An American Original Leaves Us Laughing

Richard Pryor died today at 65, after suffering from long bouts of multiple sclerosis, heart disease, drug abuse, and what appeared to be a decades-long death wish. Pryor overcame the pain and illness of his life to change an entire entertainment form -- stand-up comedy -- from a series of jokes and witty third-party observations to a review of his life and his pain that seemed almost Freudian at times, even while making us cry with laughter.

Pryor started off trying to be the next Bill Cosby -- another American original -- but Pryor soon discovered that he could not spend his life ignoring his own viewpoint. While I would hardly claim to agree with much of what Pryor said and did in his life, he never quailed at talking about his failures and making them part of his always-hilarious act. His brutal honesty towards his own shortcomings made his pointed barbs at others around him easier to take and to get a laugh. He inspired two generations of comedians and helped pioneer stand-up into an art form.

Pryor also made a number of films, with varying success. He played serious roles such as the piano player in "Lady Sings The Blues", but mostly stuck with comedies. The one he should have had but wound up losing was Sheriff Black Bart in "Blazing Saddles", a role that the late Cleavon Little made into a classic. Pryor wrote the script along with Mel Brooks, but apparently the studio felt that Pryor brought too much controversy to the screen for the movie. Instead, Pryor made classic comedies with Gene Wilder such as "Silver Streak" and with Eddie Murphy and Redd Foxx in "Harlem Nights". He even appeared with Jackie Gleason in the extremely disappointing "The Toy", a shame given the talent the two comedic titans shared between them.

Later, as Pryor left the pain and the abuse behind him, life dealt him one last blow in the form of multiple sclerosis. Typically, he made it part of his act, refusing to allow the disease to keep him off the stage. Eventually, however, Pryor had to retire from the work he loved and transformed, and we were the poorer for it. Today, the world is poorer for his leaving it -- but we will have the work he left behind.

Rest in peace, Mr. Pryor, and thank you.

UPDATE: I should have known that Roger Simon would have had an anecdote or two to add.

Double Plus Good At The Weekly Standard

The upcoming issue of the Weekly Standard has two excellent articles that provide people with absolutely essential information on the war in Iraq. First is Stephen Hayes' report on the documents that the DIA refuses to release under a Freedom of Information Act request which appear to refute the conventional narrative of the war. Hayes has gained access to the index for these documents, but even though the documents remain unclassified, the DIA refuses to release them or to provide access for Hayes:

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers.

As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its origins is taking place without crucial information about the former Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's government, much of this information still exists--in handwritten documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and satellite images, on computer hard drives. All told, the U.S. government has in its possession more than 2 million "exploitable" items from the former Iraqi regime (the intelligence community's term of art for information it thinks might be useful). According to sources with knowledge of the project, now two and a half years old, only 50,000 documents have been translated and fully exploited. Few of those translated documents have been circulated to policymakers in the Bush administration. And although one of the translated documents was leaked to the New York Times last summer, none of the others has been released, formally or informally.

The result: Much of today's debate about the threat posed three years ago by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is based on past assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies that we now know had no real sources on the ground in Iraq.

Here are a few descriptions of documents Hayes has discovered in the captured Iraqi documents:

* Intelligence coded memo by two IIS officers containing info on various topics; weapons boat, Palestinians training in Iraq, etc.

* Concerning mass graves found in the south: Check for nuclear radiation, identify bodies, ensure that CNN is the first news agency onsite. Any funerals should have an international impact. Signed by Hussein.

* Various correspondence e.g. visa forms, trade delegations, full reports on the connections between Abu Sayaf and the Qadafi Charity Establishment. Report on a certain individual traveling to Pakistan and involvements with bin Laden.

Palestinians training in Iraq? I thought that Iraq had no connections to terrorists, according to the media. Of course, by media I mean CNN -- the agency that Saddam Hussein wanted to ensure got first access to gravesites in case the mass graves ever got found. Presumably Saddam ordered this because in February 2001 (when this order was written), Eason Jordan had corrupted the media outlet enough that Saddam could trust CNN to broadcast a cover story blaming the bodies on the American use of depleted-uranium shells during Gulf War I. The third appears to connect Iraq not just to Osama bin Laden but also to the al-Qaeda linked Islamic terror efforts in the Phillippines.

Read all of the frustration Hayes has suffered trying to get the DIA to release these documents. While you're there, be sure to read Fred Barnes' demolition of the poll numbers that Democrats have thrown around in their debate over the past month about the 80% of Iraqis who want the Americans to immediately withdraw from their country:

If we knew the "internals" of the poll's sample, we could say for sure whether 82 percent of a representative sample of Iraqis said they favored immediate withdrawal. I contacted Rayment, who broke the poll story, and learned the sample size (1,264 Iraqis), but not the breakdown of Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. That remains unknown, at least publicly. It matters, though. If the sample consisted disproportionately of Sunnis, for example, that would explain a high number of respondents who want U.S. forces to withdraw immediately. However, it wouldn't be a faithful reflection of overall Iraqi opinion.

Earlier polls tell a different (and clearer) story, though still not one that's favorable to keeping American troops in Iraq indefinitely. In March 2004, a BBC poll of 2,500 Iraqis found that 51 percent opposed the continued presence of coalition troops in their country. And in May 2004, a poll in six Iraqi cities, including ones with significant Sunni populations, put the percentage of Iraqis who want coalition forces to "leave immediately" at 41 percent. And 55 percent said they would feel safer if those forces left.

Be sure to read the entire analysis. Until we know more about how this survey got conducted and the sample used, it seems prudent to treat this as an outlier at best, and potentially dishonest.

Insider Trading Scandal Deepens For Martin

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin may face more questions about personal ethics in the exploding scandal surrounding the alleged insider trading involving the Finance Minister's office and the announcement of monetary policy two weeks ago. Blogger MK Braaten has done some investigative reporting on the winners the day the policy got announced -- and found out that one of the biggest traded its shares at 3400% its normal volume in the hours prior to the announcement:

According to STOCKTRENDS.ca, the day before the Goodale income trust announcement, the trading volume of Medisys Income Trust was 226,500, with a value of $2,604,750, average trade was $37,750, and a total of 68 transactions. According to StockTrends.ca, this stock was listed as trading at “Unusual Volumes“. Click here for the report.

The volume of shares traded for Paul Martin linked Medisys Income Trust shares the day before the Income Trust announcement is way to high to be a ‘co-incidence’. The volume increased 3400% from the prior day, and the following day, dropped back down about the same amount.

Its said that Paul Martins personal doctor started a medical company called Medisys Income Trust, a chain of private health care clinics located across Canada.

The day before the Goodale income trust announcement, the volume of Medisys shares traded for the day went from 5,714 on November 21, to 203,953 on Novemeber 22. On November 23, the shares traded dropped back down to 6,220.

Amazingly, the sale of shares at thirty-four times their normal rate came just two days after a negative assessment from a respected stock analyst, Jennings Capital. Angry in GWN picks up on this:

In fact, in 2005, from a peak $15.21 in the summer, Medisys was on a downward trend, dropping 30% of its value until late November, earning another negative report on November 21, just two days before the income trust announcement.

I can only assume no one from Ralph Goodale's office called Jennings Capital Inc.

Whoever decided to ignore that negative report and picked up an astonishing 200,000 shares really picked exactly the right time.

I bet Dr. Elman will have a big smile on his face when Paul Martin comes for his next visit.

Indeed. When Jennings Capital issued its report, Medisys traded at $10.80. After the big trades -- in only 68 transactions, by the way -- the price had risen to $11.02, and as of last Friday had come up to $13.25. That represents a profit of somewhere north of $400,000. It seems as though someone knew that Ralph Goodale would issue a report favorable for income trusts and got into the market just ahead of most everyone else.

Read Angry and MK Braaten at the above links for more on this issue. In the meanwhile, the National Post reports that Goodale had a meeting with investment directors and discussed income trusts hours before he announced the new policy, a meeting which Goodale didn't reveal:

Finance Minister Ralph Goodale had an hour-long meeting with senior representatives of Canada's investment community at which the issue of income trusts were discussed only hours before his decision on the issue was announced, CanWest News Service has learned. ...

``There was a very vague, very general discussion,'' Embury said, adding that it dealt with the association's planned submission on the income trusts issue. ``They left the meeting no wiser than when they came through the door.'' ...

Conservative finance critic Monte Solberg expressed surprise when told of the meeting.

``The minister should be completely candid and release a list of all the people he had meetings with that week on the income trust issue,'' Solberg said. ``One of the things that I find frustrating is that it's only after information drifts out that they admit that they met with this group or that group, or that somebody got some kind of a phone call.

``This doesn't do anything to instil confidence in the minister or the minister's office,'' Solberg said, adding that his party will continue to ``push'' for an investigation into the issue by the Ontario Securities Commission or the RCMP into the issue.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find the assertion that senior representatives of the investment community had a meeting with the Canadian finance minister and wound up no wiser about investments a hilarious explanation. Is Ralph that incompetent that an hour of his time gains no one any insight into Canadian markets? Obviously, though, someone got wise that day. For a stock that normally trades in the low four figures on a daily basis, having over 200,000 shares transacted in just 68 purchases shows either an amazing coincidence or, more likely, a handful of individual investors got advance warning that Goodale would favor the exact kind of income trust that Paul Martin's personal friends had founded.

This story has legs, especially since there seems now to be a connection to Martin and his friends. Will the RCMP and/or the OSC start an investigation into the manipulation of the income-trust market? We'll not hold our breath ...

Northern Alliance Radio Today

We'll be on the air today between noon and 3 pm CT, talking about Joe Lieberman, the new Copperheads, advances in the Iraq war that the media hasn't covered -- and that's just the first hour. If you're not in radio range of AM 1280 The Patriot, tune us in on our Internet stream. Join us by calling the station at 651-289-4488!

Our New Bestest Buddy ... Joe Lieberman?

In the zero-sum game that has consumed our national politics in general and the Democrats specifically over the last month, Joe Lieberman has arisen as a new prize to be claimed -- or shunned. The Washington Post reports on the political damage that he may have done to his own party in coming back from Iraq and informing the nation that the Bush strategy has worked and will deliver victory if Democrats would simply not lose their nerve. Amazingly, the word "maverick" never once appears in Shailagh Murray's analysis:

The Connecticut Democrat's strong public defense of Bush's handling of the Iraq war has provided the White House with an invaluable rejoinder to intensifying criticism from other Democrats. In public statements and a newspaper column, Lieberman has argued that Bush has a strategy for victory in Iraq, has dismissed calls for the president to set a timetable for troop withdrawal, and has warned that it would be a "colossal mistake" for the Democratic leadership to "lose its will" at this critical point in the war.

Lieberman's contrarian behavior is not out of character -- he is far more hawkish than the majority of Democrats, and he has vigorously backed invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein from the beginning. But the latest defense of Bush and his stinging salvos at some in his own party have infuriated Democrats, who say he is undercutting their effort to forge a consensus on the war and draw clear distinctions with Republicans before the 2006 elections.

We can stop there for the moment. The Democrats never wanted to draw clear distinctions, which caused their current predicament in the first place. Their strategy was to shower the Bush administration with criticism on the war policy but to keep it as general as possible in order to avoid having to offer specifics on an alternate plan. That went out the window when Jack Murtha got a little overzealous about his assigned task and started talking about strategic redeployments over a six-month window, an "over-the-horizon" retreat that assumed another country in the region would happily host 150,000 American troops whose government no longer had the will to fight for the mission in the region.

When Murtha went specific, the Republicans finally took the initiative and forced a vote in the House on immediate withdrawal. Murtha complained that he didn't mean "immediate" -- at least at that time -- but the logistics of disengaging 150,000 troops on active missions and evacuating them and their equipment and support from the theater of battle would take at least that long under the most expedited of schedules. That folly resulted in the abandonment of Murtha and the notion of retreat on a devastating 403-3 vote, or at least so we thought. We thought the Democratic leadership would finally act responsibly out of sheer survival instinct, but instead they became more unhinged -- forcing voices of reason within their own ranks to publicly oppose the defeatism they espouse so passionately.

