London Arrests Seven More As Bombing Cell Collapses

British investigators captured another seven suspects in a raid earlier today connected to the July 21 bombing attempts. Even though Britain and Italy feel that they have all four would-be bombers in custody, they continue to raid locations and make arrests, indicating that their earlier captures may have resulted in a wealth of new intelligence:

Police arrested seven people Sunday during a raid on an apartment in southern England, bringing to 21 the number in custody in the relentless hunt for accomplices in the failed July 21 transit bombings.
Investigators determined to prevent further attacks also were probing possible ties between two of the bombing suspects and Saudi Arabia, British newspapers reported. Police were searching for anyone who may have recruited and directed the attackers and built the explosives.
Police arrested the six men and one woman during a search of two buildings in Brighton, on the southern coast, said a Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity because her department does not allow her to give her name. So far, 18 people have been arrested in Britain and three in Italy.
She said police believed there were more people at large who were involved in the July 21 attacks, in which four bombs partly exploded, and the deadly July 7 suicide bombings.

Police have discovered several connections between the bombings and Saudi Arabia, which seems certain to reignite the debate about the role the Saudis have in fomenting and promoting Wahhabist terrorism. One suspect called Saudi Arabia shortly before his arrest, and another spent a month there in 2003 receiving what he told his friends was “training”. That may or may not have happened before May 2003, when al-Qaeda first attacked the Saudis themselves and forced the desert kingdom to confront the Islamist terrorism it had harbored, either deliberately or through its own neglect.
Italian investigators also arrested two brothers of the bombing suspect it captured a few days ago, Osman Hussain. It turns out that Hussain gave the Brits a false name and passport when he emigrated to Italy. His real name is Hamdi Isaac and he comes from Ethiopia, not Somalia. He lied in order to get political asylum in Britain. His brothers Fati and Remzi had allegedly harbored him after the abortive bombing attempt, which is how his true identity apparently became known.
He has told Italian authorities that the July 21 bombers had no affiliation with al-Qaeda and did not intend on killing anyone. The entire stunt was designed as a protest about Britain’s involvement in Iraq, he now claims. That seems rather unlikely; why go to all the effort to fake a passport, claim asylum under the fake identity, and then pull a stunt like the July 21 bombing attempts for a mere political protest? Further, Isaac and his Italian attorney also claim that the bombing conspiracy came together at the last moment. That also seems unlikely, as the bomb technology reportedly matches what AQ uses and would have to have taken some time to develop independently of any terrorist support groups.
Isaac plans on fighting extradition to the nation for which he created a false identity to enter. He will need better arguments for that to succeed than his assertion that the failed July 21 attacks amounted to nothing but a benign statement of dissent.

Dafydd: Flipper the Duck

Patterico has noticed an astonishing claim by Howard Dean — no, I mean astonishing even on the Dean Scale — a few days ago (I can’t find the exact date).
Here comes Mr. Chairman:

The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is “okay” to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.

Let us all ponder this audacious argument. My old dictionary defines “chutzpah” as Lizzie Borden pleading for mercy from the judge on grounds that she’s an orphan. But next year’s edition will eschew written examples in favor of a photo of Chairman Dean.
What Dean has done, of course, is simply to flip the political identity of the justices on the Court; in Dean’s world, it was the “right-wing” caucus on the Court — Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Kennedy — that ruled in favor of the city of New London, CT, in the Kelo case; while the “left-wingers” (Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and O’Connor) desperately tried to stick up for the little guy. It’s Howard Dean through the looking glass!
Patterico has also noticed the thundering sound of a million crickets chirping in the MSM auditorium; or as Paul Simon (the successful singer, not the lefty senator) wrote, the “sounds of silence.” It’s hard to imagine so many quiet noises if it had been Bill Frist or Tom DeLay who casually flipped left and right; Dana Milbank in particular would have gotten at least four op-eds out of it.
In honor of Howard “Flipper” Dean, herewith, offered for your approval:
They call him Flipper, Flipper, quick to the cameras,
No-one you’ve seen, spins faster than Dean,
And we know Flipper, lives in a media bubble,
Truth lies in rubble, watch Howard preen!
MSM loves the king of the twist,
Tripe that he shoves they cannot resist,
Tricks he will do when cameras appear,
Sneer, smirk, slither, and smear!
He’s a hot tipper, Flipper, makes the news fright’ning,
Giddy they seem with “I Have a Scream,”
They know their Flipper feeds them the soundbites to plotz for,
Cheap dirty shots whore, he’s on their team!

