BellerophonChimera

Resurrection

2006-07-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

Perhaps that was a slightly longer drought than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, back again. No posts for the next few days. . . but soon.

A Personal Note

2005-09-08T19:30:00.000-05:00

The Austin Review has perished. Although I continued to post a few items from BellerophonChimera to the AR website through the first few weeks of July, the newspaper has been defunct for the past seventy days.
While this fact would appear to have no real-world consequences, it has somewhat complicated my own personal circumstances, necessitating a variety of practical adjustments -- hence, the drought of postings in the recent past. A variety of logistical and pecuniary difficulties have impeded my progress, but these should soon be, if not resolved, at least mitigated -- within a week or, at most, two.
In the meantime, postings will continue to be sporadic, even sparse. Bear with me.
Ad astra per aspera.

Gitmo Letgo

2005-08-30T18:41:00.000-05:00

Deroy Murdock’s fundamental point in today’s National Review Online is correct: “The U.S. government is preparing to return 68 percent of enemy fighters from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to their home countries, primarily Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Fraught with shortcomings, this risky scheme reeks of capitulation to Bushophobes.”
Specifically, as he avers, it appears to yield credence to the grotesque lie that the US has been anything other than the most generous combatant nation in the history of mankind in its accommodation of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo. But more importantly it creates a clear and present danger of release or escape by murderous thugs who will seek to do us harm. We have already seen previously released combatants return to the battlefield in Afghanistan, where they sought to kill American soldiers and Afghan civilians (“at least twelve of them already have engaged in terrorism after going home,” Murdock writes.)
Moreover, the risk of escape is hardly hypothetical. “Ten key suspects in al Qaeda’s October 12, 2000, attack on the U. S. S. Cole escaped from Aden’s [Yemen] supposedly well-guarded central-intelligence building on April 11, 2003. These fugitives included Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahd Muhammad Ahmad al-Quso, two top organizers of the terrorist operation that killed 17 American sailors and injured 40 more. In May 2003, a Manhattan grand jury slapped al-Badawi and al-Quso with a 50-count federal indictment for their crimes. Fortunately, all of these men were recaptured in March 2004. Who knows how much damage they did while at large for roughly 11 months.
“Also worrisome, in June 2002, Yemeni al Qaeda agent Walid Abdullah Habib fled a prison in Yemen. If American officials insist on repatriating Guantanamo’s Yemeni detainees, they first should send a locksmith there to tighten things up.”
Murdock is also correct in observing that the majority of “Guantanamo’s 510 detainees are worth keeping for their current and prospective intelligence value.
“‘We have and we are today still getting information that is relevant, that is actionable, and is supporting our service members in the field in the global war on terrorism,’ Army general and Southern Command chief Bantz Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee July 13.
“While some inmates may seem fresh out of information today, who knows what they could reveal tomorrow? Imagine that the FBI caught a terrorist in March 2006 named Mustafa al-Fissi carrying detailed diagrams of the San Onofre, California, and Seabrook, New Hampshire, atomic energy plants. Today, no Gitmo interrogator could ask detainees about the still-undetected al-Fissi. Next March, however, one or more Gitmoites might be persuaded to sing about al-Fissi, his contacts, his bankers, etc. Sending these intelligence sources beyond U.S. control will, at best, delay our ability to connect these dots. If our foreign friends limit access to transferred Guantanameros, FBI agents might stare at al-Fissi without knowing what some of his terrorist brethren know about him.”
Some might find a certain pleasurable schadenfreude in knowing that the Saudis, Yemenis and Afghanis will certainly not provide the same standards of 5-star care the detainees have received at Guantanamo. But Murdock is right also to suggest that what this really implies is a potential for violation of human rights. “The detainees’ Middle East destinations ‘are not countries with stellar human rights records,’ the Washington Post editorialized August 6. ‘Saudi Arabia’s is absolutely dreadful. Shifting the indefinite detention of enemy fighters from Guantanamo could, therefore, end up meaning worse treatment for the detainees.’
“Indeed, once departed, Gitmo’s current guests probably can kiss goodbye such conveniences as volleyball courts, extensive medical and dental care, and an 800-volume book collection from which, the Washington Times’s Rowan Scarborough reported August 8, ‘a staff of three librarians load up a book cart and go cell to cell.’” It’s difficult to weep over this change of circumstance, but the prospect of real abuse or torture (as opposed to the trivialities heretofore condemned) is real, and remains our moral responsibility.
Murdock makes an excellent prima facie case for opposing the proposed mass release. His editorial is marred by only a single flaw, when he suggests that “Guantanamo is incredibly secure. This Navy base overflows with well-armed guards and well-trained GIs. Any al Qaeda assassin who slithered from his cell soon would be neutralized. If he happened to reach the compound’s periphery, he would be greeted by barbed wire and watchtowers. If he snuck through, he could swim to freedom. Haiti is about 100 miles southeast across the shark-choked Windward Passage. Good luck.” It’s not that Guantanamo is insecure. It’s just that it isn’t some remote island. Swim just a few miles up the beach and you’re well into the home waters of Cuba – long-term sponsor of terrorism and sworn enemy of the American democracy.

Just Desserts

2005-08-30T17:35:00.000-05:00

Two nuts, one fruitcake.

Chalabi

2005-08-30T16:59:00.000-05:00

So many of the administration’s real mistakes in prosecuting the war in Iraq – not the moronic litany which constantly appears in the “mainstream” press, few elements of which were even mistakes at all – are intimately bound up with the efforts of anonymous, vindictive, and incompetent State Department and CIA analysts and operatives who tried every way short of assassination to discredit or eliminate Ahmed Chalabi, that you absolutely must read Robert L. Pollock’s “The Chalabi Comeback” in Opinion Journal. His discussion only hints at a few of the most salient errors, often indirectly or implicitly, but highlights just enough to be of significant interest.
One of the most portentous mistakes was the failure to follow through on early plans to invade in conjunction with a substantial trained complement of Iraqi volunteers, a national liberation force, which could have immediately put an Iraqi face on what became instead “the occupation.” (This force did not have to play a role of any more significance than De Gaulle’s Free French did in the liberation of France. Their importance was far more symbolic, and political, than military.) This option was derided by CIA and State Department opponents of the Iraqi exiles who disparaged their competence and hinted darkly that they were corrupted and compromised. The squishes won, with unfortunate consequences which should now be apparent to all. Nevertheless, Chalabi, “the master coalition-builder crafted the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance that shocked our spooks and diplomats by dominating the January election. The other big winners – Shiite religious leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Kurdish leaders Talabani and Massoud Barzani – turned out to be the very same group Mr. Chalabi had united under the banner of his Iraqi National Congress in the '90s, and which had widely been written off as ‘exiles.’ Mr. Chalabi had enough support to make a credible bid for the prime minister’s post, only to drop out in the face of strong U.S.-Iranian lobbying . . . for the Islamist, Ibrahim al-Jafaari, who has proven to be an ineffectual leader at best.”
As for the question of corruption, “the biggest alleged thieves in post-Saddam Iraq have turned out to be those associated with the CIA’s preferred secular Shiite, Mr. Allawi.
“The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit recently charged that Mr. Allawi’s defense minister, Hazem Shalaan, presided over the misappropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone towards better-equipped security forces. Virtually everyone I spoke to at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense confirmed this, including the new minister, Saddoun Dulaimi (an honest man by everyone’s account, and a non-Baathist Sunni to boot). But corruption on the scale suggested by the Audit Board should be more difficult now that Mr. Chalabi is chairing a Contracts Committee, which reviews every government expenditure above a certain threshold.”
Pollock is frequently too polite to call a spade a spade. When he characterizes the ludicrous leaks – credulously accepted by the “mainstream” media – asserting that Chalabi had ratted out the NSA to Tehran as having broken key Iranian codes, and further claiming that this fact was discovered when the Iranians used that same broken code to report Chalabi’s information (!), Pollack refers blandly to “improbable allegations that he somehow obtained and then passed sensitive U.S. information to Iran (another anonymously sourced story Newsweek really ought to revisit).” But he strikes home when he succinctly observes that one price of marginalizing Chalabi was that it entailed “the shutdown of an INC operation called the Information Collection Program, which Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers testified before Congress had ‘saved American lives.’ A military review had concluded that the INC provided the U.S. with far more actionable intelligence than any other Iraqi organization, including the Kurdish militias.” How many lives were lost to CIA CYA, stupidity and vindictiveness?
As for the present, Pollock’s summary is on-the-mark. “The more important story, the real determinant of whether Iraq stands or falls, is the political one. And a key player is a man countless powerful people around the world have wished would go away. Of course, there are no ‘indispensable men’ – De Gaulle famously remarked that the graveyards are full of them – but Mr. Chalabi is as close as you come among Iraq’s political class. He sees the powerful Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani regularly; he is trusted by the Kurds, and, to the extent anyone is, by Sadr; and he put forth a constitutional oil-sharing proposal that has a chance of making federalism acceptable to the Sunnis. It is telling that he was one of the last people huddled with Zalmay Khalilzad in the wee hours of Saturday, when the U.S. ambassador finally gave the go-ahead to announce an agreement. Mr. Khalilzad, who has now brokered constitutions for 50 million newly free people in two countries – and who deserves a medal for his efforts – is a man who knows who to have by his side when a deal has to get done.
“The question now is whether his bosses in Washington are mature enough to put aside past mistakes and work with Mr. Chalabi. They certainly no longer have to worry about him being written off as an American puppet.”

Diyala Valley

2005-08-30T16:31:00.000-05:00

In the Diyala valley of central Iraq, bordering on the Sunni triangle, the Iraqi Army’s 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade appears well on the way to completing a transition toward independent operations, according to a report filed by the Christian Science Monitor’s Neil MacDonald. Roadside bomb attacks have abated, and almost ceased, down more than 30% in July as compared to the same month one year ago, with an even more substantial decline registered in August. In an area of more than 1,100 square miles, with a population of some 300,000, the unit has the primary responsibility for local security. In fact, American troops recently closed a forward operating base in the region, “since the area was so calm,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Roger Cloutier of the US Army. Both Americans and Iraqis, writes MacDonald, declare that “the relative peace in the breadbasket is the result of a carefully managed transition from US to Iraqi security.” Importantly, “the local Sunni Arabs appear inclined to climb aboard the US-backed political process, rather than trying to derail it through violence.”
The Iraqi 2/2 is certainly in front of the curve, but hardly anomalous. More than a dozen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces are largely untroubled by the terrorist “insurgency”, and the three Kurdish provinces are experiencing an economic boom. The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index reports nearly 80,000 Iraqi Army soldiers and guardsmen a as “operational” as of this month. But progress isn’t what the bulk of the “mainstream” media want to discuss. (For more on this topic, see “The Media Quagmire” at the Weekly Standard, by Power Line’s Scott Johnson.) As Opinion Journal’s Robert L. Pollock reports from Baghdad, “a visit quickly makes plain that the latest ‘quagmire’ panic in Washington is widely off the mark. True, the security situation in Baghdad remains a long way from what it should be; but neither do the insurgents control swaths of territory – think Fallujah – as they used to. What’s more, the heavy lifting is increasingly being done by Iraqis. ‘The Iraqi Brigade that owns Haifa Street has done something that we could never do,’ Gen. Petraeus told me over lunch. Iraqi security forces are far more visible, and with competent Iraqi leadership such success stories will multiply slowly but steadily. It will be, in Donald Rumsfeld’s famous words, ‘a long, hard slog.’ But it should increasingly be an Iraqi slog.”

On Constitutions

2005-08-29T17:15:00.000-05:00

On September 17, 1787, the final day of the American Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the work of the delegates completed, Benjamin Franklin arose and handed a written speech to his Pennsylvania colleague James Wilson to read. “Mr. President,” Franklin had written, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not approve, but I am not sure that I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise . . . . I doubt too whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better constitution . . . . It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies . . . . Thus I consent, Sir, to this constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.” This, of that revered document which, despite its imperfections and blemishes, has endured for two hundred eighteen years and guided us through our nations darkest days, a beacon to ourselves and to the world of shining freedom.

Arrested Development

2005-08-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

For those of us impaired by congenital y-chromosome syndrome who find themselves perpetually dis-eased by their failure to comprehend the behavior, perceptions and propensities of those more blessed with double x’s, Daphne Merkin’s “Passion and the Prisoner” is a wonderful temporary palliative, but beyond a moment’s reflection a deeply disturbing confirmation: no matter how wretched we are, guys, we just aren’t wretched enough.

Doom, Gloom, Illumination

2005-08-29T16:49:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn’s irreverent but spot-on commentary (barring only a single too-flippant remark on the consequences of failure) on the Iraqi constitution thoroughly deflates who foresee impending doom, just as they have foreseen impending doom at every other crucial juncture in the war against FascIslam.
A single sample retro: “Remember the Afghan war? On Nov. 7, 2001, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd was sneering at the Northern Alliance for being a lot of useless layabout deadbeats. ‘They smoke and complain more than they fight,’ she scoffed. A couple of days later, Kabul fell so swiftly that on Nov. 14 Dowd switched smoothly – with only the mildest case of columnar whiplash – to whining that the hitherto layabout Northern Alliance had ‘embarrassed’ us with their ‘savage force.’”
That’s Maureen Dowd all right – all the intellectual candlepower of a pyrite filament, all the historical grasp of a mayfly, and all the conscience of . . . a columnist for the New York Times. Sic semper punditus.

The Green Needle

2005-08-29T16:42:00.000-05:00

In “The Cult of the Cycads” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Lauren Kessler relates a fascinating horticultural tale of ardor and lust for the acquisition of specimens of endangered, nearly extinct species of exotic plants which once ruled the floral world, in the millennia when dinosaurs were kings. Quite intriguing, and not to be missed.

Lincoln Rising

2005-08-29T16:38:00.000-05:00

“The party of Lincoln will not be whole until more African-Americans come back home,” declares Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman as he pursues an aggressive strategy of recruiting strong black candidates and opening greater opportunities for the one American minority that Democrats, as they did a century and a half ago, want to keep down on the plantation.
“More than a dozen black politicians are running on the Republican ticket in 2006 for Senate and House seats, governorships and other statewide races,” reports the Washington Times’ Brian DeBose. In Ohio, for example, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is seeking the Republican nomination for Governor, and running a strong campaign implicitly (and at times explicitly) in opposition to the badly tainted administration of incumbent Robert Taft, recently convicted of four misdemeanor campaign finance violations (and consistently given an “F” in fiscal responsibility report cards by the Cato Institute). Blackwell probably represents the GOP’s most significant hope of retaining the Ohio governorship as (thankfully) term-limited Taft steps down.
But there are many others. “More than a dozen black politicians are running on the Republican ticket in 2006 for Senate and House seats, governorships and other statewide races.
“It could turn out to be the most diverse Republican slate since the mid-1990s, said J.C. Watts Jr., chairman of GOPAC, a Republican political action committee. Mr. Watts won a House seat in Oklahoma in 1994, becoming the first black Republican to reach Congress since Sen. Edward W. Brooke III, Massachusetts Republican, who served from 1967 to 1979.
“‘I’ve often said that most black people don’t think alike, most black people just vote alike, and if Republicans understood black people better, you would have 70 to 75 percent of black people voting Republican,’ Mr. Watts said.”
If Republicans succeed in their efforts, it will be the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. And more, as retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Frances P. Rice, chairwoman of the National Black Republican Association declares, it will ultimately benefit blacks most of all. “‘Blacks after 40 years of Democrat control are complaining about the same things: poorly performing schools, dilapidated public housing,’ Col. Rice said. ‘Socialism has not worked anywhere it has been tried. Why should we do it here?’”
Yet it is precisely Democrats’ insistence that blacks rely upon an antiquated socialist agenda, she affirms, that is “destroying the community.”
All too frequently, though, the response of threatened Democrats to infringements upon their “monopoly rights” is to invoke the most racist of stereotypes. As Republican Richard Holt, running for the now vacant seat of Democratic Congressman Ted Strickland of Ohio, explains, “‘It is difficult because of people like Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory calling us ‘whitey’ and tyrants when all we want to do is make sure that our families are strong, that we own our own businesses and that our children get a good education.’”
This cynical strategy has almost run its course.

Adversarial Proceedings

2005-08-29T16:26:00.000-05:00

“In the 2000 election cycle, according to data from the National Election Study produced at the University of Michigan, 34 percent of people with advanced degrees and 44 percent of those earning $95,000 to $200,000 gave exclusively to Democratic candidates. For law professors, the new study finds, it was 78 percent.”
Under the rubric of “Confirmations of What You Already Knew”, a new study to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal this fall “analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by US News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.” As the New York Times’ Adam Liptak reports, the bias is even more skewed at the most “elite” levels, with 91 percent of Harvard professors, 92 percent at Yale, and 94 percent at Stanford hewing the leftist line.
As Liptak notes unsurprisingly, “whatever may be said about particular schools and students, professors and deans of all political persuasions agreed that the studies findings are undeniable.”

FascIslamic Family Values

2005-08-29T16:21:00.000-05:00

Also beginning a new term at school in September are the haunted children of Beslan, the little Russian village where FascIslamic terrorists from Chechnya and Ingushetia murdered 331 parents, teachers – and among them 186 children – after taking them hostage on the first day of classes this past year.
For the first graders, whose only memories of school are of those three days of fire and slaughter, “school means death,” says Beslan psychologist Fatima Bagayeva, “they have no other memory . . .”
“These children need continued special attention and, without it, I don’t think they will make it,” says Moscow psychologist Elena Morozova. “We are looking at a lost generation.”
At all the schools now in Beslan, armed local men stand guard.
Listening to the Washington Post’s Peter Finn we may measure FascIslamic compassion and mercy by its effects upon a single shattered family. “When the explosions and shooting began Sept. 3,” he writes, “[Alan] Adyrkhayev’s wife, Irina, a nurse, fled the gymnasium to the school canteen with Emilia and their other daughter, Milana, 5. From there, in the middle of a firefight, Milana somehow escaped. Irina was killed. Russian special forces found Emilia, who suffered minor shrapnel wounds and burns, nestling by the body of her 29-year-old mother.
“When Adyrkhayev asks Emilia if she wants to go back to school, the wonderful new one with the swimming pool and the big playground, she nods as if she knows the right response, but her downcast large brown eyes betray her doubts. Emilia never speaks about her experience, relatives said.
“Her father, in turn, is a hollow-eyed, broken man who has refused to return to work. Instead, Adyrkhayev sits at his computer screen scrolling through the faces of the dead. ‘I would be lost without them,’ he said.
“He has also recorded a video of Milana, a bright, smiling child, singing to a picture of her mother, and an audio clip that he plays on his cell phone when he wants to hear her voice.
“‘I know that she lives in the sky,’ the girl says on the clip. ‘They killed my mother. How can they be so cruel? They’re all beasts.’
“Adyrkhayev twirled the cell phone in his hand, smoking a cigarette in the shade of an apple tree. ‘I think I'm losing it,’ he said.
“As with the families of many other victims, relatives are providing care. Adyrkhayev’s sister and parents have moved in with him to help with the children.
“‘The babushkas are holding the town together,’ said Bagayeva, the psychologist.”
But it is to little seven year old Georgy whom Finn grants the final word.
“‘I don’t want to go to school,’ Georgy said. ‘I don’t want to be dead.’”

Revisionism Revised

2005-08-28T19:25:00.000-05:00

The new Iraqi school year begins in September. When children return for the new term, they will be provided with new history textbooks and taught according to new curricula. The Middle East Media Research Institute offers an interesting discussion of a report by Huda Jasim published recently in the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat regarding those changes.

What’s Not News

2005-08-28T18:43:00.000-05:00

The vast preponderance of the American media wishes to ignore the historic visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Kabul, the first visit of an Indian prime minister to Afghanistan in more than thirty years, and of considerable strategic importance to the evolution of Central Asian (and South Asian) politics. The media also appear to view Pakistan’s local elections as unworthy of attention, though they, too, are of great significance for the future of that vital nation. At least the lamentable BBC attends.

2020 Foresight

2005-08-28T17:32:00.000-05:00

Jacques-Henri David, President of the Deutsche Bank Group in France, assesses the world’s economy and power relations among leading nations in the year 2020 pursuant to DBG’s recent analysis of “the macroeconomic evolution of the major continents over the next fifteen years” (as transcribed by Watching America, courtesy of Power Line’s John Hinderaker).
David and DBG project that “in 2020, the United States will remain the world superpower, with a total GNP of approximately $17 trillion to $18 trillion. Thanks to its dynamic demographics (1% annual population growth), a productivity and a competitiveness amongst the best in the world (currently second in the world and far out in front of Germany (13th) or France (26th) according to statistics from the World Economic Forum), and thanks also to its constant drive to create and innovate, and with flexibility due to the mobility of its labor force, the United States will maintain a clear advantage over China and India and will widen the gap with Europe. With average per capita salaries of approximately $55,000, the income of the average American in 2020 will be 1.5 to 2 times greater than that of a European; five times higher than that of a Chinese and nine times more than that of an Indian (approximately $6,000 per capita).
“China will indisputably be the world’s second greatest economic power, with a GNP of some $14 trillion, or three times higher than today. . . . Even more than today, China in 2020 will be the industrial workshop of the world.” This assumes, of course, that “no major social crisis interrupts the long-term dynamics.” Even then, “paradoxically, one of its handicaps will be an aging population, due to the delayed impact of its ‘one child policy.’ By 2020, the median age in China will be approximately 40 years, which will be higher than in the United States.”
In third place, India. “The world’s third greatest economic power will be India, but far behind the first two, with a GNP of about $7 trillion.
“India should be the uncontested champion in terms of growth, due its demographics, its highly qualified labor force, the ease with which it can be integrated into the global economic system thanks to the wide use of English throughout its population, and thanks also to its mastery of communications technologies, especially the Internet. If China can be held out as the world’s future industrial workshop, India will undoubtedly be one of the great service societies.”
As for our European allies, the prognosis is less sanguine. “In Europe, Germany, France, along with Italy and the United Kingdom, should lose ground in the world competition with a GNP per country of about $2 to 2.5 trillion.
“While European countries will remain rich in terms of per capita income (about $32,500), their relative weight will decline with their demographics and weaker growth (on average, almost half as much as the United States). Countries like Spain or Ireland will experience a higher level of development than the European average, thanks to a wider opening of their economies to the outside, the dynamism of their investments, good population growth forecasts and effective immigration policies.
“Ireland, for example, in 2020 will have the second highest GNP per capita in the world, just behind the U.S. The increased weight of these new stars on the European landscape will not, however, be sufficient to compensate for the retreat of its historic champions [Britain, France, Germany] who will feel the full weight of their society’s declining demographics [aging populations].”
Though David doesn’t expound it, the message seems irrefragably clear: Europe must abandon its propensity toward quasi-socialist centralism and state capitalism and adopt the only viable alternative dynamic: truly free enterprise.

