herald) proved that his client won the election.

Oooh ... I can understand why that might disqualify someone for the Supreme Court!

Give us all a break. This wasn't some grand conspiracy but a court battle conducted in the open -- one which the Democrats touched off in Florida, not the Republicans. Did the Left expect that the GOP would bring in Bob Dole to do their legal work, or find the best representation possible?

What a joke.

A word of advice for the port side of the blogosphere: try keeping your powder dry. If you get this cranked up over a "revelation" that Roberts actually did work for the GOP at one point in his career, then no one will take you seriously if at some point Bush nominates a real extremist to the bench.

Further Collapse Of AQ Bombing Cell

British investigators have now added nine more people to the list of those arrested after the botched bombings of July 21, where all four bombs failed to detonate properly and left a treasure trove of evidence for police. Police confirm that they have arrested 20 suspects, including one of the erstwhile bombers:

Anti-terrorist officers arrested nine men in raids early Thursday in connection with the botched July 21 attacks on London's transit system, bringing to 20 the number of people police have in custody, including one of the alleged bombers.

Scotland Yard police headquarters said the nine were arrested under the Terrorism Act at two properties in the neighborhood of Tooting, in south London.

The arrests follow a significant breakthrough on Wednesday, when authorities in the central England city of Birmingham arrested one of the four men suspected of carrying out the failed attacks — Yasin Hassan Omar, 24. He was being held at a top-security police station in London.

The investigators have rolled up this cell with amazing speed, but they still have more work to do. They need to find the three other bombers, and obviously they have acquired some assistance in hiding out, meaning that more accomplices exist. By the time they capture everyone connected to the July 21 failure, they may well have broken a major part of the al-Qaeda network in Britain.

Police have identified two of these terrorists, one being Omar, and unlike the July 7 bombers, the two are not British-born Muslims. Omar came from Somalia, one of the first active suicide bombers from Africa rather than an Arabic nation, but that is no surprise; AQ has recruited heavily in that failed state. It may come as a shock to people in the Twin Cities here in Minnesota, where the Somali ex-pat community has grown to one of the largest in the United States. Not coincidentally, Minnesota has one of the highest rates of terror-related arrests in the country. Having a Somali go active in a suicide-bomb ring should give us a renewed boost of vigilance (not vigilantism) that something similar does not happen here.

The second suspect had already been in British hands once before. Muktar Mohammed Said, aka Muktar Said Ibrahim, emigrated to Britain in 1990 from Eritrea, just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and bordering on the Sudan. After having been convicted in the mid-1990s for a series of gang-related muggings, Britain gave him early release from prison in 1998 -- where he had already converted to radical Islam. The UK gave him citizenship last year, certainly an odd action given his history, and one which Britain would do well not to repeat.

Perhaps in the next few days, British investigators will have the names of the other would-be bombers and their accomplices. In the meantime, the British people have to keep their eyes open for these terrorists before they can strike again.

Note: The Times of London published a disturbing photo of one of the unexploded nail bombs captured after the July 7 bombings; apparently the terrorists had twelve more of them, pointing to a much-larger scale of attack than they actually succeeded in delivering. Mike at Pajama Hadin has now received a request from Scotland Yard asking bloggers not to post the picture on their sites in order to keep the investigation running properly. It sounds as if they want to lock the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I pass it on nonetheless.

Dafydd: Stupid Republican Tricks II (Update from Captain Ed)

Today, the Failed Millennium Bomber was sentenced for his attempt to "bomb LAX" (Los Angeles International Airport), a terrorist act that if successful, would have probably killed hundreds of people.

Ahmed Ressam was caught, as he drove off a ferry from British Columbia, by an alert Border Patrol agent, who found a "trunk full of bomb-making materials." As Hugh Hewitt said a few moments ago, "this guy is Mohammed Atta, except he missed!"

So what did this chappie get for this attempted heinous attack? According to AP --

SEATTLE (AP) - The man convicted of plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in prison. Ahmed Ressam got a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested, reflecting his cooperation in telling international investigators about the workings of terror camps in Afghanistan.

In fact, it's really not even twenty-two years: first of all, the sentence includes the five plus years he has already spent in prison awaiting trial. In fact,

Ressam could be out of prison in 13 to 14 years with credit for time served and potential reductions for good behavior, but then will almost certainly be deported, public defender Thomas Hillier said at a news conference.

As Ressam is only 38, this means he could be out of prison when he is only 51 years old... not exactly too old to continue his jihad against America.

The judge who issued this travesty of a sentence was U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour. Hugh worries that he might have been appointed by Bush I, since he's "around the right age"... alas, it's worse than that.

Judge Coughenour was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 -- and confirmed by the Republican Senate brought along by Reagan's coattails in the 1980 election.

U. S. District Court, Western District of Washington Nominated by Ronald Reagan on August 11, 1981, to a seat vacated by Morell E. Sharp; Confirmed by the Senate on September 25, 1981, and received commission on September 28, 1981. Served as chief judge, 1997-2004.

(From the Federal Judicial Center; search on Coughenour,John.)

Then, to add insult to injury, Judge Coughenour took the opportunity of his sentencing statement to lecture us on the evils of Guantanamo Bay, snarking about the fact that Ressam was brought to justice without having to use "secret tribunals" and indefinite detention. Yeah. Pardon my bluntness, but I see this insanely brief sentence and judges like John Coughenour as precisely the reasons that we need military tribunals and detention centers like Gitmo: because many civilian judges simply cannot wrap their brains around the fact that terrorism is not the same as carjacking or armed robbery... terrorists have already accepted death as the natural result of their attacks, and therefore they cannot be deterred, but only indefinitely detained -- or slain.

Just a warning, as if any were needed, that just because a judge is a solid Republican, appointed by the most "Republican" Republican president in decades and confirmed by a staunchly Republican Senate, doesn't automatically mean he can't turn out to be an ass.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has Judge Coughenour's statement up on his site; here is the part that really got me thinking about impeachment (alas, not possible):

"Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

"I would suggest that the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart. We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

"Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.

"The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism.

"Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.

I rest my case for military tribunals: at least if they were secret, we wouldn't have to listen to boneheaded lectures by buffoons in black!

UPDATE FROM CAPTAIN ED: Not only do I endorse everything Dafydd said, I have to add my two cents as an addendum. Please remember that this case got highlighted by the Kerry campaign during last year's election as the model for handling terrorists, as opposed to the wartime approach favored by the Bush administration. This shows that our first instincts were correct, and that the only advantage of using civilian courts to fight international terrorists will be to highlight the damage that Presidents can do when they pick idiots to sit on the federal bench.

However, I will point out something that Judge Coughenour seems to have forgotten in his zeal to hold himself up as a Constitutional protector, as opposed to the rest of us police-state brownshirts. We captured this terrorist on American soil, mostly by luck and the sharp eye of airport security. Under most circumstances, that does mean that the civilian courts would come into play. If we had traced the terrorist using highly-sensitive intelligence capabilities, however, we would have to have exposed them in Judge Coughenour's court, making them unusable after a single prosecution.

Next, a point which Coughenour elides, the detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere were captured outside the United States, as part of our military operations. Those people not only do not qualify as civilian prisoners, they don't qualify as POWs. Even if they qualified for the latter, the Geneva Conventions do not allow us to try them in civilian courts.

It's all well and good to sit on one's high horse (or bench, in this case) and proclaim one's devotion to the Constitution. It's quite another to understand the proper application of law in wartime and the nature of the enemies arrayed against us. It comes as no surprise that Judge Coughenour displays his expertise at the first and his absolute incompetence at the second, especially given the laughably light sentence he handed to a man who planned on blowing up hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans to celebrate his religion and the new century.

Bride of Update: Hugh Hewitt has been getting information from the entire planet about the adventures of Judge Coughenour, and he has posted them as updates in the HughHewitt.com post I linked earlier; take a look.

Highlights: Coughenour found "that the INS violated immigrants rights to a fair hearing, resulting in new deportation hearings for thousands of immigrants;" he ruled that "the sexual predator statute [was] unconstitutional;" he gave a longer sentence to the leader of the Montana Freemen than he did to Ahmen Ressam today -- 22½ years, as compared to only 22 years for the Failed Millennium Bomber... and LeRoy Schweitzer was not convicted of even a single attempted murder:

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour yesterday ordered ringleader LeRoy Schweitzer to 22 1/2 years behind bars, hoping to send "a loud and clear message to those who pass this hatred and ugliness around...."

Schweitzer was convicted on 25 counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, threatening a federal judge, illegal possession of firearms and participating in the armed robbery of an ABC-TV crew covering the Freemen.

Do I think Schweitzer was oversentenced? Nope, he deserves every day of that sentence. But do I think that someone plotting to kill hundreds of innocents in a terrorist attack deserves a longer sentence than someone whose most serious crimes are bank fraud and armed robbery? You betcha.

Evidently, because of what he was charged with and convicted of, Rassem could have gotten a maximum of 35 years. If Coughenour had given him the max, I would have been disappointed that Rassem couldn't have gotten more, but I would not have held it against the judge; judges cannot impose arbitrarily draconian prison terms -- they are bound by the legal maximums.

But the good judge gave this insect only 63% of what he could have given... and with all the time off and time served, he'll actually be out after serving less than 40% of what he could have been required to serve. This is not simply wrong... it is unconscionable.

If this is the model that Kerry and the pirates have for fighting the war on terrorism, then it's no wonder they've been frozen out of power ever since 9/11.

Egypt Starts Looking Inward For Answers

The bombings at Sharm el-Sheikh appear to have had one remarkable result -- the Egyptians have stopped making excuses for terrorism. Even their official media now openly acknowledge that their culture has created the elements for terrorism to thrive, especially the autocratic nature of their government:

Stunned by terror attacks in a Red Sea resort, Egyptians are in a remarkably frank debate about whether mosques and schools — and the government itself — should be blamed for promoting Islamic extremism.

