Zarqawi Said Beaten To Death By Witness Who Could Not Have Seen It

The AP has caused quite a stir today by publishing an uncorroborated account by a supposed eyewitness to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The witness, identified as Mohammed, says that Americans beat and stomped Zarqawi until blood flowed from his nose and he died:

The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said he lives near the house where al-Zarqawi was killed. He said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived.

"When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.

Interesting. Of course, Reuters reported earlier tonight that the house could not be seen from any of the local houses, screened off from the roads and other dwellings by the palm groves that hid it from prying eyes:

[T]he house where al-Zarqawi last lived was extremely isolated. It was surrounded by thick palm groves that hid it from mud and cement houses a few hundred yards away.

The site is also well hidden from the main road 400 yards away, which cuts through lush green flatlands.

Finding it must have required precise intelligence. The U.S. military has spoken of a painstaking process, including human sources and electronic surveillance, that led them to the house.

So picture this mission as the Americans and Iraqis on the ground must have conceived it. They need to attack a well-hidden house in the middle of a palm grove in Baquba in a way that ensures the occupants cannot escape if the bombing fails to kill them. They know exactly where this house is, drop two bombs on it -- and then wait around for the locals to rush into a house they cannot see to dig the bodies out? And having done that, the American soldiers then get around to arriving on scene without any concern about whether their quarry may have escaped, pull Zarqawi out of an ambulance where he is secured, and beat him to death in front of the witnesses?

Uh-huh.

The logistics of the site appear determinative that the residents of the village could not have seen any of what transpired at the safe house. The sequence of events show that the US had timed their raid for maximum security and efficiency, and that the ground forces of Iraqi and American troops would have acted immediately to secure this very remote site to ensure no one escaped. The AP apparently didn't read the Reuters description of the attack site before publishing this uncorroborated account of a supposed atrocity.

Is the AP now in the business of reporting anything anyone says about any event without doing some rudimentary investigation first? We call that gossip, not news, and we expect better than a National Enquirer standard at the AP.

Gettin' Wild With The Zarqmeister

My, the stories I miss when I'm away! It turns out that the US military didn't just kill a terrorist monster Thursday, but also a major party monster. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi apparently brought out the beast in his women, according to the clothing found in the rubble of his safe house in Baquba:

The ruins of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s house are strewn with a random jumble of wreckage -- magazines, a leopard-print nightgown, a religious slogan and a few hints at the violent career of Iraq’s most wanted man.

What is left of the “safe house” where the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq lived suggests that he and his companions lived there with few luxuries.

Apparently, it didn't take much for Zarqawi to get relaxed.

Besides the latest from Victoria's Secret for his women (well, we assume for his women), Zarqawi seemed a bit obsessed with the culture he hated so much. He read Western magazine in their Arabic-language versions, and made a particular point to keep passages regarding Christians and Jews, apparently. Strangely and perhaps coincidentally, Zarqawi had a picture of FDR from a magazine, although what significance Roosevelt had to Zarqawi will have to be left to speculation.

More interesting in a tactical and strategic sense is the descrition of the safe house. Clearly no one was going to find this place by accident -- and it almost sounds designed to attract suspicion if discovered. Palm groves surrounded the house, hundreds of yards from any other structures. The roads ran well away from the site. Cars used to drive to the safe house must have seemed to disappear into the groves. One wonders not that the house got discovered, but why it took so long for residents to catch on to the use of it as a safe haven for terrorists.

Obviously, Zarqawi felt safe there -- safe enough to bring his wife along and to plan for a little relaxation. The US has just sent a message to his followers: they are safe nowhere, and relaxing will bring death.

Long Day's Hospital Visit Into Night

My sister flew in for a brief visit and the entire family spent the day at the hospital with the First Mate, which is why I couldn't make it to my normal Northern Alliance Radio Network spot today. The FM needed me to go over the lab results with the doctors, who had told her several seemingly contradictory prognoses. The complexity of her case has her wondering what it all means, and we had the opportunity to get a lot of the fog cleared today.

She's doing much better, but the fever is still there and her hemoglobin dropped suddenly two days ago, necessitating another transfusion. Hematology wants to see what happens over the next couple of days whether she continues to have problems in this regard. The FM will probably stay in the hospital now until Monday evening at the earliest -- which displeased her, but is probably necessary.

We'll be heading back tomorrow for a lengthy lunchtime visit, and I'll know more then!

UPDATE: Hey, The Patriette had to hang out at the hospital as well, but for an entirely different reason. Big CQ welcomes to Baby Amy, the Patriettte-ette! Now that's some good news. Kelly is one of the special friends some of us have been lucky to meet through blogging, and the addition to her family makes my day.

Corruption In Nevada Judiciary

The Los Angeles Times has a blockbuster report this morning on a judicial system in Nevada that has allowed corruption into the state's justice system, an embarrassment that has benefited organized crime, casinos, and the judges themselves. By allowing a classification for jurists as "senior judges" to escape rules of accountability, the predictable outcomes have occurred:

One Nevada judge was nearly indicted on blackmail charges. Another ruled repeatedly for a casino corporation in which he held more than 10,000 shares. Still another overruled state authorities and decided in favor of a gambling boss who was notorious as a mob frontman, and whose casino did the judge a $2,800 favor.

Yet the Nevada Supreme Court has conferred upon these judges a special distinction that exempts them from some of the common rules of judicial practice and reduces their accountability. They are among 17 state judges whom the high court has commissioned as senior judges.

Unlike regular judges, senior judges are not answerable to the voters, but serve at the pleasure of the high court, and that can mean for life. Unlike regular judges, they can reject assignments until they are given a case they want to try. Unlike regular judges, they cannot be removed from a case by peremptory challenge. And until last year, they did not have to disclose their financial interests.

With this exceptional flexibility, they could try lawsuits in which they had a personal stake without revealing it. And because they cannot be removed by peremptory challenge, which normally permits a one-time replacement of a judge at the beginning of any case simply for the asking, it is possible for litigants to be stuck with senior judges, their conflicts of interest and their decisions.

Read the whole atrticle. Remember that whan accountability gets removed from any system, it allows for the corruption that inevitably follows.

Terror Experts Agree: Zarqawi Death A Significant Blow To AQ

The Washington Post leads with an analysis of the impact from the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq this week, and the news sounds much better than some of the talking heads on television would lead viewers to believe. Zarqawi's death will not only degrade his own AQI network, but will have a tremendous impact on terror networks worldwide, according to analysts:

The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could mark a turning point for al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement, according to terrorism analysts and intelligence officials. ...

Some European and Arab intelligence officials said they had seen signs before Zarqawi's death that the number of foreign fighters going to Iraq was already waning. For recruitment efforts, the importance of Zarqawi's death "cannot be overestimated," Germany's foreign intelligence chief, Ernst Uhrlau, told the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

Guido Steinberg, an expert on Islamic radicalism at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, said other groups of foreign fighters that kept a loose alliance with Zarqawi, such as Ansar al-Sunna, might turn away from al-Qaeda in Iraq now that he is gone.

"It's a great loss for the these jihadi networks," said Steinberg, who served as a counterterrorism adviser to Gerhard Schroeder when he was chancellor of Germany. "I don't think there is any person in Iraq able to control this network the way Zarqawi did. It's very decentralized. He was the only person in Iraq who could provide the glue.

"By losing Zarqawi, they run the danger of losing Iraq as a battlefield to the nationalist insurgents and others who aren't interested in bin Laden or the global jihad."

It takes the Post several paragraphs to get to its point, after offering all of the ways in which Zarqawi differed from AQ's main networks, but it does highlight the strategic and symbolic nature of Zarqawi's elimination. The Jordanian terrorist inspired many recruits, using his web site to chronicle his exploits and to show his defiance to the Western enemies he fought. He also became a rallying point for those who fear the zealotry of the Shi'a among Islam, more and more exlplicitly attacking Shi'ite targets in order to provoke an intra-Islam bloodbath.

With his elimination, no other major figure has his reach or his following to fully replace him. It will take months or years for someone of Zarqawi's stature to rise in Iraq and have the credibility necessary to unite the disparate components of the receding insurgencies there. In the meantime, because Zarqawi provided such a unifying presence, the US and Iraqi security forces will exploit the intelligence captured during the raid to damage the various cells and networks he accessed. US forces conducted dozens of raids over the last two days doing just that.

The notion that killing a high-ranking commander in any enemy organization will have no effect is just ludicrous on its face. Killing one general does not win a war, but in any case it makes it much more difficult for the enemy to organize. In this case especially, the loss of the one unifying presence for foreign terrorists in Iraq serves as a severe blow to organization, recruitment, financing, and coordination. Put more simply: Iraq, the American troops, and the world is a much better place without Zarqawi in it, and AQ has publicly lost their talking point about terrorist invincibility.

Murtha, The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Rep. John Murtha inadvertently provided a rare moment of unity last fall when he demanded an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. House Republicans took him at his word and introduced a bill to that effect, and the measure only gained three votes -- none of them Murtha's, as it turned out. He later complained that the bill misrepresented his position and that he meant to give the Pentagon six months to leave, although even the most precipitous retreat would take nearly that long to organize and execute, given our deployment throughout Iraq.

Now he apparently intends to provide that kind of unity again, among Republicans at least, by throwing his hat into the ring for a key Democratic leadership post -- that doesn't even exist yet:

Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), one of the Democrats' leading antiwar voices, startled his political colleagues yesterday by announcing he would seek a senior leadership position if the Democrats win control of the House in November.

In a letter that he circulated on the floor during a series of votes, Murtha said he is eyeing the No. 2 position. "If we prevail as I hope and know we will and return to the majority this next Congress, I have decided to run for the open seat of the Majority Leader," Murtha wrote.

The presumed favorite for that job had been the current No. 2 House Democrat, Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), with whom Murtha has long had testy relations. Hoyer, like many of his political colleagues, greeted Murtha's announcement with annoyance and exasperation, given that the election remains five months off and a Democratic victory is by no means assured.

Somewhere, somehow ... Karl Rove is behind all of this. I know it!

We have seen a lot of pre-election hubris from the Democrats lately, talking about all of the investigations they want to pursue and the rules they want to change once they take control of the House. What we haven't seen is an election agenda that gives voters any reason to put them in charge. Now we have John Murtha demanding a party war over a position that the Republicans currently hold, threatening to tear the caucus apart while they need to prepare for the upcoming midterms.

Needless to say, this could not come at a worse time for Democrats and a better time for Republicans. The Democrats already face a party split on the war and on domestic policy, one of the reasons why they have yet to put forward any kind of coherent agenda other than gainsaying the GOP. This only underscores the confusion and lack of direction of their caucus. For Republicans, it gives them yet another talking point about the war effort and the necessity of keeping Democratic hands off of it. While Steny Hoyer may be more liberal than Murtha, Hoyer doesn't get the GOP base as restive as Murtha, and expect Republicans to use it for leverage in the midterms.

This reflects poor leadership on the part of Nancy Pelosi, and the same kind of rank opportunism from Murtha that we saw last year. She apparently had no clue that Murtha would attack Hoyer's position, and apparently for personal reasons. Now that Murtha has decided to start undermining Democrats rather than the war effort, one might expect to see his lionization dim somewhat in the coming weeks.

Anti-Semitism In Virginia Democratic Primary?

Forbes Magazine reported on a potentially explosive story when it relayed accusations that campaign material for James Webb used anti-Semitic imagery to combat his opponent in the upcoming Virginian Democratic primary for the Senate, Harris Miller. According to Forbes, the drawing used stereotypical cartoon images about Jews to show Harris as a greedy manipulator, charges that came from the Harris Miller campaign itself:

Senate candidate James H. Webb, President Reagan's former Navy secretary, was criticized by his Jewish opponent Friday over a campaign flier that depicted the opponent with a hooked nose and cash spilling from his pockets.

The flier was intended for distribution among labor groups. It was titled "Miller the Job Killer," referring to Webb's opponent for the Democratic nomination in Tuesday's primary, businessman Harris Miller.

The flier, drawn in comic-book cartoon style, depicts Miller with a grotesquely hooked nose and cash overflowing from his suit pockets as he orders an underling to find ways to export U.S. jobs overseas. The flier refers to Miller as the "anti-Christ of outsourcing."

Miller called it "despicable."

"One of the things I hoped we would keep out of this campaign, because it has nothing to do with the campaign, is my religion and my background," Miller said.

Webb denied using anti-Semitism as a part of the campaign and accused Miller of distorting Webb's views on affirmative action into accusations of racism. Webb did apologize to anyone who found the flyer offensive. Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice decried this kind of campaigning, ending by noting that this should make George Allen's re-election even easier, although Allen already polls a majority and a wide lead against both candidates.

Forbes did not include any of the imagery from the flyer, and Eric at Classical Values wonders why. He provides links to the flyer, and Larry Sabato takes a look at Harris Miller, and neither of them see any anti-Semitism involved. Eric also notes that another passage in Forbes that painted Webb as anti-Semitic, a supposed quote that called Miller the "anti-Christ of outsourcing", came from another source entirely:

The use of quotes is dishonest, representing paraphrase as quotation. They took 'anti-Christ of outsourcing' from the following:

Harris Miller, aka the Antichrist if you're an unemployed IT worker, is gearing up for a Senate run as--a Democrat? "I think businesspeople can be good Democrats," Miller told me last week. "I'm proud to be a businessman; my father was a small businessman."

And as for Miller's quote about 'a good thing for the American economy?'

As for outsourcing, another bogeyman that trade unions, some legislators, and Lou Dobbs say will have all of us flipping burgers at McDonald's, Miller thinks it's a good thing. "Global sourcing continues to be a net positive for American workers and the U.S. economy," he said in an October release.

While some might defend this as 'accurate,' it's misleading, and as I said before dishonest, even if unintentional. That sort of thing would have serious repercussions in the academy.

Readers should see the material before jumping to the conclusions leveled by the Miller campaign. Here's the actual flyer, minus most of the text (click on it to expand):

I agree with Eric. This is a childish effort by Webb's campaign, with no subtlety and no class. The artwork -- if it can be called that -- comes from the kind of comic book a pediatric dentist might have in his waiting room in a vain attempt to relate to his young patients. If Webb thinks that this kind of advertisement will resonate with the Virginia electorate, he must have one very low opinion of their intelligence.

But is it anti-Semitic? Here is a picture of Harris Miller juxtaposed with one image from the cartoon:

I don't see a wad of cash hanging out of Miller's pocket or a cigar in his mouth, but other than that, it looks like a fairly honest and un-bigoted cartoon representation of Harris Miller. He certainly can expect similar treatment from editorial cartoonists if he wins the primary, and especially if he experiences the sort of miracle it would take to defeat George Allen.

An even more humorous note is how the flyer treats James Webb. Take a look at the heroic pose given in the flyer and compare it to this picture from a speech he gave:

I would say that Webb has an overly imaginative sense of self-esteem. Notice that Webb's features get almost completely obliterated in this drawing, replaced by Generic Man good looks.

I don't think Webb or his staff are anti-Semites, at least not on this basis. Forbes should have done more research into this topic instead of just regurgitating whatever complaints Harris Miller communicated. However, I'd also say that no one at the Webb campaign has a clue about political advertising -- and on that basis, I do agree with Joe Gandelman that George Allen will not have many sleepless nights in this election season.

NOTE: Pictures of both candidates were taken from their own websites.

UPDATE: A couple of points. First, I was unclear above; what I meant was that Miller's picture had no cigar or wad of cash. I was being flippant, but wound up being unclear. I did obviously see the two in the cartoon, but that's the price one pays for a lack of clarity. Mea culpa.

Second, while I don't believe this to be anti-Semitic, I can understand how one might believe it to be. Good discussion in the comments on this, and I hope it continues. Joe Gandelman is still unconvinced -- be sure to read his follow-up post. And the Commissar points out the real Democratic anti-Semite in the South.

Guess Who Wanted To Fly In New Zealand?

New Zealand authorities found out that an eager young student pilot might have more on his mind that just cruising through South Pacific clouds. The country deported Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali, an undeservedly obscure cast member from the 9/11 plot who told the Kiwis that his dream was to fly a commercial airliner:

A Saudi Arabian linked to one of the September 11 hijackers spent four months in New Zealand before being expelled as a national security risk. The United States-qualified pilot, Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali, was admitted to New Zealand in February on a student visa, saying his dream was to become a commercial airline pilot and that he needed an English language qualification to assist. Today the Weekend Herald reveals that on May 29 police and immigration officials raided Ali's Palmerston North home and deported him. ...

The Government claimed last night that Ali had lived and trained in Phoenix, Arizona, with fellow Saudi Hani Hanjour in the months before Hanjour is believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon building. ... Police seized Ali's flight logbook from the aero club, where he had flown several times in Cessna aircraft accompanied by instructors. He was sent back to Saudi Arabia under escort.

One has to suspect that Rayed's dream had more to do with flying the airliner rather than actually landing it.

Rayed doesn't get much attention in the final 9/11 Commission report; all references to him are found in the extensive footnotes. He indeed roomed with Hani Hanjour and even got his own pilot's license in 1998 from Arizona Aviation. He also was a leader of an Islamic "cultural center" (mosque) in Phoenix during that period, and was known for his radical speeches. The FBI interviewed Rayed as early as September 15, 2001, and while he obviously did not get detained or charged, the FBI found his testimony "deceptive" and not credible. As late as May 2004, just before the commission wrote the report, the Phoenix office found his connections to Hanjour "suspicious" (page 520).

Most interestingly, for a man who has a dream to become a commercial airline pilot at age 20, he stopped flying and started working as a computer programmer. Only in the summer of 2001 did he resume flight training. In the summer of 2001. He was joined by another Hanjour associate at the same time, but neither man took part in the 9/11 attack, and neither man ever faced charges in the US.

People speculated at the time that al-Qaeda had enough assets in the US to initiate a second wave of airliner attacks, and had been taken off guard by the grounding of the entire commercial industry on 9/11. The re-emergence of Rayed Abdullah Ali demonstrates that AQ has not completely given up on that tactic.

The End Of The Non-Truce

Hamas has announced the end of a truce that never was, after a series of artillery exchanges between Palestinians in Gaza and the IDF resulted in seven civilian deaths on a Gaza beach, apparently from an errant Israeli volley. After the seven victims died on the beach, Hamas angrily announced their renunciation of the truce:

Hamas militants called off a truce with Israel on Friday after a barrage of Israeli artillery shells tore into Palestinians at a beachside picnic in the Gaza Strip, killing seven civilians.

The declaration raised the prospect of a new wave of bloodshed. Hamas militants suspended a campaign of deadly suicide attacks on Israelis with a February 2005 cease-fire, and have largely stuck to the truce. The Islamic group now leads the Palestinian government.