Iran Calls Europe’s Hand

The mullahs of Iran moved today to push the nuclear nonproliferation talks into further crisis after a unilateral deadline they set for a European proposal expired. Iran announced that they will once again begin processing uranium ore, a step that likely will bring an end to the EU-3’s efforts to reach accommodation with Teheran:

Iran has announced it will resume its controversial nuclear programme imminently in the face of a European Union appeal to wait for talks.
Officials said they would inform UN nuclear inspectors of the move on Monday and then begin converting raw uranium at a plant in Isfahan.
The UK, which is leading EU attempts to negotiate a compromise, said the move would make further talks difficult.

In fact, diplomats tell the BBC that offering any new proposals while Iran processes uranium will be pointless, and they expect Europe to defer to the IAEA instead. That will force the agency to find Iran in noncompliance with the nonproliferation pact to which Teheran is a signatory and prompt the United Nations Security Council to review the dispute. This means that the US now can take the lead on pressing for further economic sanctions on Iran, a step long desired by the Bush administration in order to curtail Iran’s involvement in terrorist operations.
The UNSC will probably see a tremendous fight over this issue, one which will look very similar to the debate on Iraq. Again, France, Russia, and China all have commercial and military ties to the Islamic republic and have vested business interests in keeping sanctions off of Teheran. However, they can hardly recommend no action at all for Iranian instransigence on nonproliferation; to do so would send a green light for other nations so inclined to start arming themselves with nuclear weaponry. Russia hardly wants to see the Central Asian republics that formerly comprised the Soviet Union to get ideas about countering Iranian nuclear power. For that matter, neither would China.
So what will happen, if Iran does not back down and Europe pulls out? I suspect that France, Russia, and China will agree to some form of economic sanctions only after referring the matter back to the IAEA once for renegotiation while Iran continues working on the bomb. After that, they will work once again to undermine the sanctions and keep their commercial interests alive in Iran, just as they did with Iraq.
The one wild card will be the Anglo-American partnership that took matters into their own hands in Iraq after the UNSC refused to act after sixteen formal demands for Iraqi compliance on their cease-fire agreement. The three other veto-wielding UNSC members will recall that their obtuseness led to a war despite their best efforts to prop up their last client state. It might convince them to put enough pressure on the Iranian mullahcracy to reconsider their position. It probably won’t work, but they will certainly want to try.

Conclusion Jumping At CQ

On July 25th, I wrote that leftist vandals piled flags from the yard of a family mourning the loss of a son-in-law who died serving his country in Iraq. An arsonist had piled all twenty flags adorning the yard of the Wessel home under their daughter’s car and set them on fire, totaling the vehicle and narrowly avoiding setting their house on fire. I had assumed that only someone who wanted to stage a protest to the war would do something that stupid and dangerous to make a point.
Well, I was wrong. It turned out to be pointless after all:

Two teenage boys were charged Thursday with burning 20 small American flags set up in honor of a soldier who died from injuries suffered in the Iraq war.
Police said the boys apparently did not know the significance of the flags they took from the yard and set afire under a car belonging to the soldier’s sister-in-law. The vehicle was destroyed.

To be honest, I’m not sure what’s worse — being wrong, or knowing that teenage boys consider the flag only suitable for kindling. It still sounds suspicious to me, as it hardly takes all twenty flags to set a car on fire. Like Glenn Reynolds, I think that the fact that every single one of the flags went into the flames meant something, even if it turns out that the Wessel home was just one stop on a night of destruction and debauchery for these two unsupervised morons.
Libby says that a simple sorry from bloggers such as myself would suffice to correct the conclusion-jumping of last week. She’s right, and I am sorry for reaching that conclusion before all of the facts came in. I blew this one, and I do apologize.

