Janes: North Korea To Launch Taepodong-2

In the wake of the escalation from Hamas in Gaza this week, the North Korean standoff has received less attention of late. However, Jane's Defense Weeky reports that the Kim Jong-Il regime still intends to launch its Taepodong-2 missile. At least JDW thinks it's a TD2, because according to Joseph Bermudez, no one's still quite sure what they have on the launch pad:

For the past six weeks, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) has been preparing to launch what appears to be a prototype Taepo Dong 2 ballistic missile. ...

As of the last week in June, it appeared that the Taepo Dong 2 was fuelled and prepared for launch on the command of leader Kim Jong-il, but three questions remain: Is it a ballistic missile or an SLV carrying a second North Korean satellite? Why has it not been launched? Will it ultimately be launched? Whether it is a ballistic missile or an SLV, the issues to be tested during a launch (such as clustering, stage separation, etc) are equally applicable to either system from a scientific and technical perspective.

A successful launch of either will dramatically increase the international prestige – or threat, depending on one’s view – of North Korea. Reflecting differing political views on how to deal with North Korea, the US and Japan have
repeatedly identified it as a ballistic missile, while South Korea has suggested it is an SLV.

Despite earlier reports, no one really knows whether the rocket on the pad has been fuelled. JDW also notes that the rocket could remain fuelled for several weeks, not hours as commonly thought. The weather has also been too poor for a clean launch from the Korean peninsula the last couple of weeks. The Chinese have made it clear to Kim that they do not want to see the TD2 launched, at least not at the moment.

Still, JDW expects to see the missile launched. Bermudez points out that Kim has not yet won a political victory, and until he gets one, that missile will likely fly this summer.

Israel Follows Through On Threat

According to an MS-NBC report, the Israelis have made good on their threat to target Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the war that the Palestinians touched off by kidnapping an Israeli soldier on Israeli land. The IDF bombed the Hamas Prime Minister's offices earlier, according to witnesses who saw the attack (h/t Michael van der Galien, also of TMV):

An Israeli helicopter gunship fired at least one missile at the Gaza City office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh early on Sunday, witnesses said.

They said Haniyeh, a top Hamas official, was not believed to be in the office at the time.

On Saturday, Palestinian militants holding an Israeli soldier issued a new set of demands, calling for the release of 1,000 prisoners and a halt to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. But Israel rejected them.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian deputy minister of prisoner affairs, Ziad Abu Aen, said mediators had told him the Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was injured in the June 25 raid in which he was captured but was alive. “He has three wounds. I guess shrapnel wounds,” Abu Aen said, adding that Shalit was in stable condition.

The attack sent a message to Haniyeh. The Israelis knew his offices would not be occupied early on a Sunday morning, especially after the capture of dozens of his parliamentary contingent and Cabinet officials. They wanted to make sure that Haniyeh understands that this situation has no relation to the normal rhetorical banter. The IDF will kill Haniyeh if given the chance as an answer to the ridiculous demands of Gilad Shalit's kidnappers.

MS-NBC's report shows that the Israelis have correctly deduced the nature of the abduction. The Palestinian Authority knows how to find Shalit and knows who committed an act of war on their behalf. Instead of arresting them and returning Shalit to the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority has decided to allow these terrorists to conduct negotiations with a sovereign state to resolve the crisis. Even if the terrorists did not have the imprimatur of the PA when they raided Israel from unoccupied Gaza, which is highly unlikely, the PA's actions in the aftermath means that they have taken responsibility for those acts.

The Palestinian endorsement, tacit or explicit, makes them complicit in this act of war. Israel has finally taken them at their word, after months of rocket attacks from Gaza that the PA refused to address. The Palestinians got the war they demanded when they put Hamas in charge and failed to strip the terrorist groups of their arms, and the West should take no action to shield them from the consequences of their own actions.

UPDATE: Had the time wrong; correction courtesy of Arb in the comments.

Osama: Baghdad Is The Center Of The War

Osama bin Laden apparently has a different take on the global war on terror than many in Congress. While we have heard arguments about how Iraq provided nothing more than a diversion, the gaining strength of the new representative Iraqi government has convinced Osama of the critical need to stop it. In his Internet address to the faithful jihadis, Osama urges them to put all of their efforts to pull down the new democracy in Southwest Asia lest his entire life's work collapse:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden urged Iraqi militants in an Internet message Saturday to continue fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, or else "all the capitals in the region will fall to the crusaders." ...

The message urged militants in Iraq to continue their fight.

"Stay steadfast and don't leave Baghdad, otherwise all the capitals in the region will fall to the crusaders," said the message.

"Your Muslim nation is looking for you and praying for your victory. You are their hope after God. You are God's trusted soldiers who will liberate the ummah (the nation) from the serfdom of the crusaders in our countries," bin Laden said in the posting.

Osama also endorsed the selection of Abu Hamza al-Muhajer as the replacement target for Iraqi and American forces in Iraq now that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi continues in his long struggle to remain dead. His exhortation to Islamic lunatics everywhere reveals the desperation of his enterprise. Not only has the new democracy shown that Muslims can rule themselves without a strongman, it also appears to have built enough domestic support to resist the brutal charms of radical Islam. The Iraqis have shown their belief in liberty by voting in the millions on three separate occasions, walking for miles while the terrorists and insurgents have done their best to frighten them into obedience to Osama's oppressive vision.

The center of the Islamist project has definitely become Baghdad, and they are losing ... badly. Osama knows it, the foreign terrorists in Iraq know it, the native insurgents welcome it, and the Iraqis increasingly drive that point home on their own. In his last moments on that stretcher, Zarqawi knew it, too. Mujaher knows it, and Osama has given him the impossible task of attempting to terrorize the Iraqis into submission. Saddam managed it only by seizing control of the government and military. Mujaher will not get any chance at all at that path to power, not while the newly-freed Iraqis have anything to say about it.

Osama also praised the installation of the Islamist regime in Somalia, reminding everyone that our retreat from there in late 1993 showed us to have no tenacity in fighting Islamofascism. Even Osama can't pretend that the situation hasn't changed in the thirteen years since that ignominious "redeployment", the one John Murtha hails as a military victory. The only people still able to pretend that 1993 still exists is a rapidly diminishing group of Democratic politicians led by Murtha, John Kerry, and Russ Feingold.

Baghdad is the crucible for the Islamists and for the West. A victory for one will cripple the other. Osama sees which way this battle is going and has fewer and fewer nutcases willing to die for a lost cause there.

Fox Poll Shows Bush Solidifying The Base

A new poll by Fox News shows Bush gaining support, especially from his base, in the wake of the Democrats' attempts to force a withdrawal from Iraq. His overall job approval has held steady at 41%, up from the low 30s before the retreat/withdrawal/redeployment strategies of the Democrats took center stage. The good news for the White House does not end there:

President Bush’s job rating is holding ground as 41 percent of Americans say they approve of his performance and 50 percent disapprove. Earlier this month, soon after terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Bush hit 40 percent for the first time in months. His current approval rating is 8 percentage points higher than his record low of 33 percent earlier this year (April 18-19).

The partisan divide is evident throughout many of the poll results, including the president’s job rating: most Republicans (79 percent) approve of Bush’s performance and most Democrats disapprove (83 percent).

“While Bush has gained a little support across the board, most of his gain from the low point has come by reinforcing his base,” comments Opinion Dynamics Chairman John Gorman. “His political advisers have always been most concerned with the Republican/conservative base and you see a wide range of initiatives both substantive and symbolic designed to rally and motivate that base.”

The base still has major issues with the administration, especially on immigration. They want a borders-first approach that Bush has declined to substantively support to this point. They want him to get serious about filling the judicial openings, especially the two on the DC appellate court that still remain open. Spending issues cause even more friction. However, the Democrats did Bush a huge favor this year, spearheaded by Russ Feingold, John Murtha, and John Kerry, by trying to undercut the war on terror. That effort reminded the base exactly what they risked with a total disaffection from Bush this November.

The poll holds other good news, as noted by Hot Air. The public in general supported the Swift program of tracking terrorist money by a similar level as that of the NSA programs also revealed by the New York Times. It received an overall level of support of 70%, with majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all believing to be beneficial to our national security.

The media may not like these results very much. While a majority of Americans rightly blamed the leakers for exposing the program (51%), 43% called the media's actions "treason" and two-thirds believe they should be indicted for their efforts to publish the information. By a wide margin, Americans believe that the media damaged the nation rather than strengthened it with its reporting on covert tactics (60%-27%). Not too many believed Bill Keller's explanation that the Times published it with its civic obligations in mind; only 37% bought that argument.

The gap between Democrats and Republicans in a generic run for Congress dropped significantly from earlier this year. That had registered in double digits at one point, fueling Democratic hopes for a takeover in the House. Now that gap has narrowed to six points, just over the margin of error and too close to hope for any significant gains. The Republicans have reasserted their advantage on national security, with an 11-point gap. The Democrats have the advantage on the economy by eight points -- but with the Bush economy continuing its strong run, expect the GOP to start hammering on their record of success to narrow that advantage.

These numbers bode ill for Democrats, only five months away from the election. If these trends continue, they will face their fourth straight humiliation -- and they will only have themselves to blame.

Ronnie Earle Gets Some Comeuppance

A federal judge issued a little-noticed ruling that spells trouble for Travis County DA Ronnie Earle and his obsession with Tom DeLay. Dryly calling Earle's efforts "innovative", Judge Mike Lynch ruled that political groups broke no state laws against political coordination, one of the keystones of Earle's efforts to indict DeLay (h/t: CQ reader Gregg G):

A state district judge dealt a crippling blow Thursday to the nearly four-year prosecution of the Texas Association of Business, throwing out a felony indictment against the state's largest business organization.

District Judge Mike Lynch ruled that 2002 pre-election ads produced by the group did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of Texas legislative candidates. Travis County prosecutors had said the group broke state election law by using corporate money to support candidates.

Lynch's ruling put in doubt two other similar indictments pending against the organization by also discounting prosecutors' alternative theory that the ads became illegal when the association coordinated them with other political groups. Lynch called the prosecutors' argument "innovative" but concluded that state law does not cover it.

Austin lawyer Roy Minton, who represents the business association, predicted that Lynch's decision ultimately would be the end of the lengthy prosecution: "I believe the basic position the court has taken is going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for the state to prosecute TAB."

Even as critics warned that the ruling would open the floodgates to more secret money in state politics, District Attorney Ronnie Earle said he would pursue prosecution of a fourth indictment accusing the association of making an illegal contribution to its own political action committee. He also will probably appeal Lynch's ruling.