"The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage," the Hamas militants said in a leaflet. "The resistance groups ... will choose the proper place and time for the tough, strong and unique response."

The Israeli artillery attack was part of a wider aerial and artillery bombardment of suspected Palestinian rocket-launching sites that killed a total of 10 people Friday.

It would be easier to take this seriously if (a) the so-called truce hadn't resulted in almost continuous rocket fire from Gaza into Israel since Israel withdrew from the strip, and (b) Hamas hadn't endorsed the bombing of a Tel Aviv falafel stand two months ago that killed 21 civilians. Granted, Israel has to take responsibility for its collateral damage, and should have declared that area an open range so that civilians could have avoided the beach. However, the point is that Israel had the right to respond to attacks on its nation and citizens from an unoccupied entity, and that Israel wasn't trying to kill random civilians. They were trying to hit the people launching the rockets.

How badly will this damage prospects for peace? Not at all, since there have not been any real prospects for peace since Yasser Arafat stiffed Ehud Barak after getting almost everything for which Arafat had asked. The truce itself was an illusion, a fantasy dreamed up by the Palestinians to get Israel off their back and to play the victim for the Western press. Neither Hamas nor Fatah ever made any attempt to disarm Islamic Jihad, the group responsible for the continuing rocket attacks from Palestinian territory. For that matter, the Palestinian Authority has never even attempted to disarm Fatah or Hamas, despite commitments to do so.

Hamas will have a difficult time attempting to take advantage of the cessation of the hudna in any case. They have provoked Fatah almost to the point of an all-out civil war. Unless Haniyeh can convince Abbas to let bygones be bygones and ally with Hamas to fight a war against Israel that even together they are sure to lose, Hamas will have to fight both Fatah and Israel at the same time. Also, as Israel proved yesterday, the IDF has developed much better intelligence on their leadership -- and with Hamas renouncing the truce, Israel will have no problem putting it to use.

And as far as convincing Abbas to join with Hamas, they already have an answer. Saeb Erekat, Abbas' close advisor, has told the press that Abbas will move ahead with the two-state referendum as planned tomorrow.

In the end, this is just another example of the Palestinian triangle offense, which I predicted last April would eventually end with an Israeli counter-attack. I've been pointing this out since January 2005, and nothing has changed since.

The Famous Last Words No One Heard

So Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn't die instantly from the bombing of his safe house in Baquba two days ago, as it turns out. He lived long enough to know who killed him:

Major-General Bill Caldwell said that he had learnt early yesterday that al-Zarqawi had survived the initial airstrikes on his two-floor breeze-block hideout.

“We did, in fact, see him alive,” General Caldwell said. “He mumbled something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short.”

US medics tried to save the life of the most-wanted man in Iraq, but it was too late, General Caldwell added. “Zarqawi attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher,” he said. “Everybody resecured him back on to the stretcher but he died almost immediately from the wounds he’d received.

“He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realising it was the US military.”

I couldn't blog about this earlier, but I did hear the press conference that General Caldwell held to discuss Zarqawi's death. I predicted that someone would ask about whether the Americans had finished him off with a coup de grace, and almost as the words left my lips one of the reporters asked if Zarqawi had any bullet wounds. Caldwell seemed nonplussed at this question at first, but eventually stated that as far as he knew, Zarqawi had no wounds that would have been caused by a bullet.

What if he had? What if Zarqawi had still been somewhat conscious when the Iraqis and Americans first discovered him? He had long bragged that he would not be captured and had told associates that he traveled with a suicide belt or vest (one such vest was found in the rubble) in order to kill anyone who tried to arrest him. Under those circumstances -- and given that the commander had ordered the mission to fire on his position instead of knocking on his door -- I would have preferred one dead Zarqawi to three or four dead American or Iraqi soldiers.

I must admit that my one regret on hearing the news early yesterday morning was the assumption that Zarqawi went so quickly as to be ignorant as to who engineered his exit. From Caldwell's description, that appears to have not been the case. With the brutal methods he personally used on his victims, he should count himself lucky to have left this mortal coil with his head still attached to his body.

Mike The Contractor Speaks Out On Zarqawi

A good friend of CQ has spent decades in the Naval Reserve as a SEAL, volunteering regularly for active duty during conflicts. He has served in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf as a SEAL and spent some time as a contractor in Iraq. He was in Iraq when Islamist "insurgents" murdered four contractors and desecrated their corpses -- burning them, hanging them from a bridge, and then tearing them to pieces. Since then, Mike has occasionally shared his thoughts on Iraq and the war on terror with CQ readers. After the death of Zarqawi, Mike sent me this letter and allowed me to once again pass it along to you, after redacting some personal information.

As I am in and out of town on active duty until mid-summer I am really enjoying magical weekends off with my awesome high energy boys. At the same time I, like many veteran friends of the Iraq War conflict wish that I was in Iraq at this moment and especially for the coming days.

I wish this because I know that American and Multi-National Troops there, while still on careful guard, are going through well-deserved emotional highs. But even more important, for right now and just for a few more days, the Iraqi people as a whole are jubilant, they have real hope again, they are smiling and hugging Americans and foreigners from more than 30 Free Countries.

Please do this for me, because you only have a few days to do it and I don’t have time right now. Scour the internet news websites. Copy pictures of Iraqi people smiling, laughing, Iraqi patriots holding their guns in the air, arms around multi-national troops -- clear evidence that we are doing the right thing in this small part of the greater Global War on Terrorism. Show these pictures to your children so that they will not be afraid to stand up for freedom in the dangerous days that still lie ahead of us.

I say you only have a few days to do it because I fear it will only last a few more days. You see some of our own elected officials and the heavily lobbied predominately liberal media will do everything possible to squelch images such as these. And although, most of the Iraqi people are appreciative of our efforts and genuinely believe they should press on until they are truly free of terrorism, much like impressionable children (even college-age children), they are influenced by media.

I was in country when Udai and Qusai Hussein were killed. This was a tentatively jubilant time for all the Iraqis I knew, especially those with direct knowledge of Udai’s horrific atrocities. But on December 13, 2003 when the Ace of Spades was captured, oh my God…I have never experienced or imagined such people in pure and utter jubilation. Did you see it? Did you get a small view of what a people coming out of bondage feel? It didn’t last long did it? Remember those stained fingers and proud faces of people voting in a free election (in higher percentages than our own free nation) for the first time in their nation’s history? Where are those pictures now?

When I first entered Iraq, less than half of the Deck of Cards (55 of Iraq’s Most Wanted) was accounted for. When I left more than a year later there were only 9 left. I participated in finding, fixing and finishing barely “medium value targets” - MVPs. The HVT that was recently finished is beyond huge, but a lot of ground will be lost if we as a people of the greatest free nation on earth cannot come together and support this War in meaningful ways.

For the moment we are doing our part in fighting terrorists and freeing people away from the shores of our own country. Now I am humbly asking you to do your part.

In the coming elections I very respectfully request that you vote for the candidates who take the strongest stands on prosecuting the Global War on Terrorism and protecting our own borders.

Your friend, family and servant,

Mike

Two Editorials On Western Delusion

Almost five years into the war on terror, we still have yet to see Western governments take domestic threats seriously, and two editorials make excellent points in that regard today in response to the revelation of the Toronto terror cell this week. The Examiner talks about the "broad strata of delusion" in how security checks get conducted in the age of Islamist terror:

Here’s something to think about while standing in line at the airport. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police official described the 17 recently arrested members of an alleged terrorist cell as representing “the broad strata of our community.” The more we learn about these individuals, their recent activities and their alleged plans, the more the RCMP’s description looks like evidence of a dangerously common delusion among many Westerners, especially those in positions of authority where the demands of political correctness too often make it impossible to speak honestly about reality.

Canadian demographics clearly identify our northern neighbor’s population roots in Britain, France, Ireland and Germany. Canadians identifying themselves as immigrants from Middle Eastern and other nations with majority Muslim populations make up barely incidental percentages of the total. Canada is also a mostly secular nation, with Christianity being the dominant choice among those who identify with a religious faith. William, Jack (or Jacques) and Mary are typical and familiar names heard on the street.

The accused conspirators come mostly from places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Somalia. All have names common in Riyadh or Damascus like Saad, Abdul, Fahid and Mohammed. All are practicing Muslims. Most have been in Canada for only a few years. All sported traditional Muslim beards and requested Qurans when arrested. All but two are teens or in their early 20s.

The Investors Business Daily editorial, Sanctuaries of Terror, gets more specific about the sources of the Islamist impulse:

Time and time again, the mosque connection shows up in plots against Western targets. Yet authorities remain reluctant to do much about it. Why?

In fact, almost half the suspects in the Toronto terror plot worshiped at the same mosque. But Toronto police tried to dismiss any religious motivation. ...

No fewer than seven of the suspects prayed daily at a small Toronto-area mosque called Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education. And the oldest suspect, 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, often led prayers there.

Many are college-educated professionals, not career criminals. Religious, law-abiding. Under other circumstances, you might call them "church-going folk." Only, mosques aren't churches as we know them. Yes, most are used as places of worship by devout Muslims who wish none of us harm. But mosques are also used as fundraising centers for jihad, recruiting stations for jihadists, military planning headquarters and even weapons depots.

We continue to see an almost deliberate aversion from the truth about the nature of the terrorists every time we find disrupt their plans or arrest the plotters. The Canadians aren't alone in this; we see it in the US as well. IBD points out that mosques figured heavily into the efforts of the 9/11 terrorists, including one near the Pentagon, an ultimate target for one of their teams. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing also involved an imam, Omar Abdel Rahman (the "blind Sheikh"), currently serving a life sentence here in Minnesota for his part in the attack. In London, a raid on the Finsbury mosque associated with the July 7 bombings turned up stolen and forged passports and chemical warfare suits.

Another fact to keep in mind: eighty percent of mosques in the US, according to IBD, get their financing from the Wahhabist Saudis -- and we have over 1,200 of them.

We cannot win this war while we ignore the lines of communication from the enemy. We certainly cannot win any war if we remain afraid to name our enemy. Western governments want to pretend that our enemy is a tactic rather than a person, and so play a little dance when the tactic continually gets used by one particular strain of religious fanatics -- Islamists. This dance insults our intelligence, and it insults the intelligence of everyone else, our enemies included.

Our governments need to stop the charade of "broad stratas" and shaking down old Medal of Honor winners at airports in order to extend the delusion. The pattern of terrorist attacks show them to have almost exclusively committed by males, and young, radical Islamic males. Let's get serious about our security and the war and acknoweldge that Islamists declared war on us years ago, and that we will make sure our security protocols are geared to fight that war.

You Get The Government You Deserve, Part 37B

The London Times reports this rather depressing news:

KREMLIN hardliners pushing for President Putin to serve a third term have been given a significant boost by an opinion poll indicating that 59 per cent of the population would support such a move.

Mr Putin, who took power in 2000, has promised to step down before the next presidential election, in 2008, because the Russian Constitution does not allow anyone to serve more than two consecutive four-year terms.

However, none of the potential successors identified so far has the popular appeal of Mr Putin, whose sobriety and steely manner have consistently won him approval ratings of higher than 70 per cent. And the Kremlin controls more than the two-thirds majority in the Duma needed to amend the Constitution to allow Mr Putin, 53, to stand for a third term. The poll by the respected Levada Centre suggested that 59 per cent would support that move, compared with 44 per cent last September.

The Russians are in luck; only 32% of them believe Putin won't attempt to run in defiance of their Constitution. Just about 0% of the rest of the world believes that Putin will stay home, too.

Addendum: "Sobriety and steely manner"? That must be Russian for "dour and autocratic".

Pork On A Diet

The conference committee on the emergency appropriations bill has reached agreement on the measure which had an original spending gap of $16 billion. The resulting bill will reach the White House at $94.5 billion, $2.5 billion more than the House-approved plan but much lighter than the heavily-porked version the Senate tried mightily to get:

House and Senate negotiators reached agreement last night on a $94.5 billion package to pay for Iraq war and hurricane recovery costs, after shaving numerous extraneous provisions that the Senate had wanted to stuff into the bill.

The bill, which is expected to reach President Bush's desk next week, would designate $65.8 billion to the Pentagon to cover troop pay, provide recruiting incentives, buy new body armor and fund continued operations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other items. Diplomacy projects in the region would receive $3.9 billion in new funding.

The bill would also provide $19.8 billion in hurricane relief, exactly what President Bush had requested, but nearly $9 billion less than the Senate had sought. The package squeezed in a few other priority items, including $500 million in agricultural aid -- cut from nearly $4 billion in the Senate version -- along with the $1.2 billion in border security funding and $2.3 billion in avian flu prevention that Bush had additionally requested.

The Washington Post goes on to report what didn't get included in the final version. The first item to make an overdue exit, Trent Lott's Moveable Railroad, got left out and saved taxpayers $700 million. The committee didn't appear very sympathetic to funding a new railroad right next to the existing line the government just spent $250 million repairing. Also gone from Mississippi porkfests was the obnoxious Northrup bailout, contributing $200 million in savings. In the end, the committee trimmed $13.5 billion from the Senate's bloated budget-buster, or roughly $45 for every man, woman, and child this year.

Take the family out for a nice meal, and leave a tip. Have the pork roast; I'm sure it will be delicious.

This shows that we can have an effect on earmarks and the politicians addicted to them, as long as we remain vigilant. Organization and tenacity will leave a mark on those who defy voters for long enough. Lott has become the poster child for arrogance on Capitol Hill during this debate, not because he is a bad man -- he isn't at all -- but because he treated us as though taxation and appropriations were none of our business. That kind of politics went out when the first website went up, and more and more our representatives have begun to understand this. The only way to get through to them enough to start seeing real reforms in the earmark processes, and then entitlements, is to keep our efforts going.

We made a difference this time, a difference of $13.5 billion. A few more of these, and we'll be talking about real money.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Wow -- I got a 'heh' and an 'indeed' for one post. I'm honored!

Soldier's Mom Starts Media Watch Blog

One of my correspondents has started a blog to keep an eye on media reports regarding our men and women in the armed forces. Sharon's new blog, Spirit Builders, began five days ago and is intended to counteract the overly negative press coverage on all military affairs in the shadow of Haditha and its aftermath. Be sure to drop by and check on her observations regularly!

Dionne: Realism Is Not The Enemy Of Idealism

E.J. Dionne takes a hard look at the failure of Proposition 82 and gives liberals a truth they need to hear -- that tax and spend policies will not succeed any longer, even in a state as liberal as California. He advises liberals to start considering reality when it comes to proposing large and expensive government programs, and to make sure that they have a convincing argument before spending a lot of money trying to convince people to buy:

While the political world was obsessed with the Republican victory in a special election for a California congressional seat, the truly sobering news for liberals was in the statewide voting. Proposition 82, the ballot measure that would have guaranteed access to preschool for all of California's 4-year-olds, went down to resounding defeat, 61 to 39 percent.

Not only that, voters also rejected a $600 million bond measure for the state's libraries. A vote against libraries ? Yes, the bonds went down 53 to 47 percent.

And bear in mind that these spending measures appeared on a primary ballot at a time when Democrats were holding a fierce contest for their gubernatorial nomination, while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced only token Republican opposition. There were roughly 500,000 more Democratic than Republican primary votes -- meaning that a significant number of Democrats voted against both propositions.

Progressives can find plenty of alibis. Instead they need to deal with the sources of voter skepticism about public spending.

E.J. makes a number of very good points about electoral strategies, especially about making sure that the celebrity endorser of such programs doesn't use state money to boost his election campaign for his desired referendum. (That's sort of along the lines of "Don't get involved in a land war in China" as far as received wisdom.) Be sure to read his refreshing and intelligent review of the loss.

However, I would also add that the liberals will find voter skepticism on the increase, especially in this age of New Media. Voters have become more educated about appropriations and bonding measures, and are much less likely to take a news story or a politician's promise at face value. Before, only a handful of journalists would dig into spending initiatives and pork-barrel projects, and usually those were assigned to these tasks by editors delivering some form of justice for real or imagined transgressions on the poor reporter temporarily assigned to oblivion. No longer; now we have hundreds of citizen journalists doing their own research and scouring the media for information on spending, and suddenly those beat reporters have gotten a lot more attention.

In this environment, and especially when both parties appear incapable in their existing configurations of controlling spending on federal or state levels, no new spending proposal with any significance will get much sympathy. Politicians will get pressure to fund new initiatives, no matter how worthy, by defunding unworthy programs already in existence. When taxation accounts for almost 20% of GDP, voters understand that government has plenty of our money already. That isn't likely to change simply because a celebrity tells us we should create another huge government program, even one as politically incompetent as Rob Reiner.

Politicians at every level should be on notice that we are watching them very carefully, and that will only increase as more tools become available for accountability. E.J. has it right when he says that liberals will have to work hard to convince people to spend money; even more, they will have to work hard to convince us not to stop spending it.

Canadian Muslims Ask For Help With Extremists

In an unusual plea for assistance from a group known for its fear of outsiders, Canadian Muslims reached out to mainstream Canada to help manage an impulse among younger Muslims towards fundamentalism and radical Islam, the Toronto Star reported last night. Part blameshift and part honest introspection, the request for a conference on better integration at least acknowledges that the problem exists:

Muslim leaders pleaded for help Thursday in their struggle against extremists in their midst, saying they can't fight a small minority of radicals alone.

"We're not here to say we don't have an issue," said social worker Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association.

"Of course we have an issue," she told a news conference on Parliament Hill. "But we can't deal with it ourselves. We're part of the Canadian society and so we demand that the Canadian society come forward, help us root out this."

Her group joined the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association and several other agencies pushing for a related summit by the end of June.

They hope the meeting would bring together Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Toronto Mayor David Miller and a host of community and youth groups.

The Ontario government and Miller's office were quick to say they would take part. There was no immediate response from Harper's office, but Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has asked the Muslim groups for more details.

The blameshifting tradition for Muslims associated with these groups did not disappear. Siddiqui blames public scrutiny of Muslims after years of Islamist terror attacks around the world for radicalizing Western Muslims. Naturally, that extends to Western media, which she accuses of possessing an anti-Islam tilt. The pressure causes resentment, and Siddiqui says that Muslims lack venues for venting their frustration, leading to radicalization.