Even pro-government media say authorities have created a climate where young people are turning into radicals and suicide bombers.

In a country more used to hearing general condemnations of terrorism, critics on Wednesday were angry — and specific — hammering at instances where they say the government allowed mosque preachers or state media to promote intolerance. ...

"There is no use denying. ... We incited the crime of Sharm el-Sheik," ran a bold red headline of a lead editorial Wednesday by Al-Musawwar's editor in chief, Abdel-Qader Shohaib.

The bombers "didn't just conjure up in our midst suddenly, they are a product of a society that produces extremist fossilized minds that are easy to be controlled," Shohaib wrote.

In Al-Ahram, columnist Ahmed Abdel Moeti Hegazi wrote: "This is not just deviation, it is a culture[.]"

This appears to be another symptom of the general liberalization that has slowly occurred in Egyptian politics. While it hasn't come as quickly as some would like, the government has allowed the momentum to build towards more open and honest debate in advance of the coming elections, the first where multiparty balloting will take place. The appearance of this debate in the official media organs of the state really means one of two things: either Mubarak wants to lead people to question the authority of the central government, or he can no longer keep people from doing so. Either way marks a considerable improvement.

It also shows how support for al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism has fallen among the peoples of Southwest Asia and North Africa, even more than the recent Pew poll. As more of these bombings take place, the less radical Muslims take a dimmer and dimmer view of Osama bin Laden and his minions. It has not escaped the notice of Egyptians that most of the attacks perpetrated by AQ occur in Islamic countries, and especially if adding Iraq into the calculations, mostly kill other Muslims. Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri have miscalculated, at least in Egypt; their efforts have created Muslim moderates, not radicals.

Mubarak has made the correct decision by allowing more openness in the debate and in the electoral process, or if he didn't do it by design, not forcing the dissent to stay underground. Even he appears to appreciate how his autocratic rule may have contributed to the culture of death, and the only antidote to offer is hope. The more that Egyptians feel free to discuss and criticize their government's role in creating this culture, the more complete will be the necessary lancing of this boil in the ummah. If Egypt can deliver truly free elections with multiparty representation and real power to the Egyptian electorate as a result, Osama will have lost a major part of the war and a key recruiting center.

Stupid Republican Tricks

The Illinois GOP has ignored one of the cardinal rules of politics, which advises people to stay out of the way when their opponents have begun to self-destruct. Instead of allowing the federal investigations into Mayor Richard Daley's administration to continue as apolitically as possible, the Republicans may have transformed Daley from an albatross to a political martyr:

The Cook County Republican Party is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an indictment and conviction of Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose administration has been buffeted by scandal.

"The arrogance of Richard Daley is appalling," said Gary Skoien, chairman of the county party. "We hope this reward will inspire someone with critical knowledge to come forward." ...

The reward follows last week's announcement by federal prosecutors that they had charged two City Hall officials with rigging the city's hiring system to get around a 1983 court order that bars officials from hiring employees for political reasons.

Up to this point, the investigation had uncovered some unsavory conduct that may eventually reach the mayor himself. If it had, it would have been viewed as a reasonably independent and credible case, hopefully resulting in an indictment if Mayor Daley truly broke the law. In Illinois, that could have put a lot of wind in the sails of the mostly moribund Republican party, which has so much trouble competing in the Land of Lincoln that it had to import Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama for the Senate.

Unfortunately, the GOP has decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once more by making this a political football. What possible good will it do the investigation for the Republicans to buy witnesses? Will it make the charges more credible, or simply allow the public to write off the entire effort as a smear campaign?

Does this really take so much effort to analyze? If so, it might explain why the Illinois GOP have had so much trouble in recent years.

Pincus Still Has Truth Issues

Walter Pincus extends his conflict of interest in covering Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in today's Washington Post, continuing his role as a purveyor of misinformation. He and Jim VandeHei write that Patrick Fitzgerald has widened his investigation, but still hasn't come up with much:

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

Casting a wider net might sound as though the investigation has caught fire, but when it includes bracing a stranger in the street who happened to converse with Robert Novak, it sounds more like desperation than a focused probe. Pincus makes this sound as though Fitzgerald might have decided to go fishing in order to justify the length and cost of this investigation, especially when it looks more likely that no crime actually took place. After all, Pincus himself notes that Fitzgerald declared that his investigation was almost complete when he tried to get Judith Miller on the stand, and that was months ago.

Pincus tries to add more to the issue of Plame's role in sending her husband to Niger. Now the CIA supposedly claims that Plame did that three years earlier, but that she had nothing to do with the 2002 trip:

Using background conversations with at least three journalists and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.

If so, why didn't the CIA mention that to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? They deduced -- through testimony and the revelation of a memorandum Plame wrote -- that Plame had indeed pushed for Wilson to get the 2002 assignment, a finding that the CIA did not dispute at the time. It's hard to dispute when the date on the memo makes the timing clear (emphases mine):

Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." This was just one day before CPD sent a cable DELETED requesting concurrence with CPD's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him "there's this crazy report" on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

Really. How hard was it to dispute the "new" information that Pincus and VandeHei got from their unnamed CIA contacts? Memos from Plame recommending Wilson's involvement written in 2002 cannot have any application to the 1999 trip. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out, but apparently it takes a non-journalist to understand linear time.

This isn't the first time that Pincus has been used by the CIA to channel misinformation through the pages of the Washington Post. As the SSCI report makes clear, Wilson lied to Pincus (and Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times) when he leaked information about his trip to Niger:

The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid," June 12, 2003) which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because `the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.

Once again, Pincus and the Post have made themselves patsies for the CIA to spin their involvement in leaking false information to the press about a war which the rank-and-file opposed. At some point, the Post should consider giving this story to a reporter who has less of an interest in helping to spread more misinformation to cover that up.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has even more headscratchers from Plame stories today. It appears that the media has really begun to unravel on this story.

A Lack Of Commitment

My new Daily Standard column is up today, titled "Exit Strategies". It looks at the lack of commitment in evidence today in what used to be our most basic social model -- marriage -- and how that lack of commitment gets reflected in our politics.

This started as a post last week ("Sometimes And Whenever") about the increasing popularity of vows that avoid lifetime commitments. We covered this topic on the Northern Alliance Radio Network last Saturday as well. We had a lot of fun trying to predict the next variation of marriage that would lower the commitment level even less than that of today. Some suggestions:

* One-year contracts with mutual renewable options (sports fans would love these)

* Pre-paid marriage cards -- if things are going well, just put some more time on them

* Cell phone minutes -- sort of like the pre-paid cards, only you get your weekend minutes for free. (Big penalties for roaming, however.)

If you have any other suggestions, leave them in the comments!

Independent? Really?

The AP reports on a Council on Foreign Relations analysis which takes George Bush to task for postwar planning. The report, which claims that the administration did not consider the extent of nation-building required after the "stunning" military victory over Saddam Hussein, had two interesting people in charge of the "independent" CFR project:

An independent panel headed by two former U.S. national security advisers said Wednesday that chaos in Iraq was due in part to inadequate postwar planning.

Planning for reconstruction should match the serious planning that goes into making war, said the panel headed by Samuel Berger and Brent Scowcroft. Berger was national security adviser to Democratic
President Clinton. Scowcroft held the same post under Republican Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush but has been critical of the current president's Iraq and Mideast policies.

CFR hired Brent Scowcroft as a sop to the GOP, of course, but anyone who has followed Scowcroft's pronouncements knows that he has bitterly opposed the Iraq War from the very start. Scowcroft still backs the thoroughly-discredited "stability" policy, where the US refrains from pushing democratization in favor of propping up dictators friendly (for the moment) to American interests. The rise of Islamist terrorism notwithstanding, he would far prefer that the thugocracies, kleptocracies, and mullahcracies remain in place, like bugs in amber, in the name of stability and continuity. Scowcroft and his predecessors and followers kept these kinds of governments in place in an extension of Cold War thinking that should have long since passed from the scene -- especially after 9/11.

And Samuel Berger? Better known as Sandy Berger, this Clinton advisor last was seen walking out of the National Archive with highly-classified documents stuffed in his pants. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor last March, but his national-security clearance was suspended for three years. So how could Berger get any access to the material needed to conduct this analysis? Did he wear his special pants again?

The chances of this independent report saying anything meaningful approach zero. Neither person in charge of the CFR analysis could ever be considered "independent", and one has zero credibility on issues of national security any longer. The AP doesn't even bother to mention Berger's current status as a convict without any security clearances. Perhaps they feel it's not relevant to the story, but I suspect many readers would beg to differ. (hat tip: CQ reader Retired Military)

75,000 Isn't Enough

Have the Democrats settled on an Estradification of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts? It certainly appear so. The White House offered to release 75,000 pages of documents relating to Roberts and his tenure at the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, but the Democrats don't find that number acceptable:

"This in no way satisfies any potential document request," said one Democratic aide, generally reflecting the sentiments of Senate Democrats. "The White House has artfully made it look like they are saying yes to our requests, when they are actually saying no."

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote President Bush late yesterday saying they are "disappointed" in the decision to cut off access to "important and informative documents written" by Judge Roberts. Those documents, they said, may be necessary to "evaluate Judge Robert's judicial philosophy and legal reasoning."

The White House has refused to release federal Judge Roberts' papers from his time as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush White House, saying that doing so would violate attorney-client privilege and set a dangerous precedent for judicial nominees. The Solicitor General's Office is the federal government's lawyer in cases that come before the Supreme Court. ...

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, responded to the offer by saying the Senate -- not the White House -- will decide what it needs.

"If the White House announcement is intended to begin a dialogue about documents, I welcome it," he said. "If it is intended to unilaterally pre-empt a discussion about documents the Senate may need and is entitled to, then this is a regrettable beginning."