Illegal coordination goes to the heart of Earle's case against DeLay as well, and relies on the same legal interpretations. Lynch called Earle's arguments a "convoluted maze" that kept defendants in the dark about what laws they had supposedly violated. "You cannot make a silk purse out of this sow's ear," Lynch scolded Earle as he dismissed the charges. Even attorneys representing Democrats noted that the criminal application of these laws overreached.

DeLay and his legal team have to take some grim satisfaction from Lynch's ruling. He revealed Earle as an "innovator", which in less polite terms means someone who makes up law for his own purposes. His years-long political vendetta against DeLay and the Republican Party appears to have finally come up against a clear application of the law.

Why The UN Is Useless, Part 86d

The new Human Rights Council has already shown that it fits right into the political and cultural viewpoint of the General Assembly. It voted yesterday to dedicate itself to the deliberate targeting of the one nation it sees as the largest human-rights problem in the world -- Israel:

The new UN Human Rights Council voted Friday to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session.

The resolution, which was sponsored by Islamic countries, was passed by a vote of 29-12, with five abstentions. It effectively revives a practice of the UN's dissolved Human Rights Commission, which also reviewed alleged Israeli abuses every time it met.

Israel protested Friday's vote, calling it a perpetuation of "the old infamous habits" of the widely discredited commission.

The resolution requires UN investigators to report at each council session "on the Israeli human rights violations in occupied Palestine."

The resolution also said the council "decides to undertake substantive consideration of the human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories at its next session and to incorporate that issue in its following sessions."

Once again, we see that the UN has become corrupted by the anti-semitism and the dictatorships of its membership. This goes down the same corrupt path as the panel it replaced, avoiding consideration of real human-rights abusers such as Iran, Cuba, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia. Instead they attack Western democracies by attempting to paint them as evil oppressors when nothing could be further from the truth.

Let's look at Israel as an example, since they have made that their issue. Israel allows full suffrage for its citizens, even the Israeli Arabs. A handful sit in the Knesset, and they have their own political party. Most of the nations on the HRC don't even allow for multiparty democracy, let alone minority rights and freedom of expression. In terms of Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank, certainly some criticism is legitimate, but the overall context of the struggle they face there overwhelmingly shows them as sinned against much more than sinner. The HRC, in either incarnation, has never made an issue of Palestinian terrorism against explicitly civilian targets, making their approach to the conflict completely dishonest.

More than ever, it appears that real reform at the United Nations is impossible. The United States needs to cut funding for the kleptocrats at Turtle Bay and encourage as many of our allies to follow suit -- especially Japan, whose experience in the North Korea standoff might make them open to such a suggestion. When the money stops flowing into their accounts, the UN will get the message much more quickly than they have up to now. Defunding this mess also gives us the moral standing that refusing to enable corruption brings.

Do Political Leaders Make Legitimate Targets Of War?

Israel's threat to assassinate Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh if the terrorist group does not return Gilad Shalit unharmed has created an international uproar. Many pundits and diplomats have scolded Israel for escalating a conflict unnecessarily and issuing a threat they see as illegitimate. However, just as with some Americans almost five years after 9/11, people seem almost deliberately taking the warning out of its larger context.

First, the facts as reported by The Australian (via Hot Air):

ISRAEL last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.

The unprecedented warning was delivered to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter as Israel debated a deal offered by Hamas to free Corporal Gilad Shalit.

It came as Israeli military officials readied a second invasion force for a huge offensive into Gaza.

Not much in the way of confirmation has come through since this initial report. The Jerusalem Post does not have a story on its site this morning confirming this threat, nor does the BBC or other wire services have any other independent reporting on this. It may have been a false leak, intended to either make Israel look bad or appear out of patience with the situation.

However, if true, this threat has to be viewed in the larger context of both the immediate situation and the larger history of the conflict. The central fact of this incident is that Palestinians crossed over from unoccupied Gaza into Israel, and that the Palestinian government did not take action to either stop them or to return Gilad Shalit. In fact, Hamas gave the act its endorsement, and evidence exists that Hamas planned and executed the invasion. That makes it an act of war -- as if the daily shower of Kassam rockets from Gaza into Israel didn't already qualify for that status.

That means that the entire political structure as well as the military/security command becomes a fair target. The detention of Hamas ministers does not constitute any breach of the rules of war; as members of the opposing government, the IDF can target them for attack or capture. They should have POW status under those conditions, but they still are legitimate targets.

So too is Ismail Haniyeh. As Prime Minister, he runs the executive and again shares responsiblity for any acts of war committed by the Hamas terrorists. As the leader of Hamas, the terrorist actions of his group qualifies him for terrorist status as well. Besides, Palestinian threats to kill Israeli government officials hardly gives them any moral standing to complain about this particular threat.

Is the targeting of Haniyeh a wise move? Military strategy usually reserves attacks on political leadership as a last resort, as one needs a legitimate voice for the opponents to negotiate truces and/or surrenders when possible. However, one can easily argue that Haniyeh's role in terrorism strips him of that legitimacy. The Israelis can also argue with substantial cause that they need to make the so-called political wing of Hamas personally responsible for its terrorism, and that the IDF has tried just about everything else to make their point. That got underscored by Haniyeh himself when he declared that Hamas would never recognize Israel, implicitly or explicitly, and that the much-ballyhooed NCD did nothing towards resolving that point.

A nation at war with another state or protostate can legitimately target the political leadership of its opponents under the rules of war. Those who object to Israel's right to target Ismail Haniyeh either do not recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a war or are determined to oppose Israel under any and all conditions. The fact is that the Palestinians have conducted a low-level war against Israel ever since they pulled out of Gaza, and that the Israelis have finally responded in kind to this latest provocation.

Infirmary Update: On The Road Again

I had a productive day today, two weeks after my surgery, which is why posting has been light. I got to drive my own car for the first time in three weeks, just in the local neighborhood. I took the First Mate to dialysis under the watchful eye of my sister, who made sure that I didn't get in trouble. It felt great; I didn't realize how much being at the mercy of others for transportation needs had gotten me down. I even got the car washed and drove to my optometrist before picking the FM up from her appointment. The back got pretty sore by the time I finished, but it still felt pretty good to get out under my own steam.

The optometrist gave me less thrilling news, unfortunately. I haven't had an exam in three years, and my eyes have changed enough now where I need bifocals. That sends the message Welcome To Middle Age in letters big enough even for me to read them. I'll have to wear glasses everywhere now, which is pretty much what I had been doing with my reading glasses anyway. Also, the doctor spotted a retinal abnormality with the retinal photography this clinic uses. It looks like a little fluid has penetrated under the retina at the far edge of the right eye, along with some old spot bleeding. It may have been there all along, but she wants a retinal surgeon to take a look at it. At worst, I'll need some laser treatment to tack it back down, but it's small and in an area that doesn't affect my vision.

Let this be a reminder to you to have your eyes checked every year. Skipping your annual exam can be dangerous to your health. The FM, my sister, and the doctor all threatened me with physical violence if I miss another one, so that can serve as your example.

The FM continues to improve. The viral load on the BK infection has come down dramatically, but the CMV load has decreased only slightly. The hemoglobin still shows some instability, and now we think that one of her medications may be a contributing cause; the doctors have to all get together to review the pharmacology and determine if changes are needed. She still needs oxygenation, but her coloring and energy levels have improved quite a bit since her last hospitalization.

Hope all of you have a great weekend.

I Was A Teenage Maniac

The Globe & Mail continues its in-depth look into Canada's home-grown terrorists and how they became radicalized while living in a tolerant, multicultural Western society. Yesterday the G&M reviewed the case of Nada Farooq, the wife of Zakaria Amara, one of the cell's ringleaders. Today they focus on Amara himself:

More than anything, Zakaria Amara wanted to serve God. But it was never easy, especially not while living in Canada.

During the summer of 2004, the then-18-year-old felt disgusted by women who were immodestly dressed. For the same reason, he couldn't watch television. He and his wife Nada Farooq stopped going to movies. One of his devout friends in England sent him a desperate e-mail asking for help in beating an addiction to pornography.

But the forces tugging at Mr. Amara -- who now stands accused of being one of two leaders in a terrorist plot -- in the years leading up to his arrest this month extended well beyond those annoyances.

In 2004, he had just married a woman whose own take on Islam was often far more extreme than his own. His wife would soon become pregnant with their first child and, on little income, he struggled to balance the needs of his family and his dreams for the future. Some of his closest friends, and later fellow suspects, were also becoming more extreme. The preachers he admired -- both on-line and in Mississauga's mosques -- expressed often anti-Canadian sentiments.

Again, it seems that Canada never felt like home to these Muslims, prodded into separatism by radical imams and inspired by their Internet communications. He sees temptation everywhere, from television and films to daily interaction with secular Canadians. And while he grows more insistent on rejecting Western mores, he also becomes somewhat addicted to video games and surfing the Internet.

The Amara postings that G&M finds show someone with more than a little paranoia, feeding his identity as an outsider. Even his parents come under fire for taking a mortgage on their house, and later for demanding that he cut his hair after a hajj to Saudi Arabia. He also gets his share of disappointment for his commitment to Islam; a university in Medina rejected his application, forcing him to study at Ryerson Univeristy in Toronto instead of an Islamic college as he wanted.

Ultimately, Amara falls into relationships where his radical Islamic impulses find expression. He married his wife at 18, and as yesterday's installment shows, her radical religious philosophy far outstripped Amara's extremism, at least at first. He sought and found radical places of worship, eventually hooking up with the middle-aged Qayyum Abdul Jamal in an odd mentoring relationship. The pair wound up plotting together, and now will stand trial together.

Will this give Canadians any clue to solving the mystery of how Canadian citizens can grow up to be terrorists? Perhaps not explicitly. However, one point should be clear from the two articles: multiculturalism cannot replace assimilation. Canadian efforts to give Muslims the ability to conduct their own social interactions, including mediation of civil disputes in the mosques instead of the Canadian justice system, only increases the isolation and apartness of Muslims in their society. This should prompt Canadians -- and Americans as well -- to question previous assumptions of multiculturalism and its role in creating a tolerant and stable society.

Obama's Prayer For The Democrats

EJ Dionne takes note of the controversy created by former left-wing hero Barack Obama, who alienated a number of pundits when he scolded Democrats for eschewing religion in their politics. Dionne, whose writings often touch on matters of faith, schools Democrats to pay attention to Obama when he counsels an outreach to the faithful:

[T]here is often a terrible awkwardness among Democratic politicians when their talk turns to God, partly because they also know how important secular voters are to their coalition. When it comes to God, it's hard to triangulate.