Mark Kennedy, Northern Alliance, And A Troll

The Northern Alliance broadcast yesterday from the first Patriot Picnic, a listener-appreciation event from AM 1280 The Patriot. John Hinderaker has already posted a couple of pictures from the event from his first-hour appearance. He had to leave to join his family for a vacation, but he did get a chance to listen while we — lovingly — skewered him for his partial defense of the Kelo decision. (John, we can tell you apart from Karl Marx and Fidel Castro, even if our listeners can’t. You’re the one without the beard.)
kennedy.jpg
As you might sense, we had a terrific time at Staring Lake Park yesterday for our live show, and we had a great crowd on hand. In our second hour, Rep. Mark Kennedy dropped in for an interview, and he sounded fit and ready to take on the Senate race to replace Mark Dayton next year. Kennedy gave our listeners a taste of his passion and encyclopedic grasp of the issues facing Congress, and turned in what I felt was his most impressive media performance of his career.
This free picnic had its share of comedy outside of the NARN, too. One of the local trolls decided to come out of the woodwork. He decided to cleverly disguise himself in garb that he apparently thought would help him blend into the Patriot’s crowd:

This clown actually rented this tricorner hat from a costume shop, a fact he revealed to Brian “Saint Paul” Ward when he got up to ask Kennedy a question. Anyone at the picnic not wearing a tricorner hat (IOW, all the rest of the humans there) could see that he appeared one musket short of a Minuteman, and when he attempted to harangue Kennedy, he removed all doubt. Of course, the streamers he attached to his hat tipped us off — one says “TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH”, another says “TORTURE”, and the third says “TREASON”.
Kennedy, unsurprisingly, issued a smack-down on the three-part question that Mr. Troll had obviously prepared. Brian even let him ask a follow-up question, something we don’t normally do, but Mr. Troll refused to leave the stage for at least fifteen minutes afterwards. I’m sure he went off and told his friends that we SILENCED HIM AND DENIED HIS FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH. The last we saw of Mr. Troll, he followed in Kennedy’s wake as he left the amphitheater.
All in all, we had a great time and enjoyed hanging out with our many friends from The Patriot, as well as the terrific food from Three Sons Catering. We were even happy to help the local costume industry get a bit more business as well as relieve a local lefty of cash that could have gone to International ANSWER or MoveOn. A fine success!

Roberts Papers Reveal The Conservative Within

Today’s Washington Post editorial on John Roberts, “Young Lawyer Roberts”, reviews the documentation released so far by the Bush White House on their Supreme Court Nominee — and finds that (surprise!) Roberts will not transform into the second coming of David Souter. However, beyond branding Roberts as an unabashed conservative, the Post doesn’t do much except excerpt passages from long-passed legal debates within the Reagan administration, passages that hardly show him as the reactionary that Democrats desperately want people to believe:

While it’s dangerous to make judgments based on a quick and necessarily spotty reading of quarter-century-old documents, the picture that emerges from the first wave of papers, including a huge batch unveiled from Judge Roberts’s tenure as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, shows a lawyer fully in tune with the staunchly conservative legal views of the administration he was serving — and indeed, at times to the right of some of its leading conservative lawyers.
Those who fear or hope, depending on their political positions, that Judge Roberts might be a stealth nominee in the mold of Justice David H. Souter — a supposed conservative whose performance on the bench turned out to be far more moderate than predicted — will find no support for such predictions in the papers that have emerged so far.