Despite the protests of all living former Solicitors General, including several Democrats, against the release of privileged material to the Senate or anyone else, the Democratic leadership will continue to press for these documents in open disregard for attorney-client confidentiality. To call these documents red herrings gives them too high a status. The internal memoranda that the Democrats demand to see will reveal advice given by the SG office on specific cases which the former administrations fought in the federal appellate courts. The SG does not create policy; it merely represents those that do, and in order to do so effectively, they must discuss the ramifications of policy with the administration. Unless Roberts actually worked in the administration in a policy-development position, then these writings don't have any relevance whatsoever. Roberts wasn't even the Solicitor General, just one of the deputies.

So why do the Democrats demand to see these documents? Primarily because they know their release would be inappropriate. They can therefore paint the administration as secretive and uncooperative in the confirmation process and hope to build enough public support to get a filibuster through without triggering the Byrd option. Frist and the Republicans should make it clear that this is a pipe dream. Any fail to reach cloture should result in a rule change eliminating the filibuster in all future judicial confirmations as promised in the spring.

It won't happen, of course, because the centrist Democrats realize that this will result in losing their last bit of leverage in the process. The confirmation will continue on track, with a few delays for bloviating, but in the end any filibuster will fail and Roberts will get around 70 votes for confirmation. The only question will be how long it takes to get there.

IRA To Renounce Violence

Eighty years after the founding of an independent Ireland and thirty-five years after the start of the Troubles in Ulster, the IRA will finally disavow violence and embrace electoral politics exclusively, according to an American businessman acting as a liaison between the IRA and the American government. The New York Times reports on this historic development, which may revive home rule in Northern Ireland if the IRA follows through:

The Irish Republican Army has given up its armed struggle for a united Ireland, agreeing to turn solely to political methods, an American businessman said yesterday after being briefed on a statement expected from the guerrilla group later this week.

The agreement, if borne out, would be a historic turning point in the violent history of Ireland and Northern Ireland. But there is still widespread official skepticism about I.R.A. promises, particularly when it comes to the issue of disarmament.

Indeed, it was not immediately clear whether the I.R.A. would address how several tons of arms, hidden in bunkers across Ireland, would be disposed of, according to the businessman, Niall O'Dowd, who brokered talks between the I.R.A. and American officials that helped lead to a cease-fire in 1994. The continued existence of those weapons, which were to have been destroyed under an agreement reached after the cease-fire, contributed to the collapse of the Northern Ireland government in 2003.

In truth, this won't be the first time the IRA and Sinn Fein has tried this tactic. It agreed to political action exclusively in 1994 for the Good Friday Agreement, but failed to meet its obligations to disarm. The assembly in Belfast continuously tried to pressure Sinn Fein to press for verifiable disarmament, but the IRA refused, preferring to use that as a political negotiating chip, until it eventually sunk home rule altogether and Britain had to step in once more.

The signs and portents appear more promising on this go-around. After having been exposed as IRA commanders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, high-ranking officials of Sinn Fein, have resigned from the IRA along with other SF officials. Irish PM Bertie Ahern has rushed back to Dublin from his vacation, and the Canadian general in charge of disarmament has also come back to Ireland. This does not look like a whimsical statement but a coordinated effort by SF to finally meet its obligations.

Bear in mind that this comes after two huge public-relations debacles that nearly sunk SF as a force in Northern Ireland's peace talks. The IRA pulled off a huge armed-car robbery, taking in more than $20 million but exposing itself as a criminal enterprise instead of a political-action group of freedom fighters. Even worse, their thugs brutally murdered a Belfast man and attempted to cover it up through threats and intimidation. Two SF politicians present at the murder refused to cooperate with the investigation. The brave efforts of the victim's sisters -- ironically sympathetic to the IRA -- to hold the paramilitary group responsible caught the attention of the world and turned the IRA and its Sinn Fein supporters into persona non grata around the world. That meant a huge drop in American donations to the cause, a welcome development and long overdue. Last month, the Belfast police finally arrested two men in connection with the murder, a sign that the IRA had stopped intimidating witnesses into silence.

Now the IRA wants to announce its intention to end forever the political terrorism it has conducted for decades. These recent events make such a renunciation more credible, but only when they reveal and destroy their arms caches should anyone accept their pledge. They have proven themselves untrustworthy in the past and must go the full mile to convince the world of their sincerity now.

UPDATE: I'm getting some heat from my readers about being one-sided in debating the IRA. (This is one of the reasons I avoided this topic for so long.) For the record, I think both sides have their nutcases, and the record more than demonstrates that. Ian Paisley is no peacemaker, and he represents the worst of the other side of the equation in Northern Ireland.

However, Paisley does not come to the United States to collect millions in funding from benighted Irish-Americans, or anyone else. Paisley's group has not (recently) committed armed robbery and covered up murders. Americans who believe that the IRA has some moral standing above that of the PLO, with whom they identify, need to hear more about the true nature of their activities. That's why I have been blogging more about their issues than the quasi-Protestant thugs who provide their mirror image.

I do understand that both sides have behaved very badly in the past thirty-five years, and I will endeavor to present that more clearly in the future, if those incidents continue to occur.

Air America Took Money From Poor Kids & Alzheimer Patients

Radio Equalizer and Michelle Malkin have followed a scandal in New York that, given the involvement of the nationally-broadcast Air America, should have received national media attention by now. It turns out that the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Clubs almost had to shut its doors following a funding shortfall despite receiving a half-million dollars in grant money and much more in city contracts, getting rescued at the last moment by other independent groups. The $500K in grant money had been loaned out -- to Air America:

The nonprofit Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club and its affiliate Pathways for Youth found their city contracts, running into the millions of dollars, abruptly ended last month by the city Department of Investigation. ...

He said he and other elected officials are still in the dark over the exact nature of the probe.

In its initial announcement, the DOI said it was probing allegations that program officials "approved significant inappropriate transactions and falsified documents that were submitted to various city agencies."

According to published reports, the allegations involve Charles Rosen, the founder of Gloria Wise who has stepped down as executive director, investing city contract funds in Air America Radio, the liberal talk radio network.

Evan Cohen, Air America's former chairman, had served as Gloria Wise's director of development.

Evan Cohen appears to have sold Gloria Wise a bill of goods in its investment in Air America. First, given AA's performance, anyone putting that kind of money into it and expecting to even see the principal ever again has to be out of their minds. Second, the grant money involved was earmarked for Alzheimer's patients, senior citizens, and a mentoring program. Even if AA sounded like a brilliant investment, earmarked grant money has to go to the specific programs it intends to fund, not a flyer on some hot stock tip.

Evan Cohen's involvement on the board of Gloria Wise and his position at AA makes this decision a massive conflict of interest. Cohen had struggled to maintain his position with the netlet after it became clear that the enterprise had not captured much audience even in the more liberal areas it served. Advertising revenues remained very weak and the corporation barely eked out an existence on donations, making it a poor (and badly-behaved) cousin to NPR. If Cohen used his position on the board at Gloria Wise to misdirect government funds, then AA needs to cough up the money immediately, and any ties Cohen has to other non-profits should be thoroughly investigated.

Has Air America paid back the loan, or even made preliminary payments? We don't know; AA hasn't issued a statement, and more curiously, the national media hasn't asked them. The only papers covering this story are the New York Daily News (but not in its national paper) and the Gotham Gazette, a local newspaper for New Yorkers covering the borough beat. It seems to me that if Salem Radio or Clear Channel had taken money from poor children and Alzheimer's patients to stay on the air, we would hear about that from all major media outlets within nanoseconds of it coming out.

So why haven't we heard about this scandal from the Exempt Media?

Egypt Got Tip On Bombing

The Scotsman reports tonight that Egyptian authorities had received a warning about the bombings at Sharm el-Sheikh that killed 88 people and injured hundreds more. Security officials misunderstood the intended target of the al-Qaeda terrorists, however, leaving the hotels unprepared for the attack:

THE Egyptian authorities received information about an imminent terror attack in Sharm el-Sheik days ahead of the devastating weekend bombings, security officials revealed yesterday.

But they believed it would target casinos, so security was increased around those sites, said two officials. ...

The officials, who have knowledge of the investigation, would not say where the tip came from, but said security had been put on alert in the resort on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula several days before the pre-dawn attacks on Saturday.

Instead of casinos, the bombers, in two explosives-laden lorries, targeted hotels just after 1am on Saturday morning. One ploughed into the Ghazala Gardens reception area, levelling the lobby. A second headed for another hotel but got caught in traffic and detonated before reaching its target.

Egyptian authorities will have some questions to answer about why they limited the security to just the casinos; perhaps the tip was too specific, or else plans got changed at the last minute. However, if they took the warning seriously, one should expect that a heightened alert would have gone out to all tourist businesses and transport systems in the area. Al-Qaeda routinely targets such high-profile assets, as it did in Britain, Morocco, Madrid, Turkey, and of course America.

Egypt also has the first forensic evidence linking the bombings to AQ. The remains of the suicide bomber have been identified as a man with known ties to Islamist terrorists. The second bomber still hasn't been identified, but since the Egyptian chapter of Tawhid and Jihad (the same name as Zarqawi's group in Iraq) has already claimed responsibility, stating that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri ordered the attack, investigators can safely assume that the partner will have had similar ties.

Roe Open For Reversal: AG Gonzales

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will likely create more controversy than the Bush administration wanted for the upcoming confirmation hearings of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. In an interview with the AP, Gonzales raised the possibility that Roe v. Wade could get reversed by a succeeding Supreme Court:

The legal right to abortion is settled for lower courts, but the Supreme Court "is not obliged to follow" the Roe v. Wade precedent, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday as the Senate prepared to consider John Roberts' appointment that would put a new vote on the high court.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Gonzales said a justice does not have to follow a previous ruling "if you believe it's wrong," a comment suggesting Roberts would not be bound by his past statement that the 1973 decision settled the issue. ...