That seems a rather convenient excuse, of course. It falls into the same category of the childish "you made me be bad" excuse that most people realize is a rationalization by the time they're in their teens. Siddiqui's associate at Canada CAIR continues along this same line, demanding better public education on Islam so that Canadians will not be so judgmental of Muslims. The lesson that Karl Nickner advocates -- "Terrorism, as you know, is antithetical to Muslim belief and is a perversion of its teachings" -- has been beaten into almost every media story on Muslims since 9/11 and almost every pronouncement on radical Islam by the US government. He also wants sensitivity training for Canada's CSIS and law enforcement agencies, although they appear to have done rather well lately in their real job of providing security for Canada, rather than Nickner's priority of building self-esteem for Muslims.

We're tired of the years that we have heard this rhetoric. We'd like to start seeing some proof of this, perhaps by mosques expelling radical members and imams demanding that their congregations cooperate with law enforcement to identify and isolate the radical elements that plague them as well as us.

Siddiqui comes much closer to the mark when she talks about possible methods of correcting the descent of their youth into radicalism. She wants to publish a handbook for Muslim parents exhorting them to carefully watch with whom their children associate at the mosques and in the streets. That sounds like something Muslims could do without holding a summit. It's never a bad idea to meet with people who want positive solutions to real problems, but perhaps it might be more valuable for Siddiqui to ask her own community to take responsibility for their children first before shifting blame for them onto all other Canadians. When they start there, summits and conferences have a much better chance for success.

An Answer From Iran

Iran answered the West regarding the offer of a set of incentives, including more modern nuclear-power generation, for a cessation of uranium enrichment by the Iranian government. The IAEA reported late yesterday that Iran restarted its uranium enrichment on the day it received the offer despite public knowledge of the preconditions for talks:

Iran restarted important nuclear activities on the same day this week that six world powers offered it incentives aimed at encouraging the complete suspension of the nuclear work, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Iran restarted the pouring of a raw form of uranium into a set of 164 centrifuge machines to produce enriched uranium, said the I.A.E.A., the nuclear monitoring agency based in Vienna.

That same day, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, was in Tehran, where he presented Iranian leaders with an international package of incentives to help resolve the crisis caused by the country's nuclear program.

There was no explanation for Iran's decision. But it seemed to underscore its often stated determination not to be bullied into accepting any deal requiring it to end activities related to uranium enrichment.

When Iran stopped pouring uranium into their centrifuge cascade last month without explanation, observers thought that Iran either had a technical problem with their enrichment system or that it wanted to gauge the reaction from Europe and the US. Whatever the motivation, the suspension has ended, and the Iranians continue to develop nuclear fuel in defiance of the UN order to obey the IAEA and stop. That does not bode well for any future agreements of the nature offered by the US and EU.

Nor was that the only revelation from the IAEA report yesterday. Iran still has not resolved open questions about the nature of their enrichment system and its origins, an important point for the IAEA as it tries to shut the door on proliferation. It also confirmed the presence of highly-enriched uranium on Iranian equipment, as noted in the past few weeks, but again could not determine if that material came with imported equipment or if the Iranians produced it. Teheran did not answer that question either.

Under those circumstances, EU Foreign Minister Javier Solana unwittingly sounded more like Neville Chamberlain as he commented on the delivery of the incentive package prior to seeing the IAEA report:

Mr. Solana, apparently unaware of the critical I.A.E.A. report, was upbeat in remarks to reporters in Paris on Thursday. "I am more optimistic than pessimistic," he said after emerging from a meeting about the Iran crisis with President Jacques Chirac of France. Calling the incentives package "a pretty, beautiful package," he said it provided a way for the Iranians to extricate themselves from the crisis over their nuclear program.

"What is needed is to work with them with respect," Mr. Solana said, adding that the countries that made the offer had "the intention to work with them in the most constructive fashion possible."

It's hard to respect someone who lies and cheats on a constant basis, and in fact respect seems to be coming to Iran far ahead of schedule. If this incentive package works at all, it will be due to a healthy amount of disrespect as we insist on invasive verification procedures to ensure Iran doesn't continue cheating. Ronald Reagan once said, "Trust but verify," but he dealt with a rational enemy with a strong will to continue living. The messianic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proven himself at least a non-rational leader, and his fiery rhetoric and fervent public belief in the apocalyptic return of the Twelfth Imam makes the "trust" part of Reagan's Maxim a poor choice under any circumstances.

Ahmadinejad hasn't quite tipped his hand publicly, but this new enrichment effort appears designed to force the West into further concessions. The West needs to make clear that the cessation of uranium enrichment is a firm prerequisite for any discussions, and that once that happens all issues are on the table. If Iran continues to enrich uranium, the West needs to consider that a rejection and a defiance of the UN Security Council resolution. Bush can go no further that he already has in bending diplomatically for a negotiated solution to the crisis.

First Mate Update: Better News

The First Mate is still recovering in the hospital, but we got some good news today. The MRI taken of her brain reveals no damage, so we know she did not have a stroke or a seizure. Her phosphorus and potassium levels were very low, unusual for a dialysis patient; she has had IV infusions for both and they have improved her stamina and color tremendously. Her anemia still causes problems with oxygenation, but another transfusion has improved that too, although she remains on oxygen now.

She may improve enough to come straight home in the next day or two, although we're hearing conflicting stories on that. No one thinks she needs an intermediate-care facility with the improvement she's shown so far, which relieves both of us. In the meantime, she's relaxing (ha!) in the hospital, and this time she promises that she will not leave until the doctors agree.

We'll see ...

The Swiss Get In On The Act

Switzerland just got its first big public win in the war on terror, overshadowed on the day American forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda in Iraq targets and Israel took out #2 on their own hit parade. The Guardian (UK) reports that the Swiss foiled an airliner attack on El Al last December, and announced arrests in the case today:

A terrorist cell plotted to shoot down an Israeli airliner over Switzerland but was foiled by intelligence services, Swiss prosecutors said yesterday.

Seven people of north African origin are under arrest in connection with the alleged plot, said a statement from the federal prosecutor's office. Officials declined to give further details.

Israeli media reported last month that terrorists had planned a rocket attack on a plane operated by the Israeli airline El Al last December during takeoff from Geneva. A series of arrests began last month around Zurich and Basle, and the investigation continues in Switzerland and other countries.

"Those who were arrested in Switzerland maintained contact with similar cells in France and Spain, which were likewise smashed," the statement said. One of the members of the Swiss cell was said to have been in contact with Mohamed Achraf, an alias for Abderrahmane Tahiri, who has been indicted in Spain for an alleged 2004 plot to carry out a lorry bombing against Madrid's national court. Tahiri was extradited from Switzerland in April 2005.

The Israeli authorities said last month that a plot had been uncovered by the Swiss and French intelligence agencies. An undercover agent is said to have heard three migrants of Arabic origin boast of attempts to smuggle weapons from Russia with the goal of shooting down an airliner.

It appears that the West has taken the fight against the Islamofascists up a notch or two this week, and the terrorists have been caught flat-footed. Big arrests have been made on three continents and their most successful enterprise, the foreign insurgency in Iraq, just got decapitated, a fitting end for the terror leader whose idea of entertainment was making decapitation videos. Too many of these cells have been shut down for all of this to be a coincidence; it appears that the nations fighting terror have coordinated well beyond our prior understanding -- fortunately for us.

June 8th may be remembered as a tipping point not for Iraq,which has progressed handsomely, but for the entire war on Islamofascist terror. Never before have the terrorists experienced such a day of loss and retreat, but with the intelligence wins that these captures and kills will undoubtedly bring, they will probably start experiencing them more often from now on.

Wishing Them All The Best

It turns out that Western politicians do not have a monopoly on spin. The leftovers at al-Qaeda in Iraq put a message out on their website today congratulating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on his great victory today in allowing two bombs to fall on his head. No, I'm not kidding:

As the U.S. military announced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death, al-Zarqawi’s lieutenants did the same, with a statement on his own Web site, with a highly positive spin.

“We are bringing the good news of the martyrdom of our Sheikh,” reads the site. “What hit us is a blessing to our nation. ... It will encourage us to continue waging Jihad.”

Jihadi bulletin boards and chat rooms were quickly overwhelmed. Al-Zarqawi’s photo was posted, adorned to glorify his death. One posting said: “Zarqawi’s blood will serve as fuel to burn the invaders and the apostates.”

If that's how they feel about it .... Captain's Quarters would like to ask for Allah's blessings to flow abundantly to each and every one of their lunatic associates, and that the next few weeks bring a flood of similar good news.

UPDATE: By the way, Dilbert's pretty darned happy about this as well. (via Instapundit)

More Corruption?

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier today that the stepdaughter of a powerful Congressional committe chairman benefitted from a relationship with a company that had business before her stepfather's panel. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), chair of the ultrapowerful House Appropriations Committee, oversaw the granting of over $11 million in earmarks to Trident Systems, whose founder and president hired his stepdaughter to run his political action committee:

A political fundraising committee headed by a defense contractor has paid thousands of dollars in fees to the stepdaughter of House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) at a time when the contractor has been lobbying Congress for funding.

Lewis' stepdaughter, Julia Willis-Leon, has been paid more than $42,000 by the Small Biz Tech Political Action Committee, according to campaign finance records. The PAC is led by Nicholas Karangelen, founder and president of Trident Systems Inc.

Records show the company received at least $11.7 million in earmarked funds in recent defense spending bills over which Lewis' committee has jurisdiction.

The Small Biz Tech PAC was created early last year "to establish a strong and clear voice for small technology businesses" dealing with Congress, according to its website, which features a photo of Lewis at one of its events.

PACs customarily collect money from donors and distribute it to political figures in the form of campaign contributions. But in the case of Small Biz Tech, almost one-third of the $115,350 it has reported raising was given to Lewis' stepdaughter, according to figures in its financial disclosure reports.

To quote Mr. Mackey from South Park: Uh, this is bad, mm-kay?

The PAC paid Willis-Leon $42K during its year of operation, while they only distributed $15,600 to candidates and other political entities. The PAC and Willis-Leon say that she earned the money as a fundraiser, but a commission rate of almost 30% sounds more than a little unbelievable, even in the murky world of politics. This looks like an obvious case of quid pro quo, a payoff made to family members in a transparent attempt to rationalize the graft.

Even murkier, however, are connections that lead through the same contracting firm that figured prominently in the Randy Cunningham case, ACDS Inc. Its CEO Brent Wilkes got charged as a co-conspirator in the Cunningham case, and his firm had retained Copeland Lowery as its lobbying firm. One Copeland Lowery partner is Letitia White, who worked for Rep. Lewis as an aide prior to becoming a partner in the lobbying firm.

Letitia White is the significant other to Karangelen. They own a townhouse in DC that also serves as the business address of Small Biz Tech PAC, the firm that paid Willis-Leon more than a quarter of all the funds ever raised. Naturally, Copeland Lowery represents Trident Systems as well, helping them to score the $11 million from a committee headed up by the stepdaughter of their "employee". They received four contracts to get the funds, all of them from earmarks rather than normal appropriations.

Federal investigators have an open investigation into Lewis' dealings with Trident and Small Biz Tech PAC. If they find enough evidence, they should prosecute him to the full extent of the law. Even if they cannot find any laws being broken, this tawdry arrangement shows just how much power earmarks have to corrupt our system of government. We need to push Congress on every instance of abuse to reform the earmarking system to make it completely transparent, creating the Trent Lott Pork Database for rapid discovery of our worst sausage-makers and the ability to glean the possible influences between pork and political payoffs. Even better, Congress should eliminate the earmark process altogether and take away the incentive for lobbyists and contractors to buy our politicians.

Bomb On Head Equals Knife In Back

So much for loyalty among terrorists. CNN now reports that the Coalition mission that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came as a result of betrayal within the ranks of his own organization. The Pentagon also confirmed that US and Iraqi forces raided a total of 17 sites based on the intelligence gathered for weeks before today:

Betrayal inside his al Qaeda in Iraq terror group led to success in a painstaking U.S.-led operation to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the U.S. military said on Thursday.

The most wanted man in Iraq died in a U.S. airstrike Wednesday evening when two 500-pound bombs slammed into a safe house near Baquba, according to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell.

"Last night was the first time that we have had definitive, unquestionable information as to exactly where [al-Zarqawi] was located, knowing that we could strike that target without causing collateral damage to other Iraqi civilians and personnel in the area," Caldwell said.

In addition, Iraqi security and coalition forces conducted 17 simultaneous raids in and around Baghdad at the time of the attack, Caldwell said.

"A tremendous amount of information and intelligence was collected" from the raids, he said, "and is presently being exploited and utilized for further use. I mean, it was a treasure trove; no question."

That explains one of the questions asked by those on the Left, skeptical as to why the Coalition has not acted on previous intelligence to kill Zarqawi. Given his pledge to blow himself up if captured and his propensity to hide among civilians, the Coalition apparently didn't want to risk unnecessary collateral damage when operating on uncertain intelligence. That also explains why they killed rather than capture him. He likely would not have provided much information to interrogators under any circumstances, and the US felt that capturing Zarqawi would not be worth losing men to a suicide blast.

If the US felt it would have achieved more cachet by capturing Zarqawi alive, the revelation that Zarqawi went to his demise because his own terrorists betrayed him will stagger al-Qaeda and its wannabes around the world. After spending the last several years arguing that they represent the ummah's greatest defense against the infidel, it seems that some of their number have little compunction about working with Westerners to get rid of a troublesome Muslim in their midst. Especially embarrassing will be the fact that someone in the network ratted out Sheik Abdel Rahman, supposedly a holy man acting as Zarqawi's spiritual advisor.

For that reason, the martyrdom of Zarqawi will hardly resonate among the young radicals that al-Qaeda needs for recruitment. They will rightly wonder how supposedly faithful Muslims could turn on each other and still maintain adherence to jihad and Islam. That may provide the first glimmer for some that Islamofascism has much more to do with tyranny than religion, at least in practice.

As for the coordinated raids, that shows how long it takes to do an intel-Special Ops mission right. Hitting Zarqawi alone would have dispersed other targets immediately, allowing other important targets to escape for more mischief and terror. While Zarqawi's strength came from his decentralized ability to cause casualties randomly, our strength comes from our ability and resources to plan and execute complex and overpowering missions to defeat asymmetrical threats. Today, we see that our strengths will inevitably provide victory over those of the terrorists. They are outclassed, and the only way they can win is if we give up.

Addendum: Hot Air notes the similarity to the three Godfather films, an analogy that occurred to me earlier as well. What occurs to Rep. Pete Stark, D-CA, is that killing our enemies only has value in a political sense:

Some Democrats, breaking ranks from their leadership, today said the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq was a stunt to divert attention from an unpopular and hopeless war.

“This is just to cover Bush’s [rear] so he doesn’t have to answer” for Iraqi civilians being killed by the U.S. military and his own sagging poll numbers, said Rep. Pete Stark, California Democrat. “Iraq is still a mess — get out.”

This gives Americans a clear idea of how Democrats view war strategy, and why they can't be trusted with it.

Zarqawi Dead In Coalition Air Strike

(Note to CQ readers: This post will be time-stamped to ride on top through most of the day, in order to post updates. Scroll down for newer posts.)

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the driving force behind the foreign insurgency in Iraq, died in an air strike at a safe house while holding a meeting with his lieutenants. The announcement from Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki came early this morning, and subsequent reports detail the identification through scars and fingerprints:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings, has been killed in an air strike, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding his identity was confirmed by fingerprints and a first-hand look at his face. It was a major victory in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the broader war on terror.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said al-Zarqawi was killed along with seven aides Wednesday evening in a in a remote area 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, in the volatile province of Diyala, just east of the provincial capital of Baqouba, al-Maliki said.

Loud applause broke out as al-Maliki, flanked by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and U.S. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters at a news conference that "al-Zarqawi was terminated."

Six days ago, Zarqawi issued an audio tape specifically insulting Shi'ites and exhorting the Sunni' in Iraq to kill as many of their sectarian counterparts as possible. Perhaps not coincidentally, intelligence came to Iraqi officials about Zarqawi's location. Iraqi officials, as one might imagine, are overjoyed by this turn of events.

Nor are the only people rejoicing at Zarqawi's elimination, and it seems that Zarqawi did more than just flub gun handling in his last videotape. Jordan also provided critical information about Zarqawi's movements by analyzing the outdoor shots in his reckless show of bravado and determined exactly where the video had been shot. The Jordanians sent that information to the US and Iraq, where it formed part of the critical information that led to the air strike.

The elimination of Zarqawi and his henchmen will kneecap the foreign insurgency. Although the network will still exist, the loss of leadership and political connections will guarantee its rapid decline. What little command and control existed will disappear, and the funding channels that Zarqawi controlled with go with them. Cells will operate without any coordination at all, a problem already with the successes the Coalition and Iraq have achieved against the network. They will act all at once in response to this attack, but then should run out of gas quickly.

The Iraqis, in their elation, quickly filled the two contentious security posts left open when Maliki formed the government last month:

Minutes after the Zarqawi's death was announced the long-debated interior, defense and national security posts were filled in a giddy session of parliament. Abdul Qadir Muhammed Jassim, a Sunni Arab and former Iraqi army commander, was named defense minister, Jawad al-Bolani, a Shiite, was put in charge of the interior ministry, and Sherwan Alwaeli, a Kurd, was named the country's top official for national security.

"I call on Iraq's various communities to take responsibility for bringing sectarian violence to an end, and for all Iraqis to unite behind Prime Minister Maliki," Khalilzad said.

The American ambassador called in Iraqis of all stripes to unite around the elected government and embrace the political process. With the foreign insurgents on their way out, that has become much more possible. In the end, Zarqawi may have helped unite a country he tried so desperately to divide and destroy, a bitter and ironic end for one of the most despicable terrorists who ever existed.

Michelle Malkin has video of the press conferences and initial announcements.

Addendum: Looks like this author has even more reason to be glum for 2006, doesn't it?

UPDATE I: Mark in Mexico has been blogging on this all night. Hot Air will undoubtedly do roundups later, but probably not on this post.

UPDATE II: Tony Blair notes that this was a blow against al-Qaeda around the world, not just in Iraq:

"Today's announcement was very good news because a blow against al-Qaida in Iraq was a blow against al-Qaida everywhere," Blair told Cabinet members. The prime minister also praised U.S. and coalition troops for their work in Iraq and its new democratically elected government.

In the years after the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein, Zarqawi transformed himself into the public leader of al-Qaeda mostly be default, as the US-led war on terror marginalized Osama bin Laden, killed most of his leadership, and reduced him to merely an inspirational force. Zarqawi's death along with his lieutenants in Iraq not only eliminate AQ's only functioning operational leadership, it also shows that the top men are not invulnerable. Zarqawi's near-miss escapes added to his cachet, but his bravado/desperation finally undid him.

UPDATE III: CENTCOM has published this press release:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Gen. George W. Casey Jr., Multi-National Force-Iraq Commanding General, announced the death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi in the following statement during a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad June 8: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition Forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house.

“Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi and some of his associates who were conducting a meeting approximately eight kilometers north of Baqubah when the air strike was launched.

“Iraqi police were first on the scene after the air strike, and elements of Multi-National Division North, arrived shortly thereafter. Coalition Forces were able to identify al-Zarqawi by fingerprint verification, facial recognition and known scars.

"Al-Zarqawi and al-Qaida in Iraq have conducted terrorist activities against the Iraqi people for years in attempts to undermine the Iraqi national government and Coalition efforts to rebuild and stabilize Iraq. He is known to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi’s death is a significant blow to al-Qaida and another step toward defeating terrorism in Iraq.

“Although the designated leader of al-Qaida in Iraq is now dead, the terrorist organization still poses a threat as its members will continue to try to terrorize the Iraqi people and destabilize their government as it moves toward stability and prosperity. Iraqi forces, supported by the Coalition, will continue to hunt terrorists that threaten the Iraqi people until terrorism is eradicated in Iraq.”

UPDATE IV: Best blogpost headline so far: "The Meeting Ended Early". Omar at Iraq the Model notes that the Zarqawi network lost its high-level intelligence gatherers:

Al-Maliki said that among the 7 killed with Zarqawi were two women who were responsible for collecting intelligence for the al-Qaeda HQ cell.

He also describes the area in which Zarqawi was killed, and notes his close juxtaposition to a recent atrocity:

Hibhib is a small town several kilometers to the northwest of Baquba and most of its people are from the Azzawi tribes. This small town was traditionally nicknamed Um al-Arak as it was famous for producing some of the finest Arak in Iraq, an industry that flourished in the area for the abundance of date palms. It's even said that Hibhib's Arak can make the fox get drunk! Of course that was before hte Salafi Zarqawi tide reached this once peaceful town.

It was quite visible lately that Hibhib became a place for intense terror activity, especially after the phenomenon of severed heads appeared. Severed heads of civilian Iraqis were found twice in fruit boxes in and around Hibhib; a terrible crime that shocked Iraqis. Also a few days ago 19 passengers, mostly students were murdered in cold blood just north of Hibhib which indicated that a seriously bloody terror cell was in this area.

That was the incident where students had been forced off a school bus, Sunni students separated from Shi'ites, and then executed by terrorists. Sounds like Zarqawi made himself at home in Hibhib.

UPDATE V: George Bush says that the Coalition "delievered justice" to Zarqawi:

Al-Zarqawi's death gives Iraq a chance to "turn the tide" in the fight against the nation's insurgency, President Bush said at the White House.

"The ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders," Bush said. "Zarqawi's death is a severe blow to al Qaeda."

"Special Operations forces, acting on tips and intelligence from Iraqis, confirmed Zarqawi's location and delivered justice to the most wanted terrorist in Iraq," Bush said.

The Anchoress is working on an excellent roundup as well.

UPDATE VI: Mary Katherine Ham at Hugh Hewitt has reaction from Michael Berg, whose son Nicholas had his head sawed off on camera by Zarqawi:

"I'm sorry when any human being dies...and I feel bad for that. His death will reignite yet another wave of revenge. It's an endless cycle as long as people use violence to fight violence...When Nick was killed I felt that I had nothing left to lose...I was not a risk-taking person, but I've done things that have endangered me. I have been shot at...Every time we kill an Iraqi...we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. When are we ever gonna learn that that doesn't work?

...More and more of these everyday Iraqi people...lose it and join what people call the insurgency and what I call a people You can't really believe that that's a democracy there when the people running the elections are holding guns...

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein's a good man, but he's no worse than George Bush. Under Saddam Hussein, no al-Qaeda in Iraq; under George Bush, al-Qaeda. Under Saddam Hussein, relative stability; under George Bush, instability. Under Saddam Hussein, 30,000 deaths a year; under George Bush, about 50,000 deaths. I don't understand. Why is this better to have George Bush be the King of Iraq rather than Saddam Hussein?"

It's almost beyond belief, but Michael Berg pioneered the Cindy Sheehan strategy. And apparently he can't add. If Saddam was responsible for 30,000 deaths a year (probably higher) and if George Bush was responsible for 50,000 (usually 30,000 is the figure used, and a great deal of that includes enemy casualties), wouldn't 50K be better than the 90K Saddam would have killed off since his takedown in April 2003? And is a regime that kills 30,000 of its citizens arbitrarily each year really stable in the first place?

UPDATE VII: I forgot to link to Let Freedom Ring's ongoing coverage. And Everything I Know Is Wrong weighs in as well.

UPDATE VIII: ABC News reports that Richard Clarke has busied himself by throwing as much cold water on the news as possible:

This morning President Bush hailed the death of al-Zarqawi as a "severe blow to al Qaeda" and "significant victory in the war on terror."

Clarke said the modest size of the terrorist leader's organization and his minimal involvement in the daily bomb attacks on coalition forces made that claim unlikely.

Though al-Zarqawi was a symbol of terrorism, he commanded only a few hundred people out of tens of thousands involved in the insurgency ...

The Jordanian-born terror leader was behind many high profile attacks and beheadings, Clarke said, but was not involved in most of the roadside bombings that have made Iraq so dangerous for coalition troops.

Zarqawi wasn't important, huh? Tell that to the Iraqis dancing in the street, Richard. Tell that to the Iraqi security forces he targeted for assassination. Tell that to the Shi'ite students he butchered in HIbhib. Does anyone take this man seriously any more?

UPDATE IX: Dr. Sanity keeps an eye on the port side of the blogosphere. They seem rather dismayed at the victory, surprisingly.

While we're focusing on this, don't miss my post from last night on the Joseph Shahda translation placing a chemical weapons storage facility near Fallujah. And big thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link!

How To Overcome Conservative Battle Fatigue

My debut at the Examiner as a founding member of the Blog Board of Contributors appears today, discussing the manner in which conservatives can defeat political fatigue and exert more influence over policy. Other bloggers and I have discussed this topic extensively, and in my column I attempted to bring all of the elements together:

Many conservative voices have asked recently whether the Republican Party has any capability of representing conservative values.

After all, Republicans have controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress for the past five years, yet we have seen discretionary spending go through the roof, an explosion of earmarks, a curious lack of the veto, and a belated and misguided effort at border control that hearkens back to the failed Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty bill of 1986.

Under these circumstances, conservatives may wonder with some justification whether a continued association with the GOP unfairly tarnishes true conservative values.

I discuss the drawbacks of schism and third-party adventures and the lasting damage an election boycott will bring specifically to conservatives. After the debacles of Denny Hastert's amazingly foolish defense of a non-existent sanctuary privilege of Congress and the pork festival in the Senate, this argument may fall on deaf ears -- but it's still an argument worth making. Now more than ever, we need to disconnect conservatism from the fiscal irresponsibility and the lack of accountability that GOP leaders have provided, but we need to do so in a way that allows conservative leadership to replace it instead of liberal democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Engagement is the key principle, as well as straightforward criticism of policy and implementation that shows our independence from non-conservative leadership. The only way conservatives can rise to power is to work within coalitions; we do not constitute a majority, but within the Republican Party we can achieve that objective while acting responsibly. Stamping off in a huff ensures our ideological purity but also guarantees that we will have no influence on policy for at least a generation.

Churchill went into the wilderness, some point out, but no one let him back into power until Britain was besieged by Nazi Germany. And even then, he led a unity (coalition) government.

Read the whole article at the Examiner, and let's discuss it here.

Iranian Enrichment Suspension Not Necessarily Permanent?

The Guardian reports that Western negotiators have told Iran that the uranium enrichment suspension prerequisite to discussions over the package offered by the US only applies during negotiations. Any permanent end to enrichment will come as part of the overall negotiations, according to a report in today's Guardian:

In a major western concession, Iran is to be allowed to retain some uranium enrichment activities if it reaches agreement with the US, Russia, Europe, and China on its nuclear programme. Diplomats said yesterday that the terms of a new package of proposed rewards delivered to Tehran on Tuesday by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, state that Iran must freeze uranium enrichment activities before and during the talks.

Once "confidence is restored in the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme", it would be allowed to resume enrichment on a scale to be determined. "Those are rights under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty," said a diplomat.

Mr Solana said in Germany yesterday: "They will have to stop [uranium enrichment] now, we will have to negotiate with no process of enrichment in place ... after the finalisation of the negotiations, we will see what happens."

Uranium enrichment is the nub of the three-year dispute, as the process delivers the know-how and, ultimately, the fissile material for a bomb. Iran said in April that it had successfully enriched uranium at its underground complex at Natanz, developed clandestinely over 18 years until it was disclosed in 2002.

This may be a tough sell for George Bush back home. Uranium enrichment by the Iranians would have to be subject to the highest level of scruitiny to ensure that enrichment did not exceed the 4-5% necessary for reactor fuel. We would have to determine not only the level of trust that we could place in the Iranians for an inspection regime, but also the will of the international community to police the Iranian nuclear cycle for the next several years.

On the first point, we have already determined that the Iranians have lied repeatedly about their program. Their track record tells us that they probably will not cooperate fully with inspectors, nor will they willingly reveal all of their facilities. Iranians have already dug underground laboratories to avoid the prying eyes and the whistling bombs that the West would use to keep the Iranians in line, and any agreement would have to get a clear identification of those facilities first.

The second point seems worse than the first. Until George Bush made his bold and risky offer, the West and the UN couldn't even agree on any consequences for Iranian defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. This reaction is depressingly similar to that of the UNSC regarding the twelve-year Iraqi quagmire that dragged out the cease-fire compliance over seventeen separate demands for Saddam to meet his obligations. He booted the inspectors out of Iraq for four years with only a single air raid over Baghdad as a consequence. While US leadership has changed, it will also change again in 2009, and we cannot ensure that our tough stand on compliance will survive. We can almost bet that the same ennui that affected our partners on the UNSC between 1991-2003 will continue and worsen.

As the Guardian points out, however, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does allow signatories the right to the nuclear cycle, as long as it is for peaceful purposes. We have little standing to deny that to Iran as long as they remain within the NPT and abide by its regulations. Either we have to press for a long-term invasive inspections regime, buy the Iranians off in exchange for forgoing the enrichment, or we have to ensure that Iranian leadership changes to more reasonable and rational people. The best solution would be to pursue all three simultaneously.

ADDENDUM: The Iranians were warned by the French that a failure to accept the proposal would bring swift UN sanctions. Interesting...

British Arrest Two Terror Suspects At Airports

What's better than capturing a terror suspect in an airport? Getting two of them. The London Times and the New York Times both reporton the British double play, as an American got captured at Heathrow and a Brit at Manchester:

An American citizen who once lived in New York was indicted yesterday on charges of conspiring to send money and military gear to associates of Al Qaeda to use against United States forces in Afghanistan, federal prosecutors said.

The defendant, Syed Hashmi, 26, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London on Tuesday night as he was trying to board a flight to Pakistan, according to the United States attorney's office in Manhattan. Prosecutors said he was carrying a large amount of cash. He was jailed pending extradition proceedings.

The conspiracy alleged in the indictment was based in London, law enforcement officials said, but Mr. Hashmi, who had been living in England for two and half years, was charged in the United States because he is an American citizen. He was born in Pakistan and came to the United States as a child, officials said.

One law enforcement official said the arrest of Mr. Hashmi reinforced investigators' belief that New York was a link in a web of worldwide terrorist activity.

Hashmi belonged to a now-defunct London-based group, Al Muhajiroun, which was active in New York according to the NYT and explicitly praised the 9/11 attack. Federal sources say that Hashmi mentored another terrorist who has already pled guilty to charges of providing material support to terrorists, Mohammed Junaid Babar. Hashmi introduced Babar to his radical friends in London and apparently assisted in networking Babar's support with the two groups.

Among the support to which Babar admitted was sending military gear, including night-vision goggles, to al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan. Hashmi's indictment specifies that he performed the same function for the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would open Hashmi up to charges of treason, if the Department of Justice was inclined to pursue that legal strategy, considering Hashmi's American citizenship. We will see if they do, but more likely they will stick with more technical but just as serious terrorism charges in order to keep the trial from becoming a media circus.

The police nabbed Hashmi as he attempted to board a plane to Pakistan carrying a large amount of cash. Any suggestions what that money would have bought?

The London Times has no name for the second suspect, suspected of taking part in the Canadian terror cell that plotted to decapitate Stephen Harper and do an armed takeover of Parliament:

A BRITON said to be a key figure in an alleged plot to bomb public buildings in Canada, including the Parliament, was arrested by counter-terrorist police as he stepped off a plane at Manchester airport.

The 21-year-old man had arrived from Canada, where security services claimed that he had been living alongside some of the 17 terror suspects arrested in Toronto at the weekend in one of the biggest operations in North America. Hours later police in West Yorkshire arrested a 16-year-old youth after documents and mobile phone records seized in Canada revealed a British link to the alleged gang of Muslim militants operating from their homes in the Toronto suburbs. ...

The suspect was born in Pakistan but is believed to have British citizenship and lived at a number of addresses in Dewsbury, the home town of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 suicide bombers. He is understood to have spent much of this year living in Toronto.

“This is an example of the extremist soup we have in this country with lots of overlapping links,” a security source said.

The arrest of the 16-year-old in West Yorkshire resulted in a careful search of the premises, with police shutting down the street. It reminded residents of the aftermath of the July 7 bombings, when police did much the same thing while searching the house of July 7 mastermind Mohammad Sidique Khan, who lived in the same area. The teenager had connections to the man arrested at the airport by British investigators alerted to his presence by Canadian authorities. They identified him as a member of the Toronto cell, but could not catch him before he left the country.

It seems that some serious dot-connecting is taking place between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and that most of those dots concern the US, Canada, and Britain, and not necessarily in that order. Expect more arrests to come from these.

September 2002: Iraq Buried Chemical Weapons Near Fallujah

Joseph Shahda has translated another key text from the archives of captured documents left untranslated by the Pentagon. In this case, Shahda appears to have struck gold: the memo describes not only the disposal of chemical-weapon materials but also where Iraq buried them. The memo dated September 15, 2002, comes from the General Relations group from one of Saddam's military/intelligence organizations, and describes in detail where the chemicals were hidden from UN inspectors (via Power Line):

In the Name of God The Most Compassionate The Most Merciful The Republic of Iraq The Presidency of the Republic Saddam Feedayeens Secretariat The Supervisor of Saddam Feedayeens 2002/9

The Respected Supervisor of Saddam Feedayeens
Subject: Information
Salute and regards Sir

We received information that state the following:

1. A team from the Military Industrialization Commission when Hussein Kamel Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large container said that it contains a Chemical Material in the village (Al Subbayhat) part of the district of Karma in Fallujah in a quarry region that was used by SamSung Korean company and close to the homes of some citizens.

2. The container was buried using a fleet of concrete mixers.

3. Before the departure of the international inspectors in 1998 a United Nations helicopter flew over the region for two hours.

4. A large number of the region residents know about this container from the large number of machines used to hide it then.

5. It was noticed a non ordinary smell in the region.

6. No official visited the burial site through out the years which give the impression that it is not currently known by the Military Industrialization Commission.

7. Positions for the air defense were digged in the region that surrounds the quarry place without them knowing anything about the container. Also next to it are important headquarters like (Saddam factories-The warehouses of the Commerce ministry- Headquarters of Mujaheeden Khlaq).

Please your Excellency review and order what is appropriate Sir… With regards

Signature
General
Moohsen Abdel Karim Mahmood
General Relations

15/9/2002

The Military Industrial Commission, as Global Security explains, performed more duties than simple procurement and liaison with defense contractors. The MIC ran the Iraqi WMD program before the 1991 Gulf War, and continued its existence afterwards more covertly in the same effort. It is no coincidence that the MIC gets mention in two other blockbuster finds by Shahda: the mobile laboratories that got discounted later as $33 million hydrogen production trailers, bought just as the US made public its resolve to conclude the Iraq standoff by any means necessary, and the illegal purchase and testing of nerve-gas detectors, a necessity for those planning on transporting or stockpiling nerve agents. The continued references to the MIC in these documents more than suggest that the Iraqi regime continued to pursue WMD programs, and this memo shows that they also worked hard to hide the evidence.

The placement of this depot also suggests more to the story. The memo locates it near one of the hotbeds of the insurgency, Fallujah, especially for the foreign terrorists working for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Coincidence? Perhaps, although residents of the area apparently knew full well what Saddam and his henchmen did when it brought in all the heavy equipment for the burial. They also smelled a strange odor for some time afterwards, according to the memo.

Even more interestingly, located nearby was the headquarters of the Mujaheddin Khalq. This was another terrorist group given refuge by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. Fighting first (and badly) as a military unit, the Khalq switched to terrorist tactics soon afterwards:

In 1987, the MEK was driven from its headquarters in France and moved its base to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gave the group shelter. From that time, the group continually conducted raids, bombings and mortar attacks in Iran. These attacks were mostly carried out by the group's military wing, the National Liberation Army (NLA) of Iran, which was formed in June 1987. At least four cross-border attacks were mounted by the NLA into Iran in the late 1980s, including one after the cease-fire between Iraq and Iran in July 1988, which ended with a large MEK force being destroyed west of Kermanshah.

These cross-border attacks continued into the 1990s, with some being unreported. One reported series of incidents in mid-1992 started on April 4, 1992, when the MEK launched a raid. The raid was quickly followed by an Iranian reaction, as a crucial parliamentary election was less than a week away. Eight Iranian aircraft bombed an MEK base inside Iraq; conflicting reports disagree over whether one plane was shot down. In retaliation, the MEK conducted attacks on Iranian embassies in 13 different countries, from Ottawa to Bonn. Over the remainder of the 1990s, however, the MEK claimed credit for an increasing number of operations inside Iran.

What differentiates the MEK from virtually all other organizations on the State Department foreign terrorist organization list is that it has its own conventional military force. The MEK in Iraq is estimated to possess approximately a division's worth of heavy equipment (tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery). This equipment is manned by the NLA, which has large numbers of women in its ranks. The authoritative yearly Military Balance, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, assesses the NLA's strength at 6,000-8,000, subdivided into brigades, with perhaps 250 plus tanks and infantry fighting vehicles captured from Iran. The NLA also has artillery and helicopters. Although its headquarters is in Baghdad, the NLA has a number of bases in Iraq split between Abu Ghareb and Al-Andules Square. In October 2001, the leadership of the MEK was assumed by Moshgan Parsaii, a 36-year-old U.S.-educated woman, for a two-year period.