It doesn’t take long for the Post to try to gin up a bogeyman, however, as it describes Roberts as “expressing hostility to affirmative action programs and to a broad application of the Voting Rights Act.” Expressing hostility? That’s editorial-speak for opposing interpretations of both not grounded in the law. The use of emotional language in describing Roberts’ position doesn’t appear accidental. The next sentence states that Congress should craft legislation that outlawed practices that did actual harm to minority voters in the proposed VRA instead of creating an amorphous, subjective standard of judging the “effect” of policies that would give courts wide latitude in arbitrarily creating new law through precedent. In short, he wanted Congress to write the law intelligently and clearly so that its interpretation and application could objectively apply regardless of which court ruled on it.
That doesn’t sound like hostility; it sounds like common sense.
Another point which disturbs the Post was Roberts’ objection to state prisoners using federal habeas corpus to file lawsuits. In 1981, that effort had tied up federal courts with a slew of ridiculous and inane court actions from inmates who literally had nothing better to do with their time than appear in court. It got them out of the prison yard and extra time at their facilities to prepare their cases. They mostly represented themselves or got pro bono representation, so it cost them nothing. Roberts made sensible arguments for curtailing the access, something the Post even acknowledges was needed — but then blames Roberts for “the high court and Congress hav[ing] since gone too far.”
So Roberts got Congress and the Supreme Court to go too far just by writing this one little memo? Is that what the Post wants us to believe?
The Post needs to rethink its approach to judicial criticism and quit issuing hysterical rants based on advisory memos, especially by applying emotional language where it doesn’t belong to juice up an exceedingly weak case. It should take heart in Roberts’ assistance to Sandra Day O’Connor in her confirmation process instead of treating it as an indication of some latent dishonesty, especially since the media has spent the last few weeks extolling O’Connor as a judicial saint. It won’t make any difference in the confirmation of John Roberts, but getting a grip would have a salutory effect on the Post’s credibility.

Scotsman: Sham Iranian President Heralds Military Junta Against Liberals

In a rare moment for European media, the Scotsman published a powerful article today about the “sham” election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian president and the effect it will have on liberating influences on the Islamic Republic. The first fruits of this election, swayed by an increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard, showed themselves in the execution of political prisoners this week:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incoming Iranian “elected” president, will assume his post next month, but his presence is already felt in the political circles and on the streets of Tehran. Since his election, under the banner of a renewed Islamic revolution, the clerical regime hanged six people and sentenced another to death in the space of seven days. …
Indeed, the real story of this election is the metamorphosis of the Guards Corps from an ideological army to an omnipresent political/military powerhouse. With Ahmadinejad’s win, the IRGC is now able to spread it wings over all key centres of power in Iran. This may account for the most major power realignment within the ruling theocracy since Ayatollah Khomenei’s death in 1989.
The first success of the IRGC’s resurgence took place during national municipal elections in 2003. Then, in the February 2004 parliamentary elections, at least 40 former IRGC commanders won seats. Shortly after, Khamenei appointed a top IRGC general as head of Iran’s national broadcasting.

Ahmadinejad’s election has triggered more than just these executions. The new national chief of police has ties to the IRGC. Supreme Leader Ali Khameini has also put the intelligence/terror services under the control of the IRGC, and their nuclear weapons program has also ome under their direction. The Governing Council even put IRGC leaders in charge of newspapers and other Iranian media, as well as municipal councils and the like.
For a nation flirting with nuclear weapons, the establishment of a military junta with such extreme ideological philosophies does not bode well for peace in the region. It looks like Iran may have decided to prepare for total war, if these accounts are accurate. They rigged an election to ensure that a hardliner would be their point man while the Governing Council consolidates power through the use of their military in all domestic areas of Iranian life. Student protests have increased as a result, and some consider this hopeful as it might finally wake Iranians to the threat of military dictatorship in the name of Islam, finally dropping the illusion of democracy from their eyes. By the time that happens, however, it may be too late to stop Iran from going to war.
What enemy awaits the creation of Fortress Iran? The mullahcracy probably thinks the US plans to attack it as part of the war on terror. Certainly Iran qualifies, as a big supporter and host of Islamofascist terrorists. They may decide to press the issue themselves by attacking Israel and holding Europe hostage through its Shahab rockets, which could deliver nuclear warheads to the capitals of the Continent now.
One thing is certain. Military juntas do not make these kind of preparations without an end goal in sight. The mullahcracy plans on doing something with its military control over Iran. We need to find out what it is and stop it while we can.