"If you're asking a circuit court judge, like Judge Roberts was asked, yes, it is settled law because you're bound by the precedent," Gonzales said.

"If you're a Supreme Court justice, that's a different question because a Supreme Court justice is not obliged to follow precedent if you believe it's wrong," Gonzales said.

Although Gonzales certainly has his legal analysis correct, perhaps it isn't the best time to debate the virtues and vices of stare decisis. Everyone understands that the Supreme Court can, and often has, reversed its own precedent. During a confirmation fight over a more explicitly originalist nominee, such commentary would not make much difference. In John Roberts, though, it appears that the Bush administration wants to present the least possible profile for partisan attacks while still ensuring a conservative replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor. Gonzales' comments only stir up more suspicion that Roberts and Bush have presented this nomination in a dishonest manner.

However, one cannot fault Gonzales for his analysis. After all, had all Supreme Courts relied solely on stare decisis, we never would have had Brown v. Board of Education, which explicitly rejected the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent of almost seventy years. That's more than double the amount of time that has passed since Roe, showing that reversals of even long-standing precedent can be highly beneficial and desirable. Less desirable for opponents of judicial activism is the example discussed by Power Line in Lawrence v. Texas, which discovered a right to sodomy in the text of the Constitution (not strictly homosexual sodomy, as John noted). The court reversed a precedent of less than twenty years in that case, Bowers v. Hardwick, one that some of the current court members helped decide.

Liberals love both decisions, and both explicitly reject the concept of stare decisis, and over a wide range of time gaps. The notion of requiring a Supreme Court nominee to some blood oath to "settled law" shows more than a little hypocrisy. If pressed, Roberts should point out that the Supreme Court has a long history of poorly-decided cases, such as Dred Scott and Plessy, which succeeding courts had a duty to reconsider free of any slavish devotion to stare decisis. What matters most is the Constitution and the proper separation of powers it sets out. That may not prove terribly popular with the fringe in the Senate, but its honesty cannot be challenged.

Iraq Issues Ultimatum To Syria

The new government of Iraq apparently feels sufficiently established to flex its muscle with one of its more intransigent neighbors. Clearly fed up with the uninterrupted flow of terrorists into the Sunni Triangle, the new Iraqi defense minister warned Syria that its interference in Iraq could create a volcano that would flow lava over Damascus:

Iraq's defense minister criticized Syria on Tuesday for ignoring Iraqi demands "to stop the infiltration of terrorists."

The official, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, singled out Iraq's western neighbor as among states that are slack on stopping the flow of militants into his country.

"When the lava of the exploding volcano of Iraq overflows, it will first hit Damascus," al-Dulaimi warned during a news conference to discuss an upcoming nationwide security plan.

He said militants are coming into Iraq from Syria via three routes, with the intent of targeting the Baghdad region.

Syria claims that it is trying to stem the flow of the terrorists, but the United States shares the skepticism of Baghdad. Ever since the fall of the Ba'athis regime, we have known that Bashar Assad provided dead-enders from Saddam's inner circle the sanctuary to conduct their insurgency from inside Syria. Last February, Assad got the message, albeit briefly, when he coughed up Saddam's half-brother. Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan funded and directed the ex-Baathist insurgency, but the Zarqawi network apparently still has its Syrian connections.

The fact that Iraq feels strong enough to publicly challenge Damascus tells us two things. First, Baghdad has increasing confidence in its ability to deal with Syria as equals. Second, Baghdad considers Damascus as a much lower threat than it would have before the Syrian retreat from Lebanon. Baghdad hopes to continue to increase its prestige by pushing Assad into further retreat -- and with American backing, that looks pretty realistic. It could be yet another victory in the war on terror -- the isolation of the Assad regime in Damascus.

Democrats Offer (Non) Social Security Option

The Washington Post says that the Democrats have prepared a counterproposal for Social Security reform intended on competing with that of the Republicans. However, after reading the report by Mike Allen, it sounds as if the Democrats want to reform Social Security by ignoring it altogether:

House Democrats intend to propose a retirement-savings plan today that will be their first leadership-backed alternative to Republican plans for a broad retirement-security package, which includes changes to Social Security.

The Democratic plan, called AmeriSave, would increase incentives for middle-class workers to participate in 401(k) retirement accounts and individual retirement accounts. It would also create tax credits for small businesses that set up retirement accounts for their employees. ...

The AmeriSave announcement is designed to partially preempt Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), who plans to focus on retirement security in September. Bush had proposed adding individual accounts to Social Security for younger workers, but the idea did not win public support. He has now started talking about his plan as "senior security."

Thomas has long said that he wants to deal with Social Security as part of a comprehensive retirement package that would cover savings, pensions and Social Security.

Notice, though, that the plans have no component of reform for Social Security. They only adjust existing programs to allow for increased savings and give a few more tax incentives for small businesses to create their own retirement plans. While these goals may have their merits -- they appear to make sense to me at first blush -- neither have anything to do with the problems facing Social Security in the next generation.

In fact, by emphasizing the importance of wholly-owned personal accounts and vested retirement plans, the Democrats underscore the President's efforts to grant some ownership of the funds that Social Security drains from workers and employers each week. Pension plans and 401Ks rely on private management of retirement funds and have the benefit of developing real equity, a major flaw in Social Security, and one which Bush's limited privatization cures. Why not put that same principle to use for Social Security funds, if it works with the rest of our money? The Democrats don't explain that.

The Democrats have taken a lot of criticism for talking about the coming crisis in Social Security financing for a decade before Bush came to office, and then suddenly pretending it didn't exist. When Bush presented his plans to reform Social Security, they tried to convince people that reform was unnecessary, which no one believes, and then deliberately decided to offer no alternative, which no one appreciated. Now they attempt to offer "retirement security" by focusing on the money the government doesn't confiscate without addressing the funds that it does.

Maybe this wan attempt will take some political heat off the party for its obstinate refusal to engage on Social Security. It shouldn't. It looks like yet another attempt to change the subject by ignoring the main problem.

Dafydd: ab Hugh's Universal Rules of Intelligence

Thinking about the terrible shooting of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, shot to death in London by police who mistook him for a suicide bomber, recalls some rules of intelligence and analysis that we should always keep in mind:

1. The Law of Imperfect Precognition: Sometimes there is no "right choice." Throw the dice.

2. The Law of Imperfect Postcognition: Not even hindsight is ever really 20-20.

3. The Law of Colliding Interests: Five different people can each make a rational decision and still wind up in a melee.

4. The Law of the Rational Onion: There is always another layer of analysis that contradicts everything you've already concluded. At some point, you just have to stop.

5. The Law of Models: There is a real reality out there, whether you can see it or not. And it bites.

Pointing To A Failed State

An independent study on the effectiveness of official Palestinian security forces show them to be understaffed, outgunned, ineffective and corrupt. The BBC reports on the unsurprising results, which the Dutch and Canadian governments funded, that point to the folly of granting sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority:

The lack of equipment includes shortages of ammunition, of means of communication beyond mobile phones and of all-terrain vehicles.

Other problems include the continuing power of personalities and clans, which often create alternative, informal chains of command and weaken the authority of the man in overall charge, Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Nasser Yousef.

BBC Jerusalem correspondent Nick Thorpe says the problems are closely tied to the history of the conflict in recent years - the destruction of the Palestinian police infrastructure by the Israelis since the start of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000.

Continuing attempts to streamline the forces are praised by the report, but the overall picture is disturbing. It says the Palestinian forces are caught between far better equipped Palestinian militant groups on the one side and the Israeli army on the other.

The Israelis had to "destroy the police infrastructure" after 2000 because the Palestinian Authority used them to assist groups like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in carrying out attacks on Israelis. Had Arafat and the Palestinians used their police infrastructure for law-enforcement purposes instead of another terrorist gang, then Israel would not have needed to crush it. The Oslo accords and every negotiation since then has attempted to get the Palestinians to accept responsibility for maintaining peace on their own, and they continually subverted their police for war and terrorism instead.

Now that the years of corruption and co-optation have taken their toll, no one should express surprise that the police force that the Palestinians have left have no real influence or power, or that clan affiliations carry more weight with the rank and file than the corrupt government that misused them for years. Before a police force can enforce the law, the government which promulgates it has to value the law. Perhaps Abbas does, or maybe he just pretends better than Arafat, but either way those "police" who managed to make it this far without getting killed did so by not having much illusion as to their mission under Arafat and Fatah.

Under these conditions, without a strong and credible independent force capable of taking on the various militias and gangs that outshoot government representatives, the entire Palestinian enterprise will roll downhill faster and faster towards a Somalia-like conclusion. Warlords and gangsters will rule the West Bank and Gaza territories, while the ineffectual central government holes up in Ramallah. Laws will be issued, but the "police" and government security forces will remain thoroughly infiltrated and under the regional and local influences of clan affiliation and gang leadership.

And into this stew of chaos and gang warfare, al-Qaeda will establish itself as a player, just as it did in Somalia. Osama bin Laden will not resist building a significant organization within easy reach of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as the open waters of the Mediterranean.

Until the Palestinians reform their security forces and start to seriously address the militias and gangs, granting sovereignty to Abbas will create a failed state right where it will strategically and tactically do the most harm. Either we need to keep the lid on the West Bank and Gaza or we need to have someone replace Israel as an admnistrator until we see results.