So, when a religious Democrat speaks seriously about the relationship of faith to politics, the understandable temptation is to see him as counting not his blessings but his votes. Thus did the Associated Press headline its early stories about Barack Obama's speech to religious progressives on Wednesday: "Obama: Democrats Must Court Evangelicals."

Well, yes, Obama, the senator from Illinois who causes all kinds of Democrats to swoon, did indeed criticize "liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant." But a purely electoral reading of Obama's speech to the Call to Renewal conference here misses the point of what may be the most important pronouncement by a Democrat on faith and politics since John F. Kennedy's Houston speech in 1960 declaring his independence from the Vatican.

Obama, as Dionne explains, wants to move past the church-state separation arguments by emphasizing the benefits to the faithful of such an arrangement. However, this seems rather patronizing and pointless. Very few among the faithful -- I won't say none -- expect the US government to recast itself into a theocracy, where a Guardian Council of high priests pass judgement on all legislation. (We already have that with the Supreme Court, in some ways, which is why so many of us argue for the literal interpretation of the Constitution.)

We value the power granted to the people in crafting legislation, based on shared values and limited by the Constitution. What we do not appreciate is the systematic exclusion of the voices of the faithful in these debates. The secular underpinnings of the modern Democratic Party has done their level best to make religious belief a disqualifier for public service. All we need remember are Charles Schumer's thinly veiled attacks on "deeply held personal beliefs" of Catholics such as the reason why he would not vote for their confirmation to understand the hostility felt by Democratic leadership to people of faith.

Dionne has a good point when he reminds people that the Bible contains many teachings, among them service to the poor and disadvantaged. The teachings of both Christianity and Judaism extol the values of tolerance and ethics, the holiness of working for those who have nothing or nobody, and the essential requirement of living in the world but not being of the world. In earlier times before Democrats became Christophobes, they relied on those passages to attract support for well-intentioned social programs intended to eliminate poverty and hunger. Even conservatives of faith acknowledge the strength of those arguments, and at least it provided a commonality of purpose, even when we could not agree on the means.

Now, however, the Democrats have abandoned the morality of our faith while demanding tribute to a government that has shown itself incapable of delivering any progress on the programs that their faith at one time demanded. In fact, they use the same government that forces us to support an ever-expanding set of social programs that also demands the removal of all symbols and speech of faith from the public square. The Democrats have replaced the church with the bureaucracy, and up to now have purged all that supported public expressions of faith.

It appears that the same dynamic has come into play with Barack Obama. When he made the common-sense statement that government cannot cure the soul of a man who would shoot indiscriminately into a crowd -- a crime that happened recently in Minneapolis, resulting in the death of a random bystander -- the Left excoriates him for what essentially amounts to heresy. We see no mere rhetorical device in the argument that the Left has created their own religion out of secular humanism, and the demand that Obama repent for his apostasy confirms it.

Dionne provides one of the few voices of the Left still around to speak on faith in public policy. Democrats should heed his words and get over their own form of religious intolerance. Don't force Obama to mutter E pur si muove under his breath.

UPDATE: Howard Kurtz has more on the blogospheric reaction to Obama's speech.

Hamas Hypocrisy

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, says that Hamas will not negotiate under fire for the release of Gilad Shalit. He turned down the idea of swapping Shalit for the dozens of Hamas politicians arrested by Israel in the West Bank in response to the Shalit abduction:

In his first public address since Israel began its offensive into the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas on Friday said his government would not cave into Israeli demands but said he was working hard to end a five-day-old crisis with Israel.

Though Haniyeh did not directly address Israel's demand that Palestinian terrorists hand over abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, he implied that the government would not trade him for eight Cabinet ministers and 56 other Hamas officials arrested on Thursday.

"When they kidnapped the ministers they meant to hijack the government's position, but we say no positions will be hijacked, no governments will fall," he said.

This will come as news to Israel. After all, the entire incident came as a result of an act of war by Palestinian terrorists ferom Gaza who invaded Israel, killed two IDF soldiers, and kidnapped a third. Hamas refused to intercede for Shalit's release, and instead demanded the release of prisoners held by Israel to trade for Shalit.

And now Haniyeh refuses to negotiate under fire? Since when?

Israel changed the game on Hamas. Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal gambled that the Israelis would sit back and take no action, falling back to earlier strategies of prisoner trades for hostages. They also expected the neighboring governments and Western nations to pressure Israel to accept Hamas terms for negotiations under fire. Except for France, the Hamas strategy has backfired spectacularly. Western nations have done nothing to restrain Israel, and Egypt has called for the expulsion of Hamas' leadership in Syria.

If Hamas doesn't want to negotiate under fire, then they should stop playing with matches. This time, they have burnt themselves.

Iranian Fighters Captured In Iraq

Guess what the Iraqis and Americans found when they captured a number of Shi'ite militia fighters in Baquba?

Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and witnesses and police said U.S. helicopters bombed orchards to flush out gunmen hiding there.

Iraqi security officials said Iranian fighters had been captured in the fighting, in which a sniper shot dead the commander of an Iraqi quick reaction force and two of his men. They did not say how the Iranians had been identified. ...

"We captured a number of militants and were surprised to see that some of them were Iranian fighters," the police intelligence captain said.

An Interior Ministry official, who did not want to be named, also said Iranian gunmen had been captured. Baquba lies 90 km (60 miles) from the Iranian border.

The United States and Britain have accused Shi'ite Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs and providing military assistance to Iraq's pro-government Shi'ite militias. However, there have been few instances of Iranians actually being captured inside Iraq.

Surprise! The mullahcracy has been caught with its pants down. The Iranians have long wanted to exercise control over Iraq through the large Shi'ite population in the south. It has contested for power with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who wants to see Najafian Shi'ism come to the fore over the Iranian activist form based on Qom's scholarship. Their hopes rest on Moqtada al-Sadr, and the militia movement serves their interests in dividing Iraq and undermining their democracy.

The report states that the method used to identify these Iranian agents was not known, but as Dafydd at Big Lizards notes, it would not be difficult for Iraqis to identify Persian accents. Iranians do not speak Arabic as a native language but Farsi. Having lived in the area, they can differentiate between the accents easily enough, even if Westerners cannot.

What does this mean for the international situation? The Iranians will have to explain their presence in Iraq. This may not cause the angst some of us would like, however, as the Iranians have their own gripe about outside infiltrators in the Kurdish unrest in their own country. Unlike the Iraqis, though, the Iranians have not yet captured any of these outside infiltrators, and so they have little but secondhand information to use for their own PR purposes.

And let's face it: if we're not willing to press the issue on nuclear weapons any harder than we already have, then a handful of Iranian mercenaries will not push us into a confrontation with the mullahcracy.

However, it does provide some context for the difficulties facing the Iranians. The unrest does not spring entirely from an impulse to be rid of foreign troops of occupation. The Iranians have acted as provocateurs in the southern regions, and the absence of foreign troops at this point would only make that worse. This will also remind the Sunnis who do object to foreign troops that an early exit by the Coalition will make it that much easier for Iran to push the Shi'ite militias towards annihilation of the Sunni minority, at least until the Iraqi security forces can stand up to them.

The ultimate effect of these arrests may be a renewed push for a peaceful end to the Sunni-based native insurgencies.

Mubarak To Assad: Get Hamas Out Of Syria

The hesitation of Ehud Olmert to order the movement of ground troops into northern Gaza for unspecified diplomatic initiatives now can be understood. Reports have Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak demanding that Bashar Assad expel Hamas from Syria if the terrorist group does not release IDF soldier Gilad Shalit:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak demanded from his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad to deport the Syrian-based Hamas leadership unless it agrees to release kidnapped IDF soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit, Palestinian sources said on Friday.

The demand was made in the context of a compromise that Egypt was attempting to draft between the Israel and Hamas, whose Damascus leader, Khaled Mashaal was demanding that thousands of Palestinian detainees, held in Israeli prisons, be released. Mubarak warned Mashaal that his position was leading the Palestinians to disaster, Israel Radio reported.

According to the Palestinians, the Egyptian compromise calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip, as well as the release of prisoners who were already scheduled to be released within the next year.

Meanwhile, Mubarak stated in an interview to Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram that Shalit's kidnappers have agreed to his conditional release, but Israel has not yet accepted their terms. ...

The president said he had asked Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "not to hurry" the military offensive in Gaza, but to "give additional time to find a peaceful solution to the problem of the kidnapped soldier."

The compromise still relies on Israel's release of prisoners convicted in court for attacks against them, and the Israelis are probably not terribly enthusiastic about trading them for someone abducted by terrorists. It still rewards the act of kidnapping IDF soldiers, something that will guarantee more kidnappings. If the Israelis don't jump at this deal, it's hard to blame them.

On the other hand, having Mubarak point out publicly that Hamas started the problem and that their policies are to blame for the current situation certainly represents some progress. The Israelis would love nothing more that to have top Hamas terrorist Khaled Mashaal flushed from his cave. Given Hamas' history of negotiations, they could easily welch on any deal, in which case Mubarak's call to expel Hamas would be given even more force.

Hamas had better hope that Shalit remains in good health. It looks like their southern neighbor has had enough of their leadership in Gaza, and Shalit's death might be the last straw.

Jihad -- A Family Affair

The Globe & Mail has a disturbing look at the family life of some of the Toronto terror cell broken up by Canadian authorities. Although the particular strain of Islam espoused by terrorists does its best to oppress women, it turns out that the wife of the cell leader believed so much in holy war that she wanted to make it a condition of their marriage:

When it came time to write up the premarital agreement between Zakaria Amara and Nada Farooq, Ms. Farooq briefly considered adding a clause that would allow her to ask for a divorce.

She said that Mr. Amara (now accused of being a leader of the alleged terror plot that led to the arrests of 17 Muslim men early this month) had to aspire to take part in jihad.

"[And] if he ever refuses a clear opportunity to leave for jihad, then i want the choice of divorce," she wrote in one of more than 6,000 Internet postings uncovered by The Globe and Mail.

Wives of four of the central figures arrested last month were among the most active on the website, sharing, among other things, their passion for holy war, disgust at virtually every aspect of non-Muslim society and a hatred of Canada. The posts were made on personal blogs belonging to both Mr. Amara and Ms. Farooq, as well as a semi-private forum founded by Ms. Farooq where dozens of teens in the Meadowvale Secondary School area chatted. The vast majority of the posts were made over a period of about 20 months, mostly in 2004, and the majority of those were made by the group's female members.