That brings us to Joe Lieberman, a tough man to love. He has long been a voice of conscience in the Democratic Party. He was the first to officially denounce Bill Clinton's activities with Monica Lewinsky, making his stinging rebuke on the Senate floor while still speaking against impeachment. That led to his partnership with Al Gore for the 2000 election, and the resulting mess when Gore tried to sue his way into the White House. (Yes, it started with an Al Gore lawsuit because he wanted to change the rules for recounts; you can look it up. They lost the initial lawsuit, too.) Instead of acting as a conscience, Lieberman silently assented to this bald attempt to take through the courts what the Democrats failed to take at the polling stations, a verdict eventually reached in three separate recounts, the last conducted by the media themselves.

How did the Democrats repay Lieberman for his loyalty? They shunned him in 2004, when he should have been the leading candidate for the presidency. He waited too long, perhaps, to announce his candidacy, wanting to give Gore another shot at running so he could endorse the former VP. Gore then shivved Lieberman by endorsing Howard Dean instead of his own former running mate -- just three weeks before Dean's campaign completely collapsed. The Democrats could have waltzed into the White House on a Lieberman-led ticket, but instead chose John Kerry and ignominious defeat at the hands of their most hated enemy.

One has to wonder why, under the circumstances, Lieberman hasn't left the party that so obviously has left him. His dogged loyalty probably explains that, and that makes his latest stand all the more remarkable. Lieberman is no babe in the political woods; he understands perfectly what his statements did to the Democrats. Instead of openly wondering what motivated Lieberman to take this kind of action, Reid and other Democrats in party leadership should ask themselves why they made it necessary for him to do so.

In the meantime, the Bush administration should continue to show Lieberman respect -- not just as an ally on Iraq war strategy, but also the respect due an honorable and formidable political opponent. Lieberman is not and will not be a Republican if he hasn't switched by now, and the GOP should remember that.

Will Zarqawi Stand Down During Elections?

The United States and the UK have prepared themselves for a massive security effort for the upcoming Iraqi elections, which will replace the interim government with its first democratic, constitutional four-year Assembly and executive and promote Iraq to the ranks of the liberal democracies. Some Sunni leaders think that the security effort may prove superfluous, as they have convinced themselves that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has given up on intimidating the now-committed Sunnis from participating in the electoral process. Jonathan Steele at the Guardian reports that the same problem faces the native "insurgencies":

Their candidates have been assassinated, their party offices attacked, but hopes are mounting among Iraq's Sunni Arab politicians that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, will not make a serious effort to disrupt next week's national elections.

Despite threatening to block previous votes, this time the Jordanian militant, believed to be responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq, has been silent. "He's changed his strategy because he has discovered how confident and determined we are to vote," Azhar Abdel Majeed al-Samarrai, a leading candidate for the Iraqi Consensus Front, an alliance of the main Sunni parties, told the Guardian yesterday. ...

But the clear desire of many Sunnis to vote next week has changed the dynamic within the insurgency. "Zarqawi is in a dilemma because many Sunnis want to vote," a senior western political official said this week. The same dilemma confronts Iraq's homegrown insurgents, who rely mainly on the Sunni population for support and recruits.

A Sunni cleric from the influential Association of Muslim Scholars told worshippers at Baghdad's Umm al-Qura mosque yesterday it was a "religious duty" to vote next week. "The date of December 15 is a landmark event. It is a decisive battle that will determine our future. If you give your vote to the wrong people, then the occupation will continue and the country would be lost," he said.

This story has not made it into the American media, and one can readily understand why. It explains why Zarqawi has started to put a bit more focus on targets outside of Iraq, while still maintaining some operations within the Sunni Triangle. The murder of a Sunni politician two weeks ago resulted in a massive funeral and an outpouring of anger so large that Zarqawi's network wound up issuing a statement denouncing the assassination, an unusual move for someone who supposedly has marked anyone cooperating in the election for death. The assassination has not endeared the American occupation to the Sunnis he represented, but it cut severely into the support the Consensus Party had given the insurgents.

That political momentum shift had been predicted all along as a long-term effect of pushing for a democratic post-war future for Iraq, predicted by the Bush administration and the so-called neocons that see democracy and freedom as the only long-term strategy for triumphing over Islamofascist terrorism. In less than a year, we will have successfully engaged all major ethnic/religious factions in Iraq into the new political system, one which guarantees enough access that no two can shut out a third. The Sunnis have already experienced the futility of a boycott and will not repeat that huge mistake again. They intend on not only participating, but voting in large enough numbers to catch the Kurds and Shi'a napping in political complacency, and Zarqawi and the insurgents don't appear to daunt them at all.

Despite the desperate rhetoric coming from the Democrats in Congress the past month, this looks very much like victory to those of us who understand the overall strategy and plan for the war on terror. Once the elections take place, we can speed up the training of the Iraqi army and get them to hold towns in the Sunni areas of Iraq, forcing the insurgencies out, and allowing the Iraqis themselves to capture people like Amir Fanus, demonstrating their desire for peace and freedom over theocracy and tyranny. It will likely not even matter if Zarqawi "stands down" during the elections -- and that irrelevancy is exactly what we want for all of the lunatic Islamofascists still on the loose.

Now -- when will the American media cover these developments? Anyone? Anyone?

Schroeder's Parachute: Made In Russia

David Kaspar at Medienkritik notices a Bloomberg dispatch that should have Germans in the streets, demanding an explanation from the SPD for years of misguided policy favoring Russian interests over that of their longstanding friendship with the United States. Gerhard Schroedoer, who narrowly lost his position as Chancellor in the last election and the resulting formation of the new German executive, has managed to land on his feet -- working for the Russians on a program then-Chancellor Schroeder approved just three months ago:

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will lead the shareholders committee for a German- Russian gas-pipeline project to pump gas under the Baltic Sea, OAO Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller said today.

State-controlled Gazprom began building the more than 4- billion-euro ($4.7 billion) North European gas pipeline project today in the town of Babaeyvo in Russia's Volodga region, north of Moscow.

The pipeline will allow Gazprom to ship gas directly to Germany, bypassing Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. It will carry 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year in 2010 and twice that much by 2012, Miller said. Gazprom will raise gas exports to Europe 4.1 percent to 151 billion cubic meters in 2006 following a 3.1 percent jump this year as demand and prices rise.

Well, kiddies, can we say quid pro quo? Gazprom is a nationalized company, which means they report to Vladimir Putin -- with whom Shroeder negotiated the pact which made the pipeline possible. The Gazprom project, as David notes, creates an even heavier reliance on Russian deliveries of oil, already considered dangerously high and in need of diversification. This negotiation for the project took place while Schroeder and the SPD trailed badly in the polls.

It certainly looks as if Schroeder negotiated himself a sweetheart position with Putin for his retirement, and paid for it with a pipeline from German wallets to Putin's bank accounts. Remember Schroeder's insistence that he would never join Merkel's coalition in any other ministry except the Chancellory? Now we know why -- he had his golden parachute already strapped to his back, and it bears the label, "Made In Russia".

Congratulations, Germany. The entire nation spent years following Schroeder and his anti-American Pied Piper routine, and now the country has awoken in the Merkel era to find out that they got sold out to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Have fun with your new friends.

UPDATE: Don't forget Medienkritik is competing in the 2005 Weblog Awards in the Best European Blog category. I'd put it as a toss-up between them and No Parasan, and the voters so far agree -- but no one covers the critical area of Central Europe like Medienkritik.

Hamas: Peace Is Too Boring

The terrorist group Hamas, which has emerged as the most popular political group with Palestinians over the past year, has shifted its position on truce with the Israelis again. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' leader, claims that the truce has Hamas ... well, rather bored:

The leader of Hamas said Friday his group was growing weary of its pact with the Palestinian Authority to avoid conflict with Israel.

"There is no room for truce. I say to our brothers in the [Palestinian] Authority that we are witnessing political stagnation," Khaled Meshaal said in a fiery speech at a rally in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

"I say it loud and clear, we will not enter a new truce. Our people are preparing for a new round in this struggle," Meshaal said.

Hamas much prefers blowing up women and children in pizzerias than the actual work of statecraft, ie, building political consensus and campaigning for support on issues like sewage systems, monetary policy, and so on. That type of work requires erudition and intellect, after all, while strapping a bomb on a teenager only takes a little salesmanship and the complete lack of a soul. Apparently Hamas' terrorist core has discovered what the rest of us already knew -- that they qualify in spades for the latter but by and large lack most of the former.

The excuse du jour results from the hoary triangle offense that the Palestinians have used for years. This time, as is often the case, Islamic Jihad sat out the truce so that they could continue to launch rocket strikes into Israel. Israeli response against IJ then allows the other two terrorist groups -- Hamas and Fatah -- to claim that the Israelis broke the truce and then all three resume their attacks on Israeli civilians. However, this may be the first time that Hamas has come out and admit that without war, they have no reason to exist and no interest in politics other than as a means to conduct the annihiliation of Israel.

We need to press the Europeans to list Hamas as a terrorist group and to cut off their funding once and for all. They will never be a partner for peace -- and neither will the Palestinian Authority which coordinates with both Hamas and IJ to continue the cycle of violence. Until the Palestinians themselves decide they want peace instead of war, they will get what they deserve -- and we should stop holding back the Israelis from walling out the Palestinians on their own terms in the absence of serious attempts to resolve the issues. They have paid for that policy with far more terrorist attacks on civilians than our nation would ever tolerate. We should quit demanding that the Israelis show forebearance any longer.

Iraqis Take Another Step Towards Freedom

The Iraqis took a major step forward today towards freedom when the plain folks of Ramadi captured and handed over a major al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Amir Khalaf Fanus, known as "The Butcher of Ramadi":

Iraqi citizens turned over a high-ranking Al Qaeda member known as "the Butcher" to U.S. forces in Ramadi Friday a military statement said.

Amir Khalaf Fanus was No. 3 on the 28th Infantry Division's High Value Individual list for Ramadi, wanted for murder and kidnapping in connection with his affiliation with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"He is the highest ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq member to be turned into Iraqi and U.S. officials by local citizens," Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool said in a statement released from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. "His capture is another indication that the local citizens tire of the insurgents' presence within their community."

The critics of the war have long remarked that the Iraqis have not done enough to fight the terrorists themselves, that they've left that to Americans, and that they secretly want the terrorists to drive us out. Ramadi supposedly comprised one of the insurgent's power bases. Yet the people there took it upon themselves to go through the danger to detain one of the leaders of the Zarqawi network and hand him over to the Americans. That seems passingly strange, if one accepts at face value the assertion of the Democrats that 80% of Iraqis want Americans to leave and 45% find the killing of American soldiers acceptable.

In truth, the Iraqis have seen the fruits of freedom and while they probably don't care for the necessity of foreign troops, they understand the necessity while lunatics like Fanus run around killing Iraqis. They want to enjoy their new-found ability to choose their own leaders for a government that serves their needs rather than one that feeds them into meat grinders. After living with Saddam for over thirty years of torture and terror, Zarqawi and his minions have little chance of scaring them away from their freedom. At any rate, they don't scare the Iraqis anywhere near the extent they scare the Democrats half a world away, and they proved it today.

Congratulations to the Iraqis of Ramadi that refused to be cowed by wannabe Islamofascist tyrants like Fanus. May we continue to be inspired by your example of courage and hope.

Who Will Be Time's Man Of The Year?

Longtime CQ reader Monkei gave me a great idea this afternoon. With the end of the year coming up, Time Magazine will shortly be selecting its Man (or Woman) of the Year, an always-controversial topic among its readers and in the blogosphere. Monkei suggested the US Coast Guard, but didn't explain it -- maybe he'll throw in with a comment. Who would you like to see Time "honor" as the person who made the biggest difference in the world in 2005? George Bush? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Condoleezza Rice? Paul Volcker?