The Khalq have conventional heavy weapons, including artillery. Most of the chemical weapons produced by Saddam Hussein were manufactured as artillery shells. Saddam used the MEK in his harassment campaigns against the Kurds -- who suffered a chemical-weapons attack in Halabja in 1995. The Khalq refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into their camps, one of the many defiances of Saddam Hussein that resulted in the UNSCOM suspension in 1998. (Interestingly and certainly coincidentally, this article on the CDI site was written four days before this memo to Uday Hussein, the commander of the Saddam Fedayeen.)

These memos being translated by Joseph Shahda at Free Republic have the potential to completely recast the history of the Iraq War. Perhaps this find will allow the Pentagon to locate at least some of the WMD the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies insisted Saddam retained. They should also start working on getting the rest of these documents translated quickly while the information could still be useful.

UN: We Hate Free Speech

Just when you thought that the United Nations could not possibly sink any lower, Turtle Bay manages to find a little more wiggle room in the muck. Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown told an audience that the American government uses the UN too much to allow its citizens to criticize its shortcomings, one of which is apparently an aversion to free speech:

Secretary General Kofi Annan's deputy assailed the United States on Tuesday for withholding support from the United Nations, encouraging its harshest detractors and undermining an institution that he said Washington needed more than it would admit.

"The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable," said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. "You will lose the U.N. one way or another."

In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington's tolerance of what he called "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."

"Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.

Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said Mr. Bolton had not had time to read the speech to react to it fully on Tuesday evening. "Mr. Malloch Brown did not extend to us the courtesy of a copy of the speech," Mr. Grenell said. "We need to read it and will certainly have to respond."

It surprises me not one whit that the UN finds free speech and criticism intolerable. Unfortunately, they provide so much fodder for both that the impulse is irresistably. For instance, Malloch Brown asserted in his defense of the UN that the organization has eighteen peacekeeping missions operating at the moment, all of which perform at a lower cost and at higher effectiveness than anything done by the US. Apparently that higher effectiveness relates to the efficiency at which these missions abuse young girls, since the UN has failed to take any effective action to stop it. This is from March 2005:

The United Nations is facing new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere, which is complicating the organization's efforts to contain a sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished its Nobel Prize-winning peacekeepers in Congo.

The allegations indicate that a series of measures the United Nations has taken in recent years have failed to eliminate a culture of sexual permissiveness that has plagued its far-flung peacekeeping operations over the last 12 years. But senior U.N. officials say they have signaled their seriousness by imposing new reforms and forcing senior U.N. military commanders and officials to step down if they do not curb such practices. ...

The reports of sexual abuse have come from U.N. officials, internal U.N. documents, and local and international human rights organizations that have tracked the issue. Some U.N. officials and outside observers say there have been cases of abuse in almost every U.N. mission, including operations in Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

"This is a problem in every mission around the world," said Sarah Martin, an expert on the subject at Refugees International who recently conducted investigations into misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti and Liberia. "If you don't have a strict code of discipline, accountability and transparency in the process, then you're going to continue to have a problem."

Of course, that was over a year ago, so it probably has no bearing on their effectiveness now. On the other hand, we have this from February 2006, from the UN itself:

There are still too many complaints of sexual abuse against United Nations troops, the head of peacekeeping operations has said.

Jean-Marie Guehenno said the UN had investigated 295 cases under a new reporting system introduced last year.

It could take several more years to reform the system fully, says Jordan's UN envoy who last year urged changes. [emphasis mine -- CE]

And we also have this from last month, showing that the situation has actually gotten worse:

Young girls in Liberia are still being sexually exploited by aid workers and peacekeepers despite pledges to stamp out such abuse, Save the Children says.

Girls as young as eight are being forced to have sex in exchange for food by workers for local and international agencies, according to its report.

The agency says such abuse is becoming more common as people displaced by the civil war return to their villages.

And how effective have they been in keeping the peace? Here's a look at the Ivory Coast this past January:

IVORY COAST, once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, was close to its second civil war in five years yesterday as gangs of armed thugs loyal to President Gbagbo ran amok across the southern half of the country.

A 300-strong contingent of Bangladeshi UN troops was forced to withdraw after an attack on their base at Guiglo, 300 miles west of Abidjan, the commercial capital. At least four people died when the peacekeepers opened fire to defend themselves.

Another contingent of 70 international peacekeepers was evacuated from the town of Douéké. Peacekeepers at the UN headquarters in Abidjan fired in the air and used teargas to keep the thugs at bay. Businesses across the city closed as Mr Gbagbo’s supporters blocked roads with burning tyres and stopped vehicles.

And again in January, this time in the Congo:

The United Nations pulled its remaining peacekeepers out of the national park where eight Guatemalan peacekeepers were killed in an apparent gunbattle with Ugandan rebels, a U.N. spokesman said Tuesday.

Hans-Jakob Reichen, U.N. military spokesman for eastern Congo, said the peacekeepers were withdrawn because they had completed a two-week mission to clear Garamba National Park of rebel forces. "It was decided to pull peacekeepers out of the park since any suspected rebels had melted into the jungle," Reichen said. ...

The 105-strong special forces contingent of Guatemalan peacekeepers was added to the 16,000-strong U.N. mission in Congo because of the Guatemalans' extensive experience fighting in wet, equatorial forests and hilly terrain, the U.N. official said.

Yes, they actually "redeployed" because the peacekeepers couldn't find any more rebels in the national park, even though eight of their contingent got killed by the supposedly non-existent forces.

That's pretty damned effective. It's reminiscent of the effectiveness of the Srebrenica mission, where UN troops herded Bosnians into a city in order to protect them, then ran away when Serbians came in force and abandoned their wards to a genocide.

But of course, we're not supposed to point any of this out, according to Mark Malloch Brown, the UN Deputy Secretary General. They prefer us not to inform people of their rank incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic cravenness. Given the circumstances, I guess I can't really blame them.

UPDATE: Confirm this man now:

US Ambassador John Bolton rebuked a stinging criticism of Washington's policy toward the United Nations by UN chief Kofi Annan's deputy, demanding it be promptly repudiated to avoid doing serious damage to the world body. ...

In a furious reaction, Bolton called the speech by Annan's deputy a "very grave mistake."

"We are in the process of an enormous effort to achieve substantial reform at the United Nations," he said. "To have the deputy secretary general criticize the United States in such a manner can only do great harm to the United Nations.

"Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations," he added. "Even worse was the condescending and patronizing tone about the American people."

Bolton said the only way "to mitigate the damage to the United Nations" was for Annan to "personally and publicly repudiate this speech at the earliest possible opportunity."

Annan has already responded through his spokesperson that he stands behind the speech given by Malloch Brown and will not issue any retraction. I suggest we do the same and start by suspending all payments of any kind to any UN agency. Given the above examples, all we're doing is funding sexual abuse, graft, and incompetence anyway. Let them reform their system and then we can consider restarting our funding.

More On Jefferson's Corruption

As the voters in CA-50 put the corruption of Randy Cunningham behind them, the voters of William Jefferson's district got more information on his sellout. The New York Times reports that the FBI has acquired documentary evidence of bribery regarding Jefferson's efforts on behalf of a foreign power, albeit in a strange reversal:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Maryland home of the vice president of Nigeria last summer in search of bribe money that the bureau believed had been paid to him by Representative William Jefferson, according to documents released on Tuesday.

The documents included an affidavit signed by an F.B.I. agent who said that the Nigerian vice president, Atiku Abubakar, now a candidate for president of that oil-rich West African nation, asked for at least half of the profits of a technology company controlled by Mr. Jefferson that was seeking to do business in Nigeria.

About the same time last year, the documents said, Mr. Jefferson told colleagues of his plans to bribe Nigerian officials, including Mr. Abubakar, in exchange for their help in winning business in Nigeria, and that Mr. Abubakar would be paid as much as $500,000 in cash.

The F.B.I. affidavit, which was dated Aug. 2, and other documents were made public over the objections of Mr. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat who is the target of a wide-ranging corruption investigation. He has denied wrongdoing and has said the information in the court papers would unfairly damage his reputation.

In the affidavit, an F.B.I. agent, Edward S. Cooper, said cellphone records suggested that Mr. Jefferson visited a home owned by Mr. Abubakar and his wife in Potomac, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington, around midnight last July 31 with the intention of delivering money to the Nigerian leader while he was on a visit to the United States. The next day, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Jefferson told a confidential informant that he had delivered "African art" — which the agent described as code for a cash payment — and that Mr. Abubakar "was very pleased."

The value of art lies in the eyes of its beholder -- well, at least that's usually the case. Jefferson apparently has a different idea of art, perhaps one could say a more modern view of it.

Seriously, this opens an entirely new dimension to the case against Jefferson. Using his seat to influence and be influenced by foreign powers borders on treason in a strict legal sense. If the FBI can prove that Jefferson cast votes or introduced legislation intending on bolstering his personal business relationship with the Nigerians, the Democrats have a huge scandal on their hands. The Times writes that this documentation suggests Jefferson was "aggressive seeking to lobby officials in Nigeria and other West African nations", a mastery of understatement.

This stands in a completely different category of corruption altogether. The Democrats had better start cutting ties to Jefferson soon or risk having their biggest electoral strategy rendered null and void.

Germany: Iran Must End Enrichment For Negotiations

The Bush administration got significant international support for his latest diplomatic effort with Iran from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Showing a united front, Merkel told the Iranians that the new package of incentives could be negotiated, but not an end to their enrichment program:

The terms of an offer of incentives delivered to Iran to end a dispute over its nuclear program can be negotiated but only if Tehran halts enrichment work first, Germany's chancellor said on Wednesday.

"This is an offer to kick off negotiations but there must first be a suspension of (enrichment) activities implemented by Iran," Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters before a meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. ...

Merkel urged the Iranians to consider the offer seriously, which she said was an opportunity to secure a peaceful resolution to the years-long nuclear standoff with Iran.

"I believe that it is a truly significant chance to resolve this conflict diplomatically. And everyone should be aware of his responsibility in this context," she said.

Yesterday, the German Foreign Minister said he expected a resolution to this offer by the end of the month, when the G-8 meets in Moscow. He warned the Iranians not to try to drag out negotiations on preconditions, but to suspend their enrichment program and begin talks quickly. Frank-Walter Steinmeier also warned Western observers not to get their hopes up for an agreement by the Iranians, a cool dash of water on what might have developed into a bit of irrational exuberance, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.

The foreign support is significant. Bush played against type in offering this package, and the European nations will want to encourage this kind of engagement from the Bush administration. Most of them realize that this will not be repeated it if fails to achieve an end to Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons. They understand this as an offer the Iranians can't refuse, one last opportunity for reasonable compromise which would give Iran almost everything they want except the bomb.

If it works, the Europeans will have to acknowledge Bush's role in delivering a peaceful solution to a rapidly escalating situation. In doing that, they will also have to acknowledge that Bush established the credibility of American action as a basis for this offer in our insistence on holding Saddam accountable for his twelve years of defiance to the international community. If it doesn't work, they can no longer argue that Bush failed to exercise all of his diplomatic options with Iran. They know how generous this package is; they could not even bring themselves to offer all of these incentives in prior talks.

As I wrote yesterday, either way Bush wins with this effort. If he stops the Iranian program like he did the Libyan nuclear effort, then he gets to rightly claim credit for his diplomacy and skillful foreign policy. If Iran rejects the package, then all of his options go back onto the table. The only way Bush loses is to structure a deal without the necessary verification regimes, as Cliinton did when he allowed Jimmy Carter to impose the Agreed Framework with North Korea, a mistake that the Bush administration is not likely to repeat.

As Merkel emphasized today, the ball is back in Teheran's court. And that is a victory in itself.

RCMP Foiled A Dozen Plots

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have stopped a number of attacks from occurring in Canada, sometimes by disrupting networks when arrests could not be made, the Globe & Mail reports this morning. This semi-covert action rarely gets acknowledged but has kept the nation safe from terrorist attack and demonstrates again that the professionals have kept their eye on the ball:

The RCMP has quietly broken up at least a dozen terrorist groups in the past two years, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.

"We have completed 12 disruptions of national-level terrorist groups across the country," the Mounties say in briefing notes prepared for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

Disruptive tactics -- sometimes as simple as letting targets know they are under close surveillance -- are used to prevent a terrorist attack when the police do not have enough evidence to lay criminal charges, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service say. ...

Disruptive tactics can take many forms, including interdiction of persons or matériel at border points, denial of charitable status to front groups, deportation of non-citizens on security grounds, or "defensive actions as a result of threat assessment," CSIS spokeswoman Barbara Campion said. CSIS, the RCMP and other agencies "have a duty to prevent and disrupt terrorist acts . . . before these individuals have the opportunity to carry out their terrorist plans."

After 9/11, George Bush told Americans that this war would be fought on many fronts in many different ways. The Canadians obviously heard what he had to say. One could question whether simply spooking terrorists really stop attacks, or merely postpone them,. Since so much of their strategy involves secrecy and deception, a blown cover means that they and their entire network would have to be replaced before an attack could occur -- an expensive proposition for a movement already working on the cheap.

We like to argue that the lack of any terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 shows that we have defended ourselves well against the terrorist threat. That same argument can be made for the Canadians, who perhaps did not realize the scope of their danger until this past week.

UPDATE: OK, so Newsbeat1 knew.

Bush Recasts Immigration Rhetoric For House

George Bush, like any good rancher, has to perform some fence-tending from time to time. Apparently he sees the need to do some with House Republicans who have opposed his ideas about fence-tending on the Rio Grande, and he now wants to emphasize border enforcement as a prerequisite for any comprehensive reform:

President Bush tried on Tuesday to win back the trust of conservatives who have distanced themselves from him on immigration, promising to "get this border enforced" and warning those who enter the country illegally that "if you get caught, you get sent home."

After weeks of embracing "comprehensive immigration reform" — Washington shorthand for a Senate bill that includes a temporary guest-worker program and a promise of citizenship for some illegal immigrants — Mr. Bush shifted his tone in remarks at the Border Patrol training academy here. Having nudged the Senate into action, Mr. Bush is turning his attention to the House, where Republicans deride the Senate plan as amnesty and are balking at the idea of compromise.

After watching Border Patrol trainees conduct mock security stops under a blistering 100-degree sun, Mr. Bush told the agents "I want the country to pay attention to what you're doing."

He promised to add 6,000 agents by 2008 — bringing the total to 18,000 — to build high-tech fences and new patrol roads, and "to end 'catch and release' once and for all on the southern border of the United States," a reference to the practice of releasing those who enter illegally and are not immediately sent home.

Bush certainly needs to find some common ground with House Republicans if he expects to get immigration reform out of this session of Congress. His adaptive rhetoric at least shows that he has heard their concerns, even if the Senate package doesn't really address them. He didn't convince Rep. Steven Pearce of Artesia, NM, who liked the focus on border enforcement but still doesn't want a repeat of Simpson-Mazzoli.

Yesterday, some suggestion that the Senate might accept a phased implementation of comprehensive immigration reform began to arise. Hillary Clinton stated that the normalization process could be delayed for one to two years in order to ensure that border security was successfully implemented. The White House also appeared open to that compromise, and it will probably gain some traction among the House GOP caucus willing to buy extensive border security with some normalization, as long as the former comes before the latter.

Will that fly with the hardliners on both sides? It might narrow their numbers sufficiently to gain passage, but it would be hard to imagine them changing their minds. Those inclined to see illegals as noble proletarians denied some basic right to ignore borders will not support border enforcement, and those inclined to see anything short of deportation (self- or other-initiated) as amnesty will still feel the same way about phased implementation.

However, for those who see the Senate bill as another Simpson-Mazzoli, including that delay with the kind of security offered in the House version could be enough to gain a majority of both chambers. The main reason for an insistence on a comprehensive bill is that no politician wants to revisit this policy abbatoir more than once in a career. They will certainly appreciate a way out of this debate that actually brings it to a conclusion -- an impulse that no observer should underrate. If this effort fails, Congress will have to start over from scratch in the next session, and no elected official wants to go through this all over again.

Expect the conference committee to put together some type of phased implementation that gives all sides a piece of what they want. If the conference committee does succeed in producing legislation, Congress will pass it quickly and easily. For those reasons, keep an eye on the composition of the committee to get the sense of what it will produce.

Ann Coulter, Meet Ted Rall (Updated)

One of the topics that flew under my radar yesterday came from an interview Ann Coulter did with Matt Lauer on the Today show, promoting her new book, Godless. Other bloggers have picked up this story before I did, where I saw it at Rick Moran's Right Wing Nuthouse. Rick notes a particularly disturbing part of the transcript from the show:

LAUER: On the 9-11 widows, an in particular a group that had been critical of the administration:

COULTER: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing bush was part of the closure process.”

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”

Unlike Rick, I usually enjoy Ann's schtick to some degree. I can tell you from personal experience that she is one of the few authors who can bring energy and excitement to an interview, as well as a good sense of humor. The half-hour we did with her on the Northern Alliance Radio Network was one of our best interviews ever.

However, if one ever needed proof that the political spectrum resembles a circle where the extremes meet, this should provide it. In fact, it reminded me of another pundit whom the Left lionizes and the Right reviles: Ted Rall. Why Rall? Three years ago, Rall made essentially the same point in one of his crude cartoons and got rightly panned for it. It became one of the reasons that the Washington Post ended its association with Rall in 2004.

Whether Rall or Coulter says it, impugning the grief felt by 9/11 widows regardless of their politics is nothing short of despicable. It denies them their humanity and disregards the very public and horrific nature of their spouses' deaths. The attacks motivated a lot of us to become more active in politics in order to make sure our voices contribute to the debate, and it is impossible to argue that the 9/11 widows (and widowers, and children, and parents) have less standing to opine on foreign policy than Ann Coulter or Ted Rall.

This represents the downside of provocateurs, even those entertaining enough to enjoy for 80% of the time. Instead of arguing facts or philosophy, the provocateur usually relies on ad hominem attack in order to degrade and dismiss their opposition. A little of that goes a very long way, and unfortunately Coulter delivered it in droves yesterday. She owes these victims closest to 9/11 an abject apology and a retraction of her remarks, and she should pray that she doesn't ever experience the kind of loss that these people have had. Regardless of their politics, their grief was and is all too real, and that drives their public engagement. I doubt a single one of them wouldn't gladly trade their influence for one more day with the ones they lost. Shame on Ann for implying otherwise.

UPDATE: Thanks to Hugh Hewitt and Instapundit for their links tonight. I've gotten plenty of e-mail and a raft of comments on this, and the discussions have been enlightening.