The wives spent a lot of time on the Internet, wheedling and cajoling their readers to support and to wage jihad on Western society. Farooq wanted a baby badly, and she wanted to name it after a Chechen Islamist commander killed by the Russians. Her dream was to have her children follow in his footsteps, apparently all the way to the grave. She called openly for death by crushing for gays in Muslim societies, and she posted a prayer to Allah for the Jews to be crushed as well. Crushing, apparently, gets big play in the Amara/Farooq household. Canada doesn't fare any better in Farooq's tightly wound world. She repeatedly refers to our northern neighbor as "this filthy country". and explicitly declared in one message that "we hate Canada".

Cheryfa McAulay Jamal doesn't think too highly of Canada, either. She derides the secular nature of Canadian society, advising young Muslims not to vote or participate in its politics. She also finds membership in the United Nations objectionable -- something that might amuse the UN's critics here in the US -- and opposes the rights given to Western women. She used the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia to urge her young readers to violent jihad on a number of occasions.

The portrait painted by the G&M are of an angry subculture that praises oppression and opposes the freedoms that they exploit to pursue their recruitment to jihad. It also paints them as rather naive and foolish; they obviously never considered the trail they left behind them of missives and screeds that support the image of militant jihadis. They may not mind that image, but their husbands will find it very inconvenient when they come to trial.

UPDATE: I forgot to credit Newsbeat1 with the hat tip -- sorry!

Dutch Government Falls Over Ayaan

The government of the Netherlands has fallen as a direct result of their handling of former MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende resigned over the controversy started by Rita Verdonk:

The Dutch government has decided to resign after losing the support of its junior coalition partner in a row over Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said.

The resignation follows a conflict within the coalition government about the way VVD minister Verdonk handled the controversy surrounding the citizenship of Somali-born Islam critic and former lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Just minutes before Balkenende announced in parliament that the entire government would step down, the three ministers of junior coalition party D66 said they could no longer be part of a cabinet with the controversial Verdonk.

This ends the fallout of Verdonk's decision to strip Ayaan of her Dutch citizenship after the outspoken critic of radical Islam acknowledged that she had changed her name when applying for asylum. Ayaan had gained sympathy and support from her participation in the film by Theo Van Gogh that highlighted the harsh treatment of women in traditional Islam, a film that led to the assassination of Van Gogh by Muslim extremists.

Michael van der Galien, who has followed this story from The Netherlands, writes:

One of the key issues of the debate last night was the declaration signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Prime-Minister Balkenende explained that this declaration was necessary for legal purposes: in it she 'promissed' that she would use the name 'Ali' in the future and would not change it to 'Magan'.

However; in the last paragraph Ayaan 'admitted' that solely she was to blaim for the mess and that she was very sorry. Ayaan, however, said that she did not want to sign that declaration, due to the last paragraph because she did not agree with it. But; if she didn't sign the entire declaration things would have taken much more time. So, to be sure that she would keep her Dutch nationality, she signed it anyway.

Balkenende admitted, during the debate, that the last paragraph - in which Ayaan takes complete responsibility - was initiated by Verdonk, so it 'could be acceptable' to her.

Where I'm from we call that 'blackmail'. One of the government coalition parties D66 agreed with me.

D66 not only agreed with Michael, they put their opinion to use: they withdrew from the governing coalition after their motion to impeach Verdonk failed. The Dutch will now have to hold new national elections and put together a new government, while Ayaan has had to pay for her bravery with threatened deportation and humiliation. Rita Verdonk has had quite an impact on Dutch politics -- one that she will never live down.

How I Spend My Summer Vacation

Since I have a limited number of options for fun and frolic while I recover from my back surgery (which is coming along nicely, thank you!), I got a chance to do a little consulting for my sister, who's visiting this week. She needed to buy a laptop -- her first -- and she wanted something that would have the latest in technology. I got an opportunity to take a field trip to a new Best Buy that just opened down the street from me and give her some advice on a purchase.

We took a look around at the laptops; prices have come down a bit since I boughtthe Vaio last year, so the higher end of technology is more accessible. We settled on the HP DV-8000, which was actually on clearance. It comes with plenty of features: Centrino technology, Intel duo processors, DVD burner, TV tuner, all sorts of fun stuff. It also comes with an unsual feature -- a ten-key along with the regular laptop-style keyboard. The wide dimensions that allow the 17" screen also allows enough room for the extra keys.

I de-installed the Norton anti-virus security, having learned the lesson from my own laptop, and installed PC-Cillin. I also installed Microsoft Office at her request and removed some trial software she'll never use. I haven't played around with the TV tuner, which seems a little klugy to me, but I may in the next couple of days. The machine is pretty impressive; it runs fast, and the 200 GB of hard drive would allow for a lot of video editing. Pretty nice way to spend my down time! Too bad she's taking it with her when she leaves.

Fatah: Violence Is Hamas' Fault

A senior Fatah official in the Palestinian Authority told Israeli Radio today that, while he condemns the IDF incursion into Gaza, responsibility for this cycle of violence lies squarely with the extremists of Hamas. The advisor to Mahmoud Abbas blames Khaled Mashaal and the hardliners of Hamas for turning the world against the Palestinians:

A senior Fatah member said on Thursday that although Israel should be condemned for its incursion into the Gaza Strip and the arrest of senior Hamas officials, it was Hamas who brought these actions upon the Palestinian people.

He blamed Hamas' uncompromising, extremist approach - especially that of Hamas leader in Damascus Khaled Mashaal - for turning the whole world against the Palestinians.

The official, an associate of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, told Israel Radio said that Mashaal interfered with any attempt at moderation or mitigation of the economic embargo on the Palestinians.

The Hamas-Fatah split does not seem to have improved under fire. Fatah may see this as a golden opportunity to sell themselves as moderates that can deliver better conditions for Palestinians while negotiating on a hard-line basis with Israel and the West. They lost the last election due to their overwhelming corruption, but the Palestinians may soon long for the days when they let the crooks run the asylum rather than the lunatics.

The agreement between Hamas and Fatah on national unity may soon become a casualty to the Gaza incursion. After the border invasion and kidnapping that Hamas at least sanctioned, Fatah will be more cautious about marrying itself to the leadership of Khaled Mashaal. When the IDF leaves Gaza, look for the civil war to follow in their wake.

So Much For Trials

In reviewing the opinions of the Supreme Court in their Hamdan decision today, it seems pretty clear what action the Bush administration will take in the future with the detainees of the war on terror. More to the point, we know what action they will not take, at least if we rely on Justice Stevens' opinion. On page 80, in section VII of his opinion, Stevens writes:

We have assumed, as we must, that the allegations made in the Government’s charge against Hamdan are true. We have assumed, moreover, the truth of the message implicit in that charge—viz., that Hamdan is a dangerous individual whose beliefs, if acted upon, would causegreat harm and even death to innocent civilians, and who would act upon those beliefs if given the opportunity. It bears emphasizing that Hamdan does not challenge, and we do not today address, the Government’s power to detain him for the duration of active hostilities in order to prevent such harm. But in undertaking to try Hamdanand subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in thisjurisdiction.

Shorter Stevens: Don't attempt to hold trials at all for GWOT detainees, and you will have no problems with us. That affirms the treatment of these detainees as POWs in some sense, but in that effort, it makes clear that these detainees have no rights to any court. Stevens only says that if the government wants to try them, then the government must use civil courts, a strange ruling nonetheless when one reviews the relevant articles of the Geneva Convention.

I'm satisfied with that agreement. Lock all of them up until Islamofascists surrender or die. When the Islamist terror networks give up their war on the United States, then we will release them. Until then, they can remain in Guantanamo Bay or wherever we set up detention facilities for them.

Olmert Holds Off On Northern Gaza Operation

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has delayed the IDF incursion into northern Gaza due to an unexpected and unspecified diplomatic initiative, the Jerusalem Post reports. Olmert says that the initiative has paid no dividends as of yet, but apparently he wants to play it out a little further:

In a meeting with Defense Minister Amir Peretz on Thursday evening, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered the delay of an IDF incursion into northern Gaza . Government sources emphasized that the order was not a cancellation, but rather a postponement.

The delay is related to an undisclosed development on the diplomatic front.

Earlier Thursday, Peretz revealed that a "surprising diplomatic breakthrough" was possible in the attempts to release kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Shalit, but did not elaborate on the development.

"We are in one of the most crucial stages of establishing the rules of conduct between us and the Palestinian terror organizations," he asserted.

His aides, however, said that diplomatic efforts "were not bearing fruit," but added that a new development was possible soon.

The initiative has not kept the Israelis from pressing their incursion in the south. The IDF has to ensure that the breached southern border does not allow the terrorists holding Gilad Shalit to escape into Egypt. They want to box the terrorists into as small an area as possible in Gaza. If the situation with Shalit changes for the worst, the IDF wants to have a concentration of targets to attack.

Arab diplomats have no illusions about any diplomacy involving Hamas. The Post reports that they have started to flee Gaza, fearing the results of this standoff. That report comes not from Israel but from the Hebollah television network Al-Manar. They understand that the Israelis mean business on this mission, and that without Hamas surrendering Shalit and any other Israelis they have abducted, the Israelis intend on inflicting serious damage to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and any terrorist infrastructure they can find.

This development should mature in the next few hours. Olmert will not wait forever for the diplomats to provide a solutiion and to return Israeli hostages to the IDF.

Bush Economy Continues To Impress

Although the national media has not covered it in any depth whatsoever, the Bush economy has turned into one of the strongest booms in the last several years. Despite predictions that it had run its course, the opening quarter of this year shows that we continue to expand at a phenomenal rate of 5.6%:

The economy sprang out of a year-end rut and zipped ahead in the opening quarter of this year at a 5.6 percent pace, the fastest in 2 1/2 years and even stronger than previously thought.

The new snapshot of gross domestic product for the January-to-March period exceeded the 5.3 percent growth rate estimated a month ago, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The upgraded reading — based on more complete information — matched economists' forecasts.

The stronger GDP figure mostly reflected an improvement in the country's trade deficit, which was much less of a drag than previously estimated.

The economy does not get much press in a Republican administration unless the news is bad. That isn't just the fault of the media, but also of the people who run communications at the Treasury and the White House. One of the reasons that John Snow had been rumored to be on his way out for so long was the lack of attention given to the four years of economic expansion under George Bush. Apparently, this trend still continues.

One might expect that a better-than-expected trade deficit might get some attention, especially considering the controversies drummed up by political opponents over outsourcing. Again, the improvement will probably escape the notice of the media, due to the lack of bad news.