Love My Rifle More Than You

2005-08-28T16:52:00.000-05:00

“Chick-lit meets battlefield memoir in Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army, the title taken from a marching song,” writes Phillip Sherwell in today’s London Telegraph, reviewing (ever so briefly) former US Army Sergeant Kayla Williams new book on her experiences in Iraq. A five year veteran in military intelligence, an Arabic linguist, Williams begins by observing that “Sex is the key to any woman soldier’s experiences in the American military. No one likes to acknowledge it, but there’s a strange sexual allure to being a woman and a soldier.”
“Love My Rifle” looks as though it’s worth a read.

State of War

2005-08-28T15:45:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens has penned a strikingly perspicacious and stunningly brilliant analysis of the single most frustrating dimension of our global war against FascIslam to date for all those who perceive our present engagement in Iraq as both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity. (I must hasten to add that Hitchens emphasizes the former, and barely broaches the latter). In his essay for the Weekly Standard “A War to be Proud Of” he continues, as he has so constantly, even relentlessly, to make the irrefutable case for the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war, a case which the administration itself so regrettably has yet to make with sufficient coherence and consistency. (This is one reason that history is most likely to perceive George Bush as more akin to Harry Truman than to Winston Churchill.)
“I am one of those,” writes Hitchens, “who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)
“The subsequent liberation of Pakistan’s theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both ‘rogue’ and ‘failed.’ This state – Saddam’s ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq – had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq’s slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam’s crumbling roof.
“One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair’s decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?”
How, indeed? Hitchens readily dispenses with the simple-minded and frequently disingenuous “no WMD” mantra incompletely but effectively when he relates that “It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam’s senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam’s agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.”
Moreover, Hitchens further avers, “anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.
“At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion – as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.”
It is more an intuitive or even visceral than a conscious understanding of this reality which has kept so many Americans determinedly resilient in the face of the massive antiwar propaganda campaign in which the mainline media are gleefully complicit. “Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question – plainly and absolutely out of the question – that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism.”
The reality, despite all adversities and the misfortunes attendant to war, is that we have already achieved much, and laid the foundation for much more. Hitchen’s list of the “positive accounting” substantially matches my own:
“(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
“(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi’s Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction – a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.
“(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
“(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.
“(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)
“(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.
“(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region – the Kurds – and the spread of this example to other states.
“(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.
“(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.
“(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.
“It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.”
America is making profound progress in the war against FascIslam – a war in which we represent the one great force for freedom, democracy and hope for all mankind against a brutal, murderous tyranny. To believe otherwise is delusion or depravity. If only its advocates and expositors were more eloquent . . .

More Reefer Madness

2005-08-28T15:23:00.000-05:00

In “Marijuana Pipe Dreams” the New York Times’ John Tierney relates yet more of the perverse institutional stupidity which underlies our nation’s “War” on drugs. In this case, he attends to the question of securing adequate supplies of marijuana to perform essential medical research, so that we might actually make rational decisions about drug policies on the basis of evidence. But evidence and reason are scorned by our defenders of the faith at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
At present, medical researchers have access to but one legal source of marijuana: a government monopoly crop grown in Mississippi and distributed exclusively by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. But, as Tierney writes, “Scientists say they need an alternative partly because the government’s marijuana is of such poor quality – too many seeds and stems – and partly because the federal officials are so loath to give it out for research into its medical benefits.
“Discovering benefits, after all, would undermine the great anti-marijuana campaign that has taken hold in Washington. Marijuana is deemed to be such a powerful ‘gateway’ to other drugs that it’s become the top priority in the federal drug war, much to the puzzlement of many scientists, not to mention the police officers who see a lot of worse drugs on the streets.
“People with glaucoma and AIDS have sworn by the efficacy of marijuana, and there have been studies by state health departments showing that smoking marijuana is especially good at controlling nausea. Scientists would like to test these effects, but they can’t do good studies until they get good marijuana.
“Critics of medical marijuana say that it’s unnecessary because patients can obtain the benefits of its active ingredient, THC, through a drug that’s already available, Marinol. But many patients say it doesn’t work as well. They point to the case of the writer Peter McWilliams, who said smoking marijuana was the only way to control the nausea brought on by the mix of drugs he took for AIDS and cancer.
“He was forced to switch to Marinol after a D.E.A. investigation led to his conviction for violating federal laws against marijuana. In 2000, several weeks before he was to be sentenced, he was found dead in his bathroom. He had choked on his own vomit.”
A perfect metaphor for the “War” on drugs itself.

Out Damned Spot

2005-08-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? Shakespeare, of course.

The eternal recurrence and historical persistence of even the most ludicrous and untenable of conspiracy theories (Holocaust denial, Apollo lunar landing disavowal, certain currently popular books sold by the millions to credulous readers with abysmal taste, ad infinitum) is best explained in religious or mythological terms. For conspiracy theorists, belief is an act of faith, not a question of evidence or of reasoned analysis. This faith “rejects the most obvious explanation of an event, and reinterprets evidence to fit a preconceived idea . . . . Facts that contradict the theory are explained by conspiracy, but this ploy means that ‘conspiracy theories are really not theories at all’, but faiths, which cannot be proved false.”
Writing in the London Times Literary Supplement, Brian Vickers reviews various contemporary regurgitations of the “theories” that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, rather than William Shakespeare, were the authors of his immortal plays (and one contemporary refutation of the “hypotheses”) and asks “Why Not Shakespeare?”. Why not, indeed? His brief essay is an excellent summary refutation.

War Measures

2005-08-26T18:03:00.000-05:00

Weekly Standard contributor Christian Lowe describes the efforts of a group organized within the Department of Defense office of Advanced Systems and Concepts to develop a cluster of objective measurements determining the relative success of American strategies in the war against FascIslam. Under the auspices of this group, former Marine Colonel Gary Anderson’s “team came up with a series of broader trends that would allow U.S. policy-makers to see how well their strategies are working to defeat terrorism:
* Terrorist attacks that take place on U.S. territory show a continuous decline.
* The number of states in the Arab and Islamic worlds with representative or inclusive governments that oppose terrorism is increasing.
* Roughly 90 percent of Islamic clergy are preaching against terrorism.
* The majority of Arab language media are editorializing against the use of terrorism and giving negative reportage to acts of terrorism.
* Polling index of Arab/Muslim opinion polls are increasingly favorable.
* Groups previously identified as terrorists but have chosen to adopt non-violent means are increasing.”
As Lowe elaborates, “With the elections in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iraq; municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, parliamentary elections in Lebanon, and upcoming presidential elections in Egypt a trend toward ‘representative’ governments in a region associated with terrorist movements – a key measurement of success – could be taking hold.
“The nonpartisan Freedom House, a Washington-based democratic advocacy and research group, wrote in its latest ‘Freedom in the World’ survey that there has been an overall gain in freedom around the globe since the attacks of September 11, 2001. East-Central Europe, East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have posted the most gains, while key countries in the Middle East, including Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, have had overall setbacks.
“The number and effectiveness of terrorist strikes worldwide as a measure of success is equally mixed. Though there have been no attacks in the United States since 9/11, the U.S. State Department’s latest statistics show worldwide terrorist incidents rose from 198 in 2002 to 208 in 2003.
“Terrorism caused 725 deaths in 2003, 100 fewer than in the previous year – but wounded 3,546, up nearly 45 percent.”
Lowe also notes Michael Barone’s discussion of the extremely illuminating polls of public opinion in a number of islamic-majority countries and others which we referenced in “Breeding Gound 1”.
Indeed, by virtually any other measure than the crucial variable of domestic political opinion within the United States, we are making progress, and slowly winning, the War On Terror. For the American public, it’s time to wake up.

Beslan

2005-08-26T16:19:00.000-05:00

Slaughter of the Innocents

As we approach the first anniversary of the siege of Beslan, amid all the rhetorical excess of those who would compromise or surrender the values which animate our civilization to the dark forces of FascIslam, and who equate us with their evil acts and essence – as if there were utterly no difference between our actions and motivations and those of these malevolent enemies of humankind – it is of vital importance that we remind ourselves just who it is that we confront in this epic struggle for the soul of all humanity.
On the first of September last year, more than thirty FascIslamic terrorists attacked an elementary school on the very first day of classes, taking more than a thousand two hundred children, teachers and parents hostage. Within three days more than 300 were slaughtered – bombed, burned or shot to death – including more than eight score innocent children. More than 700 others were maimed or wounded, the last comatose victim dying but a few short weeks ago. The FascIslamists proudly proclaimed responsibility for their actions. The little ones were, after all, the children of infidels.
Certainly, the grotesque incompetence of the Russian authorities contributed to the enormity of this human tragedy. But it isn’t Vladimir Putin and his neo-tsarism that is responsible for the pain and suffering and death, however negligent, ill-conceived and hazardous the Russian response: it is the terrorists themselves who perpetrated this act of evil.
Ten days after the anniversary of this mass murder of innocent children, an act of which our enemies boast with pride, we here in America will mark the fourth anniversary of another mass murder on our own soil, the maleficent and intentional slaughter of ten times the number who died at Beslan. As we do, we must remind ourselves that our greatest enemy in this global conflict is not our adversary, but ourselves – our own complacency, inertia, division and doubt. All too many Americans, thoughtless, ignorant and unreflecting, blame their own country for the evils wrought by our depraved jihadist enemies. Such myopia is not limited to the political left or right, but appears across the spectrum, from the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons who blame our tolerance and social liberality and the Pat Buchanans who blame, implicitly, the Jews, to the far greater number of leftist apologists from Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore to Noam Chomsky, who despise the very society which assures their liberty to speak.
Two and a quarter centuries ago, the greatest orator of what was truly America’s greatest generation – the first American generation – Patrick Henry proclaimed “Give me liberty or give me death.” These were not mere words. They posed instead the stark reality of the situation for that American minority whose courageous acts and enormous sacrifice gave to us this great land, which even today remains the world’s beacon of freedom. Those same words resonate today, for the present generation, not as rhetoric but as reality. Our choice, however much we wish to deny it, is a simple one – liberty or death.
For the sake of humankind, America must choose liberty, not death.

Crucifiction

2005-08-25T18:19:00.000-05:00

The hands-down winner of the contest for this week’s “Headline of the Week” is Marvin Olasky, for World Magazine’s “Who Would Jesus Assassinate?”
As the University of Texas Professor avers, “the Bible offers no warrant for Pat Robertson’s fatwa.” (Just in case you’ve been on a Rip van Winkle, I’ll allow Olasky to explain: “Pat Robertson last week, on his long-running TV show The 700 Club . . . suggested that U.S. operatives assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez: ‘We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. . . . I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but . . . I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.’”)
From Jerry Rubin to Pat Robertson . . . ‘I don’t know . . . Just Do It!’

Constitutional Conventions

2005-08-25T17:35:00.000-05:00

“Iraq wasn’t created by God. It was created by Winston Churchill,” the smarmy and frequently unperceptive Peter W. Galbraith, former ambassador to Croatia, explains to the New York Times’ David Brooks in “Divided They Stand”. This time, the proverbial stopped clock is right. Speaking of the newly forged Iraqi constitution, Galbraith says that “this is the only possible deal that can bring stability. . . . I do believe it might save the country.” Why? As Brooks explains concisely, “this constitution gives each group what it wants. It will create a very loose federation in which only things like fiscal and foreign policy are controlled in the center (even tax policy is decentralized). Oil revenues are supposed to be distributed on a per capita basis, and no group will feel inordinately oppressed by the others.
“The Kurds and Shiites understand what a good deal this is. The Sunni leaders selected to attend the convention are howling because they are former Baathists who dream of a return to centralized power. But ordinary Sunnis, Galbraith says, will come to realize this deal protects them, too.”
As Brooks relates in his brief essay, the far more perspicacious Raul Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute (and formerly of the CIA) concurs with Galbraith. “What’s important, Gerecht has emphasized, is the democratic process: setting up a system in which the different groups, secular and clerical, will have to bargain with one another, campaign and deal with the real-world consequences of their ideas. This is what’s going to moderate them and lead to progress. This constitution does that. Shutting them out would lead to war.
“The constitution also exposes the canard that America is some imperial power trying to impose its values on the world.”
Much more about the Iraqi constitution later today or tomorrow. In the interim, be sure to see Brooks’ article.

The Slough

2005-08-24T18:59:00.000-05:00

This much is certain: as long as the Democratic party continues to delude itself into believing that chimerical “voter suppression” and an elusive magical “message” are what preclude them from winning elections, they will sink ever deeper into their slough of despond. New ideas and new policies regenerated a moribund Republican party a quarter of a century ago. Even today, at least in a comparative sense, the Republicans remain the party of new ideas and innovative policies.
“To err is human, to repent divine – to persist, devilish.”

Necromancy

2005-08-24T18:39:00.000-05:00

I assume that, as I’ve been lolling about in my dog days desuetude, you’ve been following the late summer blogospheric storm over yet another egregious lie penned by the New York Times’ resident Pinocchio, Paul Krugman. If not, National Review Online’s Donald Luskin summarizes the facts quite generously in “It’s the Truth that Counts”.
In a nutshell (the most appropriate of metaphors for Krugman’s little world), the Times’ columnist asserted (last Friday), in the context of a more voluminous and deranged rant, that in the aftermath of the 2000 election, “two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.” As usual for Mr. Krugman, this is a lie of both commission and omission.
Consider what the member papers of the two consortia reported themselves:
On May 15, 2001, the USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon in “Newspapers’ Recount Shows Bush Prevailed” reported that “George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes — more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review of the 61,195 ‘undervote’ ballots that were at the center of Florida’s disputed presidential election.”
Similarly, on April 4, 2001 in “Bush Still Wins Florida in Newspaper Recount” CNN revealed that “if a recount of Florida’s disputed votes in last year’s close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.
“The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 ‘undercounted’ ballots in Florida’s 67 counties that ended last month.
“Their count showed that Bush’s razor-thin margin of 537 votes — certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State’s office — would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.”
With respect to the second consortium, the New York Times itself declared that “a comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged [my italics], the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.
“Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.”
Also reporting on this second conortium, CNN, in “Florida Recount Study: Bush Still Wins”, avowed that “a comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.” In particular, they observed, “suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted — a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election — by a 225-vote margin statewide.”
If you missed their analysis, Power Line’s John Hinderaker and American Thinker’s Richard Baer each have excellent and extensive commentaries on Krugman’s latest prevarications. Far more terse, but entertainingly wry, is Evan Coyne Maloney’s quick summary at Brain Terminal.

Lipstick

2005-08-22T16:54:00.000-05:00

If you’re planning on being in Berlin this Friday the 26th, be sure to catch the performance of Lipstick at 11 p.m. at the Geburtstagsklub (Birthday Club) at 33 Friedrichshain, 10407 Berlin. For further information (auf Deutsch) see the Birthday Club’s website.

The Last Word

2005-08-21T14:24:00.000-05:00

“The Sheehan Family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq War and we have been silently, respectfully grieving. We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son’s good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect.”

Hot News

2005-08-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

The flame of liberty burns bright in Britain.

Danger Undisabled

2005-08-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn aptly distills the essence of recent revelations about Mohammed Atta and their implications for the politicized 9/11 Commission. “A body intended to reassure Americans that the lessons of that terrible day had been learned instead engaged in what at best was transparent politicking and collusion in posterior-covering and at worst was something a whole lot darker and more disturbing.
“The problem pre-9/11 was always political: that’s to say, no matter how savvy individual operatives in various agencies may have been, the political culture of the day meant that nothing would happen except a memo would get typed up and shoveled into a filing cabinet. Together with other never fully explained episodes – like Sandy Berger’s pants-stuffing at the national archives – the Able Danger story makes one thing plain: The problem is still political.”
Jack Kelly at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recapitulates the facts and draws even more explicit conclusions: “Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them – three times – from sharing this information with the FBI.
“The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators. (Gorelick later served as a 9/11 commission member.)
“‘They were stopped because the lawyers at that time in 2000 told them Mohamed Atta had a green card’ – he didn’t – ‘and they could not go after someone with a green card,’ said Rep. Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who brought the existence of Able Danger to light.
“The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al-Qaida. They hadn’t unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), 9/11 almost certainly could have been prevented.
“What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the 9/11 commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission which investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.”
But in fact it is even worse than that. As Kelly continues, “When the story broke, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Weldon’s credibility:
“‘The Sept. 11th commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohamed Atta or his cell,’ Hamilton said. ‘Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation.’
“Hamilton changed his tune after the New York Times reported Thursday, and the Associated Press confirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on Able Danger in October 2003 and again in July 2004.
“It was in October 2003 that Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed some. Berger allegedly was studying documents in the archives to help prepare Clinton officials to testify before the 9/11 commission. Was he removing references to Able Danger? Someone should ask him before he is sentenced next month.” So they should. But even this distinct possibility of collusion and coverup on a scale that would exceed Watergate pales beside the further implications.
“After having first denied that staff had been briefed on Able Danger, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no reference was made to it in the final report because ‘it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta’s whereabouts before the attacks,’ the AP reported.
“The only dispute over Atta’s whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.
“The CIA, and the 9/11 commission, say Atta wasn’t in Prague April 9, 2001, because his cell phone was used in Florida that day. But there is no evidence of who used the phone. Atta could have lent it to a confederate. (It wouldn’t have worked in Europe anyway.)
“But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that Saddam’s regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the 9/11 attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the revelation that 9/11 could have been prevented if it hadn’t been for the Clinton administration’s wall of separation.”
Let’s be explicit about this last point. Czech Intelligence has long had far greater competence and credibility than the hapless, gutted vestige CIA. And CIA’s tissue-thin arguments against the Czech reports have always read more like CIA CYA than considered analysis. In other words, there has always been a smoking gun to link Saddam Hussein to the events of 9/11 – not necessarily, to borrow the Commission’s phrase from another context, in an “operational control” relationship, but certainly at least in terms of knowledge, aiding and abetting. If further Able Danger revelations follow, there is a great deal more than a smoking gun.
Powerful people continue to play politics as usual (and worse) while America is at war – a war in which our freedom and our democracy are at stake. Even those whom we have trusted to learn the truth have obfuscated and prevaricated. As Kelly writes, “the 9/11 commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was.” But more than history is at risk. Our lives and freedoms are in peril. We must know the truth.

(For further background see also this post and this post from Captain’s Quarters, and this Dan Eggen article from the Friday Washington Post.)

Solidarity

2005-08-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

Twenty five years ago today, Polish trade union advocate and self-professed revolutionary Lech Walensa scaled the walls of the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk to lead the striking workers of Solidarity against the repressive Marxist-Leninist Polish government. Ten years later, Walensa became the first freely elected president of Poland in half a century.
What advice does Walensa have for aspiring democrats and the advocates of freedom today? In an interview reported by the BBC, “the former leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland has said he would support a people’s revolution in neighbouring Belarus.”
Belarus, the last European refuge of unreconstructed Communist repression, ruled with an iron fist by Alexander Lukashenko, cries out for change. “Walesa says he would support a revolution there, similar to those which have taken place in Ukraine and Georgia.” So should we.

Great Raid

2005-08-14T16:38:00.000-05:00

Scott Johnson at Power Line has an interesting discussion of the film “The Great Raid” and the reviews of that movie appearing in the “mainstream” media, in particular, the New York Times. The latter opens with Stephen Holden’s comment “about the only thing to be said on behalf of ‘The Great Raid,’ a tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand, is that it illustrates a depressing similarity between reckless war-mongering and grandiose moviemaking. Historical films with vainglorious ambitions, like ill-fated imperial ventures, often overlook the human factor, a miscalculation that usually results in a rout.” What seems especially to have offended Holden’s sensibilities is that “its scenes of torture and murder also unapologetically revive the uncomfortable stereotype of the Japanese soldier as a sadistic, slant-eyed fiend.” Or, more likely, they are merely accurate historical representations of wartime bestiality which is almost unparalleled. Such factuality and accuracy fails the first test of liberal ideology. (This point is more fully discussed in Johnson’s post.)
I haven’t seen “The Great Raid,” but having read Holden’s review I strongly suspect that Judge William at Righteous Indignation propounds a more accurate view when he writes “this is not a story of ‘characters’ but of unusual courage, audacity and fidelity. It is the story of warriors, not of individual nuances or of those seeking their own glory. And that makes it absolutely glorious. This the story of honorable men, who conducted themselves in the best tradition of the United States military. And that makes it anathema to the libs.”

Uber Alles

2005-08-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

No less pathetic is the French puppet-Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, who ever so predictably sacrifices all pretense of alliance with America and even his own nation’s vital interests in pursuit of his own selfish interest. His seven years of rule have been an unmitigated failure. Yet just as he did in 2002, he serves, protects and defends FascIslamists (then in Iraq, now in Iran) solely because he believes it will assure his re-election. Are the people of Germany awake yet?

Cindy Sheehan

2005-08-14T14:35:00.000-05:00

The vast preponderance of the American media prefers street theater, circuses and cartoons to substantive news. It is shameful that they exploit this poor, ignorant woman as they do. She shames herself and the memory of her son with her witless commentary and aberrant conduct. She would otherwise deserve our deepest sympathy for her grief in loss, but instead she invites only pity. We wish so much to empathize, but her lack of knowledge and wisdom, coupled with her harsh and mendacious rhetoric render her only pathetic. How sad.

Update:

Paul Geary at the New Editor adds this similar take on poor Cindy Sheehan.

I missed this earlier grotesquely repugnant post from Little Green Footballs. There really are people who have no conscience, no sense of shame, no honor. (Courtesy of Tom Elia at the New Editor)

Iraq Compact

2005-08-13T14:33:00.000-05:00

“The purpose of the political compact is to weld all the factions to the idea of a united Iraq committed to the principles of pluralism and democracy. If successful, this compact hopefully will split and weaken the insurgency, allow Iraq to fend off interference from neighboring states, provide an opportunity to resurrect and restructure the oil industry, and provide a blueprint for the operation of governing structures.”
In an excellent short essay entitled “Iraq’s Political Compact”, Paul Williams of American University and William Spencer of the Public International Law & Policy Group, both recently returned from a month-long consultancy with the Iraqi Constitutional Drafting Committee, explain the crucial aspects and implications of Iraq’s emerging new Constitution on the eve of the deadline for its adoption by the Iraqi national assembly. Their analysis, however compact, is cogent and on the mark. Strange that it should first appear in the New York Times’ Boston puppet paper.

Meanwhile, at the puppeteer paper, Dexter Filkins explores the tentative compromise on oil revenue and then expatiates on as many negative aspects of the continuing bargaining session as he can condense into a brief overview. As he argues, “Under the agreement, oil revenue would be shared by the central government and Iraq’s 18 provinces, and split roughly according to their populations. It was unclear which entity would control the money, though one Iraqi leader said it would be the central government . . . .
“If it holds, the deal will constitute a major advance in the effort to complete a constitution. The control of oil revenue, which provides the bulk of Iraq’s income, could significantly strengthen the hand of the central government over the regions, like Kurdistan and southern Iraq, that are pushing for greater self-rule.”
But this assessment really evades the most significant aspects of the prospective compromise. Iraq has always heretofore been dominated by a strong, if not omnipotent, central government. That government has usurped all control of Iraqi oil revenue. And globally, oil wealth more often than not has proven a curse, not a blessing, rewarding corrupt elites who divert the revenue to their own enrichment and to the consolidation and perpetuation of their power.
The point isn’t that the compromise strengthens the central government, but that it guarantees, in the basic law itself, that the central government does not have the right to unilaterally divert all oil revenue to its own ends. Instead, this compromise implicitly signals a commitment to a federal rather than a monolithic state – but also a single state, not secession and fission. It further implies greater autonomy for local and provincial governments, empowered with their own assured source of revenue. And finally, since the formula for distribution appears to be population-based, it implies that the ultimate ownership of the national resources reside not with the state, but with the people. All of these implications, however inexplicit, are to the good.