Nominate your suggestions in the comments section, and we'll pick six or seven by Sunday that appear to be the most popular as finalists. I'll post a poll afterwards that we can run until Time makes their own selection known and see how close we got. Please note that this is not an open thread, and so comments should reflect nominations and best cases for them. Feel free to offer seconds (and thirds and fourths, etc) on nominations -- that's how we'll narrow down the choices.

My own suggestion? The purple-fingered Iraqi, of course -- but that's just one man's opinion. Let the debate begin!

Hoist Upon Their Own Petard

The GOP has made no bones about taking the gloves off after spending the last few months pretending to rise above the ankle-biting rhetoric about the Iraq War from the Democrats. After watching them slowly tip over the edge in the past month, openly calling for a recognition of defeat in Iraq and an immediate evacuation of troops from the region, the Republicans have opened up on Democratic Party leaders such as their chairman, their Congressional leadership, and their last Presidential nominee for their vacillating and pusillanimous responses. I covered most of this recent history in my last Daily Standard column, "Rally Round The (White) Flag, Boys!"

For their part, the Democrats loudly responded that they have been quoted out of context. Drudge now reports that the Republicans intend on fixing that problem with a few web ads, using the actual recorded statements of each to show the nation that the Democrats have given in to defeatism:

A Democratic strategist who had the web ad described to her said, “This is way over the top but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue to pander to the anti-war activists within our party.”

The web video advances the Republican contention that the Democrats only have a “retreat and defeat” message on the war in Iraq.

The video highlights the effect Democrats can have on the morale of U.S. soldiers.

One Republican strategist familiar with the ad said, “The Democrats, especially Howard Dean have a way of trying to turn the tables and say ‘that’s not what I meant’ – its just those ‘evil Republicans’ This video will make them crazy – it reinforces what they really believe with what they actually said – and that is devastating for the Democratic Party.”

This comes as Iraqis predict an even greater turnout for their elections next week, the first under their new constitution that will bring a regularly elected democratic nation to life where a genocidal tyranny existed less than three years earlier. Even the Sunnis predict a heavy turnout among Saddam's former elite, as they have belatedly realized that the armed struggle for supremacy over the Kurds and Shi'a had no chance of even getting off the ground, let alone achieving any success:

A top Sunni party official predicted yesterday that Sunnis would vote in large numbers in landmark elections next week in spite of a campaign of violence that intensified yesterday with more than 30 people killed in a bus bomb and the first reported killing of an American hostage in more than a year.

Ala'a Makky, a member of political bureau of the Sunni Islamic Party, said in an interview that he thinks the Sunni turnout will be much higher this time than in elections to an interim parliament in January. "I think most of the Iraqi population is now convinced that the elections and political solutions and reconciliation are the only solutions for the current problems," he said. "I think the Iraqi people will go ahead and vote in the elections, as it is so critical," he said. "I don't think [Zarqawi] can disrupt this process."

David Satterfield, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, also said yesterday that attempts to draw Sunnis into the political process were working. "Sunnis have come into the political process and they've come into it in a big way and they've come into it in an overwhelming way, in terms of numbers," he said during an telephone interview conducted from Washington. Having spent most the past year boycotting the political process, Sunnis "will be elected proportionate to their population," Mr. Satterfield predicted

The irony for the Democrats is that they have relied so heavily on making George Bush the focus of their electoral strategy that literally any good news from Iraq now completely discredits them. That's why people like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi have ratcheted up the hysteria in the last several weeks approaching the next election; if successful, it demonstrates that they had sold out the US for their own petty electoral interests. They need a failure in Iraq, thanks to the stupidity of their strategy through two electoral cycles. Instead of taking Joe Lieberman's advice in 2004 and accepting the Iraq War as a bipartisan effort, so that they could focus the election on domestic issues, the Democrats took up the International ANSWER banner and argued for the most radical positions available.

Now they want to bug out just before the Iraqis make it impossible for them to declare defeat any more, the last tactic open that will ensure a failure that they can then hang onto Bush. A few prominent Democrats have started to balk at this, notably Lieberman himself, Steny Hoyer, and even Hillary Clinton to a smaller degree. They understand that the Democrats have just launched themselves off the cliff, and the GOP is about to ensure that they can't reach back for a parachute for an easy landing.

Rice Gets Europe On Board War Policy, Media Shrugs

Condoleezza Rice has reversed what the media tried hard to blow up into a crisis between the US and its European partners by challenging their commitment to security and their unfounded suspicions of illegal activity by American interrogators of captured terrorists. European leaders have given Rice a resounding vote of confidence. The Washington Post dutifully reports this -- on page A16:

European foreign ministers attempted to make peace with the United States on Thursday over the controversy concerning treatment of terrorism suspects, with many saying they were satisfied with visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's explanations of U.S. policy. ...

Some ministers, such as Bernard Bot of the Netherlands, had indicated they still had deep concerns over U.S. policy, despite a week-long effort by Rice to defuse the tensions. But afterward, ministers reported that they were satisfied with the U.S. position.

"Secretary Rice has covered basically all of our concerns," Bot said, adding that if the secret prisons existed -- which he called "pure speculation" -- Rice "has made it quite clear" that the United States did not violate international law in such facilities.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier added that Rice "has reiterated that in the United States international obligations are not interpreted differently than in Europe."

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared at a news conference that Rice had "cleared the air" and that he considered the issue closed. "You will not see this discussion continuing" at NATO, he said.

The report by Glenn Kessler provides an amusing, if desperate, attempt to keep the kerfuffle alive by reminding us every other paragraph that the Dutch might not be completely satisfied with Rice's representations. However, after making a point of the Dutch effort to open its own detention facility in Afghanistan -- which would not concern American interests in the least, as the information gathered there would still get shared with us -- Kessler quotes the Dutch foreign minister in complete contradiction to his assertion, three paragraphs later. The Post then buries the entire story in the back of their news section after covering the story on CIA detentions at or near the front page for the last few weeks.

What supposedly started as a blockbuster story turns out to amount to nothing more than common sense. The CIA detains terrorists -- what a shock! They interrogate their prisoners! They don't want people to know where these terrorists are held so that we can get intel from them to uncover attack operations against us and our allies! Stone The Crows! The American media, starting with the Post, somehow still have not put these operations in the context of the war being fought by America, the UK, Australia, and a number of other nations against Islamofascist terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. If they had thought for a moment about that, then the revelation that the CIA interrogates enemy operatives captured in battle areas hiding among civilian populations should cause no more surprise than a historian discovering that the OSS interrogated infiltrators during World War II, usually in secret locations and without worrying about Miranda rights.

Dr. Rice deserves our congratulations for reminding Europe that the fact that we detain terrorists for interrogation does not equate to a policy of torture, and the foreign ministers should be congratulated for recovering from an overdose of American media hysteria. The Post and the other outlets who followed their folly should take a couple of chill pills and come up for air before blowing the next story way out of proportion. And if they want to be taken seriously, then they should put the denouement of their sky-is-falling narratives in the same place they put them when the story broke: A-1.

Boston Muslim Group Major Al-Qaeda Fundraiser: Treasury Dept

The Treasury Department has identified the Islamic Society of Boston and its founder, the now-imprisoned Abdurahman Alamoudi, as major financial contributors to the al-Qaeda network and a conduit for Saudi funds to radical Islamist terrorism. The New York Sun's Meghan Clyne reports that the politically-connected Muslim group has several connections to terrorism, not just al-Qaeda -- revelations that will prove embarrassing for both political parties:

In July, Alamoudi was cited in a Treasury Department press release designating the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a U.K.-based Saudi oppositionist organization, led by Saad al-Faqih, as providing material support for Al Qaeda. MIRA "received approximately $1 million in funding through Abdulrahman Alamoudi," the statement said.

"According to information available to the U.S.Government," the statement continues, "the September 2003 arrest of Alamoudi was a severe blow to Al Qaeda, as Alamoudi had a close relationship with Al Qaeda and had raised money for Al Qaeda in the United States." The Treasury Department has declined to provide further information, saying the material is classified.

Alamoudi, an Eritrean-born naturalized American citizen, was arrested in 2003 on charges of having participated in a Libyan assassination plot against Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, an allegation to which he admitted in the 2004 plea agreement with federal prosecutors. He was also stripped of his American citizenship after admitting to having obtained it fraudulently. ...

Before his arrest, Alamoudi enjoyed extensive connections to Washington lawmakers as the founder and president of the American Muslim Council. During the Clinton administration, according to press accounts, Alamoudi often visited the White House to meet with and advise President Clinton, now-Senator Clinton, and Vice President Gore. In 2001, Alamoudi appeared with President Bush at a prayer vigil for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon.

This may deal a significant blow to American Muslims, many of whom might have no idea that these large organizations exist to funnel their money to radical causes overseas. In the case of ISB, al-Qaeda did not constitute its only beneficiary. One of the listed trustees for the group in IRS filings was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, identified as a trustee for tax years 1998-2000. Qaradawi lost his visa for entry to the US for his open support of Hamas and its activities in the Palestinian territories. ISB claims that Qaradawi's inclusion on its forms was an "administrative oversight", but the inclusion of such a person as one of Alamoudi's partners in the management of ISB sounds more like a pattern of terrorist support.

The ISB has threatened to sue almost everyone who has written anything critical about their operation. Andrew McCarthy, one of the prosecution team for the first World Trade Center attack, says that this is no coincidence. The lawsuits are intended to keep people from learning too much about their finances, including the millions of dollars that the Saudis and others have poured into ISB to establish its mosques in the Boston region -- and to further legitimize the organization within the US. ISB already has a sweetheart deal from Boston for development in Roxbury, an arrangement challenged by a local resident in a lawsuit regarding state support of religion. That lawsuit led to investigations by the Boston Herald and Fox TV, spurring ISB lawsuits for defamation against both media outlets.

Alamoudi has a 23-year sentence to serve, and when he finishes it he should get deported immediately. If the Treasury Department has the evidence it says it does, it should seize all assets of ISB and freeze their accounts in order to ensure that no more money gets into the hands of our enemies both here and abroad. Lastly, it is long past time for these Islamic societies to declare which side of the war they support -- the side of the radical Islamists who want to impose a global theocracy of shari'a, or the side of the nations that have allowed them to worship freely and live among others as equals and not dhimmis.

Harper Calls For Goodale Resignation Over Insider Trading Scandal

Tory leader and PM candidate Stephen Harper called for the resignation of Ralph Goodale over allegations of Liberal involvement in insider trading based on early warning of policy decisions by Goodale. The Finance Minister's office stands accused of leaking information to selected investors in order to allow them to profit off of policy statements before being made public:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper called today for Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to resign his cabinet post, saying that there is "growing evidence" that there was a leak of policy changes for income trusts that sparked trading in financial markets and that the information "may have leaked from senior Liberal sources."

"I would say that given the revelations we now have, given the information we now know, that in any country, in any other advanced democratic country where we had a government that operated according to normal ethical standards, the finance minister would have already resigned, rather than continuing to deny and stonewall information," Mr. Harper told reporters at a campaign stop in North Bay, Ont.

"I hope they'll take responsibility, Mr. Goodale will step aside, and we'll get to the bottom of this."

Mr. Goodale announced on Nov. 23 a reversal of the freeze of tax rulings on income trusts, but there was a flurry of trading in the trusts on financial markets hours before the announcement. Mr. Goodale has denied any leak, and said there are authorities to investigate such allegations.

This scandal appears to have escalated rather quickly, as opposed to the slow build of interest in Adscam over the past year. Investor's Voice has also called for a public investigation by the Ontario Security Commission in order to restore public trust in the FMO. Diane Urquhart, the investor advocate, appeared on the television show Business Morning to demand an annoucement so that Canadians can continue to have faith in the investment markets (video here). Goodale has denied releasing any information prior to his speech, but market specialists like Urquhart suspect something happened; the pattern of exploitation appears too strong to be coincidental.

At the very least, Urquhart has it right -- Canada needs an independent investigation that follows the money of those who benefited from these transactions and find out the connections of those involved. This could get bigger than Adscam.

Will The Circle Stay Unbroken?