Let me make this point clear, since it seems to have escaped some. Had Ann said in her book that the media should not shield the 9/11 widows and Cindy Sheehan from criticism or hold them up as unassailable voices with the only moral standing for commentary, I would have applauded that effort. Had she said that Kristen Breitweiser accrued too much influence and used it inappropriately, I would consider that just fair commentary; after all, Mrs. Breitweiser chose to go public and push policy, and that means opening one's self to criticism.

However, there is a HUGE difference between that and explicitly saying that these women are "enjoying" their husbands' deaths. It implies that they have reveled in their murders, and cared less for their husbands than for a few moments in the spotlight. It's cruel, it's irrational, and it's unnecessary for the point she makes. I don't care if she goes on then to argue the points I made above -- she lost me when she lost her humanity.

Ann really can be better than this, and she should apologize.

Michelle Malkin posts a subdued defense of Ann which CQ readers might wish to read. Flopping Aces tends to give Ann a pass on this. The Anchoress, however, most definitely does not, and the Commissar suggests a tour with Robert Kennedy, Jr might be in order.

CA-50 Race Too Close To Call (Update & Bump)

The polls have closed in California's primary election, and the most significant contest looks like a real squeaker. With only 11% of precincts reporting, Republican Brian Bilbray leads Democrat Francine Busby by eight points in the race to replace the disgraced Randy "Duke" Cunningham. The early absentee returns should have given Bilbray a better lead at this stage; this one will probably go to the wire. I'll update this in the morning.

UPDATE: Bilbray won, but shy of a majority:

Republican Brian Bilbray beat Democrat Francine Busby early Wednesday in a close race to replace imprisoned former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in the 50th Congressional District, a contest seen as a gauge of voter attitudes for the national midterm elections. ...

Bilbray also said that running in a heavily Republican district was an advantage, to a degree. “It can also be a big negative, because people were really hurt by Mr. Cunningham. But it was one man's mistake, and we have to remember that,” he said.

Clearly, not everyone in CA-50 agrees with that sentiment. In the Duke's last election, he garnered almost two-thirds of the vote, continuing a run of easy elections in the district for the GOP. North San Diego trends conservative in almost every manner possible, but in this special election, Bilbray won by a mere four percentage points and could not quite claim a majority (49.49% - 45.24% with 90.2% of precincts reporting at 1:35 AM PT).

Did this signal a weakness in the overall Republican position for the midterms? The Democrats will claim it does, but it appears more analogous to the race lost by Paul Hackett in a similar special election in Ohio. Hackett didn't do quite as well as Busby but made it interesting in what normally is a solid GOP district. One has to remember that the Democrats could afford to focus national resources in this one-off situation that would not be possible in November, when they have to contest 434 more House seats (plus 33 in the Senate). With the previous winner serving time for corruption, it would be expected that the incumbent party would have difficulty convincing the district to turn out in great numbers -- and indeed, turnout remained low throughout the state for this primary election, which in this district would hurt Bilbray.

None of this supports the contention that this was a "message" race at all. Even with Cunningham's conviction of the worst kind of corruption, the Democrats could not poll more than 46% of the vote in this district with all of their national effort. Thanks to California gerrymandering, CA-50 appears shaken but not stirred.

However, it does show that in terms of ready popularity, Bilbray has no secure lock on this district. He has to run again in the November midterms to win a second term after this brief initial term as Representative. His opponent? Francine Busby, who sailed to her primary win against the Democrats in this unusual election. He has five months to improve his standing and make this a secure seat for the GOP again.

UPDATE: Dafydd called this one almost exactly correct, except I don't think he anticipated Bilbray not winning a majority. More thoughts at Power Line.

The CIA Covered For Eichmann

While the entire world looked for Adolf Eichmann, the colorless bureaucrat that headed the Nazi "Final Solution" that sent millions of Jews to their ghastly deaths, the CIA knew exactly where to find him. Why didn't they capture him, or at least reveal his whereabouts to the Mossad? The American government needed to protect a former Nazi who worked for the anti-Soviet West German government of Konrad Adenauer:

The United States was aware of the hiding place and alias of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal and architect of the "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jews, but did nothing to pursue him, according to CIA documents.

Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia historian who has looked through the newly released documents, said yesterday they showed that West German intelligence had told the CIA that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the pseudonym Clemens two years before he was abducted by the Israelis - but the Americans did not want him captured because they feared what he might say that could compromise Hans Globke, who supported America's anti-communist goals in Europe.

Globke supposedly never joined the Nazi Party, or at least that was the official line that allowed Globke to escape de-Nazification and to enter the West German government. This revelation casts serious doubt on that claim.

In its way, this provides a microcosm of the ambiguity that prevailed at the end of World War II, as our former ally swallowed all of Eastern Europe after we gave them the opening at Potsdam and Yalta to do so. As America saw a new kind of fascism succeed where Hitler had failed, we turned to the Germans in the Free Zone to assume the front lines in the new war within just a few years of our victory over them. This necessitated a number of compromises -- but hiding Eichmann, the man who engineered the most notorious genocide in history, went too far. This is an embarrassment that we will find difficult to live down.

Do Not Pass Gaux

Chuck Guité, one of the handful of people who faced criminal prosecution for his part in the Adscam corruption case that brought down the Liberal government, got convicted of five counts related to the fraud. The presiding judge gleefully revoked Guité's bail, which means he will start serving time while the judge ponders his sentence:

Chuck Guité, the operational mastermind at the centre of the federal sponsorship boondoggle, was sent straight to jail Tuesday for steering money-for-nothing contracts to a friendly ad firm.

Guité, 62, clasped his hands as the jury foreman, a scrapyard manager, read the guilty verdict on five counts of fraud.

Justice Fraser Martin immediately told Guité he would go to prison for his crime — defrauding the federal government of about $1.5 million.

"I have no hesitation cancelling your bail conditions," the judge said, surprising even the Crown prosecutor with the swift incarceration.

Martin said Guité, 62, will certainly receive jail time after sentencing arguments Friday but it "remains to be seen how long it will be."

Judge Martin appears to have learned a little from the fallout of an earlier Adscam sentencing. When Paul Coffin's sentence for his part in the fraud amounted to probation and community service, Canadians were outraged. In fact, his fine didn't even approach the amount the trial proved he received from his fraud, and the only tough part of the sentence was a requirement to speak out against corruption at colleges and universities. Coffin later got resentenced to 18 months in prison when the Crown appealed Judge Boilard's highly lenient sentence. Jean Breault pled guilty to the same five counts as Guité and got a year more than Coffin for his trouble.

Guité deserves at least as much time. He stole more than Coffin, at least as far as prosecutors could determine for both men, and he also went back and worked at the firm he used to launder the money to remain close to the action. He has shown no real remorse for his crimes, and his position as a public servant is one aggravating factor that didn't apply to Brault. As the last of the three men charged with any crimes in connection with Adscam, Judge Martin may want to send a strong message about corruption and government officials as well.

Guité will have plenty of time to reflect on all of these possibilities, as he gets his head start on the sentence. He may well wonder, as many Canadians already do, why he is the last man to get charged with a crime that saw $350 million disappear through so many hands. (via Newsbeat1

Did Iran Get What It Wants?

The Associated Press reports that Iran has described the Bush offer to end the nuclear-proliferation standoff as "positive", while reports indicating that the US has promised to give Teheran the technology to build a light-water reactor have some worried that we may have given away the prize. Ali Larijani, Iran's nuclear negotiator, changed weeks of contentious Iranian rhetoric by lauding the "positive steps" taken by the Americans, while noting that areas of ambiguity need clearer definition:

Iran and the United States had a rare moment of agreement Tuesday, using similar language to describe "positive steps" toward an accord on a package of incentives aimed at persuading Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.

Diplomats said the incentives include a previously undisclosed offer of some U.S. nuclear technology on top of European help in building light-water nuclear reactors. Other incentives include allowing Iran to buy spare airplane parts and support for joining the World Trade Organization.

Tehran is under intense international pressure to accept the deal in exchange for putting on hold a uranium enrichment program that the West fears could lead to the creation of nuclear weapons.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said the proposals had "positive steps" but that talks were needed to clear up ambiguities. Iran promised to study the proposals seriously, but gave no timeframe for a response.

And Bush, using the same language, said Iran's initial response "sounds like a positive step."

"We will see if the Iranians take our offer seriously," the president said in Laredo, Texas. "The choice is theirs to make. I have said the United States will come and sit down at the table with them so long as they are willing to suspend their enrichment in a verifiable way."

This marks the first time in months that anything positive has come from efforts to restart negotiations with the Iranians. Their initial reaction of hostility could indicate that Bush's offer of safer nuclear technology and an escape from sanctions took them by surprise. They may not have considered the possibility that an offer from the US could contain substantial progress towards their publicly stated goals, and seeing the offer after delivery by Javier Solana, the EU's foreign minister, might have momentarily stalled their momentum.

This is where we see whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a) wanted a war, (b) desired better trade positioning, or (c) really wanted to switch to nuclear power instead of building refining capacity. After all, the Russians offered them something quite similar for the past several months. If Iran accepts this offer and a tight verification regime from the IAEA, then one might presume that the mullahcracy's goal all along was (b) and maybe (c). (They also may have some concerns about Russian nuclear assistance, given their poor track record.) If Ahmadinejad rejects this package outright, then obviously he pursued this to start a war.

Most likely, the Iranians will counterpropose an agreement that will attempt to allow them to continue uranium enrichment, which will put the ball back in Bush's court -- but not for long. For the moment at least, he has surprised the Western nations by agreeing to a substantial shift in American policy. They have no choice but to support the offer as it meets the UN Security Council resolutions, and any shift on their part will give Bush an opportunity to change his mind.

Bush managed to confound his allies and his enemies in one unexpected tactical shift. But is it the right offer to make?

Jon at QandO believes it is, and his explanation hits at the heart of the Western conundrum:

I already see some people expressing disapproval of this and comparing it to the Agreed Framework, but I think this is far different. For one thing, we don’t have Jimmy Carter cowboying off to conduct his own brand of "Trust! But Verify?" free-lance, "direct to CNN" diplomacy. (which hamstrung US efforts to stop North Korea, and led to one Clinton cabinet member to call Carter a "treasonous prick") For one thing, we don’t have Jimmy Carter cowboying off to conduct his own brand of "Trust! But Verify?" free-lance, "direct to CNN" diplomacy.

First, it’s important to note that we don’t have a lot of good options. For a variety of very compelling reasons, we really don’t want to attack Iran. Certainly, we can overpower them in a conventional military sense, but they have quite a few asymmetric trumps cards...

Finally — and this is important — Iran has the legal right to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. If Iran insists upon exercising that right, there’s just not much we can legally do to stop them. The Non-Proliferation Treaty states...

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

Iran is simply obliged not to pursue nuclear weapons. They have a legal right, which we have recognized, to acquire nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

While we want to keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons because of their likely transfer to terrorists, we have based our opposition on the NPA. That document does give all signatories the right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology, and any attempt to stop it would constitute a violation on our part. Many in the US noted that as a signatory to the NPA, we should not have agreed to give India assistance on their domestic nuclear-energy production, making it more difficult to deny Iran the same right as a signatory.

Given this problem, the only real solution will be to offer the nuclear technology while retaining control of the nuclear fuel -- again, the Russian solution repackaged with our preferred technology with the trade assistance that only the US can provide. How difficult a sell will that be? Long-memoried readers will recall that John Kerry and John Edwards offered a similar solution -- as an opening bid! -- and got slammed during the election for that position. (Iran, as irascible as ever under Mohammed Khatami's rule, turned him down.) Using this as a last-ditch effort to contain Iranian nuclear ambitions will no doubt give Kerry reason to crow about this Bush "flip-flop". Members of his own party will likely oppose it just on the basis of the lack of trust in the frequently non-rational, anti-Semitic nature of the Iranian leadership.

I'm not sure that this offer will ever get accepted. It looks more like a final move to show that we would present as much flexibility as possible without giving up on the key goal of stopping Iranian uranium enrichment. In that sense, the offer is brilliant. If Iran accepts it outright along with a verification regime that ensures their compliance, it still gives us a trade-off that will put Iranian nuclear development off for enough time to hopefully see a more rational government replace the mullahcracy. Bush has positioned the US perfectly to either accept this diplomatic solution or to pursue tougher options with little difficulty.

Enlist In Congress, See The World!

The Center for Public Integrity reports that lobbyists provided Congress with over $50 million in trips between January 2000 and June 2005. The amount of time spent away from the office also comes to a staggering 81,000 days:

Over 5 1/2 years, Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly $50 million in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales, from corporations and groups seeking legislative favors, according to the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of congressional travel.

From January 2000 through June 2005, House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days -- a combined 222 years -- on at least 23,000 trips, according to the report, issued yesterday by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. About 2,300 of the trips cost $5,000 or more, at least 500 cost $10,000 or more, and 16 cost $25,000 or more.

"While some of these trips might qualify as legitimate fact-finding missions," the study said, "the purpose of others is less clear." In addition, the lawmakers' financial reports that disclose the details of the trips are routinely riddled with mistakes and omissions.

Lawmakers and their staffers were treated to $25,000 corporate-jet rides and $500-a-night hotel rooms, the study showed. Lawmakers accepted thousands of costly jaunts -- one worth more than $30,000 -- to some of the world's choicest destinations: at least 200 trips to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy.

"Congressional travelers gave speeches in Scotland, attended meetings in Australia and toured nuclear facilities in Spain," the study reported. "They pondered welfare reform in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the future of Social Security at a Colorado ski resort."

Make no mistake about it -- this travel and time away amounts to a significant portion of the job for our world travelers in Congress. With a total of 81,000 days on travel, that comes to over 150 days per member during the 66-month period. For every Congressman and Senator, that equals 27 days per year of lobbyist-paid travel, or almost a full month of supposed fact-finding.

The money also staggers. At $50 million, that means each member on average received over $93,000 in travel during the period under study, or approximately $17,000 each year. How much did you spend on your vacation last year? The most expensive vacation I ever took was our two-week trip to Ireland, which cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000 -- for the three of us. This would equate to having that trip three times a year, every year in office.

John Boehner gets identified as one of the major recipients of this largesse. Boehner won the position of Majority Leader after Tom Delay's resignation based on his support for moderate ethics reform, but he opposed the travel ban that some ethics hawks wanted to put in place. Boehner, as it turns out, had good reason to oppose it: he's taken more than 200 privately-financed trips. That comes to forty trips a year. When does he have time to be Majority Leader?

Boehner's spokesperson, Kevin Madden, noted that the trips allow Congress to get a better perspective on legislation and cost the taxpayers nothing. Well, that has its upside, I suppose, but in the age of the Internet and instant communications, I doubt that these "fact-finding" trips do much more than acquaint politicians with the needs of the people who have the money to fund these junkets. In the end, given all of the pork-barrel action that these trips support, it would cost the taxpayers one hell of a lot less to foot the bill for true fact-finding missions and ban any other funding for travel. It would also help to improve the reputation of Congress, which has sunk below that of used-car salesmen, personal-injury attorneys, and the White House.

The Washington Examiner agrees:

[T]he list of corporations, nonprofits and trade associations putting out the $50 million to pay for the 23,000 trips reads like a who’s who of recipients of multiple billions in federal contracts, grants, earmarks and other disbursements. The federal budget consumes a fifth or more of the nation’s annual economic activity, with the bulk of that spending directly influenced by members of Congress and indirectly by their top aides. So why is anybody surprised that the beneficiaries of federal largesse spend millions of dollars skating right up to and sometimes past the letter of the law in order to influence the decision-makers who hold the purse strings?

The solution is not more regulations and rules that require teams of lawyers to understand and which crafty lobbyists, congressional aides and other Washington insiders eventually find new ways to evade. The solution is to reduce the size and scope of government. Only then will there be significantly fewer special interests buying plane and hotel tickets for members of Congress and their staffs.

Reducing the scope of federal government means that Congress has less resources to give away to special interests. It kills both the supply and demand sides of the corruption market. No one wants to buy a politician who cannot put money in pockets. Perhaps we might even keep our poor representatives from the stress of travel that must wear them out. At the least, we can keep them from wearing out our pocketbooks without even the courtesy of a postcard from their lobbyist-funded resort travel.

When He's Right ...

Unfortunately, E.J. Dionne paints a fairly accurate picture in his column today regarding the sudden reappearance of the Marriage Protection Act. While Bush has always supported the traditional definition of marriage, he has not pursued the Constitutional option with much vigor until his polling numbers showed significant erosion among his base. Suddenly, the MPA has received front-burner status:

This month's offensive by President Bush and his allies in Congress against gay marriage and flag burning proves one thing: The Republican Party thinks its base of social conservatives is a nest of dummies who have no memories and respond like bulls whenever red flags are waved in their faces.

The people who should be angry this week are not liberals or gays or lesbians, but the president's most loyal supporters. After using the gay-marriage issue shamelessly in the 2004 campaign, Bush and Republican leaders left opponents of gay marriage out in the cold as they concentrated on the party's real priorities: privatizing Social Security and cutting taxes on rich people.

When Bush was at his position of maximum strength after the 2004 election, did he use his political energy on behalf of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Not at all. In an interview with The Post on Jan. 14, 2005, he dismissed the question, arguing that since many senators felt that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was already an effective bar to the spread of gay marital unions, there was no point in fighting for a constitutional change.

"Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen," Bush said then. "I'd take their admonition seriously."

Dionne accurately notes that gay marriage disappeared off the radar screen after the 2004 elections. That omission also got noted here at CQ contemporaneously, although I found another omission much more problematic: illegal immigration. At the time, I wondered what the Senate GOP caucus was thinking when they drew up that list of priorities. Rick Santorum attempted to explain the exclusion of illegal immigration from the focus issues by declaring that the Senate had "no consensus" on the best policy to pursue.

Obviously, the demands from conservatives and the White House (working at cross purposes) pushed immigration back onto the list, regardless of consensus. If that was the reason why the GOP put off immigration, then tackling gay marriage makes no sense at all, except as a cheap political stunt, as Dionne describes. Not only does a consensus not exist for two-thirds support of this amendment, it doesn't even exist among the GOP caucus. DOMA has not yet been fully tested in the courts, and with the new additions showing more deference to the legislature rather than themselves as policymakers, the prospects for its survival do not look particularly grim.

So why now? Because the fight on immigration has weakened the White House in the run-up to the midterms. In that sense, I give the White House full marks for courage, just as I did with Social Security reform last year. Bush has stuck to his guns on his vision for immigration reform, even when a good chunk of his party disagrees with him so fundamentally, and he has not dodged the fight at all. In fact, he probably would have been smarter to do immigration reform last year and had this well behind him, and saved Social Security reform for this year. On the whole, he would have done less damage to Republican election prospects.