Update:

For a more pessimistic view of the question of federalism and decentralization – one which does not address the question of oil revenue-sharing -- see the Washington Post’s “US Steps Up Role in Iraq Charter Talks”.

Malice Toward None

2005-08-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

Revisionist critics of both left and right have assailed Abraham Lincoln in recent years, condemning him as malignant, incompetent and evil. Writing in the Hoover Digest, Dinesh D’Souza offers an excellent brief refutation of their specious charges in “Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman?”

Huffman Prairie

2005-08-13T13:08:00.000-05:00

Nearly everyone knows that Wilbur and Orville Wright first flew a heavier-than-air powered craft over the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But the engaging and fascinating tale of how they perfected their aircraft, simultaneously inventing the art of piloting and the science of aeronautical engineering, at Huffman Prairie, just a little northeast of Dayton, Ohio, is far less familiar. It shouldn’t be.

For Morarji Desai

2005-08-12T20:55:00.000-05:00

Nasa's new beverage has a real tang to it.

Data Hot and Cold

2005-08-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

Yesterday’s Economist featured quite an interesting discussion of three studies which have important implications, if borne out, for skeptics of global warming through human agency.
As even most casual observers of the controversy know, while computer models consistently predict warming of greater or lesser extent, the actual data have been in disagreement. While measurements of surface temperatures have seemed to confirm some models’ predictions of rising heat, at least in part, measurements of temperature collected by balloons and satellites for the troposphere – the lower layer of Earth’s atmosphere – have been contradictory, even showing somewhat of a cooling trend, particularly in the tropics.
Of the three papers discussed, the third appears least significant. Authored by a group from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, it simply points to the agreement of 19 different computer models, which all predict warming in the troposphere, and at the anomalous data, then argues that there must be something wrong with the data. Well, maybe. But the other two studies have something more interesting to say.
The first, conducted by Steven Sherwood of Yale University and colleagues, evaluates the data collected by weather balloons. The balloons are launched simultaneously twice each day from sites around the globe, once at midnight and once at noon Greenwich Mean Time. The raw data collected by these balloons is corrected to eliminate any solar heating of the thermometers so that all temperatures recorded will reflect readings taken in the shade. As the Economist explains, “because weather stations around the world release their balloons simultaneously, some of the measurements are taken in daylight and some in darkness. By comparing the raw data, the team was able to identify a trend: recorded night-time temperatures in the troposphere (night being the ultimate form of shade) have indeed risen. It is only daytime temperatures that seem to have dropped. Previous work, which has concentrated on average values, failed to highlight this distinction, which seems to have been caused by over-correction of the daytime figures. When the team corrected the erroneous corrections, the result agreed with the models of the troposphere and with records of the surface temperature. The improvement was particularly noticeable in the tropics, an area that had previously appeared to have high surface temperatures but far cooler tropospheric temperatures than had been expected.”
In a similar fashion, temperature data collected by satellites are also adjusted for the effect of intermediary layer of the atmosphere (the stratosphere) upon the measurements taken of the troposphere. In a second study, these data are also challenged. “Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems, a firm based in Santa Rosa, California, think that this trend [the cooling of the troposphere relative to surface temperature readings], too, is an artefact. It is caused, they believe, because the orbital period of a satellite changes slowly over that satellite’s lifetime, as its orbit decays due to friction with the outer reaches of the atmosphere. If due allowance is not made for such changes, spurious long-term trends can appear in the data. Dr Mears and Dr Wentz plugged this observation into a model, and the model suggested that the apparent cooling the satellites had observed is indeed such a spurious trend. Correct for orbital decay and you see not cooling, but warming.”
To be sure, none of these three studies address themselves to the question of human agency. But they do raise serious questions about the data which skeptics have emphasized most in their challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of global warming. The debate goes on.

Update:

Here’s the quick reaction of the Cato Institute’s senior fellow for environmental studies, Patrick J. Michaels: “The newly published research indicates that satellite, weather balloon and surface temperature trends in recent years are all nearly the same, placing much greater confidence in the amount of global warming that is occurring. These three different ways of measuring temperature have all converged on a warming rate that is at or near the low limit for warming given by scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These results reassure the arguments of those who say that global warming is likely to be modest and they argue strongly against the alarmist point of view on climate change.”

Improvisation & Innovation

2005-08-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

As usual, the Belmont Club’s Wretchard yesterday offered an intriguing discussion of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) as used by the FascIslamic forces in Iraq.
He notes that “Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force said that while the incident rate of IED attacks has gone up, the probability of death per attack has declined from 50% in 2003 to about 18% in early 2005. The Iraqi insurgency may be detonating more IEDs than ever but their yield per attack is not what it used to be. USA Today reported: ‘While IED attacks have increased, U.S. casualties from them have gone down. From April 2004 to April 2005, task force spokesman Dick Bridges said, the number of casualties from IED attacks had decreased 45%.’”
To some degree , this decreasing effectiveness results from specific countermeasures brought to bear against IEDs. As USA Today reports, “the Pentagon now has about 4,200 portable electronic jamming devices in Iraq and more are on the way, Bridges said. The military is about to test a new device at its Yuma, Ariz., proving ground that is capable of exploding bombs by sending an electrical charge through the ground. That device, called a Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizer (JIN), could be deployed to Iraq sometime this year if tests prove successful, Bridges said.” Wretchard elaborates, “Many bomb jammers work by preventing the triggerman from sending his detonation signal to the explosive device. Other equipment relies on detecting the electronic components of bombs, which echo a signal from a sniffer. The JIN neutralizer, now being test fielded to Iraq is an interesting application of directed energy weaponry. It works by using lasers to create a momentary pathway through which an electrical charge can travel and sending a literal bolt of lightning along the channel. A link to a Fox News video report on the manufacturer's website shows a vehicle equipped with a strange-looking rod detonating hidden charges at varying distances, some out to quite a ways.”
There are two interesting aspects to this dyadic relationship between measure and countermeasure. First, “it seems clear that the IED, like the submarine and bombing airplane before it, is not some mystically invincible device, but simply a weapon like any other caught up in a technological race with countermeasures arrayed against it. One consequence of this development is that while the enemy may employ larger numbers of IEDs against Americans, the number of effective IEDs – the bigger and better ones – available to them may actually have declined. The penalty for raising weaponry to a higher standard is making existing stock somewhat obsolete.”
But even more specifically, and perhaps ominously for the terrorists, “by engaging America in a technological arms race of sorts they are playing to its strengths. The relative decline in IED effectivity suggests the enemy, while improving, has not kept up. The move to bigger bombs may temporarily restore his lost combat power, but the advent of new American countermeasures plus increasing pressure on the bombmakers, means he must improve yet again. It is far from clear whether the insurgents can stay in the battle for innovation indefinitely.” (In this context, it is worthwhile reading today’s Belmont Club post on X-ray backscatter technology in “Unintended Consequences”.)
Wretchard concludes that “the logic of asymmetric warfare suggests the enemy will at some point abandon the direct technological weapons race and find a new paradigm of attack entirely. That is essentially what they did when they abandoned the Republican Guard tank formation in favor of the roadside bomb in the first place.
“One way to achieve this (and they have been perfecting their skills by attacks against Iraqi civilians) is to switch to other targets. In this way, they can find employment for weapons and skills which are no longer effective against American combat forces. The other is to invent some other surpassingly vicious method of attack; to create the successor to the IED.”
There are, of course, other alternatives as well: to surrender, to die, or to fade away.

New Puritanism Triumphant

2005-08-11T18:35:00.000-05:00

The spirit of the New Puritanism runs amok throughout America, destroying liberty in the name of social conformity – and making you do ‘what’s good for you.’ It’s not the Patriot Act that is the greatest threat to our freedom – it’s the Acts of Nannies.
Austinites are familiar with the new universal smoking ban scheduled to take effect at midnight on the first of September. As I observed just prior to the referendum in “Smoke & Mirrors”, there were 46,000 private businesses in Austin, of which 211 permitted smoking. In other words, more than 99% of all businesses were ‘smoke free,’ and the 23% of the populace (a little less than 1 in 4) that smoke could do so in .004% of all public places. As for restaurants, more than 2,000 were ‘smoke free,’ while 6 permitted smoking. So the 23% of the populace that smoke could do so in .003% of all restaurants. But the problem for ‘smoke free’ vigilantes was that with over 400 ‘smoke free’ bars, there were still nearly half as many (200) where smoking was permitted. Unsatisfied with a ratio in their favor of 2 to 1, the prohibitionists wanted 100%, mandated by law, enforced by fines and incarcerations. Of special significance were the live music venues on Austin’s Sixth Street and elsewhere, of which 63 allowed smoking. More than 150 did not, yielding a ratio approaching 3 to 1 in favor of non-smoking music venues. But the new prohibitionists didn’t care about the facts. For them the preference of 1 in 4 Texans wasn’t germane. ‘Screw them, I don’t like smoke.’ So they passed a law. Nannies win, 52%-48%.
As William L. Anderson of the Mises Institute indicated in the June 2003 issue of the Austin Review (not available online), “anti-tobacco activists most likely will not stop until we have something akin to the 1920s version of Prohibition, this time tobacco being the target, the failures of alcohol and drug bans not affecting them in the least.”
Similarly, as “Reefer Madness” discussed in early June, our long national experiment in marijuana prohibition has been an unmitigated disaster. It subsidizes terrorism here and abroad. It wastes as much as $40 billion every year that could be better spent on our national defense, on homeland security, on competing and far more pressing domestic priorities. The ‘War on Drugs’ has greatly accelerated the militarization of our police forces and federal agencies, and given a strong impetus to the development of a pervasive and intrusive surveillance state. It devastates civil liberties. It increases crime. (More than sixty percent of our federal prison berths are filled with drug offenders, most of whom have been convicted of possession, not trafficking.) It enhances the untaxed cash flow of organized crime in our own and other nations. It benefits no one.
But worse, as “Nanny Bobo” declared later that month, “the ultimate effect of criminalizing everything is not universal conformity to the law, but universal contempt for the law – growing disrespect and disdain for a legal regime that is contemptuous of human freedom.”
As the New York Times’ John Tierney notes in “Debunking the Drug War”, “Drug warriors point to the dangers of home-cooked meth labs, which start fires and create toxic waste. But those labs and the burn victims are a result of the drug war itself.
“Amphetamine pills were easily available, sold over the counter until the 1950s, then routinely prescribed by doctors to patients who wanted to lose weight or stay awake. It was only after the authorities cracked down in the 1970s that many people turned to home labs, criminal gangs and more dangerous ways of ingesting the drug.
“It’s the same pattern observed during Prohibition, when illicit stills would blow up, and there was a rise in deaths from alcohol poisoning. Far from instilling virtue in Americans, Prohibition caused them to switch from beer and wine to hard liquor. Overall consumption of alcohol might even have increased.
“Today we tolerate alcohol, even though it causes far more harm than illegal drugs, because we realize a ban would be futile, create more problems than it cured and deprive too many people of something they value.”
Now the Cato Institute’s Radley Balko, author of the study “Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking”, describes another insanity. In “Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense”, Balko describes the arrests in Rhode Island and Virginia of parents who sought to supervise and control the otherwise erratic and dangerous drinking of underage minors.
After noting the government’s own statistics – “47 percent of high school students tell researchers they’ve had a drink of alcohol in the previous 30 days . . . thirty percent have had at least five drinks in a row in the past month . . . thirteen percent admitted to having driven in the previous month after drinking alcohol” – he considers the cases of parents who sought to deal with the problem rationally, only to end up jailed.
“When they learned that their son planned to celebrate the prom with a booze bash at a beach 40 miles away, William and Patricia Anderson instead threw a supervised party for him and his friends at their home. They served alcohol, but William Anderson stationed himself at the party’s entrance and collected keys from every teen who showed. No one who came to the party could leave until the next morning.
“For this the Andersons found themselves arrested and charged with supplying alcohol to minors. The case ignited a fiery debate that eventually spilled onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving oddly decided to make an example of William Anderson, a man who probably did more to keep drunk teens off the road that night than most Providence-area parents.
“In fact, the Andersons were lucky. A couple in Virginia was recently sentenced to 27 months in jail for throwing a supervised party for their son’s 16th birthday, at which beer was made available. That was reduced on appeal from the eight-year sentenced imposed by the trial judge. The local MADD president said she was ‘pleasantly surprised’ at the original eight-year verdict, and ‘applauded’ the judge’s efforts.
“In the Washington area, several civic groups, public health organizations and government agencies have teamed up for a campaign called Party Safe 2005. You may have heard the ads on local radio stations in prom season, warning parents that law enforcement would be taking a zero-tolerance approach to underage drinking. The commercials explicitly said that even supervised parties – such as those where parents collect the keys of partygoers – wouldn’t be spared. Parents would risk jail time and a fine of $1,000 per underage drinker.
“Not only do such uncompromising approaches do little to make our roads safer, they often make them worse. The data don’t lie. High school kids drink, particularly during prom season. We might not be comfortable with that, but it’s going to happen. It always has. The question, then, is do we want them drinking in their cars, in parking lots, in vacant lots and in rented motel rooms? Or do we want them drinking at parties with adult supervision, where they’re denied access to the roads once they enter?” Zero tolerance, zero sense.
In his earlier “Drunk Driving Laws Are Out of Control” (July 27, 2004) and “Thank You for Not Drinking . . . In the Bar”(December 12, 2003), Balko documented the reality that America’s drunk driving laws have careened out of control.
He analyzed the advent of the new prohibitionism and its concerted efforts at social repression:
“In the last two years,” he wrote, “29 states have either passed or are now attempting to pass bills to increase excise taxes on alcohol. The cities of Oakland, San Diego, Baltimore, and Chicago have either banned or restricted alcohol manufacturers from advertising on city billboards. Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Albuquerque are considering similar controls.
“Since 2002, over 100 new pieces of legislation have been introduced in 31 states aimed at reducing drinking and driving. All but a handful of states have adopted the new, lower legal blood-alcohol threshold for drunken driving (.08 on a breath test), despite studies showing that drivers aren’t significantly impaired at that level, that the overwhelming majority of drunk driving fatalities occur at levels twice that high, and that drunk driving deaths have dropped by 40 percent since the early 1980s, and stabilized over the last several years.
“Twenty-two states have imposed restrictions on ‘happy hour’ drink specials. A spokesman for the Fairfax County police department recently defended police raids on local taverns by telling the Washington Post, ‘You can’t be drunk in a bar.’ In Bloomington, Indiana, cops began arresting of-age college students for walking home from off-campus bars while intoxicated. When asked if he’d rather drive students home, a Bloomington cop told the Indiana Daily Student, ‘Alcohol abuse is the problem, not whether or not you’re going to be driving.’
“Forty-four states now have laws that hold bar owners liable for any damages caused by their alcohol-consuming customers, after they leave the bar. Another 31 states apply those same liability standards to private residences. In Chicago – a town rich with the lessons of Prohibition – 400 of the city’s 2,705 precincts are now dry, and each election adds a few more.
“None of this happened by accident. A well-funded, well-organized campaign is afoot to make it as difficult to drink a beer as it is becoming to smoke a cigarette. This ‘neo-prohibition’ has advocates in the news media, academia, and most certainly in government. Sandy Golden, a spokesperson for the Campaign for Alcohol-Free Kids has said, ‘We’re 10 to 15 years behind the tobacco people, and we want to close the gap.’
“You thought it was absurd when city and state officials told you that you could no longer smoke in a bar. Just wait until they tell you that you can’t drink in one, either.”

For those interested in earlier controversies concerning Austin’s smoking prohibitionism, here’s my “Up in Smoke” from the May 2003 Austin Review:

“You don’t understand,” said Jack S. last Friday night in a Sixth Street bar while Austin’s best blues band ripped through an original cut.
“I’m from Boston. We don’t have anything like this there. Nothing. There isn’t anything like this anywhere, unless you pay the big bucks. It just blows me away.”
Jack may not be the only thing blown away like smoke in the wind if the Austin City Council has its way. The politicians are huffing and puffing at that very live music scene that astonished him, and preparing yet another attempt to blow it, too, away.
The pols have long touted the city as the ‘Live Music Capital of the World’. And for just as long they’ve done the very best they could to destroy live music. Now four neo-prohibitionists on the city council, including lame duck Mayor Gus Garcia, have determined to give it yet another try.
Their chosen instrument of destruction this time? A new smoking ordinance that coerces all restaurants and bars to ban smoking by force of law, rather than creating carefully crafted and intelligently designed incentives to persuade more venues to welcome non- and anti-smokers by forbidding smoking.
Why is the city council choosing compulsion over incentives? All available evidence says that, in the absence of either, the public demand for non-smoking music venues simply isn’t there.
When Acoustic Café opened last year on Sixth Street, they offered live music similar to that available up and down the street, and in some respects decidedly superior to many. The atmosphere and decor were appealing. They did not permit smoking, in the belief that this would give them a competitive advantage. Within 60 days they were out of business. Clearly, not enough members of the general public found a nonsmoking environment sufficiently enticing to persuade them to spend their dollars there rather than elsewhere.
But if the council were convinced, in the absence of all available evidence, that the demand was there, why not coax businesses along with, say, tax abatements that would change the economic incentives for owners?
Instead, their decision is to outlaw freedom of choice, divert limited law enforcement resources from serious crimes to yet another attempt to force people to do ‘what’s good for them’ whether they want to or not, and in the process place another crushing burden on Austin’s already beleaguered live music scene.
In the past two years, the number of clubs on Sixth Street has fallen by almost half, from more than 40 to 24. Many of those that have remained in business have experienced a serious decline in revenue. They’re hanging on. The last thing they need in their weakened state is to face another crushing burden.
As Wickham and Edmonson point out in “Smoke and Mirrors” (page 3), “based on other cities’ experiences, this is what we can expect: Sales will drop 20-30% at bars and live music venues. After two months, 20-25% of bars and live music venues will close down. Bars and live music venues will continue to close down at a rate of 2-5% per month for 6 months . . . . A conservative figure is to expect 30% of bars and live music venues to close within a year.”
Without coercion, a number of restaurants have made a success of operating smoke-free establishments in Austin. It makes good business sense for Roy’s, PF Chang’s, Jeffries’ and many others. Only about 1 in 4 Austinites smokes, and for a certain percentage of the nonsmoking population it makes a crucial difference whether or not an establishment has any environmental smoke whatsoever. But for most, it’s just one of many factors that they consider when making entertainment and dining choices.
And because live music venues are almost invariably far more dependent on alcohol sales than the average restaurant, their habitual clientele has a substantially higher concentration of smokers than does the population at large.
In an informal survey on four separate nights over a two week period in one club, my observation was that an average of 40 to 45% of the crowd consisted of smokers. The percentage appeared to be even higher on weeknights than on weekends, presumably because Friday and Saturday nights attract a broader segment of the public.
The implication is that a smoking ban is likely to do more harm to venues providing live music than to traditional restaurants. (Incidentally, I also made a special point of checking out the staff and musicians, and found that among them the percentage of smokers was higher still.)
Given the serious cultural and economic consequences of a coercive policy, you would imagine that even if the city council and staff were too indolent to explore policy alternatives, they would at least have a compelling reason for adopting the new rule—other than their own personal preferences and prejudices. In the present case, the proponents claim that they do. It’s a public health issue, they say. The problem is that it just doesn’t wash.
As Jacob Sullum notes in “Second Hand Smoke” (page 25), the latest study appearing in the British Medical Journal summarizes a point made time and time again by those who haven’t wanted to use the evidence for polemical reasons: “No significant associations were found for current or former exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality . . . .”
For more than a decade it has been clear to those who examined them skeptically that the claims of deaths due to second hand smoke aren’t just exaggerated, or hyperbolic. They are simply made up out of whole cloth. Those who use the claims for political purposes may believe that they are justified because they are doing such good works for the benefit of mankind.
But when crusaders threaten to damage our cultural institutions and economic well-being in order to achieve ends that a substantial fraction of the populace doesn’t want—because ‘it’s for their own good’—those of us who care about freedom, or about live music, ought to draw the line. The nannies aren’t going to stop unless we make them stop.

Err America 3

2005-08-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul” – no, more like stealing from widows and orphans to adorn Caesar’s palace; it’s as if Robin Hood were working sub rosa for the Sheriff of Nottingham, robbing the Saxons blind to fund the Norman effete; no wonder these leftists don’t give a damn about the UN’s Oil-for-Fraud scandal – they aspire toward it as a model.

I haven’t had anything of substance to add to the continuing sordid saga of theft, malevolence and shame that is “Air America”; Brian Malroney, Michelle Malkin, the Power Line trio, and Captain’s Quarters, among many, many others in the blogosphere, have had more than enough illuminating information to share. But if you’d like to catch up on developments, check out this post at Radio Equalizer. It’s chock full of excellent links to all the unsavory details.

Flow

2005-08-11T16:30:00.000-05:00

“The earth belongs always to the living generation,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, many more times than once.
But it cannot be so. The living generation of humanity is a continual coming-into-being and passing-out-of-being, a current, a flux, a flow, like Heraclitus’ river into which we cannot step twice – or like Cratylus’ stream into which we cannot step even once, as the current ever flows.
And yet all the flow remains one river. So our generations: passing imperceptibly one from another, one to another, ever-changing, always many, always one.
We cannot escape the generations long since past, or the generations yet to come.
It is not that the earth belongs always to the living generation, but that it is in that generation’s care, entrusted from the past, in trust for the future, passing-out-of-being, coming-into-being, the present channel at once of past and future.

The Least of These

2005-08-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

Michael Wines’ “Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet” is a good news story from a bad news region of the world – starving Niger. Thousands of malnourished babies are being saved by “a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands [containing] 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals.” Plumpy'nut, developed by French scientist, André Briend, is being distributed to some 5,000 babies from 32 feeding centers across the drought-stricken land.
But the good news isn’t without reservation. “The United Nations reports that 150,000 children under age 5 in Niger are severely malnourished, and another 650,000 moderately malnourished – all together, about one in five. Malnutrition is a factor in 60 percent of deaths of children younger than 5 – and in Niger, more than a quarter of all children never reach their fifth birthday.
“Fourteen packets a week times 150,000 children times 4 weeks is a lot of Plumpy'nut. But then, says Dr. [Milton] Tectonidis [of Doctors Without Borders], it is not the mathematics, or even the nutrition science, that is the hard part. It is keeping the world’s eyes focused on solving Niger’s everyday hunger problem once the television coverage of this crisis has ended.
“‘We know what’s needed in terms of malnutrition,’ he said. ‘It’s just the will that’s lacking.’”