It's not unusual during this time of year to get nostalgic for Christmases past -- when life resembled the Norman Rockwell images of American culture and children enjoyed simpler pleasures and more innocent pastimes. It seems like so much of Christmas these days has not just disappeared under waves of commercialism, but now of politically-correct bickering that makes even the phrase "Merry Christmas" a statement pregnant with purpose, rather than just a celebration of the season. The burden gets heavy enough to tire even the most fervent optimist at times.

For instance, when my sister and I were small, we waited impatiently for the Christmas television specials as an indication that the season had truly arrived. For us, Christmas season began with "A Charlie Brown Christmas", or "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty The Snowman". Even when we got a little older and I tried to act as though I was a bit too cool for the baby stuff, "The Grinch That Stole Christmas", featuring Boris Karloff's baritone narration never failed to draw me back in.

Now, of course, we can watch these whenever we want, thanks to the advances of technology -- but in doing so, they lost a bit of their charm. That's the one quality we gave up when we grew older and demanded instant access to our touchstones of childhood. Tonight, however, the First Mate and I had the wonderful experience of watching these classics through the use of that technology with the Little Admiral, who at three understands the basic themes now of these programs. It brought back the wonder and anticipation that we used to feel as children. She loved the DVD set we bought of "Rudolph" and "Frosty" (which also included "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", which we saved for later). She also, to my surprise, really enjoyed the Peanuts Christmas special that I TiVo'd from ABC this week, especially the music -- which really surprised me.

I couldn't help but wonder whether we will be able to make this a holiday tradition for her the way our parents made it for us, and in what form she will pass it on to her kids and grandkids when the time comes. Time brings change, and not all change is bad. But having the opportunity to share that tradition with my granddaughter tonight reminded me that the important point to remember is that while circumstances change, we can continue to share the same qualities and values as we have at this time of year with our loved ones across the generations.

More Evidence Of Insider Trading In Canadian Scandal

Last month I posted about a potential new scandal brewing for the Liberal Party in Canada involving insider trading on speculation about tax policy. Now it appears that more evidence and testimony gives credence to the charges that the government leaked advance warning on its tax policy to certain investors, allowing them to take advantage of the information to maximize their profits at the expense of other investors:

In the two weeks since Canada's Finance Minister announced a tax cut to dividend-paying stocks, the big question in financial and political circles is whether some people had advance notice of his Nov. 23 announcement. A CTV Whistleblower investigation into what happened that day has found that may have been the case. ...

Ralph Goodale's announcement was good news for income trust investors -- and those who buy dividend-paying stocks. He reversed his earlier plan to possibly tax the trusts. He also decided to cut taxes on dividends, to help dividend-paying stocks look as attractive to investors as the popular income trusts do.

But, some of those stocks jumped inexplicably late in the afternoon, hours before Goodale told the Canadian public anything about his plan. CTV found more evidence of a possible leak than just that jump in trading.

First, several credible sources in financial circles confirmed to CTV they heard definitively -- before the markets closed -- that an announcement would be coming after the close of trading that day.

Many people were exchanging emails, about an anticipated 5 p.m. news conference. That seemingly advance notice contradicts the Finance Department's position that they told no one -- not even privately -- about the timing of the hotly anticipated announcement, not the day or the hour it would come.

Hours before the government announced its decision, people began posting rumours of the impending decision on bulletin boards and in e-mails. In language very close to that used in Goodale's announcement, two people posted at 11:14 and 3:59 -- the latter two hours before the announcement -- that Goodale would announce a reduction in dividend taxation to "level the playing field" and that the reduction would take the form of an increase in the dividend tax credit. Later that evening, Goodale did eventually announce that the government would "help to level up the playing field as between corporations and trusts and we're going to be doing that by ending double taxation on dividends," when he met with the press.

This could still be coincidence, but some market analysts disagree. They claim the text match is too specific and that the pre-release activity show certain investors working off of a plan that specifically took advantage of this policy just before its announcement. So far, the RCMP and the Ontario Securities Commission have yet to investigate, but given the earlier corruption of Adscam, it would appear that this warrants some kind of check before the evidence disappears altogether.

Judge Lets Level 3 Sex Offender Walk

In a mind-boggling decision, a Dakota County judge allowed a Level 3 sex offender -- the kind most likely to re-offend -- to walk out of a courtroom after spending two months without making required contacts or registering his whereabouts with the police. Jeremy Queen had turned himself in after a two-month search for the chronic parole violator and spent Tuesday night in jail. Thanks to Dakota County judge Ed Lynch, by Wednesday morning he had won release on his own recognizance:

A convicted sex offender wanted by police for failing to report his whereabouts turned himself in to the Dakota County jail on Tuesday night, only to be released the next morning by a Dakota County District Court judge.

Prosecutors, dismayed by the decision, said Jeremy John Queen, 26, has a long history of ducking authorities and violating par-ole. Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said he will ask the judge to revise his decision and impose bail on Queen, considered one of the county's most dangerous sex offenders.

Queen, who was convicted when he was 17 for having sex with a 12-year-old girl, moved into a house near Apple Valley High School in January but disappeared two months ago. ...

On Tuesday night, after an article appeared in the Pioneer Press and related television coverage, Queen walked into the lobby of the jail in Hastings and surrendered.

After spending the night behind bars, Queen was arraigned before Dakota County District Judge Ed Lynch, who ordered him released on his own recognizance until his next court appearance, scheduled for Feb. 13.

Do we never learn? This man has been diagnosed as the most dangerous kind of sex offender, has twice been convicted for sexual offenses, and has consistently refused to meet the requirements of his release. He hacked off an electic bracelet meant for house arrest once in order to keep police from tracking his movements. Queen moved into a house less than a mile from his old high school. During his absence, a parent tipped police that she recognized him as the man her teenage daughter had recently befriended.

I'm not sure how many red flags Ed Lynch needs, but apparently the poor man must be colorblind as well as utterly lacking in sound judgment. Once the system managed to get Queen back under its control, it should have made damned sure he would stay there. Instead, despite his violations of the law, we have Queen roaming freely among the residents of Dakota County -- myself, my wife, my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter among them.

Here's a picture of "Q-Ball", one of Queen's aliases. He's 26 years old and has a history of hanging out with 12-15 year old girls. Thanks to Ed Lynch, he's not wanted for anything any more, but if you see him hanging around arcades or middle- or high-school facilities or functions, better warn potential victims to keep their distance. In the meantime, we can't get rid of Ed Lynch as a judge, but the next time his name appears on a ballot to reconfirm him as a Minnesota jurist, let's all remember who he set free among us and vote accordingly.

Not One Of Langley's Finest Moments

The CIA should find itself embarrassed by the article in today's New York Sun on how CIA flights in Europe got exposed. The explanation unearthed by Josh Gerstein shows little imagination and even less care in covering the tracks of what supposedly amounted to a top-secret operation, and should concern Americans about the competence of the CIA in protecting wartime operations:

In May 2004, the Swedish show reported on the CIA's involvement with the expulsion of two men from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001. The tail number of an aircraft involved in the transfer led quickly to information about at least six other occasions on which the same small Gulfstream V jet was used to move prisoners from various locations to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. "Once we had the identity of the plane, which we were able to find out in many ways - a plane leaves a lot of traces - it was obvious the plane was fishy," Mr. Laurin said.

When a producer working on the broadcast called one of the American firms involved in leasing the plane, the call was returned 15 minutes later by the Swedish intelligence service, which said it was calling at the request of its "U.S. cooperation partners."

Mr. Laurin said almost every name linked to the company that appeared to own the aircraft, Premiere Executive Transport Services Incorporated of Dedham, Mass., seemed to be fake. "You weren't able to trace the name to any living individual," he said. "They were all living in post office boxes in Virginia."

One has to wonder whether the CIA deserves its reputation for the way it conducts intelligence operations these days, or if it just has coasted on the hard-earned respect it earned during its halcyon days of the Cold War. The ease in which the Swedish press blew the CIA cover makes one wonder whether the CIA even cared that its European assets could get exposed. The Swedes say that American taxpayers should get upset and demand that the new CIA director fire everyone involved, which doesn't sound like a bad idea considering the results here.

With efforts like this, I could even start believing that the CIA intended Valerie Plame to remain NOC-listed even after having her drive to the Langley offices to work for the last several years.

The excuse given by intelligence observers is that the CIA didn't think about the way information could get pooled in the Internet age and how amateurs could start connecting the dots. Well, why the hell not? The US started running their own data-mining operations in the 1990s (LIWA, Able Danger among them. Shouldn't that proven capability have tipped them to strengthen their covers instead of shrugging their shoulders and hoping for the best? A former CIA mission head notes that the countries involved knew the nature of the flights and therefore the flights would not have been considered clandestine, but that hardly makes sense. The CIA doesn't assess the need for secrecy based on the status of our friends but the threat from our enemies -- or at least that should be how they assess it.

I suggest we convert the Langley PO boxes into recruitment addresses for those involved in keeping this operation under wraps, and Congress should ask Porter Goss if peek-a-boo has been added as a supposedly effective method of hiding agents in the last ten years. My three-year-old granddaughter seems to think it works, and she's the only one who might have been fooled by the cover arranged for these CIA flights in Europe.

I Guess The UN Has Closed Its Sex Camps

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights took the occasion of Human Rights Day to scold the United States for its conduct of the war on terror, instead of focusing on such enlightened nations as Syria, Myanmar, Zimbabwe -- and Turtle Bay itself. Louise Arbour's focus on the US resulted in a slap back from John Bolton, who warned the UN that the lack of credibility demonstrated by such actions would damage efforts to reform the UN:

Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, presented the most forceful criticism to date of U.S. detention policies by a senior U.N. official, asserting that holding suspects incommunicado in itself amounts to torture. ...

She also expressed concern in a news conference with efforts by some U.S. policymakers to exempt CIA interrogators from elements of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Vice President Cheney's office has sought to block efforts by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other lawmakers to subject CIA personnel from the 1984 convention's ban on the use of cruel or degrading treatment of detainees. ...

John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, criticized Arbour, calling it "inappropriate" for her to choose a Human Rights Day celebration to criticize the United States instead of such rights abusers as Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe. He also warned that it would undercut his efforts to negotiate formation of a new human rights council that would exclude countries with bad rights records.

"Today is Human Rights Day. It would be appropriate, I think, for the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights to talk about the serious human rights problems that exist in the world today," Bolton told reporters. "It is disappointing that she has chosen to talk about press commentary about alleged American conduct. I think the secretary of state has fully and completely addressed the substance of the allegations, so I won't go back into that again other than to reaffirm that the United States does not engage in torture."

He added: "I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."

Eighteen months after reporters and investigators began finding evidence of exploitation of refugees in almost every camp run by the UN, Arbour makes an odd choice by attacking the United States. UN-run refugee camps have turned into seraglios for UN staffers, with women and even little girls forced to give sexual favors to staffers and peackeepers alike in order to get food and medicine. It routinely selects countries like Libya and Cuba to sit on and lead its committees on Human Rights, akin to putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. In some sick and twisted way, it makes sense for Arbour to use the occasion of Human Rights Day to attack America rather than focus on all the ways the UN has promoted and allowed human-rights abuses over the past decade or more.

Bolton has it right. This demonstrates the lack of serious thought for reform at the UN. Arbour should have spoken out of humility about the UN's proven track record of abusing those under its protection and what the organization intended to do to correct it. The fact that Turtle Bay instead expanded the accepted definitions of torture to find a way to criticize us rather than clean up their own house shows that we need to issue ultimatums for reform now. No more money for UN operations of any kind should get paid until those responsible for corruption, graft, and abuse of refugees resign or get fired, from Kofi Annan all the way down to the lowliest staffers in Liberian, Congolese, Balkan, and other refugee camps who forced little girls to turn tricks or starve.

Once the UN does that and starts using occasions like Human Rights Day to hold real bloodthirsty nutcases like Robert Mugabe accountable, then we can start taking the UN seriously again. As it is, Arbour only confirms that the UN has become a useless joke with no more credibility than the Mugabes it protects and emulates.