This will do nothing to improve his standing among his base. Most of them gave up on any real attempt at marriage "protection" last year, when the Senate agenda was released. The lack of action over the last eighteen months also spoke volumes about the commitment to this cause from the White House. Some may get excited by the debate, but even for the supporters of such an initiative, this will be seen as an empty political gesture and nothing more.

I disagree strongly with E.J. on the death tax, a ghoulish double-dip by the government on assets already subject to taxation during the decedent's life, as well as privatizing Social Security. It's hard to disagree with him on the baldly partisan and completely superfluous effort expended on the MPA. Let's use this energy to get judges seated and border walls built instead.

Iraqi Judge Tires Of Saddam Defense Obstructionism

The presiding judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein castigated the defense attorneys for their repeated motions for dismissal as well as their inability to produce witnesses as promised. He angrily suspended the trial for a week to give the defense one last chance to organize themselves, and warned them against making allegations without substantiation:

The defendants have been accused of orchestrating the massacre of 148 people in retribution for a failed assassination attempt against Hussein in 1982. But defense attorneys pressed their claim Monday that at least 14 of those people were not killed. Some of the alleged victims are still alive and others died in the Iran-Iraq war, they said.

Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman had little patience for their complaints. Nor was he pleased to find most defense witnesses scheduled to testify hadn't shown up; lawyers said they were too scared to appear.

Abdel Rahman ordered the lawyers to produce documents proving that the alleged victims in the village of Dujayl weren't really executed. In scathing tones, he also accused members of the defense of turning a judicial process into a political show and ordered them to bring a final list of witnesses by next Monday.

"How many times have you made this request?" he snapped when lawyers asked the court to call off the trial. "Frankly, you are not helping justice. All you care about is obstructing the work of the court. Focus on your defense and clearing the defendants."

The judge railed against the only possible defense Saddam and his henchmen could possibly mount -- a delay-and-distraction strategy that hoped to tire the world of the effort to convict the Iraqi dictator. No one disputes that Saddam committed terrible crimes during his decades as the tyrant of the Tigris. Estimates of the death toll of his genocidal attacks on Shi'ites and Kurds range from the low hundreds of thousands to several million, the latter by National Geographic.

The question remains as to whether a trial for his crimes can successfully conclude with all of these obstructionist tactics used by the attorneys, and so far the answer appears to be yes. Those who have convinced themselves of a basic injustice in hauling Saddam before this tribunal will never be convinced, of course, but the Ramsey Clarks of this world have made themselves irrelevant anyway. So far, the presiding judge has performed better than his predecessor in forcing the defense to actually work on the trial rather than use the dock as a launch platform for Saddam's political rants. That was an easier task during the prosecution case, but as Judge Rahman showed yesterday, he will not shy from demanding focus during the defense case as well.

Saddam's team has until Monday to produce their witnesses. If they have none, expect Rahman to declare the trial concluded and request closing arguments. Most telling will be if Saddam takes the stand himself. Although in a legal sense he would be foolish to do so -- being guilty -- in a political sense, it's an opportunity that I predict he simply cannot resist. He presumes that his testimony will garner worldwide attention, perhaps even akin to OJ-trial status, with breathless updates and round-the-clock analysis. Perhaps. It's really rather telling, though, that the Los Angeles Times appears to be the only major newspaper following the trial at all.

Hearings Today For The Canadian Suspects

Seventeen suspects arrested this weekend as part of the terrorist roundup in Toronto will have their first court hearing today, where Canada will formally charge them with conspiring to detonate at least one bomb. Zakaria Amara, the 20-year-old student and father, will be identified as the man who bought the material, and another five as his primary accomplices:

Government lawyers will allege 20-year-old Zakaria Amara, a university student and father of an 8-month-old daughter, was the man who purchased three tonnes of ammonium nitrate for bomb attacks on Canadian soil, sources have told the Star.

Court documents released yesterday claim Amara and another five suspects were involved in the bomb plot.

All 17 suspects in what police are alleging is a home-grown terrorist cell are expected to appear in a Brampton court today for the start of their bail hearings.

More details have come out in the last twenty-four hours. Earlier reports had described the purchase of the ammonium nitrate as a sting operation, but now it appears that the sting was not planned. According to the Toronto Star, investigators found out about their intended purchase and intervened quickly, replacing the ammonium nitrate with a similar but innocuous material. That appears to show that the Canadians did nothing to entrap the terror cell, and may have been caught by surprise when they made this explicit move to arm themselves.

Also, investigators also revealed that nine of the seventeen suspects attended the training camp last summer, where the terrorists shot video of their activities. Some of the activity mimicked jihadist battles in familiar territories: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia. Four of the men arrested will be charged with recruitment and/or training for terrorism, but not the one man everyone has identified as the leader of the cell, Qayyum Abdul Jamal.

Two of the suspects are already in prison for running guns across the US border. Ali Dirie and Yasin Abdi Mohamed were caught in August at the Fort Erie Peace Bridge with both loaded weapons and ammunition, and now will face more charges in this case. Fahin Ahmad rented the car they drove but did not get charged in the earlier case, but with his involvement in the cell now exposed, he will face those charges as part of his indictment now. CNN reported at the time:

Two men tried to re-enter Canada from the United States early Saturday with handguns and ammunition strapped to their bodies, Canadian police said.

Ali Dirie, 22, and Yasin Mohamed, 23 -- both Canadians from the Toronto area -- face weapons-related charges and are in police custody in Niagara Falls, Ontario, according to a police statement. Ontario's Provincial Weapons Enforcement Team and the Niagara Regional Police Service are investigating.

Detective Sgt. Shawn Clarkson, of the Niagara Regional Police Service, would not say what led border officers to search the men.

The Canadians likely had their names on a watch list due to this investigation, which would have prompted them to search the pair when they attempted to cross the border. Finding light weapons would not have satisfied the CSIS enough to tip their hand on the entire investigation, and so they apparently allowed the prosecution to focus solely on the weapons charges and kept Ahmad free to keep engaging the terror cell. That takes a bit of nerve, and the gamble paid off handsomely for the Canadians.

The hearing will likely reveal no more details, but keep your eyes peeled just in case.

British Want US To Allow Sinn Fein Fundraising

My, how times have changed! After many years of complaints by the British, the Bush administration curtailed the fundraising and travel of Sinn Fein leadership in the US after the murder of a Belfast man last year. Now the British want the Bush administration to reverse the ban after getting SF leader Gerry Adams to agree to a total disarmament earlier this year, and the White House apparently has balked:

BRITAIN is pressing President Bush’s Administration to lift a fundraising ban imposed last year on the leadership of Sinn Fein, The Times has learnt.

But Mitchell Reiss, Mr Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, has so far refused to heed calls from the British and Irish governments. They believe that Sinn Fein should be rewarded for renouncing its armed struggle and decommissioning IRA weapons.

Both sides are playing down any talk of a significant row, although sources in London have confirmed that “there is a clear difference of opinion between us on this issue”.

A senior US official acknowledged that it was “ironic” that Britain, having spent years fulminating over the millions of dollars raised by the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid) to finance Sinn Fein and the IRA, should be seeking to get a fundraising ban lifted.

Restrictions were reintroduced by the Bush Administration last year after controversy over the IRA’s alleged role in the murder of Robert McCartney and the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery.

In my opinion, the ban was long overdue, and the lifting of restrictions on Adams' travel was a well-intentioned mistake of the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton wanted to ensure that the Good Friday accord would take root and decided to allow Adams to travel unfettered through the US, where he raised enormous amounts of cash from naive Americans of Irish descent. Adams funneled the money back into the IRA, which had long since developed an unhealthy fascination with Marxism, Palestinian terrorism, and their own home-grown version of organized crime and terror. Even after 9/11, the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland prompted Bush to continue Clinton's mistake, until the two spectacular and heinous crimes convinced the US that the IRA was probably irredeemable.

That proved incorrect, or at least it looks that way now, but at least we have not put American money into the pockets of thugs and terrorists during this ban. I suspect that the Bush administration learned the lesson and now wants to wait until the IRA verifiably disarms before allowing Adams to conduct his fundraising through the pubs of America. They also want to use the ban to pressure Sinn Fein to agree to the new policing structures. Also, as the Times notes, most of their donors probably have no idea that 90% of their donations pay for expensive travel and lodging; only 10 cents on the dollar actually gets into Sinn Fein coffers.

In this case, we may want to follow the lead of the British. If Sinn Fein meets their expectations for rejection of terrorism, we should probably acquiesce in order to maintain a united approach on the state of Northern Ireland, which after all concerns Ireland and Britain more than it does ourselves. If my fellow Americans of Irish descent want to allow themselves to be fleeced, as long as the money no longer goes to terrorism, that's their problem and no longer America's.

The Palestinian Showdown

The New York Times reports in tomorrow's edition that talks between Hamas and Fatah have ended without agreement, and Mahmoud Abbas will proceed with his plans for a plebescite on adopting the two-state solution as the official policy of the Palestinian Authority. This promises to escalate into a serious showdown between the two armed factions vying for power in the territories, and the chances of holding the referendum without an outbreak of civil war appears slim:

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, intends to call a referendum on a proposal developed by prisoners for a unified Palestinian political program that the governing Hamas faction opposes.

Talks on the proposal ended without agreement late Monday night, and early Tuesday morning Mr. Abbas's office said in a statement that he intended to live up to his ultimatum to Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that heads the government, and announce a referendum later on Tuesday after meeting with the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

"In light of recent contacts, President Abbas will decide the date of the referendum after a meeting of the P.L.O. executive committee," the statement said.

The referendum is expected to be called for July and will be seen as a vote of confidence in Hamas, which won legislative elections in late January but has been isolated internationally and financially because of its refusal to recognize the right of Israel to exist, to forswear violence and to accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

The vote, if it takes place, will be a kind of showdown between Hamas and Mr. Abbas, who has insisted from the beginning of Hamas's rule that it accept the idea of a negotiated two-state solution, with an independent Palestine living in peace alongside Israel.

This will bring much-needed clarity to the debate on peace in the PA. Hamas has never agreed to peaceful coexistence with Israel, and has always insisted that the Zionists must either leave or be driven out of Muslim lands. Abbas has publicly supported the notion of the two-state solution, even if he had little real power to deliver it. A plebescite gives the Palestinians an opportunity to vote explicitly on the question of peace or war, eliminating any ambiguity remaining after their surprise election of Hamas to govern the territories.

Abbas has some heavy backing in his corner. The document he wants to offer unaltered to the Palestinians comes from Marwan Barghuoti, a national hero to the Palestinians currently serving a life sentence for terrorism. Hamas leaders in prison also helped create the proposal, giving it no small amount of prestige and political weight. On the other hand, Fatah has largely been discredited through their widespread corruption and incompetence, while Hamas' purity of purpose garners support from those not completely jaded by the decades of disappointment as well as the radical Islamists who dream of a Jew-free ummah.

The Israelis can only stand back and watch. This proposal presents the classic mixed bag for Tel Aviv. On one hand, the Israelis would like to reach some sort of true negotiated conclusion to this long and treacherous chapter, if for no other reason than to leave the Palestinians to themselves and allow them their civil war. It would also repudiate Hamas and cripple their international prestige, dealing a setback to international terrorism. However, a strong Palestinian acceptance of the document would put tremendous international pressure on them to bargain on the basis of it, and it contains at least one show-stopper: the right of return that would render Israel defunct. Nor would Israel prefer a return to the pre-1967 border that allowed the Arab nations to almost bisect the country on their two invasions of Israel. An Israeli rejection of the proposal after the effort Abbas must make to stage the referendum would have serious diplomatic blowback in Europe.

It likely will never get to that stage, however. Hamas cannot afford to lose that kind of election, and they will accelerate their efforts to seize control of the West Bank and Gaza to stop Abbas from holding the election. Fatah will fight Hamas in the streets to protect Abbas' executive privileges, whether they truly exist or not, and civil war will break out instead of elections. Leaders of both parties will become targets for assassins, and when the smoke clears both parties will have lost ground with the people. It might take that to get the Palestinians to find serious leadership.

Fighting The Symptom And Not The Disease

President Bush, as expected, spoke today on behalf of efforts to amend the Constitution to establish a definition of marriage outside the reach of judicial mischief. To no one's surprise, the definition establishes "one man, one woman" as the national standard. He gave this statement at a speech this afternoon, some of which I heard live and the rest from a recording of the event:

This week, the Senate begins debate on the Marriage Protection Amendment, and I call on the Congress to pass this amendment, send it to the states for ratification so we can take this issue out of the hands of over-reaching judges and put it back where it belongs -- in the hands of the American people.

The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution. For ages, in every culture, human beings have understood that marriage is critical to the well-being of families. And because families pass along values and shape character, marriage is also critical to the health of society. Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them. And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure. ...

Today, 45 of the 50 states have either a state constitutional amendment or statute defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman. These amendments and laws express a broad consensus in our country for protecting the institution of marriage. The people have spoken. Unfortunately, this consensus is being undermined by activist judges and local officials who have struck down state laws protecting marriage and made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage.

Since 2004, state courts in Washington and California and Maryland and New York have ruled against marriage laws. Last year, a federal judge in Nebraska overturned a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, an amendment that was approved by 70 percent of the population. And at this moment, nine states face lawsuits challenging the marriage laws they have on the books.

I know that this topic gets the conservative base cranked at election time. When he covered the state GOP convention last week, King Banaian told me that nothing generated louder applause and cheers than the mention of Republican opposition to gay marriage. The problem for me is that this is really two separate issues, especially in the framing Bush used, and the crux really has almost nothing to do with allowing gays to have civil marriages or not.

For the record, it makes little difference to me whether gays marry or form civil unions. The two states are identical in law, with the one caveat that a civil-union contract might be more binding than a marriage, at least legally. Marriage is the only contractual relationship that one partner can end with no penalty, at least in most states. Try that with a prenuptial agreement, however, and one will be surprised at the way the law handles those contracts, a strange bit of irony for a society that supposedly must protect marriage in its current state. Civil law gave up protecting the sanctity of marriage decades ago. If Andrew Sullivan wants to marry his significant other, it has no affect on my relationship with the First Mate; if I was that insecure, I never would have gotten married in the first place.

What matters to me is that decisions about the nature of public policy get made in a democratic fashion. Marriage is a public recognition of a legal status between two people, and the public has the right and responsibility to define that as they see fit. The lack of a marriage option does not mean that the government has banned gay relationships, but that public policy decided by the people or their representatives choose not to bestow any legal recognition to the relationship. Laws defining marriage at the "one man, one woman" standard do not intrude into the bedroom, but do define how the government chooses to recognize relationships, and that decision belongs to the people.

From my perspective, judicial activism offends the conservative base much more than gay marriage itself. Why not, then, just concentrate on that? Bush hit the nail on the head when he noted that judicial intrusion on decisions made by the people on this issue require a Constitutional amendment to remedy. Jurists at all levels must decide these matters within the framework of that document. However, the approach endorsed by Bush and some of the GOP would eventually transform the simple clarity of our Constitution into a miniature version of the US penal code, with marriage amendments, flag-burning amendments, and so on.

The simpler solution would be to craft an amendment that requires a literal reading of the Constitution, one that forbids jurists from using emanations from penumbras to create unassailable public-policy decisions that should be left to the people. This would have a number of salutary effects. First, it would greatly reduce the partisan warfare over judicial appointments. Instead of playing hide-and-seek with nominees to find out whether they think an amendment prohibiting unreasonable seizure means that teenagers can have abortions without parental consent, we can stick to how learned and capable nominees are and whether their experience qualifies them for a seat on the bench. In many cases, it would force policy back to the states where it belongs, and limit federal power to the original intent of the framers. Such an amendment would also negate the impulse among activists of all stripes to achieve policy victories in the courts rather than in the legislatures where they know they cannot win. Finally, it would put to rest these tiresome and rabble-rousing initiatives that have no prayer of actually winning.

That's a Constitutional amendment that I could support. That would return political power -- and accountability -- to Congress and the states, those places where the people provide for their own rule under the original intent and genius of the Constitution. It would make these arguments moot, and allow our representatives to do their jobs the way our Founders intended.

UPDATE: Hot Air has a roundup of reactions from the starboard side of the blogosphere -- and surprisingly, most conservatives have grown tired of this debate. Patterico, La Shawn Barber, Confederate Yankee, and the Political Pit Bull all oppose the effort. Does anyone like it?

First Mate Update, Rarified Air Edition

The news has not been good on the home front the past few days. The First Mate came home from the hospital last Tuesday evening to try to recover from her CMV infection. She ran fevers most of the week, sometimes as high as 103, and felt weak and unable to do much outside of restroom visits. Last Friday night, her fever finally broke and I hoped we would be heading for some improvement this weekend, but unfortunately, that didn't happen.

On Saturday, she got disoriented and slipped down the stairs. She didn't get injured, but she obviously had some problems in moving around that required constant assistance when she wanted to walk. On Sunday morning, she wanted to eat breakfast in the dining room (which is on the same level as the bedroom), and I thought that might perk her spirits up. Unfortunately, she collapsed a couple of steps away from the chair. While we struggled to get her into the chair, she became unresponsive and then started convulsing. I called an ambulance, but by the time they arrived she had shaken it off. We took her to the hospital, where they determined her oxygenation level was too low (hypoxia) and her labs were off, especially her postassium (too low).

After six hours in the ER, however, the FM insisted that she was OK and wanted to go home. Neither I nor the doctors could talk her into getting admitted, so home we went, with oxygen and a wheelchair, and an oxygenator when we arrived home. Once we got home, she once again collapsed when getting out of the car in the garage. I hosted her into a folding chair and called our son. The two of us carried her up the stairs to the bedroom and got oxygen on her fast, and she came around almost immediately. Later, when she tried to use the restroom, the same thing happened, and our son and I and our roommate heaved her back into bed and increased the oxygen.

We then proceeded to have what diplomats call "intense negotiations" about returning to the hospital in the morning, with the Captain finally asserting his maritime authority and issuing a diktat to that effect. The entire family sacked out at the house, and the two young men returned her to the hospital this morning. Until she can stabilize her blood chemistry and resolve the hypoxia, she will likely remain in an intermediate care facility for the next couple of weeks.

So now I'm home alone (and blogging, natch) with a wrenched back and have to take Prednisone and Vicodin for the next few days. I barely made it to work today, and hopefully that will improve enough so that I can tackle going to the hospital for visits. I'm hardly the big issue, though. The mini-blackouts associated with these episodes have the FM pretty frightened, and we're waiting to see what the MRIs taken today will reveal. She certainly can use your prayers and thoughts in the next few days, and I will update you as I know more.