Cheer up. though, because analysts believe the Q2 figure will drop to around 3%. We can then expect headlines screaming that growth fell by almost half between the two quarters, with plenty of doomsayers to explain why the Bush tax policies are to blame. At that point, they will have to report that Q1 showed such excellent economic strength and hope that viewers and readers can't connect the dots.

Why Bush Got Angry

Scott Shane provides an interesting and balanced look at George Bush' reaction to the publication of the covert Swift intel program, ironically in today's New York Times. In it, Shane acknowledges the effect that his newspaper's reporting will have on efforts to track terrorist financing:

Ever since President Bush vowed days after the Sept. 11 attacks to "follow the money as a trail to the terrorists," the government has made no secret of its efforts to hunt down the bank accounts of Al Qaeda and its allies.

But that fact has not muted the fury of Mr. Bush, his top aides and many members of Congress at the decision last week by The New York Times and other newspapers to disclose a centerpiece of that hunt: the Treasury Department's search for clues in a vast database of financial transactions maintained by a Belgium-based banking consortium known as Swift. ...

Experts on terror financing are divided in their views of the impact of the revelations. Some say the harm in last week's publications in The Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal may have been less in tipping off terrorists than in putting publicity-shy bankers in an uncomfortable spotlight.

"I would be surprised if terrorists didn't know that we were doing everything we can to track their financial transactions, since the administration has been very vocal about that fact," said William F. Wechsler, a former Treasury and National Security Council official who specialized in tracking terrorism financing.

But Mr. Wechsler said the disclosure might nonetheless hamper intelligence collection by making financial institutions resistant to requests for access to records.

"I wouldn't be surprised if these recent articles have made it more difficult to get cooperation from our friends in Europe, since it may make their cooperation with the U.S. less politically palatable," Mr. Wechsler said.

The problem did not come from the knowledge of our efforts to track financing; it comes from the exposure of the specific tactics we used to do so. As my previous post on Canada shows, that exposure has created pressure on those people who cooperated with American intel agencies to track those transactions. The damage will not limit itself to that particular effort either, but to all instances where we need to discreetly receive cooperation from allies. The Paper of Record has made sure than no one can rely on American discretion.

The House has competing resolutions regarding this revelation, as Shane reports. Republicans have proposed one that supports the Swift effort and scolds unnamed media outlets for jeopardizing national-security efforts. The Democrats have offered an alternative that skips over the generic finger-wagging. Neither resolution has any meaning or teeth, and both should be withdrawn as an embarrassment to the politicians who sponsored them.

Instead of meaningless resolutions, Congress needs to hold hearings immediately on the rash of leaks coming from our intel agencies and Department of Defense. They need to demand an investigation by the Department of Justice that will identify the perpetrators and charge them with the felonies they have committed by their unauthorized release of classified information.

We need to forget about prosecuting the Times for the releases. That dog won't hunt politically, and legally it will be a necessarily tough sell. The people who leaked this information, however, violated a number of laws in doing so. The reporters involved in these stories need to have subpoenas issued to them for their testimony -- and if they do not cooperate, then they need to sit in jail until they do.

Bush Loses On Hamdan

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Bush administration, ruling that the US cannot stage military trials for detainees captured in the war on terror. The court ruled 5-3 to overturn the appellate court ruling on Hamdan, relying oddly on the Geneva Convention although the enemy in this war does not qualify for its protections:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.

The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001.

I haven't read the decision, but the reliance on the Geneva Convention seems strange. The convention binds nations when dealing with other signatories, not with those who have not agreed to reciprocity. The terrorists we have captured do not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from civilians; in fact, they take great pains to hide themselves among civilians, deliberately target civilians, and use civilians as human shields. Applying Geneva Convention protections to these terrorists undermines the primary reason for these conventions: protection of civilians. They now will pay no penalty for their disregard for the rules of war, thanks to SCOTUS.

In fact, if one follows the rules of Geneva, these prisoners would not get access to criminal courts, either. Article 84 makes this clear:

A prisoner of war shall be tried only by a military court, unless the existing laws of the Detaining Power expressly permit the civil courts to try a member of the armed forces of the Detaining Power in respect of the particular offence alleged to have been committed by the prisoner of war.

Since members of our armed forces would face a court-martial for crimes against civilians during a time of war, this tends to negate the exception offered under 84. Article 96 states:

Without prejudice to the competence of courts and superior military authorities, disciplinary punishment may be ordered only by an officer having disciplinary powers in his capacity as camp commander, or by a responsible officer who replaces him or to whom he has delegated his disciplinary powers.

Article 97 also states:

Prisoners of war shall not in any case be transferred to penitentiary establishments (prisons, penitentiaries, convict prisons, etc.) to undergo disciplinary punishment therein.

The Convention forbids criminal trials for those captured in war, except in cases of discipline breaches at the holding facility or POW camp. Prisoners must be held until the end of the conflict, and then repatriated to their nation of origin. All that the Convention allows is a military tribunal to determine their status under the rules of war, ie, whether they qualify as POWs. SCOTUS seems to argue that we must violate the Geneva Conventions in order to uphold them.

The opinion should have some interesting tap-dancing. In any case, the Supreme Court has effectively negated the ability for us to detain terrorists. Instead, we will likely see more of them die, since the notion of having the servicemen who captured these prisoners forced to appear to testify to their "arrest" is not only ridiculous but would require us to retire combat units as a whole whenever their prisoners appear for trial.

Congress needs to correct this issue immedately. The mischief that this enables will not only hamstring this war on terror, but any future war we may be forced to wage.

Canada Balks At Swift Program

The backlash from the Times continues today, this time in Ottawa. Canadian politicians have expressed concern over the use of SWIFT data to track terrorist financing, giving the floundering Liberals an issue to exploit against the ascendant Conservatives:

Bank of Canada governor David Dodge knew in 2002 that the U.S. government wanted data from an international banking organization for use in its war on terror. ... Like other central bankers around the world, Dodge does not appear to have raised any red flags in the past four years.

John McCallum, finance critic for the federal Liberals, said Canadians should be worried if personal information was sent to the CIA.

It would fly in the face of Canadian law and banking practice, said McCallum, a senior executive with Royal Bank of Canada before joining former prime minister Paul Martin's cabinet as minister and secretary of state for financial institutions. ...

No one involved with the Canadian banking system, SWIFT or the U.S. government will say what Canadian financial data, if any, might have been seen by U.S. authorities, but Canada's privacy commissioner is looking into the program.

This should put to rest the argument that "everyone knew we were tracking financial data" as an excuse for the actions of the New York Times. Of course everyone knew we tracked financial transactions in our efforts to defeat terrorism; we've talked about that from the start of the war. George Bush made that point in his September 20 speech. What the terrorists did not know -- and what the Times revealed -- were the specific tactics involved.

Now that this has been revealed, we have embarrassed our allies and put them in politically vulnerable positions. The head of the Canadian banking system had full knowledge of our program, and he knew better than to talk about it. Now that the Times has blown the program and his involvement in it, he may well get removed from his position. At the least, he will be forced to make a number of explanations about his cooperation with our efforts, and likely the Commons will want to know specifics about the kind of data released -- which will give the terrorists an even clearer picture of our covert tactics against them.

How many more nations will follow Canada's lead? Belgium has already announced an investigation into SWIFT and its managers for their participation. The nations who provided us with cooperation in our efforts to fight terrorism have found embarrassment, criminal investigation, and potential career catastrophes as a result of their assistance to the US.

How many people will want to help us now? How many financial managers will agree to help us track terrorists through global banking systems now that we have shown ourselves so inept at keeping secrets? For that matter, this incident will reflect on our intel services across all units -- and it will act as a powerful disincentive for individuals and nations to give us any cooperation or assistance in any future program that protects our national security.

This is the damage that the New York Times has wrought on our nation. Bill Keller and his ace reporters have done much more than kneecap our ability to find terrorists through their financial transactions. They have discredited American intelligence services, aided by a handful of criminals who violated their security clearances to have our covert tactics blabbed to the world by the Times. This is what happens when unelected, benighted, arrogant fools decide that they have the right to determine what classified information should be publicized, with the motivation of profit over national interest.

France Blasts Israel; Palis Invade Egypt

France leveled criticism at Israel this morning for its incursion into Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reports. Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned Israel's arrests of senior Hamas leadership, now up to 60, and insisted that diplomacy should be used instead of violence:

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned on Thursday the arrest of over 60 Hamas members by Israeli forces early in the morning. He said that diplomacy was the only solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and that political figures should not be arrested.

Israel stated that the arrests were made as part of a criminal investigation into the Hamas officials' involvement in a terrorist organization. Israeli officials insisted that the detainees would be entitled to legal representation, and would be released if it were to be found that the suspicions against them were unfounded.

Over 60 Hamas members, including ministers in the Palestinian Authority parliament, were arrested overnight Wednesday throughout the West Bank.

Detainees included such senior figures as Finance Minister Omar Abdel Razek, Labor Minister Muhammed Barghouti, parliament member Mohamemd Abu Teir and the mayors of Kalkilya and Jenin. Army Radio revealed that Deputy Prime Minister Naser a-Din Shaer was not arrested, as was reported earlier.

In the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Bethlehem security forces arrested the men and took them to a military detention camp to be interrogated under the suspicion of being involved in terror activities against Israel.

This, of course, completely ignores the role that the ruling party of Hamas played in the days leading up to the Israeli incursion. After Palestinians of some faction -- none have really taken credit -- invaded Israel, killed two soldiers and abducted a third, Israel appealed to the Palestinian Authority to release Gilad Shalit. Hamas refused to cooperate and instead demanded a release of numerous prisoners in Israeli jails, criminals who got caught committing crimes and convicted in open trials.

When Hamas decided to act as agents of kidnappers and provocateurs, they gave official sanction to an act of wat against Israel -- as if the constant bombardment of Kassam rockets from Gaza didn't already provide a casus belli. The Israelis took Hamas at its word, decided that diplomacy would not resolve the problem, and took action. The Israelis have used diplomacy for the last fifteen years, and to no avail; the Palestinians have gone backwards in that time. Their ruling party will not recognize Israel nor the agreements that Israeli diplomacy gained during that time.

Is France really that clueless? No; the French have had no problem using military force to resolve their own issues, including a massacre of civilians in the Ivory Coast and hiring mercenaries to conduct a coup in Comoros. The notion of diplomacy has a certain elasticity for the French -- everyone should use it except themselves. That seems especially applicable in the case of Israel, for reasons that should surprise no one familiar with the Jews in French history.