Steyn: Don't Excuse London Police

Mark Steyn takes the London police to task in a surprising Telegraph column this morning for the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who got shot eight times after running from plainclothes police in the London subway system. After watching various people -- such as myself -- come to the defense of London's special operations police, Steyn argues that we should not let them off the hook so easily:

[W]e turn to Jean Charles de Menezes, the supposed "suicide bomber" who turned out to be a Brazilian electrician on his way to work. Unfortunately, by the time the Metropolitan Police figured that out, they'd put five bullets in his head. We're told we shouldn't second-guess split-second decisions that have to be made under great stress by those on the scene, which would be a more persuasive argument if the British constabulary didn't spend so much time doing exactly that to homeowners who make the mistake of defending themselves against violent criminals. And, if summary extrajudicial execution was so urgent, why did the surveillance team let him take a bus ride before eventually cornering him in the Tube? ...

We at this newspaper are currently defending British soldiers facing prosecution for situations broadly analogous to those in which the Met found themselves. But there's still a difference. Anyone who rubs up against the military in Iraq knows what to expect: attempt to crash a roadblock and don't be surprised if they open fire. But few of us had an inkling of the Met's new "shoot to kill" policy until they shot and killed Mr de Menezes. And although I've had a ton of e-mails pointing out various sinister aspects of his behaviour - he was wearing a heavy coat! he refused to stop! - it seems to me there are an awful lot of people on the Tube who might easily find themselves in Mr de Menezes's position.

Steyn points out that Britain never openly declared the shoot-to-kill policy, and even if it had it would likely have gone unnoticed by the numerous foreign travelers using the Tube. He also opposes the notion of plainclothes officers shouting orders to stop while waving weapons around and expecting a rational reaction from a suspect, even one who has nothing to hide. Steyn likens them to a gang, although I somehow doubt that the officers wore baggy jeans and sports caps with the bills sticking out sideways. I would think that the "gang" identified themselves as police while yelling at Menezes to stop, but I don't know that to be the case.

Steyn then takes the other tube riders to task for not doing more to stop the bombers on their own, not a terribly consistent argument while criticizing the London constabulary for overreaction:

If the defence of what happened to Mr de Menezes is that it was the right treatment but the wrong patient and we'd better get used to it, perhaps the British Tourist Board could post signs at Terminal Four: "BIENVENUE A LONDRES! WE SHOOT TO KILL!" On the other hand, the day before the Met inaugurated its new policy, three suicide bombers managed to escape through Tube stations full of people. At Mr de Menezes's station, Stockwell, according to passenger James Boampong, "an olive-skinned man" mumbled a final prayer and then attempted to self-detonate on the Northern line. It was, fortunately, a damp squib. But he left his smoking backpack on the floor and fled at the Oval, up the down escalator and out to the street. Three passengers and the flower seller outside the station attempted to stop him but failed. Where was everyone else? Were they, like Tube drivers on the Bakerloo later that morning, downing tools and withholding their labour?

"Defiance" has to be more than just the latest disposable cliché of the headline writers. It would have been better had the "olive-skinned man" been caught and Mr de Menezes had been allowed to go to his electrical job. To do that you need not killer cops but an alert citizenry that understands, when you're on a train underground and something funny starts, there's unlikely to be any elite marksmen down there to take care of it. It's up to you.

I understand where Steyn wants to take the readers, but it doesn't add up. Most of the people in the tube didn't have any idea who did what on July 21st. All they saw was smoke, a bunch of people yelling to get out, and people running. Those closest to the attempt would have seen little but the smoke and would understandably be trying to save their own lives by running away from it. Steyn wants to know why the rest of the people didn't stop the would-be bombers, who were doing much the same thing as everyone around them. Suddenly, even though he castigates the police for making an assumption about Menezes based on faulty intelligence and superficial characteristics, he wants Londoners to do the exact same thing, en masse.

He does make a good point in his conclusion, in that a law-enforcement approach to terrorism forces police into these no-win choices which inevitably take much more of a toll on the civilian populace than the terrorists. I think that he also offers some truth in his criticism of the police in the Menezes shooting. After all, they turned out to be wrong about Menezes, and they did allow him onto a bus without attempting to stop him, which seems inconsistent with their claims of belief of imminent danger in the Tube.

However, with London under attack and the stakes remaining as high for stopping each potential bomber, I still think their actions are not only understandable but probably necessary under similar circumstances. If we have to criticize the London police for selecting a suspect based on rational but mistaken observation, the alternative Steyn suggests -- a mob of people attacking suspicious-looking people before anything untoward happens -- would result in chaos.

Dafydd: The Tancredo Threat

I cannot believe that this controversy is still roiling within the blogosphere. The newest argument I've seen is that threatening to bomb or even "nuke" Mecca is just the same as MAD, the Cold-War strategy of threatening massive retaliation in response to a Soviet first-strike on the American homeland.

But it's not. And there is a very good reason why it is not analogous.

The reason that MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, worked is that the Soviets were modernist dictators; they were a modern, industrial society run by atheists who believed that this life was the only life, and who were motivated not by a transcendent religion but rather by an ideology of absolute temporal power. They took seriously the threat to destroy their realm and kill the leaders themselves.

Now, I realize it seems crazy to postulate a group that literally believes that the fastest way to paradise is to die killing the infidel. It sounds insane to imagine a group that would embrace -- oh, for an impossible example, some sort of suicide bomber as a holy martyr assured of his seventy-two one-eyed virgins, or whatever it is. And it feels utterly ridiculous to worry that the leadership of such a group themselves might really believe those ideas, believe them to the point where they extrapolate the martyrdom concept to a planetary-wide "suicide bombing," actually trying to bring about global annihilation in order to precipitate the Millennium.

Alas that this "insanity" is the reality of the enemy we do, in fact, face today, right where we are sitting now.

The Tancredo Threat assumes that the militant-Islamist terrorists are rational and temporal human beings, concerned more with life and temporal power than they are with the death-cult religion they profess. But what if they are not? What if at least some of them are really what they appear to be -- irrationals concerned not with this world, but only with the next?

What of the Tancredo Threat then? Mecca is only significant in this world; it is the temporal link between humans and Allah. But if Allah has returned and is ruling in person, then what need of Mecca? Even if it were a glassy, radioactive plain, if the all-powerful Allah actually wanted it -- wouldn't he simply rebuild it himself?

People, this is the fire you're playing with, this is the lightning that Tom Tancredo thinks to bottle. You think that in the end, the Islamists will act as rationally as the Soviets did, and the Great Threat will succeed. You're playing Islamist Roulette, but you have the barrel pressed against the head of civilization itself.

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Because if you are, then God help our world.

Ten Million Strong ... And Growing

I noticed earlier today that Captain's Quarters has passed the ten million visitor mark this morning! Big thanks to all who have made this possible -- the CQ community most of all.

No one does this without lots of help. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has sent plenty of his readers in this direction, as has Lucianne Goldberg. I've been blessed with great friends in the blogosphere like my pals at the Northern Alliance: Mitch, King, the Fraters Libertas gang, and Power Line, where John, Scott, and Paul gave me a lot of encouragement in my early days, as well as inspiration. Michelle Malkin has been a wonderful friend and colleague. Jon at QandO and I started out together and he kept me going with lots of encouragement. Alicia at the Twilight Cafe started her blog the same night, and created the first CQ logo as a wonderful favor to me. Most of all, Hugh Hewitt (and Duane) have put out tremendous effort to help me become successful, some of which will only be known to a few. (In celebration of my milestone, Hugh finally redesigned his website. How many guys would do that, huh?)

Thanks to all the bloggers who link to me, have me on their blogrolls, and make this obsession of mine such a joy. You folks are the best, even when our politics don't always agree.

The Gray Lady Impersonates Kos

The New York Times published a rather offensive opinion piece by Standford history professor David M. Kennedy today, in which he describes our military as "mercenaries" and decries the dangers of the volunteer armed services:

THE United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits - a compensation package that may not always be commensurate with the dangers in store, as current recruiting problems testify.

Those who sign up for the wages and benefits must find it somewhat disappointing, as neither matches what one can receive with an above-average public-school education. Ask our military families how good they have it on those oh-so-attractive wages and benefits. A private makes between $14 - 16k. Even a sergeant with six years of experience only makes a base salary of $25K, which puts them at the same wages as a full-time worker at $12 per hour -- almost entry level everywhere for office jobs.

But people in the service get bonuses, some will point out, and cost-of-living allowances. True. However, the bonuses are not as lucrative as one might imagine and come with significant strings attached. The allowances only get paid when the soldier, sailor, or Marine live off-base. The bonuses come with specific intentions, such as college education -- which one could also acquire through scholarships without enlisting in the service. Bonuses usually require specific job assignments and an extended enlistment, meaning their financial impact gets spread out across several years.

People enlist in the services not for the cash and bennies, but primarily to serve their country. The notion that men and women choose the service because of the pay and benefits demonstrates a willful ignorance of the facts or sheer uninformed conjecture, unfortunately unsurprising for an academic these days. It recalls the words of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga who dismissed four American contract security workers butchered by Iraqis as mercenaries unfit for our sympathy:

I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries [sic]. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

Kos' post received vociferous ridicule, and rightly so, but at least Kos distinguished between contractors and active-duty servicepeople. Kennedy doesn't even bother to do that much, deciding that somehow those who volunteer to defend the US and expect some sort of minimal compensation for their efforts have nothing but the monetary motive in mind.

What does Kennedy propose? The Rangel solution -- a draft:

Some will find it offensive to call today's armed forces a "mercenary army," but our troops are emphatically not the kind of citizen-soldiers that we fielded two generations ago - drawn from all ranks of society without respect to background or privilege or education, and mobilized on such a scale that civilian society's deep and durable consent to the resort to arms was absolutely necessary. ...

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's business.

Once again, we have academics attempting to transform our military from history's most efficient and effective armed forces into a social program. We learned thirty years ago that compulsory service creates more disciplinary problems, law enforcement issues, and greater social stress. We spent a decade transforming our services into a highly motivated fighting force, one that could fight anywhere and anytime with high speed, superior logistics and production, tactical supremacy, and tightly coordinated strategic planning.