Update:

The Washington Post’s Craig Timberg further documents the travails of Niger’s starving children in “Surge of Hunger in Niger Proves Lethal to Children”.

Life Tenure 3

2005-08-07T21:06:00.000-05:00

“[I]n our system of government, we normally constrain great power with limits rather than license its indefinite exercise,” writes Robert Bauer in arguing that the Supreme Court is in “desperate need of reform; it has become increasingly isolated, imperious and opaque.” He, like many others we have discussed recently, believes that a significant contributor to this isolation and arrogance is “the justices refusal to serve limited terms.”
Yet Bauer is skeptical that there is any realistic hope of adopting constitutional or statutory limits on judicial tenure because “few in Congress have the appetite for the long, grueling and uncertain battle that would be entailed.” He is, however, hopeful that such limits could evolve as a matter of “custom or expectation” if the other branches of government began to take the question more seriously. “[T]he most important and most dramatic step the president and Congress could take,” he avers, “is to seek a commitment from a Supreme Court nominee that he or she will serve a sensibly limited period of time. The president could announce such a commitment when he introduces the candidate to the media. The Senate Judiciary Committee could ask the nominee about his views on longevity and also seek a commitment, even to a range of years. Any justice who hopes that with the passage of time such an exchange would be forgotten would likely be disappointed. Over time, a custom or expectation would develop. No law would be necessary to assure that justices act in the socially accepted fashion, just as no president served more than two terms for almost 150 years after Washington.
“Roberts’s nomination may be just the right moment to try this approach. He wrote favorably about term limits for federal judges in 1983. ‘Setting a term of, say, 15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence,’ he wrote in a memo addressing a proposed constitutional amendment to limit judges’ terms. Roberts appreciated that the case for term limits was strengthened by the enormous power of the federal judiciary, which ‘today benefits from an insulation from political pressure even as it usurps the roles of the political branches.’”
In this manner, Bauer believes, we can begin to reform the court and better secure its limited role in our constitutional republic. “It is long past time that the media, the Congress and the executive branch act to remind the court, and those who would serve on it, of its position in our governmental scheme; to affirm that the public has a strong and legitimate interest in how the court behaves; and to demand the transparency, accountability and respect for limits that are a hallmark of powerful public institutions in our democracy.”

War Scribes

2005-08-07T18:28:00.000-05:00

“Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it's visible around the world.”
John Hockenberry’s “The Blogs of War” in Wired Magazine discusses a few of the ramifications of that mass audience and instantaneous forum. As Chris Missick,of the blog A Line in the Sand explains, “Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision. Here I sit, in the desert, staring daily at the electric fence, the deep trenches and the concertina wire that separates the border of Iraq and Kuwait, and write home and upload my daily reflections and opinions on the war and my circumstances here, as well as some of the pictures I have taken along the way. It is amazing, and empowering, and yet the question remains, should I as a lower enlisted soldier have such power to express my opinion and broadcast to the world a singular soldier’s point of view? To those outside the uniform who have never lived the military life, the question may seem absurd, and yet, as an example of what exists even in the small following of readers I have here, the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.”
While by no means exhaustive or definitive, Hockenberry’s discussion is an excellent introduction to the debate.

Hiroshima

2005-08-06T18:08:00.000-05:00

“[M]y uncle was not only a member of the Enola Gay that dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, the first atomic bomb in history but was actually the bombardier,” writes Jim Martin in “Bomb that Ended a War”. “[H]e slept well at night knowing he helped save more lives than he killed by bringing the war to a sudden halt.”
“[T]he stark fact [is that] this act saved 38,000 American lives, the ‘low ball’ estimate of liberal revisionists, or up to 1 million, if you value the judgment of those who decided to drop the bomb. It also saved 100,000 Allied prisoners of war.
“Why? Because Tokyo had ordered that the moment the U.S. invaded Japan, these 100,000 POWs were to be stabbed, shot, beheaded or otherwise slaughtered.”
The German news magazine Der Spiegel conducted an interview with another member of the Enola Gay’s crew, navigator Theodore Van Kirk. Van Kirk describes the experience. “After the bomb exploded and we saw the devastation you could only draw one conclusion: the war was over. We couldn’t make any visual observation of Hiroshima because it was all covered with smoke and dust, but you could see the energy that was released. Any rational people would have accepted the terms of surrender after one bomb. Well, maybe not the same day, but certainly within the next two days. Besides, Japan was a defeated nation before we ever dropped the atomic bombs. Eighty-five percent of Japan was burned down, its industrial capacity was destroyed before we ever dropped the atomic bombs. And yet they still wanted to keep on fighting. After we dropped it, the Japanese tried to cover up the fact that one of their cities was missing. They cut off all rail transportation into Hiroshima, they never announced it in the newspapers or anywhere. (Nazi SS head Heinrich) Himmler would have been proud of them for the way they handled it.”
How does Van kirk feel about his role in that historic event? “I’m not proud of all the deaths it caused, and nobody is. But how do you win a war without killing people? If you don’t want to kill people, you should not start a war. And I think people that go around and start wars for any reason whatsoever are crazy, but that’s another story. When you have a war, there is only one thing to do in my opinion, and that is make damn sure you win it and expend any energy that you must in order to bring that war to a rapid conclusion with a minimum loss of life.”

Sixty years to the day from the detonation of the first atomic bomb in the sky above Hiroshima, we still struggle to understand and cope with the “unthinkable” consequences.
Perhaps you are already saturated with reflections about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ramifications of those now distance events that affect us yet on this anniversary of that fateful day. But if not, there is much of interest and import to be found in cyberspace that is worthy of attention.
In “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Original Ground Zero”, the Washington Post’s Neely Tucker discusses a cable documentary created from selections from 90 reels of 16mm color film, about 30 hours of footage, filmed by an American military crew in the weeks after Japan’s surrender. About five hours of this film footage, available for viewing at the National Archives, pertains to the damage, destruction and death wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As Japan’s Asahi Shimbun reports, “slightly more than 266,000 atomic bomb survivors live in Japan. Their average age is 73.” The Asahi Shimbun editorial focuses upon the efforts of one of these survivors, Junichiro Nagai, to share his experience with present generations. “[W]hen Hiroshima conducted a survey five years ago, more than half of the elementary school students did not know the year when the atomic bomb hit their city. Nearly 30 percent of junior high school students also failed to give the correct answer.” Nagai hopes to relate his experiences to the generation of his grandchildren.
The anniversary commemoration in Hiroshima is briefly reported, with an emphasis upon the pacifist perspective, by Eric Talmadge of the Associated Press in “Hiroshima Marks 60 Years”.
Other items are more comprehensive or thought-provoking. In addition to the interview with Enola Gay’s navigator mentioned above, Der Spiegel also offers a two-part series by Klaus Wiegrefe, “The Bomb that Was Meant for Hitler” and “My God, What Have We Done?”. They also conducted an interesting though somewhat uneven interview with historian Richard Rhodes. When asked whether the scientists working on the atomic bomb were “horrified at what they had done,” Rhodes explains that they were not “because they were working on the project in the middle of a war that cost 55 million human lives. From their point of view, this was going to be the weapon that was to end World War II — and it’s fair to argue that it did. And there was also a feeling that it might be a weapon that would end all wars. You can definitely argue that it ended world-scale war. If you look at the number of man-made deaths in the 20th century, you will see that around 1917 it was around 6 million per year and then in the 1930s it was around 4 million per year. During World War II, it spiked up to the horrendous figure of some 15 million per year. But then, immediately after World War II, it dropped off dramatically to around 1 million per year and stayed at that low level for the rest of the 20th century. What caused that dramatic change? I think pretty clearly the introduction of nuclear weapons.”
But not all of Rhodes’ reflections are so comforting. “Everybody I talk to in the nuclear community is pretty comfortable that nation states are not going to use nuclear weapons — even states like North Korea are clearly more concerned with the prestige factor than about actually using it. But everyone I talk to is greatly concerned about the very real possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack. Terrorist groups — al-Qaida is one example — would see a great amount of prestige if they were able to build and detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City or in Iraq’s US-controlled Green Zone. In fact, everyone I take seriously in this field believes the possibility is 100 percent. The fact is, if you can get a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, it’s very easy to make a nuclear weapon that would explode with about the same yield as the Hiroshima bomb. These weapons are so small and so portable and so vastly destructive for their weight and size that there is no effective defense against them except abolition.” One wonders, if it is so “very easy to make a nuclear weapon,” how one can believe that such abolition would be possible.
In a similar vein, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists poses the question “Would You Have Dropped the Bomb?”
“‘All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last,’ wrote the French novelist Marcel Proust. In 1945, our collective state of mind was despair. World War II touched every inhabitable continent, leaving more than 50 million dead and millions of others as refugees. The conflict had spanned more than half a decade. It would effectively end during an interval of 43 seconds — the time it took for the atomic bomb to explode over Hiroshima after it was released by the Enola Gay on August 6. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, followed by Japan’s surrender.
“Sixty years later, we live in a world where the capacity for mass destruction is no longer limited to superpowers — or, for that matter, to nations. Our collective state of mind is one of vulnerability. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not just historical events but portents of a possible future for any city, anywhere. And it is through that lens that we find ourselves looking back at the decision of President Harry S. Truman and its legacy.
“With each passing decade, the anniversary of the atomic bombings provokes a debate over whether the United States made the right choice. But this crucial question is almost always considered in the abstract. A far more difficult task is to assume personal responsibility. With that in mind, the Bulletin sought out noteworthy thinkers with backgrounds in history, theology, physics, and diplomacy and posed a single, provocative question: ‘If the decision had been yours alone to make, would you have dropped the bomb?’”
Three of the essays are available online, “A Victory Without Spoils” by Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Pakistan’s Quaid e Azam University, “Bearing the Burden” from the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Donnelly, and “The Promise of Retaliation” by Robert l. Gallucci, the Clinton administration’s chief negotiator in the sucker-punch Agreed Framework deal with North Korea in 1994.
In the National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes in “60 Years Later” that
“The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad — some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish — throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military — industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers — Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000.
“In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the ‘mad bomber’ LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.” One gleans the impression that his answer to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s question would be “yes.”
Fred C. Ikle, the undersecretary of defense for policy during the Reagan administration, shares a variety of illuminating thoughts in “Nuclear Explosion: A Portrait of Our Scary World, 60 Years After Hiroshima.” “The news about Hiroshima reached the White House on Aug. 5, 1945 [August 6 in Japan],” he writes. “President Truman’s statement next morning — precisely 60 years ago — informed the world of the ‘atomic bomb’ and the Manhattan Project. On Aug. 9, the A-bomb attack on Nagasaki prompted Japan’s surrender and ended World War II. Since then, America has devoted immense effort to the nuclear problem — an intellectual, political and military endeavor that has no parallel. We know how we entered the Nuclear Age. We do not know how to exit from it.
“First we tried arms control to kill the monster in its cradle. The U.S. advanced the Baruch Plan to confine nuclear technology entirely to peaceful uses. After Stalin rejected the plan, we began to build atomic bombs at a leisurely pace: Nine in 1946, 13 in 1947, and, by the time North Korea invaded South Korea, we had some 300 atomic bombs, the Soviet Union perhaps five. Barely 20 years later, each of the two superpowers had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.”
Ikle describes the Eisenhower’s good intentions and their unintended consequences. “President Eisenhower became deeply concerned about these trends. Based on careful deliberations, he decided in December 1953 to launch the Atoms for Peace Program at the U.N. His address received more praise — at home and abroad — than any other presidential speech. The purpose of Atoms for Peace was to enlist international support against weapons proliferation by donating or selling nuclear technology labeled ‘peaceful.’ Spurred by this American multilateralism, a shopping mall opened, making U.S., Soviet, Canadian, French, British and other reactors available for ‘peaceful’ research and electric power. This ‘peaceful’ technology was sold or donated to Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Laos, India, Pakistan, etc. No other U.S. policy, no commercial initiative, no theft of technology has done more to accelerate and expand the global spread of nuclear bombs. There is an echo of Greek tragedy here: Arms control initiatives meant to avert a calamity morph into the agent that exacerbates the feared outcome.”
To this day we are inveigled by the proponents of good intentions. “Today the Bush administration is being pressured to purchase a halt in North Korea’s nuclear bomb-making. Members of Congress and editorialists urge the president to ‘engage’ North Korea with generous economic and political gifts. Such ‘engagement’ could award us with the fifth (or would it be the seventh?) arms agreement that North Korea violates. And it would tell other rogue nations that they ought to try the same blackmail.”
In their own final reflections upon the advent of the nuclear age, the editors of the Opinion Journal, in “Hiroshima: Nuclear Weapons, Then and Now.”, declare that “looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril.” I am inclined to agree.

Fatwa 4

2005-08-05T19:04:00.000-05:00

In discussions late last month of the fatwa issued by the Fiqh Council of North America (in “Fatwa”, “Fatwa 2”, and “Fatwa 3”) I expressed the opinion that it was “just one more datum among the accumulating evidence that we are beginning to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of Islamic peoples throughout the world.” Others reacted with substantially greater skepticism, if not cynicism. Despite their counterarguments I continued to believe that “there is substantial evidence of significant attitudinal change among Islamic peoples both here in America and around the globe, and an increasing realization that they have quite as much at stake as all the rest of us in this great struggle against FascIslam. This may or may not be true in this specific instance, about which I intend to reserve judgment – but with an attitude of hopeful optimism.”
Now I find myself further encouraged that a number of Muslim scholars themselves are raising objections to the substance of the Fiqh fatwa. As the Associated Press’s Rachel Zoll reports in “Muslim Edict Slammed for not Condemning al Qaeda”, critics within the American Muslim community have taken the fatwa to task.
“‘The bulk of the Islamic tradition as it exists does stand against these lunatic, savage attacks on civilians,’ said Omid Safi, a Colgate University religion professor and chairman of the Progressive Muslim Union, an American reform group.
“‘But I would be more inclined to say there are elements of extremism in many parts of our tradition. Rather than simply saying these are not a part of Islam, I would acknowledge that these trends are there and do away with them.’
“Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at the University of Delaware and author of ‘American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom,’ said it appeared the main aim of last week’s fatwa was protecting U.S. Muslim groups from criticism. And the edict may have fallen short of even that goal, he said.
“‘They should have been at least specific about events, if not individuals or organizations. They did not condemn al Qaeda or [Osama] bin Laden. It would have had more punch to end all these claims that American Muslims are not doing enough to end terrorism if they had,’ Mr. Khan said.”
From one vantage point this might be considered as a vindication of the critics of the fatwa. But perhaps the more important observation is that Islamic scholars and others in the Muslim community are themselves finally beginning to assume a role in the criticism of FascIslam, abandoning their worried silence and raising their voice in accord with those who view this struggle as decisive not merely for the survival of freedom and democracy in the West, but also for the final achievement of freedom and democracy in the Islamic world.

Resolution & Action

2005-08-05T17:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, in his first appearance before the United Nations Security Council, US Ambassador John R. Bolton acclaimed the unanimous adoption of Security Council Resolution 1618, which “condemns without reservation and in the strongest terms the terrorist attacks that have taken place in Iraq, and regards any act of terrorism as a threat to peace and security.” One key provision of the resolution “. . . specifically strongly urges Member States to prevent the transit of terrorists to and from Iraq, arms for terrorists, and financing that would support terrorists, and re-emphasizes the importance of strengthening the cooperation of the countries in the region, particularly neighbours of Iraq, in this regard . . .” [italics in original]
Citing Syria and Iran, Bolton declared that “this resolution highlights the critical importance of cooperation among all member states to halt the flow of terrorists, weapons and terrorist financing to Iraq.”
Now, what are we going to do about it?

Beginning's End

2005-08-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

We are slowly but steadily approaching the end of the beginning of our long war to come with FascIslam. Stephen Schwartz gets it, even if the vast majority of “mainstream” analysts and commentators don’t. “While it may seem counterintuitive, the new offensive of al Qaeda, represented by the two terror attacks in London and the Zawahiri declaration, may be expressions of weakness on the main front in Iraq. Iraqi Sunnis are turning away from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his murderous Wahhabi offensive. Shia and Kurdish authorities are consolidating. With the Iraq jihad in decline, al Qaeda needs to reassert its power by more bloodshed in Baghdad and new atrocities in London and other Western cities.
“But when Zawahiri speaks, more than rhetoric is involved. Real dangers to public security cannot be denied.”

The Difference

2005-08-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

The Crucial Difference Between Knowing and Understanding

Two recent articles, one an opinion editorial by Edward Koch in today’s Washington Times, the other a report on a new publication by Sam Roberts in Sunday’s New York Times, shed light upon an important historical event and also upon our current global war against FascIslam.
Roberts discusses the book “Eavesdropping in Hell” by Robert J. Hanyok, who is an historian with the National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History. Hanyok analyzes recently declassified signals intelligence decrypted by British and American operatives during the Second World War, and the weight of his evidence leads Roberts to conclude that “in January 1942, the Nazis convened to map their Final Solution and by the following December the Allies knew or suspected enough – mostly from escaped prisoners and other partisans – to issue a public denunciation of Germany’s ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.’
“Now, a United States government analysis suggests that while the evidence was incomplete, gruesome details from coded Nazi messages that Britain intercepted beginning in 1941 could have confirmed and exposed the scope of German genocide well before 1945, when Allied troops liberated the death camps and became witnesses to the horror.”
Particularly harrowing is one decrypted message “declassified in 2000 and barely noticed except in scholarly journals, was intercepted on Jan. 11, 1943. It specified the number of Jews killed under ‘Operation Reinhard’ at four death camps – Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka – through 1942: 1,274,166.”
Koch emphasizes this message and declares that “this is the latest smoking gun which refutes the claim of apologists for President Roosevelt that the Allies did not know of the death camps or the systematic extermination of the Jews until the end of the war, so therefore, bombing the train tracks to the Auschwitz death camp or the camp itself was not an option. The latest revelations show the Allies did know, and they knew early on.”
But Koch may be making a judgment ex post facto which is clear in retrospect, but not necessarily to those acting at the time.
As Roberts point out, “the report notes [that] ‘the message itself contained only the identifying letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals.’
“The only clue that these were death camps would have been the reference to Operation Reinhard, a tribute to the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, who had been charged with organizing the Nazis’ plan to eliminate Europe’s Jews.
“But that was probably ‘unknown at the time’ to the British code breakers, the report says. Still, British analysts obviously considered the message important. It was classified as ‘Most Secret’ and marked ‘To be kept under lock and key: Never to be removed from the office.’” [In fact, this designation almost certainly would have been routinely applied to important signals intelligence decrypts.]
These observations are not intended to be wholly exculpatory. As Koch relates, “Jan Karski, a Polish Christian affiliated with the Polish underground, was spirited into the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, where he saw Nazi atrocities first-hand. When Mr. Karski went to England, he met with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, who said that Great Britain had already done enough for Jewish refugees. Mr. Karski traveled to the United States and met President Roosevelt at the White House on July 28, 1943. According to a later New York Times account, Mr. Karski ‘told Roosevelt about Auschwitz and said that 1.8 million Jews had already been killed in Poland. He said that commanders of the underground Home Army were estimating that if there were no Allied intervention in the next year and a half, the Jews of Poland would ‘cease to exist.’’ Roosevelt responded by assuring him that the Allies would win the war. The president said nothing about rescuing the Jews. Rescue was not on his agenda.
“After the war, Mr. Karski summed up his feelings concerning the destruction of the Jews as follows, ‘This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. It does haunt me. And I want it to be so.’”
Roberts also reports the comments of several historians in a similar vein. “‘If they announced it, would it have saved lives?’ said Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles.
“‘I think so, because there would have been greater pressure to bomb Auschwitz in 1944, at least the rail lines on bridges. But saving Jews was not a priority. Jewish leaders were told that the best way to stop the Holocaust was to defeat Germany.’
“Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies at Gratz College in Pennsylvania, noted that in 1943, the year after the British and Americans denounced the mass killings, the Allies convened a conference in Bermuda and could have allowed more European Jews to emigrate.
“‘Here they had significant detailed confirmation of mass murder and, yet, still their response was to come up with ways to create the impression of concern but no intention of taking any meaningful action,’ Dr. Medoff said. ‘Some Jews could still have gotten out. The logical response would have been for the British to relax their immigration restrictions in Palestine and to let more Jews into America.’”
But can we be so certain retrospectively – in particular concerning the signals intelligence? We’ve already seen the complexities of context, detail, interpretation and access with respect to the specific intercept discussed earlier. Roberts also refers to a variety of other complications which vexed intelligence collectors and analysts in World War II – and which continue to vex us in the global war against FascIslam today.
One is quite familiar to even casual observers of our intelligence bureaucracy: “British and American efforts to sort evidence were hampered by large case backlogs and a shortage of translators.” The sheer quantity of information gleaned by electronic intelligence is one of the most formidable barriers to its rapid and effective exploitation. Knowing that our efforts in the earlier conflict were impeded by a lack of German linguists only emphasizes how much more difficult a problem our present lack of Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Farsi linguists has proven to be. Raw traffic untranslated, unanalyzed, unreported or out of context can be of crucial significance, and yet unknown to the decisionmakers for which it might make a decisive difference.
Similarly, the sheer quantity of potentially useful information, coupled with the sensitive nature of its source, assures that ruthless prioritization and stringently limited access will hamper the effective exploitation of that intelligence. As Roberts observes, “efforts were further slowed by the two allies’ reluctance to share information about German communications and, more generally, by more pressing military priorities for intelligence sifting.”
The necessity for limited access is well illustrated by an occurrence related in Hanyok’s book, as related by Roberts. “The Germans were careful to plug their own obvious intelligence leaks. After Churchill, relying only on intercepts, delivered a radio address in 1941 denouncing the execution of Russian ‘patriots’ – without mentioning Jews – the Germans as ‘a probable result’ switched to a more sophisticated code and stopped transmitting radio reports on the executions.”
As for prioritization, “analysts had been looking for information about internal security, impacts of bombing and prisoners or war rather than potential evidence of war crimes and probably would not have grasped the enormity of the Nazis’ plan.” In one particular instance, Hanyok “quotes a memorandum from a British cryptologic official, dated Sept. 11, 1941, that takes account of German massacres in the Soviet Union and concludes: ‘The fact that the police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should now be sufficiently well appreciated. It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries unless so requested.’” Knowing what we know today, this sounds appallingly callous. But in the fog and urgency of war it is not incredible.

Have They No Shame?

2005-08-04T16:33:00.000-05:00

The New York Times descends from the despicable to the verminous. Hugh Hewitt offers more here.

Update:

Power Line’s John Hinderaker updates this sordid, pathetic affair by noting this report from Brit Hume which indicates that the New York Times “has been asking lawyers who specialize in adoption cases for advice on how to get into the sealed court records on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ two adopted children.”
I apologize to vermin everywhere for having demeaned them.