The Israelis owe nothing to France, and their criticism is not only baseless but transparently hypocritical. Diplomacy does not work with people who do not wish to bargain. Hamas made its bed, and now Israel will force them to lie in it.

The Palestinians themselves, meanwhile, simply cannot stay within their own borders. They have blown up part of the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, and the Egyptians have sent troops to the breach to keep Palestinians out. Dozens apparently made it through before it could be secured:

Palestinian militants detonated a land mine near the border with Egypt on Thursday, blowing open a large hole in a wall near the border, witnesses and officials said. ...

Palestinian security personnel formed a human cordon to prevent people from pushing through the gaping hole, and hurdling a second, border wall less than 100 meters (yards) away, witnesses said.

On the Egyptian side, soldiers gathered to prevent people from breaching the Palestinian cordon and officials imposed a curfew near the blast site, said Ahmed el-Masri, director of police in the Egyptian border town of Rafah.

The terrorists apparently created the nine-foot gap to get out of Gaza ahead of the IDF. Egypt has no love of terrorists after the series of bombings in the Sinai, and they will no doubt want to make repairs as soon as possible. Perhaps this might cause the Palestinians to reflect on why no nation in the area wants them around.

Did The Palestinians Fire WMD At Israel?

Reuters reports that Palestinian terrorists have claimed an attack on Israel that they say used a chemical weapon warhead (via 4 The Little Guy):

A spokesman for gunmen in the Gaza Strip said they had fired a rocket tipped with a chemical warhead at Israel early on Thursday.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the claim by the spokesman from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.

This follows the AAMB claim this weekend of WMD capability. The Israelis, however, can confirm neither the chemical attack nor any attack as described by the AAMB. So far, then, it appears that the terrorists have no WMD except in their own minds.

Hopefully, that remains the case. If they do start using chemical weapons in their attacks, the Americans should take a serious interest in how the Palestinians acquired these weapons, and where they originated. While Israel looks to Syria for the mastermind of the kidnappings and the attacks on their troops, the US may want to look closer at Syria as a repository of the missing WMD from Saddam Hussein's reign.

Israel Captures Hamas Ministers As Palestinians Kill Hostage

Israeli forces rounded up dozens of Hamas ministers in the West Bank as the Gaza incursion continued. Palestinian terrorists also announced that they had killed one of their hostages, the teenager kidnapped just as Israel entered Gaza:

Israeli forces arrested the Palestinian deputy prime minister and dozens of other Hamas officials early Thursday and pressed their incursion into Gaza, responding to the abduction of one of its soldiers.

Adding to the tension, a Palestinian militant group said it killed an 18-year-old Jewish settler kidnapped in the
West Bank. Israeli security officials said Eliahu Asheri's body was found buried near Ramallah. They said he was shot in the head, apparently soon after he was abducted on Sunday. ...

Army Radio said the arrested Hamas leaders might be used to trade for the captured soldier. Israel had refused earlier to trade prisoners for the soldier's release.

More than 30 lawmakers were detained, according to Palestinian security officials. Among them were Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer, Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti and two other ministers in the West Bank.

The arrests of the Hamas officials puts quite a different spin on the hostage negotiations now. Since Hamas has taken responsibility for the kidnappings and refused to intercede to release Gilad Shalit, and since the Palestinians keep committing acts of war against Israel, then their political leadership becomes fair game in war. Now that a few dozen Hamas leaders sit in Israeli jails, the terms of the kidnappers may be changing soon.

However, one hostage will not come home at all. Eliahu Asheri, a teenage civilian captured by Hamas terrorists, was executed by his abductors today. IDF forces found his charred body and identified it later. According to Palestinian sources, they shot him in the head shortly after his kidnapping.

If Shalit does not get released soon, the IDF may come looking for more Palestinian Authority officials.

Peretz Gives Order For Stage Two Of Gaza Incursion

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz reacted to the additional abduction claimed by the Palestinians by giving a green light to the second stage of the Israeli incursion into Gaza. The IDF will roll into northern Gaza and begin a vise manuever on the region as Israel solidifies its grip on Rafah:

Less than 24 hours after the IDF entered Gaza in the biggest operation since disengagement last summer, Defense Minister Amir Peretz gave the green light on Wednesday evening for the second part of the IDF Gaza incursion. The IDF was poised to enter northern Gaza.

IAF planes will distribute flyers on Wednesday night in the Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun areas in the northern Gaza Strip, warning local residents that they are endangering their lives by being in the vicinity of Kassam launch sites. ...

The Hamas-led Palestinian government called for a prisoner swap with Israel, saying the Gaza offensive would not secure the soldier's release. Hamas-affiliated militants holding the hostage previously made that demand, but this was the first time the government did. Israeli has ruled out a deal.

Earlier, IAF aircraft struck a Hamas training camp in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah on Wednesday afternoon, witnesses said.

The Israelis rejected the call for a so-called "prisoner swap", with Hamas attempting to trade Gilad Shalit and now an unnamed 62-year-old for all of the Palestinian juveniles in Israeli jails. Unfortunately, Israel has agreed to these one-sided trades with terrorists in the past, leading Hamas to believe that the Israelis would do business as usual. The second stage of the Gaza operation is a response that Israel should have given before to terrorist blackmail, and it certainly sends the message that this government will not do business as usual.

The Israelis have poured a lot of resources into Gaza in this mission. At some point, Israel will need to mobilize additional forces to protect itself against an opportunistic attack from Syria, the only one of Israel's neighbors still dumb enough to try something against the Israelis. If the Israelis decide to keep this mission going, they may call up more reserves soon.

An Appointment With The Opthalmologist

Israeli Air Force pilots paid a visit to the Middle East's most famous opthalmologist earlier today, reminding the doctor that unless he stops protecting Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, the IDF may send a lot more business his way soon:

Israeli warplanes buzzed the summer residence of Syrian President Bashar Assad early Wednesday, military officials said, in a message aimed at pressuring the Syrian leader to win the release of a captured Israeli soldier.

The officials said on condition of anonymity that the fighter jets flew over Assad's palace in a low-altitude overnight raid near the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria. Israeli television reports said four planes were involved, and Assad was home at the time.

The flight caused "noise" on the ground, the military officials said on condition of anonymity, according to military guidelines.

The IDF has paid visits to Bashar Assad before. In 2003, they buzzed the house at a low enough altitude and high enoufh speed to shatter the windows of his villa. Syrians told the media that anti-aircraft fire drove off the jets, but not before Israel delivered its message.

The message is the same that George Bush announced on September 20, 2001. Those nations that support terrorism will find themselves held responsible for terrorist activity as if they had conducted it themselves. We have removed two brutal regimes under that same policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two biggest terror sponsors, however, still remain in power in Damascus and Teheran. Israel has apparently decided that Assad's sponsorship of Hamas makes him responsible for their attacks and abductions (up to three now), a decision that is both reasonable and long overdue.

Israel also wants to ensure that Assad understands that his life can be forfeit at any time Israel decides. The opthalmologist may not have the same acumen as his father, but one hopes he can read the writing on the wall. He has a choice to make -- and Israel wants him to understand the consequences of a bad decision.

UPDATE: CQ reader Turner H reminds me that Assad is an opthalmologist, not an optometrist. Good thing I have an eye appointment myself this Friday!

Iraqi Insurgents Want Two-Year Withdrawal Commitment

The amnesty plan offered by Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki and President Jalal al-Talibani appears to have broken a standoff with native insurgents in Iraq. The groups have replied by demanding a commitment to a two-year withdrawal plan of foreign forces from Iraq as a condition of their surrender:

Insurgents are demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. and British forces from Iraq within two years as a condition for joining reconciliation talks, a senior Iraqi government official said Wednesday. ...

Iraqi government officials involved with the contacts with insurgents told The Associated Press that several militant groups sent delegates from their regions and tribes to speak on their behalf.

One of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of demands for secrecy in the talks, said the insurgents have so far rejected face-to-face talks, saying they fear being targeted by Shiite militias, Iraqi security forces and the Americans.

The official said the insurgents have demanded a two-year "timetable for withdrawal" in return for joining Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's bid for national reconciliation.

The insurgents also said a condition for any future direct talks would be the presence of observers from the Arab League, Saudi Arabia and Iraq's influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars.

These demands do not appear too extreme and can form the basis of rational talks aimed at a national reconciliation. The involvement of the Saudis and the two Arab associations may not sit well with the new Iraqi government; after all, none of them have a particular fondness for democracy or self-determination, especially Saudi Arabia. However, Iraq will have to find ways to exist in tandem with all of them, and including them in this process might be a good start.

Interestingly, the insurgents tacitly admit the necessity of the foreign troops in their demand. They have not demanded an immediate withdrawal, or even one within 12 months. Foreign troops need to remain to ensure protection against the foreign insurgency, which Iraqis have grown to detest. As long as the native insurgents and Ba'athist dead-enders have stopped tossing bombs and firing bullets, the foreign troops pose no danger to them. More to the point, the Sunnis who make up the insurgencies fear Shi'ite militias more than the foreign troops. They need our protection from the Shi'ite vengeance that would surely erupt without some kind of stabilizing force to prevent it.

In this, the insurgents appear far ahead of the Democrats in Congress. They have spent the last few months demanding immediate withdrawals or at least timetables for such, with some calling for retreat as early as the end of this year. Even the insurgents see the folly of that idea. This demand acknowledges that the US and Coalition forces have succeeded in creating an effective and professional security force for Iraq, one that needs more training and seasoning before we can leave and expect stability and self-management in Iraq.

I wonder if the Democrats will have an explanation for why they want our troops to retreat faster than the insurgents have demanded.

Iraqi Oil Production Hits New Post-War High

The production of oil in Iraq has reached a post-Saddam high of 2.5 million barrels a day, with a quarter of the production going to domestic use. The AP reports that the Iraqi production system has survived sabotage and political chaos to move forward to its current production levels:

Iraq is producing an average of 2.5 million barrels of oil a day, its highest level since the war began in 2003, an oil ministry spokesman said Wednesday.

Assem Jihad said 1.6 million barrels are being exported daily from the southern port of Basra, while 300,000 are being pumped from the northern city of Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

The other 600,000 barrels produced daily are for domestic use, he said. ... Jihad also said new measures were being implemented and he was optimistic that the situation would improve.

"We hope to add 200,000 to 300,000 (barrels per day) before the end of this year," Jihad told The Associated Press, adding he also hoped to double the amount of oil pumped from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in that time period.