Instead of appreciating that outcome while allowing Americans a free choice to serve their country -- upholding our basic traditions of freedom by avoiding conscription -- Kennedy instead wants us to strip people of their freedom to choose and force them into uniform so that he can feel better about the balance of economic strata in our military services.

Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants (and a brilliant columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) has a solution for Professor Kennedy. If he wants better socio-economic representation in the services, he can start by "telling your students at Stanford that they should enlist." At the least, he can campaign to get places like Stanford -- which also hardly represents the socioeconomic composition of America -- to stop blocking ROTC programs and recruitment efforts. That might address the problems that Kennedy decries and allow more exposure for young men and women to the "noble calling" of serving this country.

'Army People Are Respected'

The London Telegraph published a fascinating look at the Iraqis who defy the suicide bombers to serve their nascent democratic republic in the security services. Despite the targeting of recruiting offices, Iraqis still have enlisted in droves to oppose the Islamofascist lunatics that threaten to start a civil war:

The young men and handful of women in the queues say they are as keen for the private's salary of $400 a month as they are to serve their country to rid it off insurgents.

There are others who have had friends and relatives among the estimated 25,000 civilians killed over the past two years. Some also believe that the only way to get an American withdrawal from Iraq is to build a secure and substantial security force.

But all have an air of defiance, and in some of the fresh recruits there is a hint of gratitude for just making it through the queue at the murderous south gate, on Zawraa Road.

Ali Hamza, a 21-year-old who had always wanted to join the army, said: "It might be chaotic but I'm not afraid because I am willing to join the army and that has many dangers anyway.

"Also, in the new army people are respected."

Just coming to sign up requires a gut-check. Terrorists have targeted the queues for enlistment into the new security forces for months now, attempting to discourage new recruits from bolstering the newly elected representative government. Undoubtedly this has had an effect on recruitment, but perhaps not what Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had in mind. Watching friends and family get blown up by bloodthirsty lunatics has given new incentive to these Iraqis to seize control of the streets back from the terrorists, and the most effective way to do that is to join the government forces.

Some recruits come for the money, some come for an end to American occupation, and some come for a chance to redeem the deaths of loved ones. All, however, understand that Iraq must eventually defend itself against criminals, usurpers, and bombthrowers. Iraq has come to the realization that America cannot solve that problem by itself, nor should it. For their own sake and for their future self-respect and self-assurance, that job belongs to the Iraqis.

The Iraqis watched us depose the hated Saddam regime without assistance from the natives, but now they want to demonstrate their ability to keep their freedom on their own once they have gotten back on their feet. All we need to do is to provide the assistance necessary to allow them the chance to rebuild.

Why India?

In a little-noticed blurb in yesterday's London Times, India sentenced an al-Qaeda operative for his participation in the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Afroze got seven years for plotting attacks overseas on 9/11 to coincide with the attacks on America. However, Afroze's choice of targets certainly bears review, as Melanie Phillips and RattlerGator point out:

AN INDIAN man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001.

Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. ...

Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.

Let's take another look at that target list for 9/11. The British had allied with the United States in our work in Iraq, of course, and helped us enforce the no-fly zones over the northern and southern parts of the country. That would fit in with the supposition that AQ intended on doing nothing more than forcing infidels off the Arabian peninsula, the current meme that blames the string of bombings in London this month on the Coalition presence in Iraq.

However, Australia didn't have troops in Saudi Arabia in 2001, although they supported the US and UK diplomatically. The Aussies had not even sent troops in the first Gulf War, sending a support contingent instead. However, in 1999 they did help liberate East Timor from the grip of a military occupation, which inexplicably caused the inclusion of Melbourne on the al-Qaeda hit list.

But the final target raises the most questions about the supposed causality between American/Western interference in Southwest Asia and AQ operations. Afroze, an Indian, had targeted the Indian Parliament. Why India? India opposed the American intervention in Iraq later, and before 2001 had not maintained terribly friendly relations with the United States. India also had no troops in the Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, where US troops supposedly provoked the AQ response.

So why plot to attack India -- a plot only subverted by the failure of the "courage" of the terrorists assigned to strike it?

India has a long history of Hindu-Muslim tension. Pakistan and Bangladesh owe their existence to a British partition of the Asian subcontinent when it pulled out in 1947. Ever since the split and massive relocations in the period that followed, the mainly Hindu India has disputed the borders it shares with Muslim Pakistan, which resulted in a nuclear standoff not long before 2001. Both nations claim the Kashmir province, and radicals on both sides provoked both governments into several bouts of brinksmanship.

AQ targeting of India shows quite clearly (as does its attempt to strike Australia) that the analysis of American causality as the origin of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings clearly do not make sense. If anything, India's targeting shows that AQ doesn't just dream of an Arabian peninsula under its tyrannical control, but an Asian and African continent ruled by a new Caliphate. That has nothing to do with American interest in the Middle East, but rather an old dream of world conquest that has haunted the consciousnesses of lunatics for centuries.

And here's a good question for our media -- why haven't we heard about Mohammed Afroze? Why hasn't his conviction for targeting India and Melbourne made headlines in the United States? Could it be that the media understands all too well what Afroze's conviction means for its meme of American provocation of al-Qaeda and have chosen to remain quiet rather than prove itself tragically wrong?

BUMP: To top.

UPDATE: India sentenced Afroze, not Britain. (h/t: Robbie) East Timor had been occupied by Indonesian paramilitary forces. (h/t: Anthony). I would point out that this latter correction makes the point even more clear that al-Qaeda does not need "provocation" to recruit and attack.

Spammers Use Blogger

I have to temporarily block blogspot.com URLs because Blogger sites have begun spamming my trackbacks. Using a number of different sites, Blogger spam has flooded my site this morning. At first, I tried blocking the specific site URLs, but apparently Blogger has allowed a number of commercial sites to spam other bloggers. Until they fix their problem and block access to spammers, I have to keep the block on CQ.

If your blog is part of the Blogger community, you may want to write Google (Blogger's owner) and tell them to clean up their act.

UPDATE: I've taken the block off for the moment. It did manage to stop over 50 trackback spams during the day today.

More Hate-Crime Stupidity

The AP, in today's Washington Post, reports on racial disturbances in Buffalo, NY, which have resulted in an inconsistent application of hate-crime charges. Gang wars in two difference neighborhoods prompted differing reactions from Buffalo law-enforcement officials:

Five black teenagers are accused of roaming through a city neighborhood late Friday, shouting racially charged threats and, after an exchange of words, stabbing three young white men in a fight.

The five were charged with second-degree gang assault.

A week earlier, five white men in another neighborhood were charged with attacking a black man with a baseball bat and shouting racial epithets. They were charged with assault as a hate crime.

This points out one of the follies of hate-crime legislation. Here we have two similar incidents, involving similar motivations, and yet we have one group charged with hate crimes and another with just assualt. Both groups went out of their way to target different ethnicities for reasons of racial animosity. Only one will face prosecution for it. Why? It appears that hate-crime law treats one group of citizens differently than others, a violation of the Constitution.

This just reveals hate-crime legislation as self-defeating, hypocritical, and opposed to the best instincts of American jurisprudence. Motive goes to proving a crime; it should not constitute a crime in itself. Criminalizing intent amounts to and establishment of thought police. It leaves far too much possibility for capricious enforcement and application by politically-correct district attorneys, making a mockery of equal treatment under the law. The crime itself should be enough to garner the appropriate punishment, and if not, then the law should get strengthened to ensure that it does.

What I found most aggravating about this story is that the AP doesn't even address the disparity in the treatment of the two groups. Under the law, both groups should face hate-crime indictments. Under the traditions of American justice, neither side should have to face imprisonment for their thoughts, but for their actions instead.

Leftist Vandals Attack Family Of Slain Soldier

The family of a soldier killed in Iraq and just buried less than 24 hours earlier awoke the next morning to a fire in their driveway, which totaled the car of the soldier's sister-in-law. The arsonist(s) set the fire with 20 American flags that the family displayed yard, given to them by mourners at the soldier's funeral:

American flags, lining the lawn of the mother- and father-in-law of fallen U.S. Army Pfc. Timothy Hines Jr., were heaped in a pile early Saturday and burned under a car parked in front of the home - less than 24 hours after Hines was buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery. ...

The flames totaled Sara Wessel's car.

Sara is Hines' sister-in-law and Jim Wessel's oldest daughter. She had been staying at the house on Sando Drive since the family returned last week from Washington, D.C., where they were visiting Hines at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Hines, 21, was buried Friday after more than 400 people mourned his passing and celebrated his life at the Vineyard Community Church in Springdale. He was buried with full military honors, leaving behind a pregnant widow who expects to give birth in about two weeks and a 2-year-old daughter.

Wessel's father thinks the fire was "a random act of violence," but neighbors don't think so. One pointed out that the street has more than 20 cars parked near where the fire was set; why pick on the one with all the American flags in the yard? And why use the flags as torches to set the fire in the first place?

It doesn't take Scotland Yard or Hercule Poirot to figure out that the arsonists had a problem with the American flags. Likely, the arsonist(s) knew nothing about the funeral, but got offended by the sight of so many American flags at one house. They probably presumed that the flags constituted a statement about support for the Iraq War, and America in general, and decided that the appropriate response was to burn the family to death, and failing that, at least get their car. (Maybe it was even an SUV -- making it doubly satisfying for the arsonists.) Fortunately the car alarm went off before the fuel tank exploded and involved the entire house, or else the Wessels could have lost much more than a car and the flags that honored their son-in-law and his sacrifice to this country.

This doesn't constitute protest or political speech; it reflects madness. America-haters have come unhinged. When displaying our country's flag makes a dead soldier's family a target for political violence -- and there seems to be little doubt of the nature of this attack -- something terrible has gone wrong with the Left.