Hawaiian Apartheid 2

2005-08-04T15:58:00.000-05:00

In “Hawaiian Apartheid” nearly two weeks ago, we discussed the bill (SB 147, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005; for full text see here) introduced by Hawaii’s Senator Daniel Akaka to impose an insidious new regime of racial apartheid in the nation’s fiftieth state.
According to Malia Zimmerman, writing yesterday in the Hawaii Reporter [courtesy of Michelle Malkin], “the bill, introduced to ‘protect’ native Hawaiian rights and lands, and possibly further expand them, may be debated and voted on Sept. 6, 2005, in the Senate when Congress goes back into session.
“Sen. Akaka has filed a petition for a cloture, which could force debate and a vote on the bill if 60 senators support his petition.
“That may happen because Hawaii’s Republican Governor, Linda Lingle, is fighting for the passage of the bill along with Hawaii’s Democrat Congressional delegation. Lingle has rallied the support of the president behind the bill, and behind the scenes President Bush is said to be lobbying Republican Senators to pass the measure. In addition, the president’s administration reportedly has asked the U.S. Justice Department to downplay its concerns over the constitutionality of the bill.” [My italics.]
Not content to have been the party of slavery for three-quarters of a century and of Jim Crow for a century, the Democratic party stands today as the primary exponent of contemporary racism. Someone must stand against it. What possible reason could George W. Bush have for defending apartheid in the 21st century?

Pravda

2005-08-04T12:47:00.000-05:00

Separation of News and State

“PBS . . . is broadcasting by bureaucracy. This is not a good thing. We should have separation of news and state. ‘We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper, writes [the Cato Institute’s David] Boaz, ‘why should we have a government television network and a government radio network?’”
In today’s RealClearPolitics, John Stossel makes the definitive case against federal subsidies for leftist agitprop, “Privatize PBS”.
Call it the Maori option: ‘First, we kill all the Big Birds . . .’

For more on this topic, see David Boaz’s Fox News commentary “Top Ten Reasons to Privatize Public Broadcasting”

Iraqi Constitution

2005-08-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

“The new Iraqi constitution to be presented later this month will not resolve many of the most difficult questions that threaten to split the nation along ethnic and sectarian lines,” writes Sharon Behn in the Washington Times, paraphrasing “key participants in the process.”
“Rather, the parties expect to meet an Aug. 15 deadline for drafting a basic law by deferring tough decisions on the details of the role of Islam, women’s rights, oil-revenue sharing and federalism until after a new legislature is elected in December.”
Americans shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, that’s precisely what our own Constitutional Convention did in September of 1787. Examine the document our founding fathers adopted and nowhere will you find the word “slavery” or “slave.” The issue was so divisive that it could not be resolved without destroying the consensus required to unite thirteen separate states into a federal nation. And that convention was meeting four years after a treaty of peace concluded our Revolutionary War, six years after Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, not while terrorists and insurrectionists sowed violence in the streets.
Without explicitly saying so, the Constitution did forbid Congress to adopt a law against the importation of slaves until 1808. And it took the Civil War to finally resolve the issue of slavery – but not until the Constitution had seen us through nearly three-quarters of a century. (It also took nearly a century and a half to secure women the right to vote in national elections.)
These observations are not intended to countenance complacency about the serious differences of opinion yet to be resolved along Iraq’s path to democracy. But they should grant us some perspective and an understanding that not every political question can be answered decisively all at once.
Behn indicates that “a U.S. source close to the drafting committee said that U.S. political considerations rather than Iraqi political needs appear to be driving the push to finish quickly.
“‘The U.S. is putting on pressure because it is viewed as tied to troop withdrawals,’ he said.” But surely this is contemporaneously too cynical and too naive. Too naive, because it fails to comprehend that it is the pressure of a deadline itself which aids in the resolution of those questions which are amenable to compromise – and that America is using its good offices in part to assure those compromises. But also too cynical, because it fails to understand the confluence of American and Iraqi interests engaged here. Certainly both sides have a compelling interest in “standing up” the Iraqi forces to preserve, protect and defend their own nation as rapidly and efficiently as possible. It is germane to consider that one of America’s motives in doing so is drawing down its troop levels – but only one. To pretend that it is an “exit strategy” rather than a “victory strategy” makes good copy, but fails to accord with the facts.

Pluto Plot Thickens

2005-08-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

As you knew it would, the discovery of tenth planet 2003 UB313 – has reignited the tired debate over whether Pluto really is or is not a planet.
I’m going with Dr. Michael Brown, one of the scientists who discovered 2003 UB313 on this issue: “Our culture has fully embraced the idea that Pluto is a planet and scientists have for the most part not yet realised that the term planet no longer belongs to them . . . .
“From now on, everyone should ignore the distracting debates of the scientists. Planets in our solar system should be defined not by some attempt at forcing a scientific definition on a thousands-of-years-old cultural term, but by simply embracing culture. Pluto is a planet because culture says it is.
“It is understandably hard for scientists to let go of a word that they think they use scientifically, but they need to.”
As the BBC reports, Brown “considers 2003 UB313 to be a planet in a ‘cultural’ and ‘historical’ sense, adding: ‘I will not argue that it is a scientific planet because there is no good scientific definition which fits our solar system and our culture and I have decided to let culture win this one.
“‘We scientists can continue our debates, but I hope we are generally ignored.’”
But notice where all this controversy leads. The BBC notes that “Dr Brian Marsden, director of the International Astronomy Union’s minor planet centre, believes the simplest way to resolve the confusion is to reject Pluto’s claim to being a planet on the grounds that ‘size does matter.’
“Instead he says people should accept that ‘we have eight planets and only an object bigger than Mars could be considered to be a planet in the future.’”
Well, no, actually, if we accept Dr. Marsden’s criteria, we don’t have eight planets, we have seven – because Mercury isn’t a planet either. Mars has a diameter of 4,220 miles. Mercury’s diameter is just 3,032 miles. Mars has a mass of 6.4x10 to the 23rd power. Mercury has a mass of 3.3x10 to the 23rd power. Ergo, according to Dr. Marsden, Mercury is not a planet. Absurd.

Persian Perfidy

2005-08-02T13:20:00.000-05:00

Courageous Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji today enters the 53rd day of his hunger strike – and the New York Sun is apparently the only newspaper in America that thinks there is anything newsworthy about his imprisonment.
Ganji was rearrested in June for urging his compatriots to boycott the sham elections which have placed professional assassin and terrorist Mahmoud Amadinejad in line for inauguration as FascIslamic Iran’s new president – ironically, and appropriately, on the 60th anniversary of the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb. Despite threats of retaliation, his despairing wife has appealed “to the United Nations, human rights groups, and other nations to pressure our government to release my husband. Our struggle must reach out past the borders of Iran now. Our leaders will not listen to their people, they will only respond to external pressure.” (Ganji was originally arrested for publishing a series of exposes about the role of the Iranian government, during the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – the losing presidential candidate in the runoff against Amadinejad, and characterized by the “mainstream” press as a “moderate” – in carrying out a program of assassination of dissident intellectuals.)
Yesterday, Ganji’s lawyer was arrested on espionage charges. Today, BBC News reports, the judge who sentenced Ganji was shot to death as he left his court building by a motorcycle gunman.

Correction:
Ahmadinejad will be installed as president two days prior to the anniversary of the flight of the Enola Gay, not, as I wrote, on the anniversary.

Running Now, Running Later

2005-08-02T10:11:00.000-05:00

Today Brendan Miniter writes of “The Cut-and-Run Caucus” in the Opinion Journal, exploring the domestic political ramifications of the Democrats’ raucous anti-war stance. In doing so he submits that “today the sacrifices have been made, the election is over, a constitution is being hammered out, and all that’s left is victory – and victory is inevitable if the U.S. forces continue to stand up Iraqi forces while facing an unpopular insurgency that isn’t propped up by a large foreign power. Yet opposition to the war hasn’t abated. Indeed, in Congress it’s actually gotten more organized. In late June 50 House Democrats formed the Out of Iraq Caucus. The leaders of this cut-and-run caucus last week used Gen. Casey’s remarks [on prospective troop withdrawals next year] to publicly lay out their proposed timetable for retreat.”
I’m not quite sanguine enough to agree with Mr. Miniter that “victory is inevitable”, but it should be clear by now that the most crucial battle was fought on the first Tuesday after the first Monday this past November. Once President Bush was re-elected, the very real possibility that we might surrender unilaterally evaporated. All the crucial outstanding questions now concern the unevaporated “fog of war.” And while nothing is ever “inevitable” in war, the odds are now overwhelming in favor of success. Just consider the most likely course of events.
On the 15th of August or shortly thereafter, the Iraqi assembly should approve a compromise constitution. In September, or perhaps October, Saddam Hussein will begin to stand trial for his mass murders and other grievous crimes against humanity. In October, if the assembly has truly achieved a compromise, the constitution will be approved in a national referendum in which the Sunnis have vowed to vote. In December, new elections will be held for the representatives to a new a permanent constitutionally mandated parliament. Meanwhile, as these events unfold, America will continue crushing the terrorists in the four or five provinces still at risk; training and equipping ever more Iraqi soldiers and police to assume the task of defending their own country and protecting their own citizens; reconstructing Iraqi infrastructure; and exploiting the opening in Iraq to effectuate ever greater changes across the landscape of the Middle East – in Lebanon and Syria, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Libya and beyond.
The great likelihood, then, is that by the middle of next summer it will be clear to all but the most hardened cynics, myopic leftists and antiquated isolationists, that the United States is well on its way to winning a very great victory in the War on Terror. Where will today’s advocates of surrender be then?
Often, in the aftermath of wars, voters choose to abandon the victors. During the Potsdam Conference at the end of the European phase of World War II, the British people decisively defeated Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party, ungratefully electing Clement Atlee and Labour (who then proceeded to devastate the country for the next generation). But Labour had not opposed the war. Atlee had served loyally as Churchill’s number two in a coalition government throughout the global conflict.
More importantly, when the present battle for Iraq is winding down, American troops are coming home and victory is at hand, only the most unthinking will believe that the long hard war against FascIslam will be done. Victory in Iraq will bring us closer to victory in the War on Terror, but it will not consummate it.
The Cut-and-Run Caucus should enjoy their temporary moment in the sun. Let them sow the wind with their discord. Tomorrow, they reap the whirlwind.

Lipstick

2005-08-01T15:54:00.000-05:00

In last Friday’s Slate in “Techno Ueber Alles”, Philip Sherburne notes the obvious: “You don’t need to be a Kraftwerk fan to know that Germans are as famous for their precision-engineered electronic music as they are for their automobiles. (Although judging from the Saturday Night Live sketch ‘Sprockets,’ most people take German cars more seriously.) Dance music — other than rock and hip-hop — may have fallen out of favor in the United States and the U.K. recently, but German artists have stayed the course, turning out some of the most electrifying updates of house, techno, and disco in years.”
Sherburne quickly reviews “Five albums that prove Germany’s mastery of electronic music.” Inexplicably, he misses the best young techno artists of all, Berlin’s Lipstick.

Battle of Mosul

2005-08-01T15:08:00.000-05:00

This week and next Michael Yon will be posting a four-part series on the Battle of Mosul on his website. Today, “Battle of Mosul: Part 1”.

Jihadi Rights

2005-08-01T13:20:00.000-05:00

“I have rights!,” Ramzi Mohammed screeched as he emerged to surrender to London police. And so he does – the rights guaranteed by the democracy he sought to destroy; the rights that he and FascIslamists across the globe will exploit for their own advantage, but will never permit in the dystopian hell-on-earth they seek to impose upon us.
James S. Robbins of the American Foreign Policy Council expresses the fundamental distinction between us and our implacable FascIslamic foes in today’s NRO.
“Generally speaking, terrorists are cowards. They hide behind masks, make surprise attacks on the innocent and helpless, and take pride and apparently pleasure in ritually beheading unarmed, bound men. However, when cornered they do not fight to the death or scream oaths to justify their cause; they lie about their involvement and demand their rights to due process. And this is not limited to the foot soldiers; even Osama bin Laden took over a year to admit complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
“Capturing an entire terrorist cell intact is a signal event. Usually there are few left alive after an attack of this nature. The authorities now have the bombers, their weapons, and numerous documents and computer hard drives. They will learn a great deal. And the lesson for the rest of us is that there is no moral relativism in this conflict. Those of us who uphold the principles of the free society are better than the radical Islamic terrorists, and we should not be afraid to declare it. Western society and its ideal of human liberty is superior to the despotic social order they want to force on the world, so much so that they seek to use the guarantees promised citizens of the liberal states to preserve their miserable lives. And we so venerate our principles that we will give them the chance.”

Plame Game 8

2005-08-01T12:43:00.000-05:00

In “Plame Game 3” on July 13th, I wrote an aside to an editorial commentary in Opinion Journal. They had written “To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he’d obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn’t even know Ms. Plame’s name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.” My comment? “Bet on Judith Miller of the New York Times; their studied and calculated hypocrisy in this matter shrinks their credibility to the nanoscale.”
Now, in today’s National Review Online, Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, seems to concur in an article subheadlined “Could Judy Miller Have Been the White House’s Source?”. He, in turn, credits Arianna Huffington’s July 27 post “Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don’t We?” (I don’t recommend the latter, as it’s chock full of Huffington’s usual blathering nonsense, but see for yourself if you will.)
May exclaims “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Arianna Huffington has a point.
“She reports in the July 27 edition of ‘The Huffington Post’ that in the halls of the New York Times, among the colleagues of imprisoned reporter Judy Miller, a theory is being debated. It boils down to this: Perhaps after Joseph Wilson’s notorious op-ed appeared in the Times, Judy called a source (or two) in the intelligence community to find out how and why Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium.
“Perhaps her source(s) told her that Wilson got the assignment thanks to his wife, Valerie Plame, who works at CIA HQ in Langley.
“Now further suppose that Miller is trying to develop this into a larger story on Wilson and the controversy over the Bush administration’s arguments for regime change in Iraq. So she calls people in the White House, Karl Rove, maybe, or Dick Cheney deputy Scooter Libby or someone. (Newsday identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 — two days after Wilson’s op-ed appeared, with an ‘unnamed’ government official.)
“Judy perhaps says: ‘My sources tell me that Wilson’s wife works at the CIA and that she was the one who recommended that he get the Africa assignment. How does that square with Wilson’s claim that Cheney sent him to Niger, and that Cheney received his report and ignored it?’
“At this point, whoever in the White House Miller talked with would know about Plame — but not based on their access to classified information.
“And he (or she or they) still would not necessarily know that Plame had some sort of undercover status. Judy’s source(s) might not have told her that. Indeed, the source(s) might not have known. The source(s) may have become acquainted with Plame at CIA HQ in Langley. Presumably, Plame would not have told such colleagues that she occasionally worked undercover. They’d have no ‘need to know.’”
What are the crucial clues that such is a credible scenario? As May indicates, “If this is close to what happened, it would explain why Judy would not feel free to testify before a grand jury. Were she to do so, she’d get her source(s) fired, and probably prosecuted. Reporters don’t like to do that.
“It also would explain why independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is keeping Miller in the slammer. If it were she who first told someone in the White House (who no doubt told others in the White House) about Plame, her testimony would be the key that solves the puzzle. In fact, without that key, it might be impossible for Fitzgerald to solve the puzzle.”
So I’m sticking to my original supposition about this entire ludicrous tempest: “Bet on Judith Miller of the New York Times; their studied and calculated hypocrisy in this matter shrinks their credibility to the nanoscale.” The Times sinks ever deeper into the slough of its political and moral depravity.

Intelligent Design

2005-08-01T08:08:00.000-05:00

Charles Krauthammer, in Time, inveighs against recent attempts in Kansas, Ohio and elsewhere to insinuate intelligent design creationism into science curricula. Much that he writes makes good sense, but the most important point is the one he raises in concluding: “To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion.” It is the last point which aggressive advocates of intelligent design should heed most carefully. After thirty years of concerted attempts to extirpate all traces of religious conviction from the public realm, attempts so overbearing as to become their own reductio ad absurdum, a movement has begun to take hold to shift governments both state and federal onto more neutral ground. We have begun, at least, to return to the real Constitutional approach – that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” – and away from the invidious notion that a “wall of separation” demands that all things religious must be expunged from public discourse and display. For those, a majority of Americans, whose religious convictions make them sympathetic to a revival of neutrality, these impositions of faith are certain to do more harm than good. America must not be held hostage to the demands of radical secularists. But neither should it be held hostage to those who seek to use the state to impose their own religious perspective.

Spurned Mackerel

2005-07-31T23:03:00.000-05:00

Even with the recent spate of science snippets, I’ve been a tad too “political” in orientation this month – at least in terms of my own perception. So I’ll close July with a poem, spurned mackerel, from monkeyshines, the third of the Sixth Street Trilogy.

spurned mackerel a fish tale for victoria aquamarine

soaked
sopping
soporific
all asweat poring
over manuscripts of monograph 33:
effectuating samizdat fengshui in Texas Irish pubs: the manual
and its stirring sequel, one third quagga nation:
in praise of miscegenation —
desperately willed autosaprophytic
incongruous yet
celebratin’ the very y chromosome
as tainted him
diverted him
convoluted
converted him,
cathartic as a mint mandala
mushroom
perfidiously advertising
self referential
adumbration
animaliberation:
spurned mackerel
ionesco’s kaleidoscope
shining in the moonlight
as it rots

fin.

The Velvet Hammer

2005-07-31T18:08:00.000-05:00

“When Rice visited Paris in February to give a speech on U.S.-European relations, French Ambassador Jean David Levitte said, she ‘really changed the atmosphere – of the media, of public opinion – about the Bush administration. It was really a turning point.’
“Because of her impact generally after first six months, he concluded, Rice is ‘probably the most powerful secretary of state in decades.’”
Today’s Washington Post features a front page article by Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler focusing on the impressive record Condoleezza Rice has already begun to establish as Secretary of State – in sharp contrast to her immediate predecessor. In “At State, Rice Takes Control of Diplomacy”, the two Post staff writers offer a balanced and complimentary analysis of the “Velvet Hammer” and her diplomacy of “practical idealism”, yielding only occasionally to “mainstream” media stereotyping. (The worst example:
“Rice has worked hard – at a pace that sometimes seems like a campaign – to overcome her image during Bush’s first term as a weak national security adviser who struggled to mediate among the strong-willed personalities vying to shape foreign policy.” It was an “image” which existed only in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.)
Definitely worth a read.

Hispanic Assimilation

2005-07-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

Nearly one in seven Americans is Hispanic in origin, representing more than 40 million people, and almost half of the total American population growth of 2.9 million since July of 2003 is among the Hispanic population. Jose Maria Marco of the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research analyzes the implications of these facts in “Hispanic Immigration and Assimilation into the American Culture”.
Marco outlines three characteristics of America’s Hispanic population which are of concern to some among the political and intellectual classes: “First, it tends to be concentrated in a few geographical areas in Texas, Florida, Southern California, New York and Illinois, although the dispersion is accelerating lately.
“Second, most immigrants generally have abandoned their language of origin in favor of English between the second and the third generation. And in the case of Spanish-speaking immigrants, Spanish is spoken only among family members or the immediate community, where it does not compete with English, which most Hispanics view as necessary for societal integration.
“On the other hand, many wish to maintain the use of the Spanish language, and given the size of the Spanish-speaking population, it is conceivable that a significant portion need not learn English to live in the U.S. Third, a large portion of U.S. territory was for a long time under the control of the then Mexican and Spanish Crown.”
But, Marco argues, “there is no reason that there should be a clash between the American cultural identity and that of Hispanic immigrants.” Instead, “if the American culture has assimilated and is currently assimilating people of African and Asian origin, it should certainly be capable of assimilating Hispanic immigrants.
“The evolution of the Hispanic immigrant population confirms this fact. Hispanic immigrants know that if their children learn English, their opportunities will be greater. They tend to become homeowners, they open their own business and they adapt to American customs.”
In addition, “Hispanics also participate more in public life over time. In the last presidential election, 9 million Hispanics voted, versus 6 million just four years earlier. And Hispanics do not align with either political party. The Democratic Party has not been able to retain a solid majority of Hispanics, and according to the polls, the Republican Party obtained around 45% of the Hispanic vote in the last presidential election, versus just 35% in 2000. To maintain and expand that vote, the GOP will have to resist the temptation of the anti-immigration arguments. Instead of distrusting Hispanics, it is better to invite them to participate in the American project.”
The most crucial consideration, Marco suggests, is that “most Hispanics that immigrate to the U.S. do so because they believe in the universal principles in which American culture is based.”
In particular, “Hispanics do not immigrate to the United States to enjoy the services of the welfare state. They come so that their children may have a decent future, to buy a house, and to be entrepreneurs in a system that encourages free enterprise. Moreover, they are drawn by lower taxes, simpler regulations, a judicial system that functions, and a more competent public education system.”
Each of these factors favors assimilation, enriching and stimulating the broader culture rather than disrupting it.

Oil’s Well

2005-07-31T13:46:00.000-05:00

Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy research Associates is skeptical of the imminent shortage of oil within five to ten years that is feared by so many. He contends that “this fear is not borne out by the fundamentals of supply. Our new, field-by-field analysis of production capacity, led by my colleagues Peter Jackson and Robert Esser, is quite at odds with the current view and leads to a strikingly different conclusion: There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day – from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day – a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand.”
Moreover, this increased production capacity “is pretty evenly divided between non-OPEC and OPEC. The largest non-OPEC growth is projected for Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Azerbaijan, Angola and Russia. In the OPEC countries, significant growth is expected to occur in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Algeria and Libya, among others. Our estimate for growth in Iraq is quite modest -- only 1 million barrels a day – reflecting the high degree of uncertainty there. In the forecast, the United States remains almost level, with development in the deep-water areas of the Gulf of Mexico compensating for declines elsewhere.” In addition, “the share of ‘unconventional oil’ – Canadian oil sands, ultra-deep-water developments, ‘natural gas liquids’ – will rise from 10 percent of total capacity in 1990 to 30 percent by 2010. The ‘unconventional’ will cease being frontier and will instead become ‘conventional.’ Over the next few years, new facilities will be transforming what are inaccessible natural gas reserves in different parts of the world into a quality, diesel-like fuel.”
Yergin’s analysis in “It’s Not the End Of the Oil Age” is well woth a quick read.

Magic Mushroom

2005-07-30T10:33:00.000-05:00

With little more than a week to go until the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Richard B. Frank analyzes the crucial influence of signals intelligence upon the final decision to deploy this ultimate of weapons. “Why Truman Dropped the Bomb” in the current Weekly Standard is required reading for any who are interested in this important historical decision, or in the role that intelligence plays in foreign policy decisionmaking in general.
The left revisionist historians (now the “critical orthodoxy” in Frank’s terms) have never been able to make a prima facie case for their viewpoint with facts, but only with supposition and innuendo. Frank doesn’t explicitly say so, but reality has put paid to their fantasies.