Rethinking Saint Colin

Today’s Washington Post contains a glowing profile of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the changes she has made in the nation’s foreign-policy arena. Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler note her many substantial and subtle changes at a department often seen as an obstacle to carrying out George Bush’s foreign policy goals. In doing so, an undercurrent of unspoken criticism of Rice’s predecessor seems apparent:

Now six months on the job, Rice has clearly wrested control of U.S. foreign policy. The once heavy-handed Defense Department still weighs in, but Rice wins most battles — in strong contrast to her predecessor, Colin L. Powell. White House staff is consulted, but Rice designed the distinctive framework for the administration’s second-term foreign policy.
In short order, she has demonstrated a willingness to bend on tactics to accommodate the concerns of allies without ceding on broad principles, what she calls “practical idealism.” She also conducts a more aggressive personal diplomacy, breaking State Department records for foreign travel and setting up diplomatic tag teams with top staff on urgent issues. …
In the interview, Rice said she discovered on her first European trip that, particularly on the Iran issue, “somehow we’d gotten into a position where it was the United States that was the problem . . . that was not a good place to be.” So she formulated action that put the onus back on Iran and, later, North Korea.
“Sometimes the power of diplomacy is not just saying no, but figuring out a way to protect your interests and principles to help the other guy — or in this case the other countries — move forward as well,” Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said. “It is the kind of diplomacy some of our critics had felt we were no longer capable of, that we were a kind of superpower saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but not anywhere in between.”

When Rice first got nominated to this position, Democrats and editorialists expounded on the dangers of the president eliminating dissent from his Cabinet. They held Colin Powell as the last person of stature that would keep honest debate on policy occurring at the highest levels of the administration. Rice, by comparison, represented an attempt to surround the President with “yes men”, so to speak, that would simply do his bidding without argument. The results in Rice’s case, these experts predicted, would be further isolation and withdrawal of cooperation from allies around the world.
This started towards the end of Powell’s reign at State. Media organization love Colin Powell, and for good reason: he looks and sounds impressive, he served his country honorably for decades in and out of the military, and he communicates his clear and precise thinking with a moderation and gravitas that undoubtedly attracts attention. The media decided that Powell, who they had earlier derided for not airing his personal and policy differences with Bush publicly, was the Oracle of all wisdom on foreign policy and repeatedly featured him in article after article during Rice’s confirmation period and for a short time thereafter.
Now, however, the Post appears to have changed its mind, although one would have to have some familiarity with their previous coverage of Powell to recognize it. First, the article states several examples of Rice acting what many suppose Bush’s policies demand. She initiated one-on-one contact with North Korea in order to get the multilateral talks back on line. She overrules Donald Rumsfeld on foreign-policy efforts. Rice reinvented the policy on Iran, working with Europe to set a slate of incentives that the US would back in exchange for a verifiable cessation of their nuclear program. She even found a formulation that the Bush administration would not veto at the UN which allowed the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Sudan.
Rice did all of this in six months. Powell, for all his gravitas and supposed opposition to Bush, could not do this in four years, a fact only obliquely referenced by Wright and Kessler on the fact that Powell couldn’t get the Bush administration to even drop the “axis of evil” connotation for Iran. The Post also notes with a heavy helping of snark that Rice may “break … State Department records for foreign travel[.]” Certainly the notoriously home-bound Powell never threatened to do that in his tenure at State.
Once again, the media has “misunderestimated” George Bush. First, Powell may never have provided the dissent that his aides proclaimed through anonymous leaks to journalists. If he did, he certainly didn’t dissent very effectively. Second, this calls into question whether these positions that Rice has reversed ever were Bush’s policies or Powell’s. If Bush insisted on them, Rice certainly has changed his mind — something that Democrats and the media tried to convince Americans that could never happen without Powell at the helm at State.
The Post appears to have decided that Condi Rice has the right stuff to lead State, and even gets Senator Joe Biden, one of her critics during her confirmation, to grudgingly agree. They also seem to realize that Rice’s spectacular success calls into question all of the fawning coverage given to Colin Powell, especially towards the end of his time at State. They don’t have the courage to do this re-evaluation overtly, but they leave enough subtle clues to make this conclusion quite easily reached.

Leftists Stage Backlash While Air America Admits Its Theft

Brian Maloney has the latest installment of the Air America disgrace that revealed the liberal radio netlet’s misuse of government funds under founder Evan Cohen’s direction. Leftist bloggers have begun their inevitable backlash defending Air America, calling the story “phony” and irrelevant to Air America by trying to distingush between AA and its original owner, Progress Media — which only had the one asset and whose chief executive sat on the board of the non-profit it helped to bankrupt through this “loan”.
Well, the Left simply hasn’t caught up to reality. Air America said in its second press release on this matter that it planned to pay back the money, a very strange thing to do if it didn’t take it in the first place. As I pointed out yesterday, it’s also a very convenient position to take — considering that Gloria Wise has gone bankrupt and closed its doors. Apparently that little detail didn’t go unnoticed by Air America’s other critics, and the netlet’s spokesperson told Fox News this:

“We’re committed to paying this money and the terms are being worked out… We are awaiting direction from the investigation into how to proceed.”