UPDATE: Jesse at Pandagon claims that I'm jumping to conclusions and says the flags were used because they were flammable. Uh, so's the gas in the car itself, which one could easily touch off with a newspaper or rag. It doesn't take but a single flag to start a fire, either. Why were all 20 flags used for kindling? Why pick that house and that car to burn? Can anyone remember the last time random drunks just decided to commit arson after a night of partying by burning 20 American flags to torch a single car in a residential neighborhood full of them?

I guess some people really need a helping hand to connect a few dots.

Roberts Papers Will Not Get Extorted

The Bush administration made clear that it will not surrender to nor tolerate an attempt to Estradify the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Despite calls from a few Democratic Senators this weekend, the White House will not release privileged communications between Roberts and the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations:

The refusal sets up a showdown between the White House and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who have said they want to see some of the documents from the time when Judge Roberts worked for previous Republican administrations.

Specifically, Mr. Gonzales said the White House does not want to reveal any documents that are subject to attorney-client privilege. Doing so, he said, would "just chill communications between line attorneys and their superiors within the Department of Justice."

Some documents, however, might fall outside the privilege and will be handed over on a "case-by-case" basis, said Mr. Gonzales, adding that the administration would "be as accommodating as we can."

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, the Tennessee Republican assigned to shepherd Judge Roberts through the confirmation process, said yesterday that all living solicitors general -- both Democrats and Republicans -- have urged the White House to keep the lid on those documents.

The former solicitors general made their opinion known during the confirmation battle of Miguel Estrada to the federal appellate court, but to little avail. At the time, the Democrats only had a three-seat disadvantage and they maintained the filibuster on Estrada regardless of how Estrada's predecessors and successors at the SG testified. The Democrats used their fishing trip in the waters of attorney-client privilege to paint the Bush administration as excessively secretive and Estrada as hiding something, justifying (in their minds) the continuous stall tactic. Estrada later withdrew his name in frustration.

Pat Leahy calls the privilege issue a "red herring," saying that the SG works for the American public and not as a private attorney to the White House. However, the concept is still the same. All administrations rely on the SG to help them formulate their legal strategies, and in so doing require some degree of privacy. Saying that the privilege does not exist because American taxpayers pay the bill would then open the question of whether public defenders have any claim for the attorney-client privilege, either.

Besides, the only red herring in this story is the notion that these memoranda have any bearing on Roberts' qualifications to the bench. They don't; like Estrada, the Democrats want to fish for anything they can quote out of context to paint Roberts as an extremist. They need to do this in order to continue using judicial confirmations as political warfare. They need to guarantee continuing liberal control of the highest courts in order to push those policies which could not possibly win in open voting into law through judicial fiat. More pointedly, they need to guarantee that a new court of judicial constructionists don't reverse the activist decisions that enacted so much of what used to be their political agendas.

The dishonest methods they use to block confirmations -- demanding that nominees publicly prejudge issues that will come before them and attempts to violate attorney-client privilege -- show their desperation and their lack of ethics in preserving their back channel for their failing policies. The Bush administration must keep its spine stiffened on this point, and break out the Byrd option at the first hint of a filibuster. If the Democrats attempt to Estradify a Supreme Court nominee the way they've done to John Bolton, they will kiss their red-state Senate seats goodbye in 2006, and perhaps hand the GOP a filibuster-proof majority.

UPDATE: Majority, not minority (h/t: Russ). Holy cow, I must really have been tired this morning.

Souter's Neighbors Not Entirely Unsympathetic To New Hotel

Not long ago, after Supreme Court Justice David Souter supported the seizure of private property in the Kelo decision, a collection of activists decided to take Souter at his word and exercise eminent domain on his house in Weare, New Hampshire in order to build a hotel. Freestar Media wanted to bring the foolishness of Kelo to Souter's doorstep -- literally. And despite Souter's popularity among his fellow New Hampshire citizens, they have surprisingly looked at Freestar's efforts with understanding, if not outright support:

People from across the country are joining a campaign to seize Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter's farmhouse to build a luxury hotel, according to the man who suggested it after Souter joined the majority that sided with New London, Conn., in a decision favoring government seizure of private property.

"We would act just as these cities have been acting in seizing properties. We would give Souter the same sort of deal," said Logan Darrow Clements of Los Angeles. A rival proposal from townspeople would turn Souter's land into a park commemorating the Constitution. ...

In a state where people fiercely protect their right to local control over land and government, many said the hotel gambit is Souter's just deserts.

Robin Ilsley, who makes syrup on a family farm about two miles from Souter's place, said the justice brought the controversy on himself. "It was a pretty stupid ruling," she said.

Her mother watched Souter grow up but is unsympathetic. "I like David very much, but I don't like his ideas," said Winnie Ilsley, 77, who runs a doll museum at her farm. "I just don't think it's fair," she said of the court's "takings" decision.

A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that 93 percent of state residents agree with her.

The notion of poetic justice rings true among New Hampshire citizens, apparently, which I admit surprises me. I expected this effort, which I called the Mark Twain option, to make its point and fade into obscurity. Granite State citizens instead have expanded it into a second proposal, one that sounds as if Weare residents have decided to make Souter's participation in the diminution of private property into very personal consequences to him and his family. I believe that the Freestar proposal has a better chance of success under Kelo as the commercial value matches better with the details of that case, but Weare shows that it has an open mind about using Kelo for any of several purposes with what may soon be the former property of David Souter.

Obviously, I oppose the confiscation of Justice Souter's land, just as I opposed Kelo for allowing the state to seize property from one private owner just to give it to another one that the state likes better. If we have to live in a Kelo world, however, it is only fair that Justice Souter live in it as well.

Key Democratic Pillar Crumbles

One of the key political pillars of the Democratic Party has crumbled. Labor has split, perhaps permanently, over the role of politics in the union movement, and the largest unions have voted to leave the AFL-CIO:

The four unions, representing nearly one-third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members, announced Sunday they would boycott the federation's convention that begins Monday. They are part of the Coalition to Win, a group of seven unions vowing to reform the labor movement — outside the AFL-CIO if necessary.

The Service Employees International Union, with 1.8 million members, plans to announce Monday that it is leaving the AFL-CIO, said several labor officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the developments.

The Teamsters union also was on the verge of disaffiliating, and would likely to be the first to follow SEIU's lead, the officials said. Two other boycotting unions were likely to leave the federation: United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE, a group of textile and hotel workers.

The Teamsters have a long history of low-level dissent within the AFL-CIO and their loss will definitely hurt, but the SEIU will cause the most pain. The SEIU serves government agencies and has solid political connections. However, what they want is less politicking and more organizing in order to stem the steep decline in the labor movement over the past several decades. They will pull their considerable dues away from the highly political AFL-CIO and return the funding to their own control.

What does that mean? To some extent, it means more of the same. The SEIU will still have policy interests that intersect with the Democratic Party, and they will still contribute to politicians who represent those interests. However, the SEIU and Teamsters, and other, have made clear that they cannot hope to affect national politics while their memberships wither away. In that, they certainly can't be faulted; unless they can organize much larger groups of workers, both dues and influence will continue to decline. The AFL-CIO has made a mistake in not taking that advice.

That redirection of efforts means that less money will come to the Democrats. More importantly, it presents an opportunity for new national leadership to come to the fore for the labor movement. That leadership will not have the long-standing relationship to the Democrats that have sold labor and the unions to the Democrats for two generations. The Republicans have an opportunity to at least neutralize the Democratic hold on labor, if not swing a significant portion of it to the GOP.

Together with the new Republican inroads in the African-American community, this new refocusing of labor on organization and the split in the national movement means that the Democrats face the very real possibility that they will spend a generation in the minority.

Back To The Encounter

I will be spending the day helping to facilitate a Marriage Encounter weekend. As I posted yesterday, we have worked with this marvelous nonprofit support organization to help bolster marriage for over five years now -- and we're really the new kids on the block. Most of the people who volunteer at Twin Cities Marriage Encounter have worked for ME for ten, fifteen, twenty years or more. In fact, I suspect that's how we became the President Couple; the others have already done their share in leadership ... and probably because we're gullible enough to agree to it!

I'll be back to blogging later, but be sure to check out Michelle Malkin, QandO, The Anchoress, bRight and Early, Gay Patriot (who just got back to blogging), Anti Media, Mac's Mind, and the great bloggers on my blogroll.

And if you'd like to contribute to the effort to help create stronger marriages, consider donating to Marriage Encounter at the link above. They do not have a PayPal link (yet) but the website has all the contact information you need. Thanks, and have a great Sunday.

Alliance Of People For Dishonesty

Dana Milbank highlights the laughable notion that People For the American Way and Alliance for Justice have not taken an official position on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Titling his vignette "Profiles in Courage," Milbank skewers their silly denials of opposition behind their obvious antagonism towards any Republican nomination:

The liberal group People for the American Way has many things to say about President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr. It calls his record "disturbing" and says he is "hostile to women's reproductive freedom" and "detrimental" to free speech. It has "serious concerns about his ideology" and says he "falls far short of demonstrating the commitment to fundamental civil and constitutional rights that should be shown by a Supreme Court nominee."

So the organization, it is fair to say, has a position in opposition to Roberts? "No, we don't," says Ralph Neas, the chief. ...

The Alliance for Justice, too, says it has "serious concerns" about Roberts. He has an "exceedingly restrictive view of federal law-making authority" and has views or policies that "could threaten a wide swath of workplace, civil rights, public safety and environmental protections" and could "weaken school desegregation efforts, the reproductive rights of women, environmental protections, church-state separation and the voting rights of African Americans."

So, surely the Alliance for Justice is opposed?

Heavens, no. "We are raising serious concerns, but we are not opposing at this time," spokeswoman Kelly Landis said.