Tenth Planet

2005-07-30T08:29:00.000-05:00

“Even if it reflected 100 percent of the light reaching it, it would still be as big as Pluto . . . I’d say it’s probably one and a half times the size of Pluto, but we’re not sure yet of the final size.
“We are 100 percent confident that this is the first object bigger than Pluto ever found in the outer solar system.”
So said Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, of the object presently designated only as 2003 UB313. A name, as yet unannounced, has already been proposed for the first new planet discovered since Clyde Tombaugh (a Kansas boy) announced the discovery of Pluto 75 years ago.
The BBC and USA Today offer brief reports on the new planet, but more information is available from Science Daily and the New Scientist.

Update:

The New York Times also has an excellent write-up on 2003 UB313 – which, inexplicably, mentions neither Abu Ghraib nor Guantanamo.

Sci Fri

2005-07-29T16:55:00.000-05:00

Astronomy and Planetary Science

A survey of 21 sun-like stars within 400 light years of our own solar sytem by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory strongly indicates that there is three times more neon in our own sun than previously expected, the exact amount needed to solve a conundrum about how convection currents within the sun transport energy to its surface.

The Mars Express probe has discovered an 8-mile diameter ring of ice water in a large impact crater near the north pole of Mars, increasing the prospect of finding life on our sister planet. But unless NASA does a better job of sterilizing its spacecraft, we risk contaminating Mars with terrestrial microbes, according to a panel of the US National Research Council.

In late 2003, astronomers discovered Sedna, an icy world out in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Pluto with amazing characteristics. At 1,700 kilometers in diameter, Sedna is almost three-quarters the size of Pluto. Just the year before, Quaoar, about half the size of Pluto was found in the same region. It also has some quite curious features.
Now, just yesterday, another planetoid has been discovered in the Kuiper Belt, and this new object may be twice the size of Pluto. (Oops, update, same link: it’s 70% the size of Pluto).

Archaeology

Emperor Constantine’s head has been found in a Roman sewer. (Okay, more precisely, a 1,700 year-old marble head of Constantine. In hoc signo vinces.)

An art conservationist and bioengineer is convinced that he has compelling evidence that Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco “Battle of Anghiari”, which hasn’t been seen since 1563, is completely preserved behind a wall in a room at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

Paleontology

Dinosaur embryos from the late Triassic or early Jurassic – roughly 190 million years old – show evidence of ‘parental care.’ (For more details, see here.)

Geology and Earth Science

Japanese geologists are planning to drill far deeper into the crust and mantle of the Earth than ever before – as much as 4.5 miles – in order to understand climatic and biological evolution.

Scientists have successfully measured the Earth’s core radioactivity for the first time. (Lord Kelvin would be embarrassed all over again.)

Biology

Now we know why cats don’t like Snickers. They can’t taste anything sweet.

Today’s most popular article: fish diversity declines. You can read it in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, the Economist, or any of a hundred other places. Poor fish. They’re finished.

Constitutions and Chimeras

2005-07-29T14:55:00.000-05:00

Marcel H. Van Herpen of the Cicero Foundation considers the question of “The Failed European Constitution and US Interests”, a puzzling analysis which appears to studiously ignore the most vital questions of concern to both America and to Europe at the expense of pursuing fantasies.
The question, after all, isn’t whether or not a united Europe is in the interest of the United States. The question is which Europe and united how? (By “how”, of course, I mean “in what manner.”)
Van Herpen begins by intimating that “after the EU vote resulted in the dismantling of the EU Constitution, some journalists reported a feeling of schadenfreude in the United States.” But schadenfreude – a perverse delight at the suffering of others – is precisely the opposite of what all but a few puerile pundits felt or expressed, Instead, there was a great sigh of relief from those who wish both America and Europe well – relief at the rejection of a “constitution” which served only the interests of an effete and insular bureaucratic elite at the expense of the European peoples.
It is the precipitate bureaucratization and centralization of Europe in the absence of democratization which Americans and Europeans both have most to fear. (I do not pretend that this was the motive for vetoing the “constitution” in either France or the Netherlands; only that for motives good or ill a very bad document was refused assent, a document which would have magnified and strengthened the heretofore prevailing negative trends.)
Van Herpen continues, supposing that “at this time, the question to consider is whether or not this covert glee is misdirected, for it is possible that the EU’s failure to copy the Philadelphia Convention does not serve US interests. In fact, the consequences of this failure might shepherd in, not only, a prolonged period of institutional stagnation in the EU, but, might also, mark the beginning of the downfall of the European Union. Both possible consequences of the failed Constitution might impact the US negatively.” But this formulation begs the question in a number of respects. First, aside from the juveniles referenced earlier, there simply was no “covert glee”, and in sense could this abortion of a “constitution” be compared to the remarkable instrument adopted in September 1787.
Second, to pretend that the failure to adopt the monstrosity might precipitate “the downfall of the European Union” is quite monumental silliness. And third, to claim that “this failure might shepherd in . . . a prolonged period of institutional stagnation” is the utter opposite of the case. The overwhelming evidence indicates that the European Union has already endured a “prolonged period of institutional stagnation” precisely because of the unaccountable centralization and bureaucratization represented most profoundly by this rejected “constitution” and the preposterously arrogant manner of its construction and political marketing.
Van Herpen laments the impact of the negative vote upon the fate of Jacques Chirac in France and, less directly, upon the fortunes of Gerhard Schroeder in Germany: the two living emblems of economic stagnation and political bankruptcy. If we should end with the Christian Democratic Union’s Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany after the September 18 Bundestag vote, and with Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France following the elections in 2007, then the people of Germany and of France and of the United States (and of the rest of Europe as well) will all be blessed. This isn’t merely a question of revivified relations between the United States and two erstwhile estranged but vital European powers. It would also represent the overthrow of myopic policies which condemned both France and Germany, collectively the former “engine” of the EU, to “a prolonged period of institutional stagnation.”
But, Van Herpen proceeds further, “more obvious reasons for the US to support, at least, the short term longevity of the EU include the fact that Britain’s Tony Blair will take over the EU Presidency in the second half of 2005, which will certainly lead to a more US-friendly and pro-Atlantic EU approach. The EU-US partnership will be a greater asset to the US if the EU remains a strong organization, strengthened by a uniting constitution.” It is surely fortuitous timing that Britain’s prime minister will assume the helm at this crucial moment, and it is not conjectural but certain that the United States continues to perceive a strong, united and democratic European Union as a vital interest. The words of Condoleezza Rice at the June 2nd US-EU Ministerial Meeting in Washington (quoted later by Van Herpen himself) should be carefully attended to in this regard: America supports “a strong and united Europe that is able to act as a global partner with the United States, given its democratic values and our long history together.” It is important to emphasize the elaborating clause “given its democratic values.”
To the extent that the Europeans now have an opportunity to forge a “uniting constitution” that secures accountability to the European people – and not just ever more concentrated power in the hands of an arbitrary, unelected, arrogant bureaucratic elite – this popular rejection prepares the way for a renascence, not for a decline.
But, Van Herpen asserts, “conversely, the US might find it more befitting their objective to see the EU weaken in spite of Blair’s approaching authority, for his predecessor is still undetermined, as is the future potential of the EU body.
“With the weakening of the EU, new EU member states could increasingly turn to the US and NATO for their security, thereby jeopardizing efforts to build a common European defence – the same defence which offers to both strengthen and weaken the US, simultaneously. In the near future, looming over the US is the possibility that past reluctance of the present EU-25 to accept new member states will be exaggerated by the constitution’s failure, making the entrance of two close US allies, Bulgaria and Romania even more delayed.”
With respect to the latter question, it is hardly the French and Dutch rejection of the “constitution” which risks a delay in entry, but rather their own domestic difficulties, in both Bulgaria and Romania, in forging responsible governments and completing the tasks required of them to secure timely consummation of their integration.
But more importantly, it is sheer fantasy to believe that responsible policymakers in the American government see European disarray as serving American interests. We are engaged at present in a deadly global struggle against FascIslamists who wish to destroy our civilization – ours collectively, both American and European. America must have a strong, capable, resolute, democratic ally in Europe to effectively prosecute that war and secure our mutual interests. This alone would be reason enough, and yet, of course, there are a multiplicity of reasons.
This is not to gainsay Van Herpen’s perception that others do see profit in European disarray. “Around the world nations have been responding to the failed EU constitution, some, clearly satisfied. The day after the French no vote, for example, China announced it would suspend its self imposed export duties on textiles, a measure especially desired by the French. Russian President Putin expressed his great satisfaction with the internal EU problems, clearly expecting that this would give him more freedom to act with or in the former Soviet republics. A same sense of satisfaction might be felt in Tehran as well as in other nations threatened by a great power, for a divided EU front does not exude the same strength as a united front.” But each of these three real-world cases of schadenfreude evidences the collectivity and not the clash of American and European interests.. Yet Van Herpen persists in cautioning that “although the US might see a temporary gain in exploiting the present crisis in the EU as a means of weakening the organization further and preventing the EU from challenging the US hegemony, by jeopardizing the EU, the US might fail in retaining enough worldwide support to combat terrorism and safeguard fundamental rights. A strong and united Europe, on the other hand, which shares ideations with the United States, is a greater, long term interest to the US and its mission to secure and preserve democracy.”
The conclusion is, of course, correct, when stripped of the chimera of “hegemonic desire.” There is no such beast.

Fatwa 3

2005-07-29T12:26:00.000-05:00

In the post “Fatwa” early Thursday I wrote that “while more than three years overdue, the decision by the Fiqh Council of North America to issue a fatwa condemning terrorism — to be released at a news conference later today in Washington, DC – is welcome news.”
But at the Counterterrorism Blog, Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism disagrees, declaring that “The American Islamic Leaders’ ‘Fatwa’ is Bogus”.
“This morning [Thursday] a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against ‘terrorism and extremism,’” he writes. “An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa.
“In fact, the fatwa is bogus. Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism. It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.
“I spoke with Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who told me that the fatwa was ‘vacuous because it does not name the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist theologies and leaders of Islamic movements like Yousef Al Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.’ Pearl told me that these groups are ‘trying to perpetrate a deception on the American public.’”
Emerson further references this extensive “Backgrounder On the Fiqh Council of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations” which details innumerable links to terrorist acts and organizations by leaders and members of both organizations.
The specific shortcomings specified by Emerson and Pearl are indeed accurate in the main (but see more on this below), and certainly there is ample reason to be cautiously skeptical. But I am not certain that this is “a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate” or that it is utterly “vacuous.” As indicated in my earlier post (and in the subsequent “Fatwa 2”), I believe that there is substantial evidence of significant attitudinal change among Islamic peoples both here in America and around the globe, and an increasing realization that they have quite as much at stake as all the rest of us in this great struggle against FascIslam. This may or may not be true in this specific instance, about which I intend to reserve judgment – but with an attitude of hopeful optimism. Why? Read the text of the fatwa itself and see whether or not you believe it represents, at the least, progress toward a desirable end.
The crucial part of the text read as follows:
“The Fiqh Council of North America wishes to reaffirm Islam’s absolute condemnation of terrorism and religious extremism.
“Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives. There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram – or forbidden – and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not ‘martyrs.’
“The Qur’an, Islam’s revealed text, states: ‘Whoever kills a person [unjustly]…it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.’ (Qur’an, 5:32)
“Prophet Muhammad said there is no excuse for committing unjust acts: ‘Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong to them. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and not to do wrong (even) if they do evil.’ (Al-Tirmidhi)
“God mandates moderation in faith and in all aspects of life when He states in the Qur’an: ‘We made you to be a community of the middle way, so that (with the example of your lives) you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind.’ (Qur’an, 2:143)
“In another verse, God explains our duties as human beings when he says: ‘Let there arise from among you a band of people who invite to righteousness, and enjoin good and forbid evil.’ (Qur’an, 3:104)
“Islam teaches us to act in a caring manner to all of God’s creation. The Prophet Muhammad, who is described in the Qur’an as ‘a mercy to the worlds’ said: ‘All creation is the family of God, and the person most beloved by God (is the one) who is kind and caring toward His family.’
“In the light of the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah we clearly and strongly state:
“1. All acts of terrorism targeting civilians are haram (forbidden) in Islam.
“2. It is haram for a Muslim to cooperate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence.
“3. It is the civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of all civilians.
“We issue this fatwa following the guidance of our scripture, the Qur’an, and the teachings of our Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him. We urge all people to resolve all conflicts in just and peaceful manners.
“We pray for the defeat of extremism and terrorism. We pray for the safety and security of our country, the United States, and its people. We pray for the safety and security of all inhabitants of our planet. We pray that interfaith harmony and cooperation prevail both in the United States and all around the globe.”
The complete text of the fatwa appears here and CAIR’s press release concerning the fatwa appears here.
In addition, two other articles concerning the fatwa which I had not earlier referenced appear here and here.

Political Junkie Alert

2005-07-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

Sridhar Pappu, writing for the September edition of the Atlantic Monthly, offers an interesting portrait of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in “The Holy Cow! Candidate”.

Miranda Warning

2005-07-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

Here’s one of those handy little internet guides that you just can’t do without: “A Practical Guide to Taping Phone Calls and In-Person Conversations in the 50 States and DC”, from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The entry for the state of Texas reads:
“Texas Penal Code § 16.02: So long as a wire, oral or electronic communication — including the radio portion of any cordless telephone call — is not recorded for a criminal or tortious purpose, anyone who is a party to the communication, or who has the consent of a party, can lawfully record the communication and disclose its contents.
“Under the statute, consent is not required for the taping of a non-electronic communication uttered by a person who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication. See definition of ‘oral communication,’ Texas Code Crim. Pro. Art. 18.20.
“Unlawful recording of a conversation, or disclosure of its contents with reason to know of the illegal interception, is a felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison and a fine not to exceed $10,000. Texas Penal Code § 12.33. A civil cause of action is expressly authorized for unlawful interception or disclosure. Texas Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 123.002. The plaintiff may be entitled to $10,000 for each occurrence, actual damages in excess of $10,000, punitive damages and attorney fees and costs. Texas Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 123.004.
“The U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans (5th Cir.) held in 2000 that a television station and reporter who had been given illegally obtained tapes of telephone conversations, but who had not participated in the illegal recording, could nonetheless be held civilly liable under the federal and Texas wiretapping statutes. Peavy v. WFAA-TV, Inc., 221 F.3d 158 (5th Cir. 2000). The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court along with two other cases raising similar issues. The Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case but decided in one of the other cases, Bartnicki v. Vopper, that media defendants could not be held liable for publishing information of public concern that was obtained unlawfully by a source where the media were blameless in the illegal interception. Following the Bartnicki decision, the parties in the Peavy case settled out of court.”
Exquisite.

Damned If You Do . . .

2005-07-28T09:54:00.000-05:00

Definitely read Michael Fumento’s column at Townhall.com on “Mainstream Media Suppress Iraq Optimism”.

Life Tenure 2

2005-07-28T09:37:00.000-05:00

Returning to the fertile fields we plowed twice this month in “Life Tenure” and earlier in “Lest Ye Be Judged”, Jeff Jacoby’s column in today’s Boston Globe, “When Justices Refuse To Retire”, adduces a few more interesting examples of the relatively common historical propensity for Supreme Court justices to persevere well beyond the point at which their competence declines. “John Rutledge, who served briefly as chief justice after a recess appointment by President Washington, was so shattered by the death of his wife, a contemporary noted, ‘as to be in a great measure deprived of his senses.’ At least twice during his time on the court he tried to commit suicide by drowning himself.
“Fortunately, Rutledge left after just six months. Not so Henry Baldwin, who joined the court in 1830 and less than two years later was clearly mentally ill. He missed the court's entire 1833 term because he had to be hospitalized for ‘incurable lunacy’; his colleague Joseph Story described him as ‘partially deranged at all times.’ But there was no way to compel his retirement, and Baldwin remained on the court until his death in 1844.
“Over and over the story line has been repeated: A Supreme Court justice suffers serious mental decline but refuses to step down. By the start of the 1880 term, Nathan Clifford had been reduced to ‘a babbling idiot,’ a fellow justice wrote. ‘He did not know me or any thing, and though his tongue framed words, there was no sense in them.’ Joseph McKenna was so far gone, Chief Justice William Howard Taft lamented in 1922, that he ‘wrote an opinion deciding the case one way when there had been a unanimous vote the other, including his own.’ Taft himself stayed on the bench too long. ‘I am older and slower and less acute and more confused,’ he admitted privately in 1929. But he was determined to hang on ‘in order to prevent the Bolsheviki from getting control.’
“Hugo Black once told his clerks that justices who stay in office longer than they should ‘impose terrible burdens’ on their colleagues. But he didn’t take his own advice, refusing to resign even when a stroke had wrecked his memory and ability to concentrate. A stroke debilitated William O. Douglas’s mental abilities, too. In his last years on the bench, he addressed people by the wrong names, spoke in non sequiturs, and dozed during oral arguments. Even after finally retiring, he continued to show up at the court, insisting in his dementia that he was still a sitting justice.”
Jacoby reiterates the problem but proposes no solution. John Fund, however, in Monday’s Opinion Journal, declared that “18 Years Is Long Enough: It’s Time for Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices”. His arguments will be familiar to those who read the earlier posts, but with a slightly different nuance. “For the Founders,” he writes, “the courts did not exercise the sweeping, unaccountable power they do now. That’s one reason why many people are now coming around to the notion of instituting an 18-year term limit on Supreme Court justices. They include conservatives such as former presidential candidate Steve Forbes and liberals such as Paul Carrington, the former dean of Duke University’s law school.” [One reservation here: before introducing this point he asserts that “220 years ago . . . the courts had yet to claim the power of ‘judicial review,’ the power to determine which laws meet constitutional muster.” While technically true, since Marbury v. Madison was not decided until 1803, it is clear that Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, specifically asserted the necessity for judicial review in the new and as yet unratified Constitution.] Fund elaborates by suggesting that “a seat on the high court is now so powerful and so heady that many justices stay long past their prime. Legal scholars have concluded that half of the last 10 retirees have been too feeble or inattentive to fully participate in the work of the court.”
Fund argues that “the life tenure for justices in our nation’s highest court is an anomaly. No other industrialized democracy has embraced life tenure for its judges, and of the 50 states only Rhode Island appoints its state Supreme Court justices for life. Britain has a mandatory retirement age for its top jurists, while Germany, Italy, Spain and France all appoint them for a fixed number of years.”
Fund outlines the kind of reform he would propose, and adduces a few of what he perceives to be consequent advantages: “The various proposals to impose term limits have interesting variations on the same theme. All would exempt sitting justices from any limits, ending arguments that one president could ‘pack the court.’ Almost all would set the limit at 18 years, with one seat opening up every two years. Some proposals would seek to change the Constitution, others maintain a mere statute would suffice if the principle of life tenure were retained by giving retiring justices the right to serve on a lower federal court after 18 years.
“A major advantage of term limits is that they would limit the temptation for justices to remain in office if the presidency is occupied by someone they are ideologically opposed to. Each president would get to appoint at least two justices. That would end the anomaly of some presidents being unable to make any appointments for an entire term (Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush in his first four years) while others (William Howard Taft) get to appoint four during a single term in office. Confirmation battles, now routinely toxic, might become less so because the stakes would be reduced, with everyone knowing the nominee would serve 18 years instead of a possible 35 or more.”
What then is the likelihood that some variant form of term limits might be adopted? “While term limits face an uphill struggle, the idea has popular sentiment behind it. Polls show the general public supports term limits at every level of government [does this specifically include Supreme Court Justices?] and 42 states currently limit the tenure of their governors. But when National Journal polled insiders in Congress it found that only 36% of the Republicans and 30% of the Democrats it surveyed backed the idea. But several members have told me privately that if they could be assured that judicial term limits wouldn’t be expanded to cover Congress they would be for them in a heartbeat. Everyone resents and wants to control unaccountable power so long as it’s not their own.”

Fatwa 2

2005-07-28T08:40:00.000-05:00

“It was all too familiar. Part of me felt a tinge of desperation, a feeling of inevitability. But this time, there was something else – a feeling that we, the American Muslim community, were now ready to take the steps we should have taken long ago.
“Where we had slowly become desensitized by the endless reports of slaughter in Iraq, 7/7 came unexpectedly, forcing our community to finally confront an uneasy reality. On that day, something clicked inside me and so many other Muslims who, in focusing primarily on the threat to Muslim civil liberties, had not paid enough attention to the threat of religious extremism in our own communities.
“July 7 will haunt us for the foreseeable future – as it should. As American Muslims, we had seen terrorism as something uniquely foreign – relevant, but remote. But the London attacks were a frightening reminder that if anti-American anger and jihadist sentiment were left unaddressed in our communities, the consequences would be devastating. Too often, in the face of nearly daily terror attacks abroad, American Muslims had wiggled and equivocated. Past condemnations of terrorist attacks have been sincere, no doubt, but they’ve sometimes had the appearance of being forced. This time around the response from the national Islamic organizations has been more forceful and resolute but that, alone, isn’t enough.”
Writing in today’s Christian Science Monitor, Shadi Hamid offers an articulate, perspicuous and very personal appraisal of the great awakening now taking place within the American Islamic community and, as we discussed in the immediately preceding post, across the globe. Mr. Hamid, recently returned from Amman, Jordan, where as a Fulbright fellow he had been conducting research on Islamist participation in the democratic process, offers more than insight. He also proposes specific and concrete actions that he believes the Islamic community must undertake:
First, he recommends a zero-tolerance approach to violence. “[T]he July 7 bombings reaffirmed what already should have been obvious – Islam has been hijacked by a band of murderers. It’s imperative that Muslims, instead of waiting for others to remedy the situation, offer a stronger, more systematic response to terrorism. Mosque leaders must begin by instituting a policy of zero-tolerance for terrorism. In practice, this means that anyone caught advocating violence against the US government or its citizens should be, first, expelled from mosque grounds, and then reported to the appropriate authorities.”
Beyond this, he believes that “national Islamic organizations and local mosques must do more to encourage political integration of young American Muslims.” He expresses the conviction that “most Muslims will continue to oppose the Bush administration’s policies abroad, especially its unbalanced approach to the Palestinian conflict and its continued support for various Arab and Muslim autocracies. Yet, at the same time, an effort should be made to convince young, easily impressionable Muslims that the key to change lies not in a return to some idealized notion of an Islamic state, but rather in a pragmatic, nuanced approach to involvement in the American political process.”
Moreover, “Muslims must rediscover their religion’s deep respect for the sanctity of human life – whether the lives in question are British, Iraqi, or Israeli. The Muslim community’s inability or unwillingness to speak out against suicide bombing in Israel is reflective of the moral depths to which we’ve so tragically sunk. Some things in life are morally ambiguous. The killing of Israelis in cafes and pizzerias, however, is not one of them. When we argue that the immorality or illegality of suicide bombing is contingent upon political considerations, we’re on a dangerously slippery slope.”
Finally he offers a crucial insight for all of us: “Muslims here should be seen as one of the best weapons against terrorism. With their diversity and knowledge of Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, they’re an untapped resource. As the US wages not only a war on terror but a war of ideas, American Muslims can do much to strengthen public diplomacy efforts in the Arab world that, so far, leave much to be desired.”
Read this essay.