The 20-Foot Rings Of Able Danger

AJ Strata has more on the Able Danger story tonight, following the release of a National Journal article at Govexec.com that might fill in some of the blanks on why the program lost its backing in mid-2000, just when it appeared to make headway against al-Qaeda. As Shane Harris reports, the second dry run of the data harvest that eventually spawned Able Danger turned up more politically difficult names in connection to Chinese espionage:

The experiment "went well," the former IDC employee said. "Unfortunately, it went too well." During construction of those link diagrams, the names of a number of U.S. citizens popped up, including some very prominent figures. Condoleezza Rice, then the provost at Stanford University, appeared in one of the harvests, the by-product of a presumably innocuous connection between other subjects and the university, which hosts notable Chinese scholars.

William Cohen, then the secretary of Defense, also appeared. As one former senior Defense official explained, the IDC's results "raised eyebrows," and leaders in the Pentagon grew nervous about the political implications of turning up such high-profile names, or those of any American citizens who were not the subject of a legally authorized intelligence investigation. Rumors still abound about other notable figures caught up in the IDC's harvest. "I heard they turned up Hillary Clinton," the official said. The experiment was not continued.

"We determined that there were significant methodological problems," Hamre said of the IDC's techniques. Data-correlation analyses on raw information "produce impossibly large numbers of potential correlations. The numbers are too large to be operationally helpful."

But it appears not everyone in the military establishment agreed. Over the next several months, Kleinsmith estimated he gave more than 200 briefings on the IDC to members of Congress, generals, and senior government officials. "I could tell in three to four minutes if someone 'got it,' " Kleinsmith said. Hamre got it, he noted. And so, it seems, did officials with the Army's Special Operations Command, who, despite the unease over the China experiment, came to the IDC asking for information about a then-shadowy organization called Al Qaeda.

This history of LIWA and Able Danger makes the timelines a bit more clear than in the past. The Pentagon ran the Chinese experiment in 1999, during the height of the impeachment backlash and well after the worst of the Chinese campaign-funds scandal. Turning up Hillary as part of the research would not have been all that dramatic, as speculation about how closely the Chinese had tied themselves to the Clintons through the efforts of their intelligence agents. In fact, it probably would have culled John Kerry's name as well.

I doubt that the data proved anything about Hillary other than the connections to the already well-known Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying. Nevertheless, as the results got wider exposure in Washington, the pressure of having all these important political players sitting in a database must have triggered a case of nerves at the Pentagon. A year later, as the IDC went through the Able Danger exercise using the same data harvest as part of its information, the order came down to kill all data that contained American citizens -- and one would have to presume that everyone understood that citizens such as anyone named Clinton would get especial scrutiny. That data cull crippled the ongoing effort to find al-Qaeda assets inside the US, although the AD team continued to focus outside the country for more terrorists using the technology.

Read the rest of this piece for an excellent rundown of Able Danger and the context from which it sprang, and then recheck AJ Strata's excellent analysis of the information. I'd put this as confirmation of some of the most interesting theories about the program, but it still doesn't explain why the FBI never went back and rechecked on the status of this promising counterterrorism program.

The Brown Pants Party

In my latest Daily Standard column, I argue that the Democrats have in their desperation finally come up with a war strategy -- only they had to reach back 140 years to find it. "Rally Round the (White) Flag, Boys!" notes the discomforting and embarrassing similarities of the Democrats' current stance on the war in Iraq and their take on the Civil War in 1864:

Not even during the Vietnam War did a major American party position itself to support abject retreat as a wartime political platform. For that, one has to go back to the Civil War, when the Democrats demanded a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal from the South. Celebrating the popularity of former General George McClellan, who had come from the battlefield to represent a party whose platform demanded a negotiated settlement (which McClellan later disavowed), the Confederates assumed that the war could be over within days of McClellan's presumed victory over the controversial and hated Abraham Lincoln. Even some Republicans began to question whether Lincoln should stand for reelection--until Sherman took Atlanta and exposed McClellan as a defeatist and an incompetent of the first order.

Murtha's demand for a pullout gave the party's leadership a chance to openly embrace defeatism, much as McClellan did for Northern Democrats in 1864, using McClellan's field experience for the credibility to argue that the American Army could not hope to defeat the enemy it faced.

The column recounts the hysteria and confusion among Democrats over the past few days, especially the declaration of defeat made by Democratic Party chair Howard Dean as an argument to elect more Democrats. The result is the adoption of the white flag as a party banner. The title of this post, however, refers to an old joke about a remarkably successful military commander who demanded his red shirt whenever he went into battle so that his men would not get demoralized if he was wounded and started to bleed. I'll leave it to CQ readers to figure out why he wore the brown pants.

Shelton: Able Danger My Idea

General Hugh Shelton confirmed that the Able Danger program had backing from the highest levels of the military and that he had at least two personal briefings on the progress of the program tracking al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 -- again raising the question as to why the 9/11 Commission ignored this program entirely in its supposedly thorough look into American preparedness for a terrorist attack:

In his first public comments on the initiative, which some former intelligence officers now say was code-named Able Danger, Shelton also confirmed that he received two briefings on the clandestine mission - both well before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Right after I left SOCOM (Special Operations Command), I asked my successor to put together a small team, if he could, to try to use the Internet and start trying to see if there was any way that we could track down Osama bin Laden or where he was getting his money from or anything of that nature," Shelton said Tuesday in an interview. ...

In Washington, sometime between 1999 and 2001, Shelton received a more extensive briefing from Defense Intelligence Agency officers involved in the program.

Shelton said he doesn't recall hearing or seeing Atta's name in those briefings or at any time before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"To be candid, there were not many specifics in it," Shelton said of the later briefing. "There were no names that surfaced that had not surfaced before through normal intelligence channels. There was no identification of any new players, or anything of that type."

Shelton, though, said that a CIA representative and an FBI representative were present at the second briefing. And he said, "I know for a fact that I was told that they had been a part of the effort" to track al-Qaida through computer data-mining.

That puts a much different light on the status of the program. Up to now, we've heard that the FBI knew nothing of AD and its efforts. Now we have the FBI attending high-level briefings on its progress. No one before this, to my knowledge, has shown any operational awareness of the program on the FBI's part prior to the 9/11 attacks. Doesn't that beg the question of why the FBI never followed up on AD and any information it might supply?

Check out AJ Strata for more, and we'll stay on top of this as developments warrant.

Hillary Facing Challenge From The Left?

Just when it appears that the GOP's efforts to unseat Hillary Clinton have collapsed with District Attorney Jeanette Pirro's wobbly candidacy for the Senate seat, Clinton may face even more challenge from the Left. Another anti-war candidate has announced his intention to run against Clinton, and this one has some union clout:

A longtime labor advocate launched his challenge to Senator Clinton's reelection while another anti-war Senate hopeful yesterday suggested the two join forces against Mrs. Clinton in the 10-month lead-up to the Democratic primary.

A former head of the National Writers Union, Jonathan Tasini, announced his bid in a 20-minute speech to supporters and members of the press at the W Hotel in Union Square. The address largely focused on his opposition to the Iraq war: He said Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats who voted for it "abdicated their responsibility to the American people and to the values of the Democratic Party."

This could bode well for a serious GOP challenger to the Senate seat Clinton currently holds. By forcing Hillary to address her left flank, it keeps her from preparing for her 2008 candidacy by claiming the middle ground. She will have to convince the anti-war factions that she has their interests in mind -- which could lead to statements and promises that will make great fodder for the Republicans in 2008. If she loses too much ground to the challengers, her star may soon fade from the Presidential sweepstakes, even though her re-election to the Senate seems assured. A close election next year probably reduces serious consideration for her Presidential candidacy.

If she can't shake these guys off early, watch for Clinton to start embracing that "immediate strategic redeployment" theme offered by Howard Dean this week. That will be Hillary's jump-the-shark moment, if it occurs.

Babs Discovers Editors

Barbara Streisand discovers why we bloggers mistrust the Exempt Media and write for ourselves. She's miffed because she wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times and they had the audacity to edit her letter when they published it. Babs presents the letter as written on her website, and then reproduces the resulting publication. I won't excerpt it here; you should read it for yourself.

I have to admit that she has a point about the hack editing job done on her letter. Unfortunately, she wrote a hack letter in support of a hack columnist (Robert Scheer) who should have been terminated years ago. Be that as it may, the resulting edit removed the key point of her letter -- that she felt strongly enough about the Chicagoization of the LA Times that she had canceled her subscription. It shows that people on both the right and the left have come to a similar conclusion about the cluelessness of Tribune management of the LA paper, and apparently that charge hits a little too close to home to get published in the Letters section of the Times.

Now, after complaining about editorless bloggers, Babs finally gets to experience the frustration that launched a million blogs. Now if she would only discover permalinks, she'd be all set. (via The Corner and an amused Jonah Goldberg)

Have They Forgotten The Mission?

A few CQ readers sent me a surprising story this morning regarding a decision by some "megachurches" to close their doors for Christmas. The AP reports that pastors at these large, non-denominational Christian houses of worship have decided that one of the more holy days for Christians should give way to secular celebrations instead:

This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country. Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anti-cipating low attendance on what they call a family day.

Critics within the evangelical community, more accustomed to doing battle with department stores and public schools over keeping religion in Christmas, are stunned by the shutdown. ...

Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.

"If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don't go to church, how likely is it that they'll be going to church on Christmas morning?" she said.

Among the other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky., near Lexington, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside of Dallas. North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., outside of Atlanta, said on its website that no services will be held on Christmas Day or New Year's Day, which also falls on a Sunday. A spokesman for North Point did not respond to requests for comment.

Given that the "war on Christmas" has been pushed by churches such as these, I find these decisions rather stunning. As a Catholic, my experience has proven just the opposite: more people show up for Christmas and Easter (the holiest Christian celebration) than any other time of the year. Closing the doors due to a drop in attendance on Christmas morning would never get consideration at a Catholic parish, nor I suspect at most mainline Protestant churches either.

If the remarks made by Parkinson are representative, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian mission by the megachurches. The point of operating a church isn't just to convince the unchurched to attend -- it's to build and minister an entire community, including those who are "churched' -- to keep them in that status. In order to do that, the ministry has to take the mission seriously. What kind of message does it send when the church closes its doors and does not offer the opportunity for even a part of its community to gather and pray on one of the most holy celebrations in the Christian calendar? It sends a message that popularity trumps truth and secular concerns supercede spirituality.

It says, "We give up."

I'm sure that the people who work at these churches want to spend the day with their families, and the lower attendance makes them feel that their efforts have less worth. That only remains true, though, if one considers popularity an accurate measure of the mission. Most churches do not -- they understand that the mission requires churches and ministers to take a stand for the principles of Christianity, including the sacrifice for which it calls, of which attending a 90-minute service on Christmas historically represents the least of sacrifices made for the mission. Church doors should remain open to force sinners and the "churched" alike to remember this truth.

If Christian churches want to reclaim Christmas for themselves, then they need to literally show up to do so. Closing the doors is nothing less than surrender.

Saddam Keeps On Manipulating

Apparently not satisfied with the results of his constant interruptions and disrepectful outbursts in court, Saddam Hussein has decided to escalate his manipulation of his trial and the media coverage by refusing to attend. The trial found itself at a standstill this morning when the former dictator refused to go into court, leaving the nonplussed judges wondering what to do next:

Saddam Hussein's trial was delayed Wednesday after the ousted president refused to attend the session, court officials said. Defense lawyers huddled with the judges in hopes of resolving the latest test of wills in the often-unruly trial.

An angry Saddam threatened at the end of the Tuesday court session to boycott the next day's proceedings after complaining that he and the seven other co-defendants had been mistreated by the "unjust court."

Court officials on Wednesday said Saddam was sticking by his vow, and the judges were trying to decide whether to proceed without him.

If the differences cannot be resolved, an official said the court might hold a closed session to search for solutions.