Lipscomb Fisks The Gray Lady

Thomas Lipscomb, whose writing on the John Kerry campaign in 2004 earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination, has fired a salvo back at Kate Zernike and her article on Kerry's attempt to re-engage on the Swift Boat campaign. In an article at Real Clear Politics, Lipscomb deftly points out the journalistic, evidentiary, and logical flaws in Zernike's rather naive reporting:

Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.

But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.

Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.

One would think that after eighteen months, if anyone wanted to dredge this up again, a reporter would want to do so in order to achieve more clarity on the allegations. Instead, Zernike used these as a platform for Kerry to make even more unsubstantiated statements, such as the notion that he and his supporters had gathered evidence that would show all of the charges made by the SBVFT as baseless lies. Wouldn't a reporter ask to see that evidence? Wouldn't that kind of scoop put her on the top echelon of the media? Instead, Zernike did little more than take dictation from Kerry and his cohorts, as Lipscomb repeatedly demonstrates.

Read the entire article. I couldn't agree more with Lipscomb's conclusion -- if the media wants to re-open this as a story, it should be prepared to demand all of the records from Kerry as well as thoroughly review the evidence gathered by the 250 veterans who opposed Kerry's bid for the presidency. If no one is prepared for that commitment, then it should remain where the voters left it in November 2004.

Do They Know Something We Don't?

Iranians have begun exporting their savings into international banks, also buying gold at an accelerated rate, according to the Wshington Times. This panic demonstrates that the Iranians understand the position that Ahmadinejad has placed their nation -- or perhaps it demonstrates something else entirely:

Threats of an international financial squeeze stemming from the showdown over Iran's nuclear program have sent Iranians scrambling to get their savings out of the country, or if that won't work, to convert them into gold.

An estimated $200 billion has left the country since last year's election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, accompanied by panic buying of gold. The Iranian stock exchange lost an estimated 20 percent of its value even as other bourses in the region rose.

"The most tangible effect of the threat of sanctions in the private sector is downsizing," said Farhad Sanadizadeh, a Tehran-based oil and gas consultant who has let 40 employees go in the past six months. "A lot of companies are not hiring new people and reducing their work force."

Last week, it was disclosed that most European banks are no longer facilitating money transfers from Iranian banks. Iran has already removed most of its capital from European banks, according to press reports, fearing a possible assets freeze.

The explanation of avoiding sanctions makes some sense, especially for the gold purchases. Gold never loses much value, and in a time of economic chaos, it carries a unique cachet (diamonds might share it) that magnifies its worth. However, if international sanctions were to be applied, then the act of sending the funds to overseas accounts makes no sense at all. The sanctions would leave Iranians unable to access those funds from inside Iran.

That kind of strategy appears more likely a preparation for war. If the US attacks Iran, which this seems to indicate is the prime worry of the Iranian people, then any funds in Iranian banks might well be lost if the nation collapses. In the final extremity, the mullahcracy might confiscate those funds, leaving Iranians who kept their savings in domestic banks destitute. Moving $200 billion outside of Iran ensures that survivors of the feared conflict could once again get back on their feet in short order.

Either way, it demonstrates that the Iranians are very worried about the direction Ahmadinejad has taken with his nuclear brinksmanship. This unrest translates into a high-stakes gamble with the West. If the West calls Iran's bluff, the economic panic could easily trigger a political crisis that could topple the mullahcracy altogether. It reveals a highly pessimistic attitude among Iranians, and the risk for the US would be in contradicting their expectations. Remember, the German people went through the same roller coaster with Hitler in the several diplomatic confrontations with the West prior to 1939, and his diplonatic victories against seemingly impossible odds convinced more and more of them of Hitler's invincibility and their own.

We need to remain firm in our resolve, and not allow Ahmadinejad to win such an important victory. The Iranians are on the run financially, and we need to make sure they stay that way.

The Broad Strata And Its Narrow-Minded Origins

The supposedly "broad strata" of society whence the Canadian terror cell sprang had an unusually narrow base: a single mosque in Mississauga. The eldest of the cell and apparently its ringleader, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, sat on the mosque's board and led prayers while organizing this conspiracy to attack Canadian targets:

Several of the people arrested by Canadian authorities in a huge counterterrorism sweep over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in a middle-class neighborhood of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns.

The eldest of the 17 Canadian residents arrested in the sweep, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was described by his lawyer as an active member of the mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, though not its leader.

"He's on the board, he's there regularly, but he's not an imam," said Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from this Toronto suburb who were arrested Friday night and who also attended the same mosque. "He's one of about a half dozen people who lead prayers at the mosque."

Of course, we are to take no notice of these keys to the conspiracy. Heaven forfend we draw conclusions about the nature of the cell's motivation just because a number of them attended the same mosque. On the other hand, one of the spokespeople for the Canadian Muslim Congress did have a good point about Jamal, noting that he was not considered an imam:

"I do not think of him as an imam," Tareeq Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said. "People like him are freelancers. I don't fear imams. I fear freelancers who are creating a Islamacist, supremacist cult."

I can understand the problem Fatah describes, one which Christianity has experienced since the Reformation. When people take it upon themselves to interpret religious writings on their own with varying degrees of regard for the history of its understanding, very strange ideas can erupt, including violent cults. However, the solution to that would be to bar non-imams from leadership roles within mosques. Besides, other mosques have turned themselves into terrorist recruitment facilities with the leadership and assistance of imams, notably in Great Britain.

Please read the entire article by Anthony DePalma and Ian Austen to get a sense of what media outlets do when they have no fresh information to report. The last half of the article is absolutely hilarious, an assortment of off-topic trivia that practically screams "filler". The Gray Lady informs us that:

* Jamal lived in a handicapped-accessible apartment, but didn't use a wheelchair (think that might finally anger the PC crowd?)

* The mosque has lots of books

* Apparently, women must enter the mosque through a side door (and it was locked!! Discrimination squared!!)

* A car outside Jamal's home had an illustrated guide to understanding Islam on its dashboard

Truly, this enlightens us about the nature of the Islamist terror cell and of Islam in general. This is the kind of reporting that can only be done in the mainstream media, filtered through those multiple levels of editorial checks that ensures the highest quality output. The blogosphere stands in awe.

One Last Word On New York City's Finances

The cuts to the DHS grant program of 34% from fiscal year 2005 have created a wailing and gnashing of teeth in New York, where elected officials have made accusations that DHS chief Michael Chertoff has "declared war" on the Big Apple for cutting UASI funding by 40%, along with Washington DC. The DHS did not help its case when their evaluation of the city's application resolved that NYC had no monuments or national icons, although as Newsweek reported yesterday, that description unfairly portrayed the analysis:

The "risk" score sheets, based partially on classified data that included "suspicious incidents," "FBI Cases" and "Intelligence Community Reports," said New York had no "national monuments and icons," four "banking and finance" institutions with assets greater than $8 billion and two nuclear facilities. (The D.C. region was rated as having 18 monuments or icons, 2 major banking or finance institutions and 7 nuclear facilities.) "It's outrageous that these bean counters don't think the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building are national monuments or icons," said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Homeland Assistant Secretary Tracy Henke, a former GOP Senate aide, told NEWSWEEK that, in the Feds' assessment, the Empire State Building was counted as a tall building and the Brooklyn Bridge as a vital transportation facility. (The Statue of Liberty was counted as a New York state, rather than NYC, asset.)

In fact, the article makes clear that the DHS used a team comprised of dozens of state and city homeland-security officials who reveiwed the applications and provided as rational an analysis as possible. The resulting funding decisions, made with a budget reduced by a third from FY05, did cut NYC's UASI grants by 40%. However, that had the effect of cutting NYC's share of the total UASI outlays from 25% to 18% -- still giving Gotham by far the biggest slice of the pie. Los Angeles moves up to second place with 11.3% (8.35% FY05) and DC (6.5%, 9.3% FY05) drops below Chicago (7.35%, 5.4% FY05) for fourth place. This appears to be reasonable based on population centers, and one could argue that Los Angeles may have required a bigger portion of the funding due to the size of the territory. And when one looks at the DHS grants by state, which includes UASI spending, New York has substantially the same share of the reduced budget as it did last year (10.9% FY06, 11.8% FY05).

The picture becomes even more clear when one takes a look at the annual budget for New York City, a $53 billion behemoth that already soaks up more than its share of federal grant money. For FY06 alone, federal categorical grants came to $5.6 billion dollars, or about sixty-seven times what the DHS cut from the UASI grant program for the city. Federal and state grants comprised 28% of the revenues for New York City in FY06. In fact, from FY95 to FY05, federal grants to NYC grew 41%, a substantial portion of which came from 9/11 abatement aid. State grants rose 37% during the same decade. However, not all of the federal grant money came from security concerns; education grants rose 71%.

For purposes of comparison, the state budget of Minnesota comes to $32 billion -- for two years. Take a look through the detail of our biennial budget and see if you can find federal grants in any significance. We will receive about $10 million over the next two years for DHS grants, but if we total $500 million during that period in federal grant monies, I can't see it anywhere. And Minnesota not only has a population approaching that of NYC (6 million vs 8 million), but we also have had several high-profille terrorism arrests, centering on our burgeoning Muslim population.

New York City, far from being "disarmed" as some would describe it, still has a huge chunk of the UASI grant funds. The state of New York has its share of overall DHS funds. And anyone who can argue with a straight face that the federal government neglects New York City is either a demagogue or an economic illiterate. (via an anonymous CQ reader)

Ahmadinejad: I've Got A Secret

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to publicly release the package offered by Western nations for an end to Teheran's uranium-enrichment program. Brushing off a warning from Kofi Annan, Ahmadinejad says he wants his people to remain fully informed of the situation:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday that Iran would publish details of the package of incentives and possible penalties prepared by the United States and five other major powers aimed at halting Iran's nuclear program.

In a speech in which he warned Iran's critics against "threats and intimidation," Ahmadinejad seemed to sweep aside a request by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to keep the process confidential. Western diplomats had said they were trying to avoid the appearance of threatening Iran by keeping the terms of the package as private as possible, especially the specific penalties Iran might face if it continues to enrich uranium.

"We will record the talks and we will publish them at the appropriate time, so our people will be informed about the details," Ahmadinejad said in his first speech since the package was agreed upon by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany.

Addressing a crowd of government loyalists at the tomb of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's theocratic state, Ahmadinejad said Iran would not prejudge the offer from the United States and the other countries. But he reiterated Iran's refusal to cease enriching uranium as a condition for formal negotiations, saying, "The Iranian nation's right to nuclear technology and power is legal and definite, and we will not talk about these issues."

Some commentators wondered whether the package contained any sticks to go along with the carrots at all, as Russia and China have continually said that they believe sanctions of any kind were "premature" at this stage. This threat implies that the package does specify some negative consequences for Iranian obstinacy. If so, then Ahmadinejad's action will surely embarrass his putative allies in this issue. Russian and Chinese promises of sanctions would expose their diplomats as disingenuous to the Iranian people.

On the other hand, although it is difficult to assume that Ahmadinejad is a rational actor, this would seem to cut off his nose to spite his face. Why antagonize Russia and China, when they are all that separates Iran from a backbreaking sanctions regime? Let's return to that in a moment.

The other option is that the package contains absolutely no sticks whatsoever. Ahmadinejad might delight in exposing this to his people to show that Uncle Satan Sam has no teeth at all. Such humiliation would play well with the hardliners and could demoralize the democracy activists. It would also anger the US once we found out that we offered direct talks and a light-water reactor while specifying no consequences for refusal. The Bush administration might get flak from both right and left, further weakening his flexibility on Iran.

And here's where both ends meet. If Ahmadinejad wants to humiliate Russia and China, then the West will finally be able to get tough on Iran, through the UN Security Council in all likelihood. If Ahmadinejad wants to humiliate Bush, the political fallout from such a move would almost ensure that America will have to toughen its stance, bringing an end to any diplomatic rapprochement. Both cases almost ensure some kind of severe diplomatic break.

As I have written before -- that's exactly what Ahmadinejad wants. He is neither rational nor irrational, but non-rational. His messianic strain of Shi'ism drives him to believe in a world catastrophe in which the Twelfth Imam will arise and take control of the entire world. Everything Ahmadinejad does is completely understandable in this context. His efforts to derive nuclear material for a bomb is the most public of his efforts to create explosions of every kind, and to put Iran in the center of the maelstrom. He's planning for Islam's transcendancy, not in a strictly corporeal sense but in a spiritual sense as well.

In poker terms, this man is all in for the pot. And it has become increasingly clear that he isn't bluffing for the final hand.

This ... Is GJN

As more information comes to light about the terror cell in Toronto smashed by Canadian authorities, the picture emerging is that of a global jihadist network that apparently does not require professionalism or guile to join. As this episode shows, any group of Muslims filled with enough hate for motivation can work through the Internet and a system of mosques to find like-minded terrorist wannabes and the resources to make their dreams come true:

A Canadian counter-terrorism investigation that led to the arrests of 17 people accused of plotting bombings in Ontario is linked to probes in a half-dozen countries, the National Post has learned.

Well before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh.

The six-month RCMP investigation, called Project OSage, is one of several overlapping probes that include an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar. ...

The Toronto busts are linked to arrests that began last August at a Canadian border post near Niagara Falls and continued in October in Sarajevo, London and Scandinavia, and earlier this year in New York and Georgia.

The FBI confirmed Saturday the arrests were related to the recent indictments in the U.S. of Ehsanul Sadequee and Syed Ahmed, who are accused of meeting with extremists in Toronto last March to discuss terrorist training and plots.

This should send chills through Western populations and open eyes as to the nature of the terrorist enemy. Seventeen native-born Canadians, whose families apparently had no connection to radical Islam, managed to plug themselves into a network that spanned six nations and literally went around the world, despite their amateur status. How did this happen? How can a group this large and inexperienced make such inroads into a jihadi network?

In short, the network itself has become so decentralized that it is almost as easy as plugging a laptop into a wide-area network jack, figuratively as well as literally. With the demolition of al-Qaeda's functional leadership, the lack of direction has moved the jihadi movement from the hills of Afghanistan to a system of mosques and imams, preaching their own brand of hatred. Young men looking for a cause or an outlet for their frustrations can easily find these Muslim supremacists. If they can't find them physically, they can certainly find them with just a few minutes on the Internet. This particular group found each other, and then found like-minded prototerrorists in five other nations, including the US.

The above is the bad news. The good news is that the rapid decentralization of Islamic terror has led to a rapid decline in the discipline and quality of the jihadis. The Canadians caught up with this group two years ago and have followed them closely, apparently never tipping their hand to the seventeen bright lights they arrested yesterday and the day before. By monitoring their Internet communications, they not only discovered this cell but also others around the world, all of whom have now been neutralized as threats. The increasing reliance on amateurs like the Toronto 17 makes it more likely that we will continue to root out their partners, wherever they may be.

After a couple of months of agonizing over the efforts made by agencies to monitor communications traffic for terrorist contacts, this should explain why such efforts remain necessary. As long as the West wishes to remain free, it has to find ways to detect and neutralize those threats that, if their plans were ever realized, would push us towards greater restrictions than ever before. We need to demonstrate to the amateurs that they have no percentage in attempting to organize for terrorist attacks. This six-nation effort has made that point.

RCMP Went Undercover For Raid

The Toronto Star reports this morning that the RCMP itself sold the Toronto terror cell the three tons of ammonium nitrate it planned to use for devastating attacks on Canada. The Mounties moved to capture all of the suspects as soon as the deal for the fertilizer concluded:

The delivery of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate to a group suspected of plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario was part of an undercover police sting operation, the Toronto Star has learned.

The RCMP said yesterday that after investigating the alleged homegrown terrorist cell for months, they had to move quickly Friday night to arrest 12 men and five youths before the group could launch a bomb attack on Canadian soil.

Sources say investigators who had learned of the group's alleged plan to build a bomb were controlling the sale and transport of the massive amount of fertilizer, a key component in creating explosives. Once the deal was done, the RCMP-led anti-terrorism task force moved in for the arrests. ...

It's still unclear how the group of suspects is connected and police yesterday offered few details of its alleged activities. But sources close to the investigation told the Star that the investigation began in2004 when CSIS began monitoring fundamentalist Internet sites and their users.

They later began monitoring a group of young men, and the RCMP launched a criminal investigation. Police allege the group later picked targets and plotted attacks. Last winter some members of the group, including the teenagers, went to a field north of the city, where they allegedly trained for an attack and made a video imitating warfare.Sources said some of the younger members forged letters about a bogus school trip to give to their parents so they could attend.

That probably means that they have everyone in custody they want. The RCMP has clearly taken its time to hook these fish, and for that matter knew which bait to use.

From the description of the Star, the suspects had long since progressed from mere campfire talk to active preparation for attacks. Earlier reports had only mentioned a list of targets, something that could have been argued as merely childish spitballing among friends. If the RCMP has videos of training and the notes used by some of the younger suspects to lie about their whereabouts, it shows a much more explicit commitment to the conspiracy.

Predictably, the attorneys continue to lament the focus on Muslims while the Canadian government tries to pretend it doesn't exist. Both gain themselves little credibility in either effort. Luc Portelance of the CSIS, whom one presumes knows better, tapdanced around motivation in statements yesterday:

Yesterday, officials offered few details about the suspects or how they met, saying only they come from a "variety of backgrounds" and represented a broad strata, including students, the employed and unemployed.

"It is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community or ethnocultural group in Canada," said Portelance. "Terrorism is a dangerous ideology, and a global phenomenon. ... Canada is not immune from this ideology."

When asked why Canadians would want to attack targets in Canada, Portelance said: "Clearly, they're motivated by some of the things we see around the world," he said.

"They're against the Western influences in Islamic countries and have an adherence to violence to reach a political objective. But as far as the specific motivators, I think they probably change from individual to individual."

Yes, he offered more of the "broad strata" argument. However, where Portelance sees a clear connection to world events, the rest of us mere mortals only need to scan the list of suspects to understand that all of these Canadians are Muslims. In most investigations, at least pre-political correctness, that kind of connection would be determinative. When three mouthbreathing morons dragged James Byrd to his death in Texas, their racism made clear what their motivation was, even though there are plenty of racists who would never have gone that far with their hateful ideology. No one much doubted the motive, and law enforcement didn't pretend Byrd's grotesque murder had some inspiration from "world events". When Eric Rudolph blew up abortion clinics and eventually was discovered to have detonated the Atlanta Olympic bomb, no one thought that he found motivation from "world events". Why do Western governments find it so difficult to abandon this transparent folly?

Sometimes, as Sigmund Freud once famously remarked, a cigar is just a cigar.