Fatwa

2005-07-28T07:04:00.000-05:00

While more than three years overdue, the decision by the Fiqh Council of North America to issue a fatwa condemning terrorism — to be released at a news conference later today in Washington, DC – is welcome news.
As the Washington Post’s Caryle Murphy explains, this “organization of top American Muslim religious scholars plans to issue a formal ruling today condemning terrorism and forbidding Muslims to cooperate with anyone involved in a terrorist act . . . . The one-page ruling, or fatwa, will be issued by the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Islamic legal scholars that interprets Islamic law for the Muslim community. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, said the ruling does not represent a new position on terrorism.
“Rather, Hooper said, ‘it is another way to drive home the point that the American Muslim community rejects terrorism and extremism.’”
Others, however, have emphasized that there is a substantial difference between the present measure and previous, sometimes pro forma condemnations. “Louay Safi of the Islamic Society of North America noted that there is an important difference between a fatwa and previous statements from the Muslim community. The fatwa ‘is not a political statement. It’s a legal or religious opinion by a recognized religious authority in the United States’ . . . . Safi, who heads the society’s Leadership Development Center, said yesterday that ‘the statement prohibits Muslims from giving any support to terrorist groups who have carried out attacks against unarmed civilians. Groups like al Qaeda have misused and abused Islam to fit their own radical and criminal agenda, and . . . the statement is an important step to repudiating such groups.’”
According to Hooper, the issuance of the fatwa “was prompted by the condemnation of terrorism in a similar ruling from the Muslim Council of Britain after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London.”
While the London bombings may indeed be the precipitating event, it is clear that global trends are beginning to shift decisively against Al Qaeda and its FascIslamic allies. As we discussed earlier in “Breeding Ground 1”, on Bastille Day the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a global survey entitled “Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western Publics” and subtitled “Support for Terror Wanes Among Muslim Publics”. The substance of this report has, as you would expect, been largely ignored by the “mainstream” media. But a few acute observers have begun to explore its significant ramifications. In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Max Boot reiterated much of what we had noted earlier:
“The public opinion poll was conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, hardly a bastion of neocon zealotry. (It’s co-chaired by Madeleine Albright.) Over the last three years, Pew surveys have charted surging anti-Americanism in response to the invasion of Iraq and other actions of the Bush administration. But its most recent poll — conducted in May, with 17,000 respondents in 17 countries — also found evidence that widespread antipathy is abating.
“The percentage of people holding a favorable impression of the United States increased in Indonesia (+23 points), Lebanon (+15), Pakistan (+2) and Jordan (+16). It also went up in such non-Muslim nations as France, Germany, Russia and India.
“What accounts for this shift? The answer varies by country, but analysts point to waning public anger over the invasion of Iraq, gratitude for the massive U.S. tsunami relief effort and growing conviction that the U.S. is serious about promoting democracy.
“There is also increasing aversion to America’s enemies, even in the Islamic world. The Pew poll found that ‘nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries.’
“Support for suicide bombing has declined dramatically in all the Muslim countries surveyed except Jordan, with its large anti-Israeli Palestinian population. The number of those saying that ‘violence against civilian targets is sometimes or often justified’ has dropped by big margins in Lebanon (-34 points) and Indonesia (-12) since 2002, and in the last year in Pakistan (-16) and Morocco (-27).
“This has been accompanied by a cratering of support for Osama bin Laden everywhere except (unfortunately) Pakistan and Jordan. Since 2003, approval ratings for the world’s No. 1 terrorist have slid in Indonesia (-23 points), Morocco (-23), Turkey (-8) and Lebanon (-12).”
As Boot observes, more and more Muslims are beginning to understand the extraordinary stake that they themselves have in this global war. “What accounts for this decline? Primarily the actions of the terrorists themselves. Since 9/11, most of the atrocities carried out by Islamist groups have occurred in Muslim nations — the latest examples are the bombings in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, and bombings too numerous to mention in Iraq — and most of the victims have been Muslims. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t endeared the jihadists to a lot of their coreligionists.
“Yet even attacks on the West no longer win knee-jerk approval in the Muslim world. After the 7/7 London bombings, Islamic groups and intellectuals who have seldom had a cross word for suicide bombings were pretty unequivocal in their condemnation.
“To cite only one example of many, Jihad Al Khazen, a rabidly anti-American and anti-Israeli columnist for the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, wrote that ‘the Arabs and Muslims must help the U.S.’ in the war on terror. There are still plenty of Muslims who blame the victims for bringing terrorism upon themselves, but there is also a growing countervailing attitude.”
This countervailing attitude brings Islamic attitudes into accord with American strategy, as “Muslim opinion also challenges jihadist orthodoxy that proclaims that giving power to the people, rather than to mullahs, is ‘un-Islamic.’ The latest Pew poll found ‘large and growing majorities in Morocco (83%), Lebanon (83%), Jordan (80%) and Indonesia (77%) — as well as pluralities in Turkey (48%) and Pakistan (43%) — [that] say democracy can work well and is not just for the West.’
“That’s exactly what President Bush has been saying. Though his actions and rhetoric have been denounced as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘extremist’ by his American and European critics, it turns out that Muslims welcome it. ‘Roughly half of respondents in Jordan and nearly two-thirds of Indonesians think the U.S. favors democracy in their countries,’ the new Pew study said. ‘About half of the public in Lebanon also takes that view.’ Imagine that: Bush’s actions might actually be making Middle Easterners more pro-American!”
Today’s fatwa is just one more datum among the accumulating evidence that we are beginning to “win the hearts and minds” of Islamic peoples throughout the world.
If we persevere, we will win this war, and FascIslam will be consigned to the graveyard of defunct ideologies alongside its progenitors Communism, Fascism and National Socialism, where it belongs.

Update:

Perhaps I should also note another article addressing similar concerns which appeared in the Tuesday Christian Science Monitor. In “Terror Shifts Muslim Views”, Dan Murphy offers a variety of examples of the global shift underway. Domestically, he mentions that “in a talk given in Los Angeles last Friday by Maher Hathout, a senior adviser to the US Muslim Public Affairs Council, an organization opposed the US invasion of Iraq, he condemned suicide bombings. He spoke of a ‘perversion’ of Islam as having affected the men who attacked London. ‘Somehow, some person [made] them swallow the bait that transformed them into [being] willing to blow themselves up and take with them innocent lives that God created,’ he said. ‘So many hearts that were supposed to be opened are closed; so many minds that could have been guided by the light of Islam have been confused.’”
Similarly, he describes two events abroad. First, “on Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians, mostly hotel workers, marched through Sharm el-Sheikh, where a weekend bombing killed scores of people, chanting: ‘There is no God but God; terrorism is the enemy of God.’” Meanwhile, “in Pakistan, an Islamist call for nationwide protests against a crackdown on militants fell flat Friday with rallies drawing just a few hundred people.”

The Happy Land

2005-07-28T04:57:00.000-05:00

With all the doom and gloom propagated and reinforced by the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ in our precious media, perhaps a touch of reality is due. Reporting in the Washington Times, Jennifer Harper informs us that “a new poll has found that Americans are the happiest people on the planet.
“‘With a few exceptions, Americans are generally happier with their lives and more optimistic about their future than most Europeans,’ a Harris poll states.
“The group plumbed the feelings of 1,000 persons from July 17 to July 21 to reveal that things are pretty good on these shores, despite bleak press reports about the direction of the country and persistent partisan criticism of the Bush administration.
“The poll found that 58 percent are ‘very satisfied with their lives,’ compared with a 15-country European average of 31 percent. In polls taken two years ago, those figures were 57 percent and 26 percent, respectively.
“An additional 56 percent of Americans think their lives have improved since 2000, compared with a 45 percent average among the Europeans. Two years ago, 49 percent of Americans felt that their lives had improved, compared with 39 percent of Europeans.
“But Yankee optimism reigns supreme. The survey found that 65 percent of Americans expect their personal situation to improve in the next five years, compared with 44 percent of Europeans.
“The American number is up by two points from two years ago, when 63 percent said they were optimistic; the Europeans are up three points from 41 percent.”
Strangely, the Danes aren’t equivocal at all about their happiness, apparently having reconciled themselves to the notion that it is better to be. “The only country that tops the United States in terms of overall satisfaction is Denmark, where 64 percent said they were ‘very satisfied’ with their lives – six points higher than their American counterparts.
“Next in line was Luxembourg at 51 percent, the Netherlands and Sweden (tied at 44 percent), Ireland (39 percent) and Britain (33 percent). At the bottom of the heap were Germany (21 percent), France (18 percent), Italy (16 percent), Greece (14 percent) and Portugal (3 percent).”
As for progress perceived, “while 56 percent of Americans say things are better than in 2000, the number stands at 57 percent in Britain, 60 percent in Sweden and 63 percent in Ireland.
“Still, Americans lead in their optimism parade, with two-thirds – 65 percent – expecting life to get better by 2010.
“The number was 58 percent in Ireland, 56 percent in Spain, 55 percent in Britain, 51 percent in Sweden and 47 percent in France. At rock bottom was Germany: Only 23 percent expected some improvement – while 26 percent think things actually are going to get worse.” (No schadenfreude there.)
So smile, you’re in America.

Guerrilla Media

2005-07-28T03:29:00.000-05:00

“I knew what I had to do. I did it because I knew no one else would. A lot of others could, but no one else would,” says J.D. Johannes to Glenn Harlan Reynolds in the interview preceding the one with Michael Yon described in “First Person Singular”, immediately below. Johannes is using three media – the internet at “Faces from the Front”, local television news stations in Kansas and Missouri, and a Public Broadcasting System documentary – to tell the story of a single platoon of Reserve Marines, all volunteers, “as they root out insurgents in Iraq’s Al Anbar province.” Naturally, Johannes is a Kansas boy.
Most of the interview focuses upon the continuing technological revolution and its implications for “mainstream” media. But perhaps the most interesting single observation is Reynold’s conjecture that “this is probably bad news for terrorism, which is an information warfare operation disguised as a military one, and one that is based on taking advantage of the kind of reporting (hysterical and shallow, for the most part) that traditional mass media tend to do. I suspect that the growth of guerrilla media – ranging from operations like Faces From the Front, to reporting by freelancers like Michael Yon, to reports from Iraqi bloggers and even emails from soldiers – has made the terrorists’ task tougher, as the reporting is by people who are much closer to what’s really going on, and much more closely connected to their audiences.”

First Person Singular

2005-07-28T02:29:00.000-05:00

“Yesterday a sniper shot at us, and seven of my neighbors were injured by a large bomb. These are my neighbors. These are soldiers I have borrowed camera gear from (soldiers who have better photo gear than I have), these are the people who risk their lives for me. I see them bleed, I see them die, I see them cry for their friends, and then I see them go right back out there on missions, and I see them caring for Iraqi people and killing the enemy. I feel the fire from the explosions, and am lucky, very lucky, still to be alive. Everything here is first person.”
Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit offers this intriguing interview with Michael Yon, a former Special Forces trooper who now writes a truly exceptional blog from the ground in Iraq.
“When I want firsthand and nitty-gritty information about an area in Iraq,” Yon tells Reynolds, “I search for bloggers in that area, and then decide for myself if they sound credible. For firsthand information in Iraq, the best sources definitely are not mainstream media, all of which have become fixated with counts: numbers of car bombings, numbers of dead, numbers of insurgents captured, etc. But for real stories, the majors have lost the battle in Iraq. There is no question that the best sources for detailed information in Iraq tend to be bloggers. Mainstream media straggles further behind every day. Should they be worried? If they really care about the legacy of solid journalism, probably, yes. But if they only care about the bottom line, they are probably already thinking up some ‘reality TV’ version of the news, maybe some program where they gather bloggers from around the world, put them in a wired house and film them finding and reporting news . . .”
The proof of this observation is in Yon’s own blog. You’ll never find anything like it in the pages of the brain-dead New York Times or the moribund Washington Post. If you want to understand what’s going on in Iraq, do not miss – do not miss – Yon’s Tuesday post, ”Empty Jars”.

Update:

“It’s increasingly dangerous to be a terrorist here,” writes Michael Yon in “The Devil’s Foyer”.
Nevertheless, “part of the persistence of the insurgency results from a staggering availability of fighting materials. There are tons of explosives and munitions here in Mosul, with more streaming in every day, though mounting evidence strongly suggests this flow is abating. For example, the street price of 60mm ‘mortar bombs’ was about $3/shot 9 months ago. Now it’s up nearly seven-fold to over $20. Car bomb incidents in Mosul, while still causing major damage to both military and civilians, have been declining.” The Devil’s Foyer describes the unearthing of one weapons cache, and helps to explain just why.

Sinistral Cannibalism 2

2005-07-28T00:04:00.000-05:00

“Pay No Attention To That Woman Behind the Curtain”

“Mrs. Clinton’s new agenda-setting role with the grass-roots organization that helped her husband launch his presidential campaign in 1992 has sparked attacks from liberal activists who say her embrace of the DLC will draw opposition from the left if she runs for president in 2008.” writes Donald Lambro in “Hillary’s Ties to DLC Rankle Left”.
“But supporters dismiss such criticism, saying her relationship with the DLC should not concern Democratic activists on the left. They say those on the far left should pay more attention to her voting record, which has earned her a near-perfect 95 percent approval score from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
“‘It’s much more important to look at what she does and how she votes, and not that she has associated herself with the DLC,’ said Harold Ickes, who was deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and is now one of Mrs. Clinton’s top campaign advisers.”
Good advice for all. It’s what they do and how they vote – not what they say.

Mother Hubbard's Cupboard

2005-07-27T07:58:00.000-05:00

In the Sunday Washington Post, columnist Jim Hoaglund addressed the “visionary bilateral agreement” concluded between the United States and India upon the occasion of the recent visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This agreement symbolizes, if it does not yet consummate, an emerging alliance with the rising power of Indian democracy which will be of inestimable importance over decades to come. “For the Bush administration,” writes Hoaglund, “this accord demonstrates the peaceful application of a national security strategy that holds that the nature of regimes, rather than the nature of the weapons they possess, will determine their relations with Washington” – a keen recognition of a vital Bush Doctrine corollary, and a key element of the “new realism” in American foreign policy.
We’ll return to the Amero-Indian alliance and its implications in a later post, but for now I want to consider briefly the very next sentence Hoaglund writes: “This is the first important diplomatic accomplishment of the George W. Bush presidency, which was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard in its first four years.”
Perhaps it would have been more fair, and accurate, to say that Mother Hubbard has been very busy baking a considerable number of pies, none of them quite done yet, but several appearing to have a delicious golden brown crust and looking almost ready to pull from the oven.
Let’s consider just a few of those pies.
Afghanistan is no longer ruled by the vicious Taliban, and no longer harbors Al Qaeda. It has an elected president. It is legal for little girls to go to school and for children to fly kites. In September they will hold elections for a new parliament. It’s true that Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, that terrorists and insurgents there still murder and intimidate, that the production of opium poppies has not been extirpated, and so on. But does anyone believe that it is less than a stunning change for the better?
Similarly, in Iraq, a thuggish mass-murderer has been overthrown, a new sovereign state is in place, and free elections have been held for a new and democratic government. Next month this government will finish work on a new constitution, which will then be put to a vote of the Iraqi people in October. If they approve, new elections will be held in December for a permanent sovereign democratic government. Is all well in Iraq? No. But does anyone truly believe that the great majority of the Iraqi people would prefer to have Saddam Hussein back in power?
Perhaps Mr. Hoaglund would object that these two changes of regime were effectuated not by “diplomacy” but by force of arms in war.
What then should we make of Libya’s decision to surrender all its nuclear weapons programs and facilities, to allow international inspectors to monitor their disassembly and transport to America? Not diplomacy, but magic perhaps? And yes, Libya is no utopia as of yet – but is the world better or worse for Colonel Gaddhafi’s surrender?
Or perhaps it was an accident, or the sheer generosity of Syria’s Bashar Assad, that led the Syrians to withdraw from Lebanon, and not a popular uprising – inspired, as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt averred, by the American intervention in Iraq and the success of the Iraqi elections – coupled with concerted pressure by the United States and (!) France.
Is it also by accident or magic that North Korea has returned to the six party nuclear talks with what appears to be a more receptive attitude? An accident that neither Pakistan nor Saudi Arabia has collapsed into the FascIslamic camp – both very real (and yet present) risks in a dangerous post-9/11 world? An accident that Al Qaeda has been decimated, and then decimated again, not solely by military action but also by concerted efforts in intelligence, law enforcement, and finance by dozens of nations from Albania to Yemen?
If Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare, it’s only because she’s been baking so many pies.

Sinistral Cannibalism

2005-07-27T02:16:00.000-05:00

In accord with historical practice, the left begins to devour its own.

War/Crime

2005-07-26T21:15:00.000-05:00

In today’s London Telegraph, Mark Steyn encapsulates the moral culpability of those who, in pursuit of their own agenda, disseminate distortion and propaganda and ignore the truth: “According to his cousins back in Pakistan, Yorkshire lad [and London terror bomber] Shehzad Tanweer decided to become a ‘holy warrior’ because of ‘US abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.’
“There is, of course, no ‘US abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.’ Newsweek’s story about Korans being flushed down the toilet turned out to be a crock; minor examples of possible disrespect of the holy book are outweighed by multiple desecrations of their Korans by the detainees. One man was exposed to Christina Aguilera CDs played very loud in an attempt to break him, which I can’t say I’d care for. Another had large chunks of Harry Potter read to him, but don’t worry, it wasn’t the new one.
“None the less, to avenge the brutal torture of having Harry Potter read to you by a woman, Shehzad Tanweer self-detonated on the Underground and killed seven people. Ted Kennedy, Newsweek and the British press might like to ponder that before they puff up the next shameful torture technique (insufficient selection of entrées?) into front page news.”
But Steyn’s most emphatic point is his conclusion, one which continues to elude so many in the West. “The pathetic public execution of an innocent man [Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes] on July 22 joins the [London terror bombing] events of July 21 and July 7 as a reminder of why a narrow, reactive law-enforcement approach to terrorism will always penalise the populace more than the terrorists. You win this war militarily (in the badlands of Pakistan and elsewhere) and culturally (which is a much tougher battle)” – not by arresting Osama bin Laden and Aymar Zawahiri, reading them their Miranda rights, cuffing them and ‘bringing them to justice. We’re at war, not fighting crime.

Political Nuts & Bolts

2005-07-26T20:04:00.000-05:00

For those who aren’t political junkies, avidly reading the latest from Charlie Cook, Stuart Rothenberg, Larry Sabato and Ron Faucheux, but who are just a bit curious about what the early line on next year’s Congressional elections might be, the Wall Street Journal online has just the right summary for you. It’s a reasonable though somewhat simplistic overview of the key nuts and bolts questions. Three vital points: a) it’s much too early; b) only 16 House members have announced plans to retire; and c) in 2004, only 59 House districts produced a split decision, voting for one party in the presidential race and the other party in the congressional race.
The Cook Political Report at present rates just 50 House seats as competitive – a number which is more likely to shrink between now and November 2006 rather than expand. That’s why Campaigns & Elections Magazine presently rates the odds for Republican retention of House control after the 2006 election at 60%. I think they’re low-balling.

Life On Titan

2005-07-26T07:08:00.000-05:00

“Has Huygens found life on Titan?,” asks Stephen Battersby of New Scientist.
“The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January.
“Titan’s atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.
“They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.”
The crucial indicators, once scientists are able to analyze the detailed data returned fro mthe Huygens probe would be depleted hydrogen or depleted acetylene in the lower atmosphere. “McKay and Smith calculate that if methanogens are thriving on Titan, their breathing would deplete hydrogen levels near the surface to one-thousandth that of the rest of the atmosphere. Detecting this difference would be striking evidence for life, because no known non-biological process on Titan could affect hydrogen concentrations as much.”

Asteroid Could Put Your Asterisk

2005-07-26T05:53:00.000-05:00

“Ten years ago we would have been blissfully ignorant.”
The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter N. Spotts presents an interesting analysis of asteroid 99942 Apophis, which will pass within 22,600 miles of earth on April 13, 2029 – and then, if everything works out just wrong, be diverted into an orbit which would impact earth in 2036.
“‘We understand the risk from this object, and while it’s small, it’s not zero,’ says David Morrison, the senior scientist at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.” In fact, under one possible scenario it’s about 1 in 10,000.
“It’s unclear to some experts whether ground-based observatories alone will be able to provide enough accurate information in time to mount a mission to divert the asteroid, if that becomes necessary.
“So NASA researchers have begun considering whether the US needs to tag the asteroid . . .with a radio beacon before 2013.
“Timing is everything, astronomers say. If officials attempt to divert the asteroid before 2029, they need to nudge the space rock’s position by roughly half a mile – something well within the range of existing technology. After 2029, they would need to shove the asteroid by a distance as least as large as Earth’s diameter. That feat would tax humanity’s current capabilities.”
In a sense this potentially bad news is really quite good news. Whereas even as little as a decade ago we would have been utterly unaware of a looming hazard, “today, at least five programs worldwide are hunting down near-Earth objects. NASA is well on its way toward achieving its goal of cataloging 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than 0.6 miles across by 2008. And it is devising ways to ensure that information about potential hazards reaches top decisionmakers throughout the government.”

Constitution In Exile

2005-07-25T23:28:00.000-05:00

If your liberal friends have begun prattling on and on about the “Constitution-in-exile” movement in accord with the latest leftspeak talking points bulletins, Power Line’s John Hinderaker has just the essay for you at the Weekly Standard. Short answer? It’s the bogeyman!
More specifically, “in truth, what the left fears is not that conservative judges will follow the liberal lead and create new ‘conservative rights’ that are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Rather, the left fears that conservative judges will read the Constitution as written and attribute meaning to the commerce clause, the takings clause, the Second Amendment, and other ‘forgotten’ provisions of that document, while at the same time abandoning the left’s project of using substantive due process to impose liberal policy preferences where those preferences fail to command a popular majority.
“For understandable reasons, those are fears that the left prefers not to articulate in public.”