The resolution of this issue should be simpler than when Saddam kept disrupting the court. A defendant has a right to attend court and face his accusers, to cross-examine witnesses and to argue on his own behalf. That doesn't equate to a necessity of the defendant to attend the trial. If a defendant refuses on his own accord to show up and exercise those rights, then the People still have a right to continue the trial. Even if the defendant does want to attend, the rights of the defendant to participate do not automatically override the rights of the People to a fair trial. Disruptive behavior can and should result in removal of the defendant from court when it becomes contemptuous of the court's authority.

The Iraqis should get tough on Saddam. They've shown him deference; now they need to show some steel. If he prefers to putter around in his cell and let his lawyers deal with his trial, so be it. This is an attempt -- an all-too-successful attempt, in all likelihood -- to get the headlines off of the testimony of the victims by making himself the center of attention again. In one sense, it's typical behavior from a sociopath, but in terms of PR in Iraq, it's the only smart strategy left to him. The court needs to make sure that his absence winds up backfiring on him by continuing to present witnesses to Saddam's atrocities, this time without Saddam's running commentary distracting the global media covering the event.

Let him rot in his cell. I don't need to hear much from Saddam anyway, and I wouldn't trust anything he says unless it came accompanied by a video and corroboration from the Archangel Gabriel. The court should plow ahead and reveal Saddam's foolishness as well as his ghoulishness.

UPDATE: The show must go on, even without the uplifting presence of Uncle Saddy glowering from the dock:

Saddam Hussein's trial resumed Wednesday after a delay of several hours with the deposed Iraqi leader absent from the courtroom.

Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin opened the session at 3 p.m. (7 a.m. ET), about four hours late, and called the first witness.

Hussein's chair sat empty at the front of the dock, and his chief lawyer thanked Amin for continuing the proceedings.

So Saddam took his marbles and went back to his cell. Let him throw his tantrums there. Let's keep the trial moving from now on.

An Honor To Compete (Means -- I Wanna Win, Dammit!)

The voting continues at the 2005 Weblogs Awards, and so far it looks like the Daily Kos will run away with the Best Blog award, the category in which CQ competes this year. Many fine blogs have been nominated for this honor, and it's terrific just to be mentioned in the same category as them. I don't want to get too far into recommendations for specific awards -- I have a lot of friends in the blogosphere, and some of them compete against each other this year. However, I'd like to at least draw your attention to a few:

Best Canadian Blog - Near and dear to my heart this year. Be sure to check out Small Dead Animals, Angry in GWN.

Best New Blog - All Things Beautiful; Alexandra is a class act all the way.

Best Conservative Blog - Jeez, I love all these guys. Vote for a new one each day, but blogroll them all.

Best Liberal Blog - They picked a good selection for these finalists as well. I think TalkLeft (Jeralynn Merritt) and Matthew Yglesias might be the most consistently well-written of the group, and Ezra Klein makes the best arguments for the liberal cause. Right now, Americablog is hot, and I expect John Aravosis to win, which would be all right, too. I'd vote for Pennywit, but I don't know why he's not nominated ... and yes, I do read the liberal blogs (the intelligent ones) to keep up with the debate.

Best Religious Blog - Evangelical Outpost. Joe Carter always gets my vote, but if they'd have put The Anchoress here, I would have had a tough time with that one. (I think she would have a better shot at competing here, too.)

Best Media/Journalist Blog - Several of these are excellent, but Lileks is a friend of mine, so he gets my vote. Michael Yon should win here, and he deserves it.

Best Military Blog - Blackfive should top a great list of bloggers here. Visit them all.

Best Humor/Comics Blog - Day By Day gets my vote, but just barely over Protein Wisdom, Scrappleface, and Iowahawk. They're not the only deserving ones on this list, either. Blogroll all of them for much-needed laughs.

Who do you like in this contest? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Is Harry Doomed?

The Daily Mirror dishes out some Harry Potter gossip that will likely have fans buzzing for the next year or so while they wait for the final installment of the Potter series to apparate at their local bookstores. Jim Dale, who provides the voice of Harry Potter for American audio books, claimed that author JK Rowling has tired of the Potter phenomenon and wants to kill off the character in the final installment (h/t: Hugh Hewitt):

HARRY Potter may die in the next book in the series because author JK Rowling wants to kill him off, it was claimed last night.

Actor Jim Dale - the voice of the teenage wizard in the US audio books - believes the seventh and final instalment will spell the end for Harry.

He made the astonishing claim after meeting with the writer to discuss his characterisation of the parts.

The revelation will shock millions of die-hard Potter fans.

He said: "She's lived with Harry Potter so long she really wants to kill him off." Predictions about the fate of Harry in the seventh book have enthralled millions worldwide.

I suspect that she may really consider this a possibility, but I'd still be surprised if she did it. Supposedly the death of a minor character in book 4 and a more central one in book 5 brought Rowling to tears -- and it would be hard to imagine her being detached enough at this point to put her teen and pre-teen readers through the emotional wringer that his death would bring. Still, it could go somewhat like Frodo's passing from Middle Earth -- the bittersweet realization that one had saved a world that one could no longer rejoin has resonated as a theme since Moses. That would give the series a literary touch that its popularity has not quite yet bestowed on the tales from Hogwarts.

On the other hand, we could also explore what others might do to justify Harry's death. Suppose, for example, that Rowling let Howard Dean write the last volume. We could then get treated to Voldemort as a misunderstood victim, or perhaps a bad guy but no worse than the arrogant and arbitrary Albus Dumbledore, who tried to control the wizarding world just as surely as Tom Riddle. Why, Dumbledore taught Voldemort almost everything he knew! And the Ministry of Magic spent years denying Voldemort's danger, so obviously they are to blame for all that has happened, not the evil wizard (as if there is any such thing as evil). Harry, therefore, is little more than a fool that chose the wrong horse and got himself killed for it. Good thing, too, because if he survived, he would get blamed for all the deaths that occurred just because he found it necessary to oppose Voldemort.

Now that would make one creepy ending for a delightful series.

Back To The (Meat) Grinder

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed yesterday after numerous disruptions from the defense threatened to derail the proceedings. The first of the witnesses offered their testimony after a 90-minute pout by Saddam and his defense toadies, now apparently led by American leftist and supposed idealist Ramsey Clark, who then had to listen while witnesses described the horrors inflicted on the townspeople of Dujail after an assassination attempt in 1982:

Ahmed Hassan Mohammed was the first witness to testify in the murder and torture case against Saddam, highlighting an emotional day in which the former dictator repeatedly yelled at the judge and the defense team briefly walked out in protest over the proceedings. ...

Mr. Mohammed was 15 when hundreds of families from his village were tortured and killed after an assassination attempt against Saddam. The witness said his family was among the hundreds taken to a Baghdad jail.

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," said Mr. Mohammed, who allowed his face to be shown on camera despite the risk of retaliation by Saddam's supporters.

"My brother was a student in high school, and they took him and my father to be interrogated. They tortured him with electric shocks in front of my 77-year-old father," said a sobbing Mr. Mohammed.

"Some were crippled because they had arms and legs broken," he added.

The meat-grinder image will undoubtedly remain in the minds of the judges as well as Iraqis and others who listen or follow the testimony in court. Obviously Saddam knew this as well; he began to get disruptive during this testimony, shouting slogans about Iraq while his brother-in-law yelled that the witness needed a psychiatrist. In a Western court, defense attorneys would advise clients not to react so violently to such testimony, as it only confirms the impression of the defendants' arrogance and disdain for any authority other than their own.

The testimony continues this morning, with a Dujail woman describing her treatment as a teenage girl after the roundups. She described the beginning of her four-year ordeal inside Saddam's prison camps:

Saddam sat stone-faced as the woman, identified only as "Witness A," told the court from behind a light blue curtain that she was taken into custody after the 1982 assassination attempt against the former Iraqi president in the town of Dujail.

The woman often cried during her testimony and repeatedly said she was forced to undress, implying that she had been raped but not saying so outright.

"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet ... He [IIS officer Wadah al-Sheikh] continued administering electric shocks and beating me," she said.

Following Witness A came Witness B, an elderly woman who had been in her early 50s during the Dujail incident. The emotional testimony of these survivors apparently have settled the defendants down to a mostly silent state, although they will still interject accusations of lying occasionally. It doesn't work; the defendants with their disrepectful tactics have already alienated the judges to some degree, with Saddam particularly being provocatively condescending. He called one of the witnesses "son" while warning the witness not to interrupt him, a silly and needlessly arrogant reaction that brought a rebuke from the court.

Now people can see Saddam for what he is, not just through the testimony but from his own actions in court. It is this man's rule -- the tortures, rapes, wholesale murders, and grinders for the broken bodies of his real and perceived enemies -- which some people still think would have been better to allow to continue than to give the Iraqis a chance at freedom and liberty. Now the Iraqis hold Saddam responsible for his actions, but the public nature of the trials will also beg the question for the international community as to why they waited twelve years and through seventeen UNSC resolutions demanding change to do something about this abomination. The real shame is that some still wanted him left alone to continue grinding his victims into bloody chunks and would never have lifted a finger to stop Saddam.

What The Media Ignored From Howard Dean

Yesterday, the leader of the major American opposition party called the war in Iraq "unwinnable", compared the supposed scandal over intelligence -- the same intel that Congress had seen since the Clinton administration -- with Watergate, and issued a demand that Bush immediately withdraw half of the forces in Iraq -- and yet the major newspapers could not be bothered to write their own articles about the story or include it in their print versions today. Neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post gave any kind of comprehensive report to Howard Dean's shrieking for retreat and surrender, nor to his ridiculous notion of how to fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as told to WOAI radio in San Antonio:

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years. ...

"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.

Dean didn't specify which country the US forces would deploy to, but he said he would like to see the entire process completed within two years. He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.

First, from these comments Dean makes clear that he has no idea of the difference between a strategic redeployment and running away. The former refers to a rearrangement of tactical positioning, including tactical retreat in some cases, in order to regain the initiative for a bigger push later on. "Redeployment" by disengagement with no intent to return to the battlefield has another term in military parlance: full retreat. Dean also exposes his utter lack of comprehension of the situation in Southwest Asia when he suggests that we can easily find a "friendly nation" to host 80,000 American troops while our country lacks the political will to allow them to fight. Exactly who will want to board Americans when the terrorists come after us in our new bivouac? And would Dean and the Democrats allow them to fight then, or will they claim that we're still the root cause of the terrorist activity and give up the Middle East altogether?

Dr. Dean, which country would sign up for that duty? The only nations large enough to host 80,000 American troops would be Turkey (which won't do it), Kuwait (which is on the wrong side of Iraq to easily address the issues in the west and center of Iraq), and Saudi Arabia (which is where we supposedly offended the Islamofascists initially).

Most laughably, the leader of the Democrats and the man responsible for coordinating their electoral efforts then claims that by pulling American troops out of Iraq and outside of the range of Zarqawi, we'll be better prepared to fight the insurgents -- even though we will no longer have assets on the ground gathering intelligence and conducting the kinds of patrols necessary to find and engage the enemy on our terms. Instead, Zarqawi will simply start taking over towns like Falluja and Ramadi all over again and operating in the open to spread his lunatic Islamofascism across central Iraq.

The embarassment of Dean's military analysis would make clear that the Democrats have no business conducting foreign affairs and national security for the US in this age of Islamofascist terrorism. That's why the newspapers buried Dean's comments on their web sites. They had plenty of time to write their own copy, or at least to include the AP story in their print edition. However, the NYT and the Washington Post obviously hope that Dean's comments get quickly forgotten. (The Los Angeles Times doesn't bother to mention it at all, despite the longer lead time for their newspaper.)

Perhaps this comes as no surprise -- it doesn't surprise me -- but the national media has long since decided it needs to downplay Dean if the Democrats are to survive 2006. The Democrats still haven't gotten the same message.

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle Malkin, QandO, and The Anchoress for their links. Be sure to check out their takes on this issue as well. I'll have more on this tomorrow ...