The increase in oil production shows an improving security situation as well as expertise. However, it only represents about 70% of the production under the Oil-For-Food program in the years leading up to the March 2003 invasion. Oil production under OFF peaked at 3.5 million barrels a day. Unlike the OFF production, though, the proceeds of today's production do not go into the pockets of a genocidal tyrant and the corrupt Western officials trying to curry favor with the Butcher of Baghdad.

It's good news, and we can look forward to more increases as the Iraqi government grows stronger.

Mixed Bag In Texas Redistricting Case

The Supreme Court handed down a moderate victory for Texas Republicans, ruling that states can redistrict at any time, and that the redistricting plan did not violate the Constitution. The court did rule, however, that the Texas legislature must redraw one district, as the new boundaries unfairly deprived Hispanic voters of political power:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights. ...

At issue was the shifting of 100,000 Hispanics out of a district represented by a Republican incumbent and into a new, oddly shaped district. Foes of the plan had argued that that was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voting rights.

On a different issue, the court ruled that state legislators may draw new maps as often as they like -- not just once a decade as Texas Democrats claimed. That means Democratic and Republican state lawmakers can push through new maps anytime there is a power shift at a state capital.

In some respect, the court upheld the power of the legislature against that of the judiciary. The main argument in the lawsuit sought to throw out the entire redistricting plan implemented by the Texas legislature after a court-ordered redistricting plan was put into place after the 2000 census. The plaintiffs maintained that redistricting could only be done once per census. The Supreme Court disagreed, noting the requirement of redistricting after each census but declining to interpret that as a requirement for only one redistricting. The decision also acknowledges the right of the elected branch to write laws that overrule court decisions, an important precedent for the primacy of the legislature.

The court extended a minor victory for the plaintiffs in TX-23, currently represented by Republican Henry Bonilla. Ironically, the court agreed with the plaintiffs that the new district inappropriately excluded Hispanics and did not allow them an equal opportunity for representation. Bonilla, of course, is Hispanic. The Texas legislature will need to redraw TX-23 and at least one neighboring district. It seems odd that the court did not take into account the actual results of the election, where a Hispanic won the seat; instead, the court once again put Texas redistricting at the mercy of federal courts, somewhat negating their overall decision.

TX-23 borders districts 16, 11, 28, and Mexico, which thankfully does not yet have a representative in Congress. Those representatives are:

K. Michael Conaway, TX-11 (Republican)
Silvestre Reyes, TX-16 (Democrat)
Henry Cuellar, TX-28 (Democrat)

It doesn't appear that Hispanics or Democrats have a problem competing in these areas. The court decision seems a bit strange, especially when reviewing the districting map. The districts themselves do not appear all that strangely shaped (one has to remember that the Captain is a California native, however!). The fact that of the four districts in question, three have elected Hispanic representatives and two of them Democrats appears to prove that the districts are both representative and reasonably competitive.

Overall, however, the ruling gives Republicans a victory and Tom DeLay a small measure of redemption.

9/11 Commission Chair: 'A Good Program Is Over'

Byron York interviewed Thomas Kean, the 9/11 Commission chairman, on the revelation of the covert terror-finance intelligence operation in the New York Times last week. Kean tells the National Review's White House correspondent that he tried to talk Bill Keller out of publishing the story, and pronounces the program dead as a result of Keller's decision:

Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.”

Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean called Times executive editor Bill Keller in an attempt to persuade him not to publish — has done terrible damage to the program. "I think it's over," Kean says. "Terrorists read the newspapers. Once the program became known, then obviously the terrorists were not going to use these methods any more." ...

“That’s the way it is in this war,” says Kean. “There are a number of programs we are using to try to disrupt terrorist activities, and you never know which one is going to be successful. We knew that this one already had been.”

Indeed, this program had shown success in bringing down at least one al-Qaeda leader. It allowed American intel the ability to track the finances of terror suspects without having to breach private data on other transactions, and given the large cash movement required for terror plots, it provided quite a perch for intel agents to surveil the system. This, according to Kean, was one of the most successful post-9/11 efforts by the government in increasing security and targeting terrorists.

Thanks to the Times, that has come to a close. With the operation now made public, the SWIFT cooperative and the EU now have closed ranks and demanded an end to American investigations. The International Herald Tribune, owned by the New York Times, now reports that the administrative subpoenas that made the investigations legal in the US will no longer suffice for Europe:

The Bush administration has defended the program as a crucial element in its campaign against terrorism, but Europe and the United States are increasingly at odds over how to protect civil liberties at the same time.

On Tuesday, the European Parliament's center-right European People's Party, its largest and most influential grouping, called for the EU to open an inquiry into the legality of Swift's actions. Thomas Bickl, a spokesman for the party, said it was concerned that the transfers had been made as part of a covert and untransparent operation. ...

Davies said Swift had received broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the Treasury Department, which gave its actions a legal basis in the United States. But he said the subpoenas took the form of letters that were issued without judicial consent or due process in the European Union, where only the data protection authorities or the courts have the power to consent to such transfers.

The Europeans have a difficult time understanding why a covert operation to track terrorist financing requires a lack of transparency -- while arguing that such an operation breaches the privacy of Europeans. That seems a rather contradictory statement. Full transparency would mean the publication of all financial data. If Europe wants to keep that data secret, then how could an investigation of illegal transfers of money in support of terrorists offer "full transparency"? The entire idea is to track that money to see where it leads, not to let people know that the transfers have been traced.

This is just another example of European silliness in the face of an existential threat. It shows why the US has limited access to these programs to those who take terrorism seriously -- and the EU, thus far, doesn't qualify. Swift understood the stakes involved, but now that the Times has embarrassed them in Europe by revealing their role in the operation, we can expect their cooperation to come to a screeching halt.

All of this was as predictable as the sun rising in the east, and the Bush administration tried to explain that to Bill Keller on a number of occasions through a number of different people, including Kean. However, Keller remained obtuse either deliberately or through some defect of intellect and ran the story anyway. Thanks to Keller, we will now know much less about terror financing, and therefore much less about the terrorists, their plans, and their resources.

Cannon Wins The Primary

Rep. Chris Cannon beat his Republican primary opponent, John Jacobs, last night in what supposedly was a bellwether race on illegal immigration. Hardliners on border security had targeted Cannon in the primary despite his support for the House border-enforcement bill because he also supported a compromise with the US Senate. His twelve-point victory belies the earlier analysis that Jacobs had pulled even with Cannon:

The five-term incumbent defeated political newcomer John Jacob on Tuesday 56 percent to 44 percent — or 32,306 votes to 25,589 votes — with all precincts reporting but an unknown number of absentee ballots to be counted.

"This is a big margin of victory. It says a lot about Republicans getting together and solving this problem," he said. ...

Last December, Cannon voted for a House bill that would toughen border security, criminalize people who help illegal immigrants and make being in the U.S. without the required papers a felony. But he also supports Bush's proposal for a guest-worker program.

Cannon's willingness to compromise made him a target of Team America, a conservative group that calls illegal immigration the most critical problem facing the nation. It spent $40,000 on radio ads criticizing him.

Jacons conceded the race last night when the trends became obvious. Cannon now has a mandate from the Republicans in the area to pursue both border security and a compromise on normalization, assuming that he gets re-elected to Congress in the general election this fall. The Democrats will certainly take note of the split in Cannon's district and do their best to exploit it.

That puts the onus back on Team America and the Utah GOP to unite behind their candidate. They ran a tough primary, which is commendable, but in the end they lost. Will Utah Republicans have what it takes to be a majority party and elect Cannon back to Congress, or will they sit out the general election in a fit of pique over losing the primary on this narrow ground?

Gaza Incursion Gains Ground

The IDF gained important tactical positions east of Rafah this morning, allowing Israel to control more of the southern border of Gaza, while it also captured an airstrip in Dahaniyeh and bombed northern Gaza where Palestinian terrorists often launch Kassam rockets into Israel. The manuevers show that the IDF has taken the time to think its incursion through for strategic as well as tactical purposes, cutting off the escape routes from Gaza into Egypt:

Earlier in the day, the IDF took control of the abandoned airport in Dahaniyeh and the town of Shuka in southern Gaza in a move to cement their foothold in areas east of Rafah, a city on the Egyptian border.

The area of Dahaniyeh represents a strategic control and observation point over the area of Rafah and the southern Gaza Strip. So far there has been one incident of gunfire and anti-tank missile fire at the forces, but no injuries or damage were reported. ...

Armored personnel carriers were stationed outside northern Gaza, and were expected to move in later in the day.

The Israelis appear to have a much larger invasion planned than first thought. Originally, pundits surmised that the IDF had wanted to just find their kidnapped soldier, and assumed that their intel placed him in or around Rafah. However, if the Jerusalam Post has its information correct, the IDF will hit Gaza in the center and the north once Israel has the southern egress routes into Egypt sealed off -- effectively trapping Palestinian fighters between the IDF and the Mediterranean.

The Israelis appear serious this time about delivering the war for which the Palestinians voted when they elected Hamas to govern them. Hamas certainly has given them the provocation the voters wanted by attacking into Israel and kidnapping Gilad Shalit. With Gaza no longer occupied by Israel, it gives them a much easier target to attack on this invasion; the Palestinians no longer have the settlements as a bargaining chip against full-scale war.

This incursion comes as the world media reports that Hamas has agreed to an "implicit recognition" of Israel, but the details show that it does no such thing:

The military moves came as Hamas executed a dramatic shift in policy to reach an agreement that implicitly recognises Israel. The militant Palestinian group’s U-turn could see the Hamas-led Government — anathema to Israel and the West — replaced within weeks by a national unity coalition.

As the military wing of Hamas took joint responsibility for kidnapping the Israeli soldier, its political wing was ending its power struggle with Mr Abbas by apparently accepting a national unity plan that the President had threatened to put to a referendum. ...

Hamas has long advocated the destruction of Israel, but the plan calls for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza territories captured by Israel in 1967 — implicitly recognising Israel’s existence in the rest of historic Palestine.

However, the original document, drawn up by Palestinian prisoners from all factions, does not mention a two-state solution or Israel’s right to exist. Its already ambiguous language may also have been watered down in recent talks.

The document that Hamas has apparently accepted does not implicitly recognize Israel, nor does it limit resistance to the "Zionist enemy" to the post-1967 territories, as some had reported earlier. As I wrote last week, the NCD does nothing but propose that all factions unite in their opposition to Israel rather than continue to fight each other. It delegitimizes any effort to find peace by tying all groups into one unit to fight Israel under one command. With Hamas' efforts this week to force military action, we can see exactly what purpose the NCD serves now.