Hoover's Files

2005-07-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

“I became deputy attorney general in early 1974, after the ‘Saturday night massacre,’” writes Laurence H. Silberman. “Having seen printed rumors of the ‘secret and confidential files’ of J. Edgar Hoover (who had died in 1972), I asked Clarence Kelly, the very straight and honorable director of the bureau, whether they existed. He assured me that they did not. If they ever did they must have been destroyed.
“I was shocked then, when on Jan. 19, 1975, as acting attorney general, I read a front page story in the Washington Post confirming the existence of the files. The story pointed out that the files contained embarrassing material collected on congressmen. When I confronted Kelly, he was initially mystified. He then realized the Post must be referring to files in his outer office, in plain sight, which he had inherited but never examined. Sure enough, they were the notorious secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover.”
Silberman’s essay “Hoover’s Institution” – really an edited transcript of his recent address to the First Circuit Judicial Conference – confirms the veracity of several anecdotes concerning J. Edgar Hoover’s, and Lyndon Johnson’s, malicious abuse of the FBI for political ends.
“The House Judiciary Committee demanded I testify about those files, so I was obliged to read them. Accompanied by only one FBI official, I read virtually all these files in three weekends. It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service . . . . I intend to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures--some still active. As bad as the dirt collection business was, perhaps even worse was the evidence that he had allowed – even offered – the bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes. I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.
“We attempted, without going into specifics, to explain to the committee the nature of Hoover’s secret files. I intend now to be more specific because I see no reason why such matters should not be public. Indeed, from my subsequent vantage point as ambassador to Yugoslavia, I was rather surprised that the Church Committee, which had access to the files, largely ignored the FBI’s misdeeds and concentrated instead on rather less objectionable CIA activities.”
With all the accumulating evidence of gross incompetence and unwarranted restrictions upon FBI (and CIA) activities revealed by the president’s commission on intelligence, which Silberman co-chaired, and by numerous other investigations into the genesis of 9/11, it is absolutely vital that we keep in mind the essential nature of this double-edged sword.
The irony of our great experiment in democracy is that it cannot survive without the essential instruments of its own defense against the very real threats prevalent in a world which does not cherish freedom so much as we – and yet, these very instruments are also threats to the democracy which they are tasked to defend. The sword we wield in our defense may also cleave us.
Silberman closes his essay with a proposal which should be adopted: “Former Director Louis Freeh initiated the practice of taking new FBI recruits through the Holocaust Museum to show what can happen when the law enforcement apparatus of a country becomes corrupted. I have always thought that sort of extreme example was a bit farfetched for our country, but there is an episode closer to home. I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover. And in that connection this country – and the bureau – would be well served if his name were removed from the bureau’s building. It is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history.”

Liberty & Realism

2005-07-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

More than forty years ago, Dr. Thomas Szasz in his perceptive “Law, Liberty and Psychiatry” encapsulated prevailing trends with his observation that “if people believe that health values justify coercion, but that moral and political values do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of the category of moral values. We are already far along the road.” Today, we are four decades and all too many miles further down that road.
The chief distinction between the extremes of the political camps described as “liberals” and as “social conservatives” is not which group is predisposed to repression to achieve its ends. Both are so predisposed. They are distinguished only by the question of whom they seek to repress, and by the objects and at times the instruments of their repression.
Contemporary political discourse widely recognizes the propensity of social conservatives toward repression – at least, the discourse of the political left. But the very ones who so loudly denounce that propensity of social conservatives in the most strident of terms are precisely those who have proven most successful in recent decades in deploying the state and its allied institutions to suppress activity and speech at variance with their own ideological inclinations and predispositions.
This is not a novel observation, having been raised with increasing frequency by the “right” in recent years, yet it remains largely unadmitted and even unrecognized by the “left”.
Speech codes on campuses, antismoking ordinances, the accelerating and intensifying regulation of almost every aspect of contemporary life – all these are a measure of the “success” of repression from the “left”. Yet all too many liberals sanctimoniously pride themselves for their staunch defense of civil liberties and freedom. This pride is folly and delusion.
The unfortunate reality of our present politics is the unassailable fact that each of our two great political parties comprises a coalition incorporating a significant constituency favoring repression, and that each to some degree is driven to accommodate its own repressive faction.
Worse, the advocates of expanding rather than contracting the sphere of political liberty are split. All too many who would defend the realm of freedom here at home see no necessity for defending it from threats abroad. Yet the menace of FascIslam is as great, perhaps in some respects even greater, than that of its malicious predecessors Fascism and Communism. While each of those posed some domestic as well as foreign threat, neither did so quite as ominously as that of our present adversary.
Those who care about the preservation and recovery of our freedoms must soon come to understand that such vital ends may be achieved only when we act decisively to counter the advocates of repression both left and right, both here and abroad. Our freedom is in peril.

Shipshape

2005-07-24T19:03:00.000-05:00

Hungary and Slovakia are landlocked nations. They have no coastline, no ports, no navy. But the European Union intends to keelhaul the two nations before the European Court of Justice if they refuse to implement the giant bureaucracy’s legislation on safety at sea. The London Telegraph reports that “Slovakia last week received two EC ‘yellow cards’ for ignoring the laws. Known in EU-speak as ‘reasoned opinions’, they are final warnings issued to national governments before court action is taken.
“‘The commission has decided to send a double reasoned opinion [I particularly like that phrase ‘double reasoned opinion’] to Slovakia on account of its failure to transpose into national law a number of directives on maritime safety, including that of passenger ships and the prevention of pollution from ships,’ the EC said.
“While admitting that Slovakia was ‘not a maritime state’ the commission sought to justify its warning. There are 20 vessels which fly the Slovakian flag but trade elsewhere in the world, it said, and they need to be inspected and certified according to the new criteria. The Slovakian embassy countered that the Slovakian-flagged ships were not of the kind covered by the directive.
“‘As far as passenger ships are concerned, you’re not actually allowed to register them in Slovakia,’ said Marta Domokova, a spokesman. Resignedly, she added: ‘We have no coastline but it looks as if we are going to have to implement all these laws anyway.’”
Shape up, or ship out.

Justice Delayed

2005-07-24T18:33:00.000-05:00

Machang Lalung was arrested in his native village of Silsang in the state of Assam in northeastern India in 1951. No official records remain concerning the crime which he was alleged to have committed, but as the Times of India reports, there is “a document that indicates he was booked under section 326 of the Indian Penal Code.
“This section pertains [to] a non-bailable offence for ‘voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means.’ If found guilty, the maximum penalty under this provision is 10 years in prison.”
But Machang Lalung was not found guilty. He was never brought to trial. Instead for 54 years he languished in prison and in a mental asylum. In 1967 he was found sane, but not released. Not until this month, at the urging of India’s National Human Rights, was he finally granted a hearing, and ultimately released on a bond of 1 rupee.
“After Mr Lalung’s release,” the BBC reports, “he was escorted back to his village, where only one villager, Benu Lalung, recognised him.
“‘We handed him over to the village headman but could not find his family or relatives,’ said B Das, a police official.
“He said that Mr Lalung had almost forgotten about his past and does not remember anything about his village now.
“‘He just did not react at all when he arrived at Silsang,’ Mr Das said.”

Humpty Dumpty On Constitutional Law

2005-07-23T21:21:00.000-05:00

(Through the Looking Glass)

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean a ‘nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Alice In Wonderland)

“Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and, as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question.”

Disillusion

2005-07-23T21:12:00.000-05:00

Yesterday’s delusions realized become today’s illuminations – often ugly, sometimes beautiful. Can one live without illusions? Or is life itself without illusion mere illusion?

Dean's Demise 2

2005-07-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

The great classic study of politics in the American South, V.O. Key’s “Southern Politics in State and Nation” remains illuminating 56 years after its initial publication. To this day it is accurate to say that southern politics cannot be completely understood without it.
Most of the best work on the grand transformation of southern politics in the 60 years since the end of World War II could be viewed as a series of footnotes and addenda to Key’s great work. Alexander Lamis’ “The Two-Party South” and Jack Bass and Walter De Vries’ “The Transformation of Southern Politics” build upon Keys’ insights. Yet, in their introduction to another excellent analysis, “Politics and Society in the South, Earl and Merle Black unequivocally declare that “for almost two generations, V.O’ Key’s “Southern Politics in State and Nation” has been the standard book on regional politics. Key’s magnicent analysis remains unsurpassed in its treatment of the old southern politics, but subsequent changes have rendered it inadequate as a guide to southern politics.” Quite true. An adequate contemporary view would require the three works just cited and also the Blacks’ “The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected”. It is hardly an accident that from 1964 to 2004 every president elected has been either a Republican or a Democrat from the South.
Such “iron laws” of politics are never etched in stone. Yet the fundamental trend which has produced that forty-year tradition is unlikely to be broken soon.
Nearly two weeks ago, the Washington Times’ Donald Lambro explained why this is so in “Sunny Days Ahead for GOP as Population Shifts South”:
“Migration from liberal bastions in the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt states will boost Republican electoral strength in the coming decade, making it tougher than ever for Democrats to win the presidency without carrying states in the South or Southwest.
“The Census Bureau's latest projection of population shifts, the first in eight years, shows a dramatic movement from the North to Southern and Western states over the next 30 years. The study points to a political movement as well.
“Heavily Democratic states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Michigan will go on losing congressional seats and thus electoral strength in presidential elections, political analysts say. At the same time, they say, Republican states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada likely will gain congressional and electoral clout.”
There are, no doubt, both caveats and countervailing trends. These to the despite, “‘The net beneficiary of this will continue to be the Republican Party because the population shift is moving into an environment that is heavily dominated by the Republicans,’ says Merle Black, a professor of politics and government at Emory University and author of books on political shifts in the South.
“‘In the 2002 and 2004 exit polls, we saw for the first time a majority of Southern white voters identifying themselves as Republicans and Democratic identification falling to a low 20 [percent] to 25 percent,’ Mr. Black says.
“This doesn’t mean that Democrats cannot win, but population shifts give the GOP ‘a long-term structural advantage,’ he says, ‘and assuming they nominate credible candidates, they start with a strong base.’
“He adds: ‘The Republicans will continue to be the dominant party in the South for the foreseeable future.’”
As Lambro reports, “Census Bureau projections show significant population shifts over the next three decades. The share of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest will fall from 42 percent to 35 percent of the population, while the South and West will rise from 58 percent to 65 percent.
“Among the 10 most populated states, Democrat-leaning Michigan and New Jersey will be supplanted by heavily Republican and fast-growing Arizona and North Carolina.
“Ohio, a pivotal swing state in presidential races, will drop from seventh to ninth place in population, while Republican-rich Georgia will move up from 10th to eighth.
“Over a shorter term, Florida is expected to pass New York and move into third place by 2011, with California and Texas remaining in first and second, respectively. California, Florida and Texas are expected to grow by more than 12 million in population and will account for 46 percent of the growth between 2000 and 2030.
“Overall, the South's population is projected to grow by 42.9 percent and the West by 45.8 percent, at the expense of the Midwest (9.5 percent) and the Northeast (7.6 percent).”
Still there are those who dissent, discerning in the prevailing trends not so much intensification as dilution.
“‘The people moving to the Carolinas are from the blue [Democratic] states to a large degree,’ says William H. Frey, a population analyst at the Brookings Institution. ‘They are coming from the Midwest, from New Jersey and New York, and they are going to bring with them certainly Southern fiscal values but also maybe Northern social values.’
“Florida, where population growth increasingly hails from heavily Democratic states in the North, will turn into a more fierce political battleground as it becomes more socially diverse, Mr. Frey suggests.
“‘They are getting younger, more mainstream suburbanites from the Northeast in Orlando and Tampa, but also more diverse, minority immigrant populations, all of which are different from the Florida we've seen in the past,’ he says.
“But Mr. Black thinks this increased diversity may not be enough to change the long-term political makeup of the South, which, if anything, has become even more Republican.
“‘If you look at younger white voters in the South, they are even more Republican than the older white voters," he says. "As these younger white voters age, they are going to be even more cohesively Republican than their predecessors.
“‘So you could have more Democrats moving in from outside, but if the native population in the South becomes even more Republican, that may not lead to the diminishment of the GOP in the South.’”
It is always a hazardous enterprise to predict future events based upon the projected continuation of contemporary trends, even those of long standing and persistence, even intensification. But the most likely eventuality should offer little comfort to the beleaguered Democrats.

Either/Or

2005-07-23T19:29:00.000-05:00

It is a source of continual amazement to me how easily one's actions and motivations are misinterpreted or misunderstood. Half the travails of humankind arise because we fail to understand - the other half perhaps because we understand too well. Yet it is so much easier to be chastized, even denounced, for that of which we are truly culpable than for that which others imagine of us. Though I wonder, when you're standing before the firing squad, does it matter to you whether you are guilty or innocent?

Typewriter 5

2005-07-23T19:22:00.000-05:00

My good friend Lee Mitchell takes umbrage (in conversation rather than comment) at my redundant references to that antique mechanical device, the typewriter. I honor his wishes in the breach.
"As expediter," types McLuhan in Understanding Media, "the typewriter brought writing and speech and publication into close association. Although a mere mechanical form, it acted in some respects as an implosion, rather than an explosion."
The internet transforms this "close association" into fusion. Speech, writing, publication, all are one, contemporaneous, a single integrated act.
The booming artillery of Gutenberg's press demolished the Medieval world. The rattling machine gun of the typewriter mowed down the Enlightenment and Romanticism alike. And the voracious thermonuclear internet . . .

Plame Game . . . ?

2005-07-23T19:13:00.000-05:00

(I've Lost Count)

Damn the Evidence

Reporting on the eye-glazing "hearings" conducted yesterday into . . . whatever they think they were investigating, the Washington Times' James G. Lakely summarizes the facts, again:
"Mrs. Plame is the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who has accused the White House of lying about Iraq's attempts to acquire weapons-grade nuclear material from Niger. A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the British intelligence service and other intelligence agencies around the world, however, claim the attempt was made.
"The bipartisan intelligence committee report also determined that Mrs. Plame recommended to the CIA that her husband - a critic of the war in Iraq - travel to Niger to verify the story of attempted 'yellowcake' uranium purchases. Though his own report suggested it had occurred, Mr. Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, saying it was wrong of the White House to suggest it did happen.
"Mr. Wilson has never publicly reconciled that conflict.
"Democrats, however, made it clear that they believe Mr. Wilson's op-ed, and are convinced that Mr. Rove 'outed' Mrs. Plame as a form of political retribution."
At this rate by mid August they'll subpoena the Tooth Fairy.

Hawaiian Apartheid

2005-07-22T16:40:00.000-05:00

Most of us are familiar at first hand with one form or another of invasive non-indigenous species that wreak havoc on the environment: kudzu and fire ants in the South, rabbits in Australia, the walking catfish in the Chesapeake Bay area. Some, like kudzu, were introduced intentionally. Many have been purely accidental, or at least unintentional, intrusions.
Many of the world’s extinct and endangered species have been eliminated or sorely pressed by such invaders. Nowhere is this more true than in the uniquely balanced and fragile ecosystems of islands. (Think Mauritius’ dodo, for example.)
Several Hawaiian islands have been invaded by a tiny two-inch long amphibian from Puerto Rico called the coqui frog. As the Washington Times reports, “beloved in its native Puerto Rico, the coqui frog has become a menace in Hawaii, where it suddenly appeared in the 1990s. With no natural predators, such as snakes, to keep their numbers under control, the frogs and their loud mating calls have multiplied exponentially — causing headaches for homeowners.
“Some believe the noisy amphibians also could cause serious damage to Hawaii’s economy if they drag down housing prices, which real estate agents say is a distinct possibility.” As state representative Clifton Tsuji exclaimed, “this is an invasive species of the worst kind. It’s a species of mass destruction.” The times continues, “some parts of the Big Island have infestations so large, authorities have been forced into containment mode.
“Brooks Kaiser, a University of Hawaii visiting scholar heading an economic impact study of the coqui, said living next to a major infestation could rival the experience of living next to an airport. Residents, for the most part, agree.”
But the coqui frog isn’t the only invasive species threatening Hawaii. An even more dangerous invasion is in prospect, that of the race-baiting politician.
Five years ago the Supreme Court of the United States voted 7-to-2 in Rice v. Cayetano to eliminate a race-based sytem. As Opinion Journal’s John Fund explains, “under that system non-Native Hawaiians were barred from voting for trustees overseeing the state’s Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The ruling, which was joined by liberal Justices David Souter and Stephen Breyer, found that a Hawaiian law requiring that the trustees be Native Hawaiians and elected only by other Native Hawaiians was obviously discriminatory. ‘There can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race,’ wrote Justice Antonin Scalia. ‘In the eyes of government, we are just one race, it is American.’”
But in a bill now before the United States Senate, the “Native Hawaiian Reorganization Act” introduced by Hawaii’s Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka, what Fund characterizes as “supporters of racial restrictions” have sought to abandon colorblind government and “skirt the Fifteenth Amendment’s constitutional ban on race-based governments by requiring that Washington, D.C., recognize Native Hawaiians in the same manner it recognizes separate governments for American Indians and Alaska natives.
“That comparison, however, quickly falls apart. It’s true that the Founders (and the British before them) recognized Indian tribes to be separate, sovereign governments. They signed treaties with tribes and carved out territory for tribes to occupy — a system of separation that never led to equality. But in Hawaii, the history is demonstrably different. When the island chain became a state in 1959, there was a broad consensus in Congress that Native Hawaiians would not be treated as a separate racial group, and that they would not be transformed into an ‘Indian tribe.’ Indeed, Native Hawaiians have never asked to be recognized as an Indian tribe; they not only lack their own system of laws, but are widely geographically distributed throughout Hawaii and have a high rate of intermarriage with other groups.
“Reversing this policy with what would amount to federal recognition of a ‘tribe’ for Native Hawaiians today would create an independent state within a state that would lie outside the Constitution and laws of the United States as well as those of the state of Hawaii. The Akaka bill would also authorize the transfer of a portion of Hawaii’s state-owned lands, natural resources and other assets to the new race-based government (at no cost to that new government, of course). Hawaiians would also be unable to fight back, as the state does not allow for referendums. And, just as on American Indian land, a shopkeeper who is part Hawaiian could claim exemption from state taxes and other laws, giving him an advantage over his next-door, non-Native Hawaiian competitor.”
But it’s actually even worse than that. In a recent letter to his constituents, Republican Senator John Kyl of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, explained the substance of an opposition study he had performed. The letter was reprinted in the Honolulu Advertiser in “Akaka Bill a Recipe for Racial Conflict”. As Senator Kyl wrote, “While I support efforts to preserve the heritage and culture of Native Hawaiians, I oppose this bill. By creating a separate, race-based government within the state of Hawai'i, (it) would violate the United States Constitution and create a divisive and unworkable system of government.
“The Akaka bill would authorize persons with some Native Hawaiian blood to form a Native Hawaiian government. This government would have powers identical to those of a reservation Indian tribe — the power to tax, regulate and make laws for its members.
“On a practical level, it is difficult to imagine how such a government would interact with the rest of Hawai'i’s people.
“Tribal Indians on a reservation generally are immune from state laws — from the taxes and regulations that apply to other residents of the state. But unlike reservation Indians, Native Hawaiians do not live in one area of the state that is set aside for Indians. They live in the same cities and neighborhoods, and on the same streets, as other (residents of Hawai'i) do.
“Would the citizens of the new Native Hawaiian government — like reservation Indians — be immune from state laws, regulations and taxes? Would a Native Hawaiian-owned business — like a reservation Indian business — be exempt from the taxes that its non-Native competitors must pay? If Congress were to create a separate tribal government for Native Hawaiians, it would be imposing just such a system on the people of Hawai'i.
“Persons of different races, who live together in the same society, would be subject to different legal codes. This would not produce racial reconciliation in Hawai'i. Instead, it is a recipe for permanent racial conflict.
“I believe that the Akaka bill also violates the U.S. Constitution. The tribal governments on Indian reservations in the continental United States were preserved as separate entities when their surrounding states entered the union. These governments are not subject to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
“The proposed Native Hawaiian government likewise would not be bound by the Bill of Rights. But unlike reservation Indians, all of Hawai'i’s citizens have been subject to state law ever since Hawai'i entered the union — and all Hawaiians receive the full protection of the Bill of Rights.
“By subjecting Native Hawaiians to a government that is not bound by the Constitution, the Akaka bill effectively would take away these constitutional rights from persons who currently enjoy their protection. This is something that I believe Congress neither can nor should do.”
So it’s hardly surprising that, as Fund observes, “there is strong public skepticism in Hawaii about the establishment of what would amount to racial enclaves. ‘It’s telling that there have been no public hearings organized by the state, the University of Hawaii, the state’s congressional delegation or the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to determine if there actually is support for the Akaka Bill,’ says Malia Zimmerman, the editor of the news service HawaiiReporter.com. ‘There is a complete atmosphere of silence in the state government and mainstream media about this bill's weaknesses.’
“Even with debate smothered, a poll conducted by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii this month found that two out of three state residents oppose the Akaka bill, including 48% of Native Hawaiians. While some natives oppose the Akaka bill because they support complete independence, most native opponents see no need for a new layer of government ruling over them. Native Hawaiians have never experienced the kind of oppressive treatment American Indians have had to endure. The U.S. did overthrow Queen Lydia Liliuokalani in 1893, something Congress has since apologized for, but what followed in no way compares to the plight of many tribes in the continental United States, in part because Native-Hawaiians weren’t pushed into reservations. Also, for the past 30 years, Native Hawaiians have been the beneficiary of many targeted housing, education and welfare benefits.
“But guilt is a powerful political weapon, and Hawaii’s major politicians have fallen completely into line as lobbyists for the Akaka bill. Among them is Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, who is said to have convinced herself that her party’s ability to compete for Native Hawaiian votes is linked to support of the Akaka bill.” Indeed, along with Mark J. Bennett, she penned an opinion editorial for the same issue of the Honolulu Advertiser in which Kyl’s letter appeared, arguing that the bill “neither further balkanizes the United States nor sets up a race-based separate government in Hawai'i.
“It provides a simple measure of justice and fairness to Native Hawaiians.”
Read her editorial and see whether you believe she has effectively refuted any of Kyl’s or Fund’s substantive arguments I have reproduced here. In my opinion she does not, effectively countering only a variety of straw man arguments she adduces herself.
Lingle “claims to have helped convince six Republican senators, including Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to support the measure. If she is right,” declares Fund, “that means there will be a bare 51 vote majority for the Akaka bill when the full Senate votes on it next week. Since the House has previously passed similar versions of this bill, it is likely to approve this one as well. The Bush administration has remained neutral on the bill, although it suggested it be amended to better protect the interests of U.S. military bases and to limit casino gambling.”
Ominously, however, as Bruce Fein pointed out in the Washington Times, “proponents oppose any amendment, for example, a requirement of approval by a majority of adult Native Hawaiians before all Native Hawaiians are subjected to the new race-based government; a prohibition on racial, religious or ethnic discrimination; a proscription on secession; an injunction against evicting the U.S. military from Pearl Harbor; or, an obligation to honor the Bill of Rights. They even reject a requiring a plebiscite in Hawaii to determine if its citizens wish to carve out of every island multiple sovereign racial enclaves.”
Fein notes that the majority of Hawaiian citizens oppose the bill and adds that “these percentages are stunning because the government of Hawaii has spent millions propagandizing in favor of the race-based legislation over several years. They discredit the representations of the governor of Hawaii and Hawaii's two senators and two representatives that the people of Hawaii overwhelming covet a race-based sovereign.” This is in sharp contrast to “a Hawaiian plebiscite [which] was held in 1959 over statehood; 94 percent of the voters approved, including a majority of Native Hawaiians.”
As Fein declares, “the Akaka Bill is unconstitutional, racist, divisive and subversive of American unity. It deserves the same repudiation as Jim Crow laws.” The Senate should reject this bill – and the House should be ashamed for passing it.