What The Media Ignored In Its DeLay Reports

Yesterday, Tom DeLay won an impressive ruling from Judge Pat Priest in his trial on money-laundering and conspiracy charges surrounding the transfers of cash between local and national GOP organizations three years ago. Priest dismissed the original indictment of DeLay, the grand jury bill in which prosecutor and DeLay's personal Jauvert Ronnie Earle felt so confident that he immediately went out and burned through two more grand juries to get a different indictment just to be sure he could get something that stuck. However, if one reads the Washington Post and the New York Times this morning, it would appear that DeLay lost yesterday -- because both papers leave out a significant portion of the story.

Both papers get this much correct:

A Texas judge dismissed one charge against Representative Tom Delay on Monday but let stand two more serious charges, complicating Mr. DeLay's hopes of regaining his post as House majority leader when Congress resumes in January. (NYT) ...

Senior District Judge Pat Priest, who took over the case after DeLay's lawyers objected to another judge on political grounds, did not rule in his 11-page decision on the issue of DeLay's culpability. In a slap at Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, who oversaw the DeLay inquiry, Priest said a grand jury had erred in indicting DeLay for conspiracy when that crime was actually not covered by the state election law when it occurred. (WaPo)

Here's what the NYT hides until the last paragraph of its coverage, and what the Washington Post doesn't bother to report at all except as a potential delay to a trial:

Judge Priest also said he had yet to rule on a defense motion of prosecutorial misconduct.

The motion regarding prosecutorial misconduct relates directly to the two remaining charges. If the judge rules that Earle acted unethically or illegally in getting the indictment, the remaining charges will also get dismissed -- and it seems a fair bet that it will happen, especially since Priest hasn't yet dismissed the motion out of hand. Earle went out after the first grand jury refused to indict DeLay on money-laundering charges and tried to get a second grand jury to bring an indictment. When that failed, he formed a third grand jury without ever telling them (or the court) about the second grand jury and got the indictment within four hours of forming the third pool. That bill comprises all the remaining charges against DeLay.

Now, perhaps Ronnie Earle has a really good explanation for his frantic grand-jury shopping, but what it most shows is an inordinate desire to find any charge at all with which to kneecap a political nemesis. After all, Earle had done fund-raising tours for the Democrats based on his efforts to put DeLay in the dock. A failure to get an indictment that would hold up on first exposure in court -- a failure easily predicted and one which Judge Priest made reality yesterday -- would expose Earle as a partisan hack of the worst kind, one who abuses his authority to defeat opponents he or his party can't defeat legitimately.

And so here we are, with the first bill of indictment completely dismissed and the second only affirmed in that the law cited in the indictment actually existed and covers the allegations made by the third grand jury. The judge warned everyone that despite his ruling on dismissal on the basis of the defense's original motion to quash, he still had prosecutorial misconduct under consideration -- and all that the dismissal meant was that the charges could go to trial, not that DeLay had been found guilty of anything. Amazingly, both newspapers offer reports this morning that avoid the pending ruling on prosecutorial misconduct and treat the ruling as a body blow to DeLay.

Talk about spin! Earle got humiliated yesterday with the loss of his primary indictment and the announcement that Priest has apparently found the motion on misconduct interesting enough to continue his deliberations. That is a result that the NY Times and Washington Post cannot hide from informed readers no matter how much they attempt to bolster Earle's campaign against DeLay.

John Kerry: American Soldiers Are Terrorists

John Kerry appeared yesterday on the CBS talking-head show, "Face The Nation", to discuss the war in Iraq with Bob Schieffer. Just as in his speeches on the Viet Nam War, Kerry has slipped into deep Left-speak in an attempt to gain national traction for his pose as a party leader. In fact, in language reminiscent of his infamous "Genghis Khan" speech before the Senate in April 1971, he yesterday referred to American soldiers as terrorists -- and then suggested that we leave terrorism to the new Iraqi army.

From page 3-4 of the CBS transcript, emphasis mine (h/t:CQ reader Dave Z):

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let me shift to another point of view, and it comes from another Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. He takes a very different view. He says basically we should stay the course because, he says, real progress is being made. He said this is a war between 27 million Iraqis who want freedom and 10,000 terrorists. He says we're in a watershed transformation. What about that?

Sen. KERRY: Let me--I--first of all, there is so much more that unites Democrats than divides us. And Democrats have much more in common with each other than they do with George Bush's policy right now. Now Joe Lieberman, I believe, also voted for the resolution which said the president needs to make more clear what he's doing and set out benchmarks, and that the policy hasn't been working. We all believe him when you say, `Stay the course.' That's the president's policy, which hasn't been changing, which is a policy of failure. I don't agree with that. But I think what we need to do is recognize what we all agree on, which is you've got to begin to set benchmarks for accomplishment. You've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not...

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: ...Iraqis should be doing that. And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Kerry thinks that the American soldiers are the terrorists in Iraq, applying that unique gift of his for moral relativity once again to indict an entire deployment of soldiers as criminals of the same order as our enemy. And Bob Schieffer sat there, without even raising an objection to Kerry's smear. Had Kerry not shown a long track record of this kind of rhetoric in the past -- and had to answer for it repeatedly during last year's presidential election -- one could possibly believe it came out as a slip of the tongue. However, he obviously has never stopped believing that the American fighting man and woman represents the same relative evil as the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and al-Qaeda.

The Democrats need to answer for this outrage. Is it really the party position that American soldiers terrorize Iraqi civilians? Do they want the Iraqis to do it instead of us? Kerry has unmasked himself and his fellow anti-war zealots for the hypocrites they are.

Will India's Government Fall Over OFF?

The Indian government, under the Congress Party, may fall due to connections described in the Volcker Report on the Oil-For-Food program. The AFP reports that a key minister faces parliamentary ire for his corruption by Saddam Hussein, and that the ruling party's blocking of parliamentary procedure may create a backlash among MPs:

India's opposition piled pressure on the government in parliament over new charges that the former foreign minister and the ruling Congress party joined a scam to profit from the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Trouble erupted within minutes of parliament assembling as MPs belonging to the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) jumped to their feet to demand the resignation of ex-foreign minister Natwar Singh, now serving as cabinet minister without portfolio.

Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said the opposition could discuss later the new charges that Singh and the Congress party received special vouchers to purchase oil cheaply from Baghdad in 2001 in return for political support.

But the opposition, whose campaign to embarrass the government in parliament fell short last week, voiced determination to capitalise on the disclosures about the scandal made on Friday by Congress insider Anil Matherani.

Chatterjee first adjourned the parliamentary session for 30 minutes, then till later in the afternoon and finally for the day.

Singh served as foreign minister for India during the latter years of Saddam's rule; he crafted and delivered the policy of opposition to the war on Iraq. Now, as Volcker has revealed, we all know he received over four million barrels of oil. Not only did Singh himself received that sum, but also the ruling Congress Party itself got a similar allotment of Iraqi oil. It looks like a payoff, and a profitable one at that.

Now CP wants to shut down the Indian parliament to keep debate from returning to accountability on why Saddam would have given Indian government officials that much oil. I doubt that will create a particularly trustful atmosphere for the government. Indians will not long resist the urge to toss out the executive and hold new elections, if that's what it takes to get answers to these questions. Expect the CP to stop its obstructionism and offer up some sacrificial lambs, and quickly, before momentum builds to replace the CP with others less involved in Saddam's corruption.

Saddam Trial: A Fit A Day

The trial of Saddam Hussein picked up where it left off, with yet another disruption from the defense team and Saddam himself, a development from which observers could practically set their watches. In this case, the entire defense team walked out when the court initially ruled that Ramsey Clark had no standing to address the court in session, and Saddam chanted Arab slogans in protest of the court's decision:

The court reversed an earlier decision not to allow Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General and member of the defence team, to make a statement challenging the legitimacy of the trial.

Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the judge, said that only Saddam's chief lawyer could address the tribunal under laws established by an elected Iraqi government, which led the defence team to walk out of the court room.

But after a 90-minute recess, Mr Amin allowed Mr Clark and another of the defence team, Najib al-Nueimi, to speak on the legitimacy of the trial and safety of the lawyers.

The former US Attorney General finally got his moment in the sun, for which he has slavished devotion on Saddam since his capture two years ago. He argued that the court needed to bring reconciliation to Iraq and not division, saying that if the court was not universally perceived as fair, it would divide Iraqis.

He waited two years to say that? That's his big revelation? Any trial that doesn't end with Saddam at the end of a noose would be "unfair" to the thousands of Iraqis who died on his command simply for the crime of being Kurdish or Shi'ite, or for opposing his dictatorial rule. The only suspense will be whether they wait until Saddam gets tried on all counts, or whether they will execute him after the first guilty verdict -- assuming he gets convicted of his crimes. The only open question now comes from how many of these victims Saddam created. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions, as suggested by National Geographic?

I understand that Saddam should get legal representation, but the long, strange trip of Ramsey Clark has always been about Ramsey Clark and had little to do with Saddam Hussein or the rule of law. Only a man perverted by his own vanished celebrity would use the trial of a genocidal maniac to get his name in the papers in one last, pathetic attempt to rejoin the "A" list of political activists. His participation in the staged disruptions of the Iraqi attempt to hold their former tyrant accountable to the law, avoiding the understandable urge to just kill him and deliver justice, will forever stain the record of Clark. It is an all-time low, even for a man of his ambulance-chasing reputation.

Fortunately, the trial continued this morning and the first of the witnesses has already taken the stand. With any luck, even Clark will lose interest in himself and leave, ending the embarrassment for himself and Americans that once respected him for his role in the Johnson administration.

Navy Ends Retreat On Ship Inventory

The Navy has determined that it must start expanding its shipbuilding immediately, after years of drastic reductions in the post-Cold War era has left the service at half of its peak strength. The New York Times reports that even a modest increase in ship-building may not get the necessary funding from Congress, however:

The plan by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, who took over as chief of naval operations last summer, envisions a major shipbuilding program that would increase the 281-ship fleet by 32 vessels and cost more than $13 billion a year, $3 billion more than the current shipbuilding budget, the officials said Friday.

While increasing the fleet size is popular with influential members of Congress, the plan faces various obstacles, including questions about whether it is affordable in light of ballooning shipbuilding costs and whether the mix of vessels is suitable to deal with emerging threats, like China's expanding navy.

"We are at a crisis in shipbuilding," a senior Navy official said. "If we don't start building this up next year and the next year and the next year, we won't have the force we need." The officials would not agree to be identified because the plan had not been made public or described to members of Congress.

The Navy's fleet reached its cold war peak of 568 warships in 1987 and has been steadily shrinking since then. Admiral Mullen's proposal would reverse that, expanding the fleet to as many as 325 ships over the next decade, with new ships put into service before some older vessels are retired, and finally settling at 313 between 2015 and 2020.

The Navy will never get back to its former strength, thanks to the wholesale destruction of entire fleets of ships as part of the "peace dividend" that we took, primarily in the 1990s. Most of those ships had remained in service too long, but the Navy never got enough money to sufficiently replace them before the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, many had gone through extensive refits, making their retirement a rather easy decision at the time.

Now that we have all discovered that history did not end in 1990 and that existential threats not only remained since then but thrived on our ignorance, the time has long since passed to bolster the Navy to ensure the security of both coasts. In a decade, the Chinese fleet may surpass our Pacific fleet in firepower, a dangerous imbalance not only for us but for our Pacific Rim allies such as Japan and South Korea. That shift in power will signal not just Beijing but other regimes and terrorist bands that the US has lost its primacy on the seas -- and that will exponentially expand our problems.

Interestingly, one of the major proponents of expanding the Navy's inventory is Susan Collins of Maine. Her support comes from more practical considerations, however; shipbuilders make up a large part of her constituency. The sometimes-Republican Senator wants George Bush to push Congress to increase the budget necessary to start putting her voters to work. I'd tend to agree with her in this instance, but the White House will surely feel a strong impulse to take advantage of the situation to get Collins on board in support of other Republican initiatives before committing to her pet project. That's how power politics get played in DC, after all.