The problem, Milbank writes, is avoiding charges of knee-jerk liberal opposition along partisan lines instead of thoughtful opposition based on issues and judicial temperament. Unfortunately, their own language belies the latter and endorses the former. Without giving much in the way of specifics except out-of-context quotes from legal briefs while representing others, neither PFAW nor AFJ has any evidence that Roberts opposes free speech or civil rights, favors segregation, and wants to allow the rape of the environment.

Well, almost none, except that his nomination to the Supreme Court came from a Republican president.

Given the hyperbolic descriptions of their "concerns", does anyone think it likely that either organization will endorse Roberts? Of course not. Why? Because Ralph Neas and AFJ president Nan Aron have spoken against Bush's judicial nominations in the most strident and confrontational manner for the past five years, and have played a key role in pushing Democrats towards the obstructionism during his terms that have guaranteed them minority status. These organizations lost any credibility they have had during that period and have exposed themselves as the worst of the partisan special-interest groups.

This effort to win nonpartisan credibility will fail; you can't build credibility by telling bigger lies.

Dafydd: Word War III

All right, I confess: being a math geek, I actually love polls to death.

I love nearly everything about them... especially the game of taking some tendentious poll and trying to tease out what's really going on beneath all the thud & blunder. And boy, did I run across a doozy yesterday!

How's this for a headline?

Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely
by Will Lester
AP
Jul 23, 2005, 4:01 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans are far more likely than the Japanese to expect another world war in their lifetime, according to AP-Kyodo polling 60 years after World War II ended. Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified.

What caught my eye like a free-swinging fish hook [eeew] was the comparison between Japanese and Americans. Why such a huge difference?

Six in 10 Americans said they think such a war is likely, while only one-third of the Japanese said so, according to polling done in both countries for The Associated Press and Kyodo, the Japanese news service.

According to my wife Sachi, who is Japanese, there is a lot less political variation among Japanese than among Americans. There are Japanese Communists, of course; a lot more than here. And there are true "right-wingers" who still yearn for the emperor to seize control and turn Japan back into an imperial-military dictatorship.

But both of those extremes added together are still a very tiny percent of the population, not likely to show up in a typical poll of 1,000 respondents. Outside that fringe, Japanese political opinion is much flatter than in America.

So my suspicion -- in the absence of any real data in the AP article about the actual poll results -- is that the Japanese response of 33% was likely across the board, whether the Japanese places himself to the left or the right of the political centerline (mathematically, I predict a very low standard deviation).

But let's turn to the American side. How on earth do we get 60% of Americans convinced that World War III is just around the corner?

The rest of this post is numbers, numbers, numbers... so if you took your Sociology or English Lit degree precisely to avoid those squirmy little figures, don't continue reading this post!

In contradistinction with Japan, America is a divided nation on a great many issues... and more often than not, the divide is between liberals and conservatives. In particular, can we at least agree that liberals are not exactly fond of George W. Bush? In fact, they see him as a dangerous demagogue who invades other countries without the slightest provocation (Afghanistan, Iraq, you know) and wants to destroy the entire world so Dick Cheney can get rich stealing oil wells from the poor. Or something like that.

There have been a lot of polls lately trying to determine who is a liberal, who a conservative, and who is in between. Taking my cue from history, I'll call those in the middle who can't make up their minds mugwumps, since their mug is on one side of the fence, and their "wump" is on the other. There are two basic schools of thought on the polity:

1. Liberals: 40%; Conservatives: 40%; Mugwumps: 20%

2. Liberals: 33%; Conservatives: 33%; Mugwumps: 34%

What's interesting (to me, at least) is that my analysis of this poll is not significantly affected by whichever one of these scenarios you accept. You still get the same result.

Let's take the Japanese response rate -- 33% think World War III is likely -- as the norm: with regular people, a third will believe that WWIII is coming. Since I am, as you all know, completely non-biased about this -- shut-up, you in the back! -- I'm going to assume that this is probably also the figure reported by the conservatives in the poll: 33% of conservatives believe that WWIII is on its way.

The liberals, however, are another matter. Anyone here old enough to remember Reagan's election in 1980 knows that, well, liberals tend to get a little hysterical about proactive Republican presidents who actually want to defend the United States (the brutes). The American Left is little better this time around with George W. Bush; just count the number of passionate predictions that Bush will bring about Armageddon.

I think I'm pretty safe in assigning 90% to the liberals; 90% of self-identified liberals probably believe that World War III is likely, at least until a Democrat is elected president.

Finally, we come to the mugwumps. On the one hand, they tend to think like liberals; but on the other hand, they tend to think like conservatives. So lets be cheeky and just split the difference: the mugwumps get 61.5%.

Here is how the two scenarios work out with values of 33%, 90%, and 61.5% for conservatives, liberals, and mugwumps, respectively:

Scenario 1: 61.5% of respondents believe WWIII likely;
Scenario 2: 61.5% of respondents believe WWIII likely.

The two scores are identical -- but this is an artifact of averaging them to get the mugwump level, of course. In any event, there is your "6 in ten Americans" saying "they think such a war is likely." Voila!

But it really doesn't matter that much, even if we lower the mugwump level. If only 50% of mugwumps expect WWIII, you get 59% for scenario 1 and 58% for scenario 2... again, AP would probably describe both as "6 in ten Americans."

Even at a 45% mugwump fear-factor, the final results are 58% and 56%, respectively. (AP might describe the last number as "somewhat over half," rather than "6 out the ten" -- assuming AP was trying to be unbiased. Whether that's likely is left as an exercise for the reader.)

What all of this means is that if the American Left is hysterical enough, they can skew the entire poll to make it seem that Americans in general think World War III is headed our way -- when in fact, it's only American liberals and the most liberal elements of the mugwumps.

As a final check of our hypotheses, let's read a couple of the pro-WWIII respondent comments that AP quoted.

"Man's going to destroy man eventually. When that will be, I don't know," said Gaye Lestaeghe of Freeport, La.

I can feel the inner liberal rising to the surface....

Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.

"I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.

Bingo; I think we rang the bell on that response! For anyone to imagine that what we're experiencing right now, the "sacrifices" we must make (like arriving at the airport an hour earlier), is the same as what our grandparents enduring fighting the last numbered war, he has to be not only myopic to the point of utter blindness but also willfully and criminally ignorant of very recent American history. Since we already established above that I am utterly unbiased, you can just take my word for it: that thought can only be thunk by a liberal.

Finally, there is this bit, which brightened up my whole day:

Two-thirds of Americans say the use of atomic bombs was unavoidable.... Just one-half of Americans approve of the use of the atomic bombs on Japan.

So in other words, at least 17% of Americans thought the use of the atom bomb in 1945 was unavoidable -- yet they nevertheless fault us for using it.

Go figure that one out!

The Left Ignores North Korean Tyranny

Nicholas Kristof discovers today that the Right actually gets it right regarding North Korean tyranny and says so in the New York Times. Unfortunately, the advice he gives the Left to address the problem gets it all wrong.

Kristof starts out by scolding the Left for ignoring the problem altogether:

Liberals took the lead in championing human rights abroad in the 1970's, while conservatives mocked the idea. But these days liberals should be embarrassed that it's the Christian Right that is taking the lead in spotlighting repression in North Korea. ...

"The biggest scandal in progressive politics," Tony Blair told The New Yorker this year, "is that you do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, 23 million of them, and no one protests!"

Actually, some people do protest. Conservative Christians have aggressively taken up the cause of North Korean human rights in the last few years, and the movement is gathering steam. A U.S.-government-financed conference on North Korean human rights convened in Washington last week, and President Bush is expected shortly to appoint Jay Lefkowitz to the new position of special envoy for North Korean human rights.

He then ignores decades of results from appeasement strategies by advising massive American investment in the North Korean economy:

So can anything be done to help North Koreans? Yes, if liberals stop ceding the issue to conservative Christians. Ultimately, the solution to the nuclear standoff is the same as the solution to human rights abuses: dragging North Korea into the family of nations, as we did with Maoist China and Communist Vietnam. ...

[W]e should welcome North Korea's economic integration with the rest of the world. For example, we should stop blocking Pyongyang's entry into the Asian Development Bank and encourage visits to North Korea by overweight American bankers. In a country where much of the population is hungry, our most effective propaganda is our paunchiness. ...

[W]e should continue feeding starving North Koreans, while also pushing for increased monitoring. The food is delivered through the U.N. World Food Program in sacks that say, in Korean as well as English, that the food is from America. Nobody has done more to bring about change in North Korea than the World Food Program, which now has 45 foreigners traveling around the country.

In other words, we should prop up the Kim regime by removing the political pressures caused by his oppressive policies. People starving en masse because Kim reroutes all of his resources to his military? No problem, Dear Leader: we'll feed them instead, but we'll mark the food Made in USA. Can't find anyone to invest in your nationalized economy? We'll guarantee the investments with government money so that our taxpayers foot the bill when you confiscate their assets. Gee, and we hope that in thirty years, you can have progressed in human rights -- to the level of Viet Nam and China.

Nothing sums up the earnest but clueless liberal approach to foreign affairs better than that.

After watching how this approach worked in Africa (and Iraq) over the past forty years, where the West spent hundreds of billions in aid, one would presume that lessons had been learned by the liberals who ran the programs. All this does is make despots very rich while prolonging the starvation cycles that their own politics cause. The solution may involve aid and investment, but only as a fulcrum to force and follow political reform. Even Bob Geldof learned that, and it only took him twenty years to figure it out.

Kristof sells the Left short, I believe. Perhaps the Left has learned this lesson. They just don't want to get North Korea to reform itself. The sheen of communism makes Kim, along with Castro in Cuba, something of a guiding light to their fringe. Addressing the desperate situation of the North Korean people requires them to acknowledge Kim's oppression and brutality. They'd much rather protest the United States and George Bush; there's less cognitive dissonance in it for them.