That certainly indicates that AA believes it took the money improperly, and also that it has had contact with the investigation into Gloria Wise’s collapse and possible malfeasance with its grant monies. We know that Air America has had problems finding competent management (and an audience), but I doubt they’d be anxious to cough up $480,000 for no reason, especially in their present financial condition. It hardly sounds like a “phony” story to me.
Barbara O’Brien claims that the story is so obscure that she had difficulty tracking it down. On that point, she may be right. I wonder why that may be. Can anyone here at CQ come up with a reason that the Exempt Media might be disinclined to report on a story that shows Air America misusing government funds and taking money from poor kids and Alzheimers patients? Anyone at all?
Oh, let’s not see the same hands …
UPDATE: Brian Maloney, not Mulroney. I’m suffering from Canadian withdrawals at the moment. (h/t: Tory, GOPinion’s editor) Also, the Politburo Diktat explains Google to Barbara O’Brien.

Jimmy Insults American Military On Foreign Soil

At one time, people considered Jimmy Carter the most successful ex-president, building a far better reputation through his philanthropical work than he ever did in his single term in the White House. However, over the past ten to fifteen years, his meddling in foreign policy and continuous left-wing stridency has dimmed the luster of his charitable efforts. Despite being out of office at the time, he may wind up most responsible for North Korea having nuclear weapons.
One would think that would give him a legacy unmatched in recent times. Today he did what most of us thought impossible — he actually made his reputation worse. Carter took an opportunity to castigate the American military for its treatment of terrorist detainees while traveling overseas ona visit to our most strategic ally:

Former President Carter said Saturday the detention of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base was an embarrassment and had given extremists an excuse to attack the United States.
Carter also criticized the U.S.-led war in Iraq as “unnecessary and unjust.”
“I think what’s going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A.,” he told a news conference at the Baptist World Alliance’s centenary conference in Birmingham, England. “I wouldn’t say it’s the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts.”

I have covered the Guantanamo Bay dispute for the past several weeks, even before Dick Durbin attacked the joint task force of our military at Gitmo and their administration of the camp and treatment of its prisoners. Over and over again, the notion that Gitmo has done anything to “embarrass” the United States has been thoroughly debunked. The only people with egg on their faces are the politicians like Durbin and Ted Kennedy who bloviate about abuses in order to puff up their political credentials. An independent investigation confirmed that only three violations of American law and Geneva Convention standards had occurred at Gitmo in the thousands of interrogations that have taken place and the hundreds of detentions.
Carter’s second notion, that Gitmo has given terrorists a reason to kill, disputes not only common sense but history as well. Gitmo didn’t take in detainees until after the Afghanistan operation collected terrorists by the dozen in the field of battle. Before that had happened, Islamofascist terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center twice (1993 and 2001), Khobar Towers, two of our African embassies, and the USS Cole. Since we opened Gitmo, how many times have AQ terrorists attacked US assets, at home or abroad? And how does Gitmo explain attacks on Madrid, Istanbul, Morocco, and now London? The British should have laughed him off their island.
But even beyond the folly of Carter’s assertions, the fact that he decided to attack the military and the American administration while abroad marks him as particularly despicable. He went to the soil of our strongest ally and attempted to undermine their support for the war effort in Iraq. If he succeeds, then American soldiers will wind up facing even more danger in the country at a time when we hope to be readying the Iraqis to stand on their own. No American should do such a thing during wartime, especially an ex-President — even one as relentlessly clueless as Jimmy Carter.
Carter has long shredded his charitable reputation by reminding us how inept his grasp of foreign policy was and is. Now he has revealed himself as a man of low character and relative loyalty. That may surprise few at this point of his post-office career, but the extent of his perfidy still disappoints nonetheless.