The White House should resist that urge in this case. The Navy needs to start now on its rebuilding effort if we hope to maintain our power gap, especially in the Pacific. Playing politics with this particular issue of national security will make the GOP look less than serious about defense and erode our credibility on these topics, just when we may have repositioned the party for its 2006 run.

2005 Warblogger Awards (Update On 2005 Weblog Awards!)

John Hawkins has announced the results of the 2005 Warblogger Awards at Right Wing News. A stellar cast from the blogosphere has reviewed the bloggers under consideration, and CQ ended up in the top ranks in a couple of different categories. Thanks to all the bloggers who voted for CQ! (And a big thanks to John Hawkins for creating and hosting this set of awards.)

UPDATE: I have been nominated for Best Blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards at Wizbang. This poll allows voters to cast their selections for their favorite blog once every 24 hours. Check out the competition -- I'm up against some brilliant bloggers -- and make your selection every day until the 15th. And drop Kevin Aylward a note thanking him for all his work in setting up the Weblog Awards.

The Irish Say 'Olé!'

The BCS has announced the game lineups for the major bowls this season, and the big news isn't that the USC Trojans will meet the Texas Longhorns for the national championship; that merely fulfills a foregone conclusion after yesterday's results. No, the big news is the return of Notre Dame to the ranks of the major bowls with an invitation to the Fiesta Bowl to face the Ohio State Buckeyes on New Years Day:

In his rookie season as Notre Dame coach, Weis has the Fighting Irish (9-2) in the BCS for the first time since they lost the 2001 Fiesta Bowl 41-9 to Oregon State. They automatically qualified for a spot by finishing sixth in the BCS standings.

"I think it's a great tribute to our coaching staff and our players that they were able to turn it around that fast," Weis said.

While some complain that Notre Dame has bulked up this season on a weak schedule and gets too much credit for a 34-31 loss to USC, the Fighting Irish are college football's top drawing card.

The only people who don't appear to appreciate this matchup are Oregon fans, who complain that they have one more win than Notre Dame and Ohio State and should get a BCS matchup. They should talk to the writers who rank the teams -- or better yet, take their complaints to the NCAA. They have yet to explain why Division III teams have a playoff system but their top division somehow can't survive with a rational post-season system. In my opinion, the NCAA could easily build a 16-team or 32-team playoff system that allows for all division champs and a limited number of at-large teams to play in the bowl games as rotated by the BCS now.

The other conflicted person is Hugh Hewitt, whose beloved Buckeyes play against his favorite Fighting Irish. I knew that this dissonance would drive Hugh crazy, and indeed it has. He has adopted the Jerry Brown Fan Rationing System, only rooting for the Irish on even-numbered days, while cheering for the Buckeyes on odd-numbered days. That means on January 1, he will be backing Ohio State instead of God's Own Team. He may forgive Hugh, but the Irish will make Hugh serve a difficult penance on New Years Day.

Step back from the brink, Hugh. We're here to help.

Politically Correct Christmas Carols

Okay, I had planned on mostly staying out of the Christmas Wars this season, a madness where "Happy Holidays" has now reached the status of a war cry. However, while the First Mate and I went out for our first whack at Christmas shopping, we stopped for lunch at Applebee's. They had a music channel on that rotated through various holiday songs, mostly pleasant if forgettable pop covers of the classic carols.

One, however, couldn't be forgotten if we tried. Right in the middle of the last chorus of the song, the singer paused and added "Happy Kwanzaa" in the pause.

The song? Incredibly, it was "The Christmas Song" -- you know, the one that starts, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..." I don't know the artist who provided this cover, but the irony and the stupidity made me laugh out loud, while the FM's jaw dropped, aghast. Here's the chorus:

And so I'm offering you a simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Though it's been said many times many ways
Merry Christmas ...
Happy Kwanzaa ...
Merry Christmas ... to you.

What's next? "The Little Drummer Boy" playing his drums for Caeser Augustus? Give me a break. The song itself refers to Santa being on his way -- hardly a reference to Kwanzaa. Can we just sing Christmas carols, even these secular ones, for what they are? Especially one specifically named for the holiday?

UPDATE: CQ reader Dan notes that the Christmas carol madness continues, although along an entirely different front:

It's pretty bad. Especially considering at my 'conservative' christian college, (Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington) the Whitworth Choir is required to sing, "God rest ye merry *people*."

Never mind tradition. We don't wanna rankle people with a *sexist* Christmas Carol. What's next?

- “Frosty the Snowperson?”
- “I’m dreaming of a multicultural Christmas?”
- “Rudolph the differently-abled Reindeer-American?”
- ’Jolly’ Mature Morally-Gifted Nicholas?”

Dreaming of a multicultural holiday, Dan. Back to the Gloria Steinem Re-education Camp for you! (And wasn't it "Rudolph the Recovering-Alcoholic Reindeer"?) Seriously, Dan, thanks for the laughs and hang in there.

CQ Media Notes (Updated - With New Appearance!)

I will be on Howard Kurtz' Reliable Sources today at 10 am ET, talking about the so-called propaganda scandal that already seems to have lost steam this weekend and coverage of George Bush's speech on Iraq. I may have given the wrong time yesterday, so be sure to re-check your times. I'll be on with John from Americablog, so we should have some fun with each other.

Also, it looks like my trackbacks might be working again, so give it a shot.

UPDATE: Just got home and watched my segment on the TiVo. Not too bad, I think, and the people at CNN treated me very well. Howard Kurtz gave me plenty of time to talk. As it turned out, John Aravosis and I didn't really disagree that much on the topics involved (I thought John did a good job as well, although I didn't know he was in studio with Howard until later -- I thought he was also connected remotely). We still had a lively conversation, and I hope I can do it again sometime soon. Let me know what you think, if you caught it.

If the Political Teen didn't catch the video, I may try to copy and post it myself.

UPDATE II: The White House apparently agrees with me, according to Stephen Hadley:

President Bush is disturbed by the U.S. military's practice of paying Iraqi papers to run articles emphasizing positive developments in the country and will end the program if it violates the principles of a free media, a senior aide said Sunday.

"He's very troubled by it" and has asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to look into the pay-to-print program, national security adviser
Stephen Hadley said.

"If it is inconsistent with the policy guidance it will be shut down," Hadley said on ABC's "This Week."

Hadley acknowledged there is a need to counter the disinformation campaigns of U.S. enemies in
Iraq. "But the message we need to get out has to be truth and facts," Hadley told "Fox News Sunday."

Even if the stories are factual, "it's got to be done in a way that reinforces a free media, not undermines it," Hadley said.

I think that the program doesn't represent a huge moral or ethical problem the way some bloggers have pushed it. However, I think it will prove detrimental to our long-term strategy of creating a model democracy to change the dynamic of the Middle East. Part of that mission means supporting the establishment of an independent media. The Middle East is filled with news outlets that wind up as mouthpieces for different hidden powers -- we don't need to create more of the same. If we need to create more opportunities to get our message out, we have the resources to do it properly and above-board.

UPDATE III: I will be on the air with the guys at Pundit Review tonight at 8:20 ET, so I have the opportunity to do two classy shows in one day. Be sure to tune in over the Internet and call your questions into the show!

UPDATE IV: I had a blast on Pundit Review tonight -- I hope plenty of CQ readers got a chance to listen to the show. Let's hope that bloggers all over make this a regular Sunday night download! Also, the Political Teen did get the CNN video, and CNN has the transcript up at its site (h/t: Newsbeat1).

Bush Softening Stance Towards Iran?

According to the London Telegraph, the American ambassador to Iraq received administration authorization to review border status with the hard-line Iranian government in an attempt to stabilize the long eastern border between Iraq and Iran. Zalmany Khalilzad will also discuss supressing the Iraqi insurgency and stopping the flow of explosives and weapons from the Islamic Republic, which seems as futile as asking Saddam to remove his army from Kuwait was in 1990:

The American initiative, a further indication that the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's more moderate diplomacy has replaced the hardline foreign policy of Mr Bush's first term, follows another recent shift of tactics towards Iran.

For the first time, America is offering active support to European and Russian officials in their efforts to end the deadlock with Iran over its nuclear programme, after previously adopting a hands-off approach - to the alarm of prominent neo-conservatives who back regime change in Iran.

They believe that given Iran's track record of duplicity in international negotiations, talks will be futile and interpreted as a sign of American weakness.

Unless the talks are just a sop to European tendernesses, it's difficult to understand this exercise in terms of any real or perceived benefits. The Iranians stoke the insurgencies because they want to make it difficult for American troops to stay in the area, and they understandably want to influence Iraqi development towards their own model of government for their own security purposes. They fought a long, brutal war with Iraq two decades ago and don't want another. They also don't want 160,000 American troops on their border for any reason whatsoever. And those are just the rational reasons.

The new Ahmadinejad regime has taken the mask off of the nature of Iranian rule as implemented by the Guardian Council. Their explicit goals are to wipe out Israel, and afterwards come after the United States. Ahmadinejad held a forum on those topics just a couple of months ago and has steadfastly refused to back down from its implications. We could have issued a diplomatic ultimatum on those points alone, had we desired it and had we any kind of diplomatic contact with Teheran now.

Why should Khalilzad get involved in direct negotiations with such a regime? The only result will be a general perception that we have softened our stance on Ahmadinejad and the mullahcracy for which he fronts. If the Iraqis want to negotiate border issues, then they should do so -- but with their eyes open about the nature of their counterparts. We should refuse to recognize the criminal rule of both Ahmadinejad and his GC enablers and tell the Iranians through the press to either fix their border problems or be prepared to suffer serious consequences. That's as much "dialogue" as we need with the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism.

Rice To Europe: We're At War, You Fools

Condoleezza Rice will confront European queasiness with covert operations head-on during her tour of EU nations this week, according to the London Telegraph, by staunchly defending American transit of suspected terrorists on CIA chartered flights that sometimes refuel in EU nations. The revelation of such flights and secret detention centers in Eastern Europe caused some consternation among Europeans, who have protested the practice:

Condoleezza Rice, the United States Secretary of State, will urge European governments to back off in the continuing row over alleged secret terrorist detention camps in Eastern Europe and clandestine CIA "prison plane" flights.

Dr Rice, who begins a four-country European tour tomorrow, is preparing a "robust" defence of American treatment of terror suspects, as Washington belatedly comes out fighting on the controversy, senior European diplomats told the Sunday Telegraph.

Although Dr Rice is keen to improve diplomatic relations with Europe, she will use her visit to argue that unorthodox tactics are needed to obtain information from detainees and to prevent terror attacks.

The problem with our European friends and allies is that they still refuse to believe that we're fighting a war. They claim to believe it, but then they act as though one should treat terrorists the same as fugitive bank robbers. Our intelligence services need time and access to get information from the detainees so that we can prevent further attacks, not just on Americans here and in Iraq but on Europeans in London, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and so on. That intelligence then needs to get checked out in the field and corroborated or disproved to determine whether the detainee has helped or hindered our efforts and to possibly extend the intelligence with more captures of key terrorist personnel.

Publicly identifying the flights on which these transitions occur and the centers where the CIA interrogates the terrorists only will add to the security risks presented. The flights themselves will come under attack, as will the centers. The notion of making those flights public, or simply not moving detainees at all for intelligence review, shows a lack of seriousness on the part of Europeans about the nature and scope of this war. That doesn't exactly come as breaking news to Americans, who have long since resigned themselves to European cluelessness even after two major attacks on European capitals over the past three years. The Brits understand the nature of the war, and most Eastern European nations understand the stakes based on their collective experience of oppression for most of the past 60 years. As for the rest -- they have always preferred to assume the worst about American efforts, and this just presents them with one more opportunity to do so.

Rice needs to make clear that our war effort wasn't designed to make terrorists feel comfortable and imbued with legal options after capture. We need to know what they know as fast as possible, and we're going to continue to make every effort to ensure that. The Geneva Convention does not cover them, and our treatment of them has remained humane; that's as much as they will get. We are fighting this war to win it, not to look good while losing it, and if some Europeans can't deal with that, that will be their problem, not ours.