Israel considers Hamas an enemy at war, and have announced that Hamas leaders involved in the attack and kidnapping of at least Gilad Shalit will be a fair target. That includes Khalid Mashaal, who reportedly ran the abduction mission from his offices in Syria:

Justice Minister Haim Ramon said Wednesday that Hamas's Syria-based leader, Khaled Mashaal, is a target for assassination for ordering the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip.

"He is definitely in our sights ... he is a target," Ramon told Army Radio. "Khaled Mashaal, as some who is overseeing, actually commanding the terror acts, is definitely a target."

Interior Minister and former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter said that the only reason Mashaal is not in an Israeli jail is that Israel, as an enlightened nation, has placed certain restrictions upon itself.

Well, that's not entirely the reason. The Mossad actually attempted an assassination once before, injecting Mashaal with poison in Jordan, but got caught before Mashaal died. King Hussein of Jordan refused to release the agents until Israel gave up the antidote, which it did and Mashaal survived. Netanyahu also released Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, as part of the deal. The IDF caught up to Yassin seven years later in 2004, when they killed him in a 2004 Gaza air strike.

If the IDF gets another shot at Mashaal, pardoning the pun, you can be sure they will take it.

Saudi Visas Double In 2006

The Jerusalem Post revealed earlier tonight that a study of State Department figures show that visas granted to Saudis have doubled in 2006. The State Department stated that we are "pleased" at the increase:

For the first time since the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the US State Department has begun to sharply increase the number of entry visas granted to Saudi Arabian nationals seeking to visit the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Figures obtained by the Post reveal that after three years of steady decline, 2005 saw the number of US visas issued to Saudis remain relatively stable, while this year the number has more than doubled.

In an e-mail to the Post, Amanda D. Rogers-Harper, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, confirmed that as of June 10, a total of 18,683 non-immigrant US visas had been issued to Saudi citizens since the start of the current fiscal year.

"This," she noted, "is twice as many as the 9,338 issuances to Saudis" in the corresponding period last year, marking an increase of over 100 percent in just the past 12 months. ...

"We are pleased to see an increase in visa applicants at posts around the world, including Saudi Arabia," Rogers-Harper said, adding that this year's increase could be attributed to "a new student scholarship program funded by the government of Saudi Arabia, which encourages students to pursue their studies in the US.

"We hope to see a continuation of this positive momentum," she added.

Of course this pleases Americans. After all, it's not as if students from Saudi Arabia traveling on visas ever caused us any problem before. Right? Oh, wait a minute -- I do recall reading something about Saudi student visas in a government report I read at one time. I think this was a relevant passage (page 226):

By the spring of 2000,Hanjour was back in Afghanistan.According to KSM, Hanjour was sent to him in Karachi for inclusion in the plot after Hanjour was identified in al Qaeda’s al Faruq camp as a trained pilot, on the basis of background information he had provided. Hanjour had been at a camp in Afghanistan for a few weeks when Bin Ladin or Atef apparently realized that he was a trained pilot; he was told to report to KSM, who then trained Hanjour for a few days in the use of code words.

On June 20, Hanjour returned home to Saudi Arabia. He obtained a U.S. student visa on September 25 and told his family he was returning to his job in the UAE. Hanjour did go to the UAE, but to meet facilitator Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

Yes, we're delighted that so many Saudi students want to come to the United States. The program has shown great success in the past in allowing Saudis to come to our shores unchallenged. No wonder the State Department shows so much joy in their doubling of the numbers allowed to travel to our country.

Israel Meets Little Resistance In Gaza

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli troops have met only light resistance from Palestinians in Gaza as its ground offensive pushed across the border. The IDF has made this military operation a coordinated affair, with the Israeli Air Force taking out a power station in the area of the invasion, along with at least three bridges:

The incursion began shortly before midnight, when IAF aircraft blew up three main bridges, located along the main route connecting between the northern and southern parts of the Strip. The army said that the operation was intended to keep Hamas from taking kidnapped soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit out of the Gaza Strip.

Ground forces then began entering the southeastern part of the Gaza Strip and the troops gained control of two key sites near Dahaniya. At the same time, artillery units were shelling areas from where Kassam rockets were often launched at Israel.

The Air Force also struck an electrical transformer station south of Gaza city, cutting the power supply from portions of the region. Palestinian sources said that the IDF shot at least nine missiles at the electric station. A large fire erupted and the turbines and fuel supplies were burned. Still, some of the power was restored by wires connected to an Israeli power supply, Israel Radio reported.

An IDF spokesperson told The Jerusalem Post that there was little Palestinian resistance to the incursion. He denied a report claiming that the Erez crossing had been opened in preparation for entry of troops into the northern Gaza Strip.

Palestinian terrorists claimed responsibility for another kidnapping, this time of Israeli civilian Eliyahu Asheri, an 18-year-old man from Itamar. His abductors threatened to kill him if Israel did not cease its offensive against Gaza, but Israel responded immediately by declaring that it would not negotiate for any hostage release. The Israelis also said that they would not release any Palestinian prisoners they now hold.

The Palestinians have fired Kassam rockets into Israel almost ever since the day Israel withdrew from Gaza. The artillery attacks in northern Gaza intend on wiping out the bases for those attacks. However, Israel did not invade Gaza until the Palestinians invaded Israel to kill two soldiers and abduct a third, Gilad Shalit. The Post now reports that the kidnappers have been taking orders from a Syrian-based Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal. Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, acknowledges that he knows the people holding Shalit, but thus far has not ordered his release. Israel has diplomats working with the US and France to get pressure on Syria to have Mashaal deported.

The destruction of the three bridges and the power station indicates that the Israelis have a particular military strategy in mind for this mission. They have cut off some egress paths, and it looks like they want to box the terrorists into an area that the IDF can exploit by land. The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF wanted to ensure that Hamas could not sneak Shalit into Egypt and out of range of the IDF, but it seems unlikely that Egypt would want Shalit or the Hamas terrorists in the Sinai. I would wager that the Israelis have a very good idea where most of the terrorist assets in Gaza are located, and they may try to wipe out as much of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as possible during this exercise.

We should know more by the morning here in the US. Expect the UN to demand an end to the "aggression" by tomorrow afternoon.

The Hammer Falls In Gaza

Israel has begun its response to the Palestinian incursion from Gaza this weekend and the capture of an IDF soldier. Israeli tanks have attacked a bridge in central Gaza, and Palestinian security forces report that IDF tanks have begun to move towards the border:

Israeli planes attacked a bridge in central Gaza late Tuesday, Israel Radio reported, and Israeli tanks were said to be on the move, possibly signaling the start of a military operation.

Palestinian security forces said Israeli tanks were moving near the Israeli village of Nahal Oz, a main Israeli staging area just outside Gaza, but that they had not yet entered Gaza.

In the Shajaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, not far from the border fence, armed militants took up positions across from the blaring headlights of Israeli vehicles, and Israeli attack helicopters hovered overhead. The militants told residents to leave the area.

Israeli military officials said a limited operation has been authorized for southern Gaza, aimed at "terrorist infrastructure." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

If any Palestinians have thoughts of fleeing into the Sinai, the Egyptian government has a response ready. After Hamas ignored their entreaties to release the wounded IDF soldier, they sent 2500 troops to the Gaza border. The Egyptians have no desire to get drawn into the conflict, but neither do they want a flood of Gaza refugees fleeing into Egypt to cause even more trouble than the Palestinian terrorists have already created.

The Israelis will not bargain with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. They committed an act of war, and the Israelis will answer back in the same fashion. The only question will be how far they will go into Gaza and for how long.

Europe To Debate Whether Iraq Can Prosecute Saddam-Regime Criminals

The European Court of Human Rights has taken it upon themselves to debate whether Iraq has any sovereignty. At least, that is the implication of their agreement to deliberate whether the Coalition should allow Iraq to try former Saddam Hussein regime figures, starting with Tariq Aziz:

A lawyer for former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, in US custody in Baghdad, said the European Court of Human Rights had conditionally agreed to hear a plea over fears Aziz might be handed over to the Iraqi government.

Italian lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano said the court had first said it wanted to know to whom it was that Aziz had surrendered in April 2003, shortly after the fall of the former regime, by whom and where had he been held since then and at what date they proposed transferring custody.

Di Stefano and fellow Italian lawyer Domenico Marinelli said in a statement on Monday that the safety of their client and other detainees from the former Iraqi regime could be at risk if they were transferred to Iraqi custody.

I suppose that the Iraqi enablers of Saddam's terroristic dictatorship could find themselves "at risk". They will be at risk of being found guilty of their crimes, tried by the people against whom they committed their brutality. That process started in Europe, when the Allies tried the Germans for their crimes against humanity. One can easily argue that the Iraqis have more right to try their former oppressors than did the US, Britain, and Soviet Union to try Germans for their horrific acts.

What can this court be thinking? Does Europe really want to take the position that an elected government, representative of the Iraqis, do not have the sovereignty to try Iraqis for their crimes in Iraq? Tariq Aziz and the rest of Saddam's henchmen and toadies spent their lives propping up a bloodthirsty tyrant, and in doing so committed an almost endless series of crimes against their fellow Iraqis. Now that the tables have turned and the people have a justice system far more honest and straightforward than anything staged by these same men, the EU suddenly thinks it has the right to dictate to the Iraqis whether or not they can hold these monsters accountable for their actions.

Shame on the European Court of Human Rights and the EU for their patronizing and colonial attitudes. They have no business interfering with the efforts of the Iraqis in bringing their tormentors to justice.

The Roberts Letter And Its Lack Of Significance

Senator Pat Roberts chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and has a rather large influence on how our intelligence agencies conduct their business. For that reason, the following letter from Roberts to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, seems rather tepid at best:

June 27, 2006 The Honorable John D. Negroponte Director of National Intelligence Washington, D.C. 20511

Dear Mr. Director:

Unauthorized disclosures of classified information continue to threaten our national security – exposing our sensitive intelligence sources and methods to our enemies. Numerous, recent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive intelligence programs have directly threatened important efforts in the war against terrorism. Whether the President’s Terrorist Surveillance Program or the Department of Treasury’s effort to track terrorist financing, we have been unable to persuade the media to act responsibly and protect the means by which we protect this nation.

To gain a better understanding of the damage caused by unauthorized disclosures of this type, I ask that you perform an assessment of the damage caused by the unauthorized disclosure of some of our most sensitive intelligence programs. While your assessment may range beyond the President’s Terrorist Surveillance Program and Treasury’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, I am particularly interested in the damage attributable to these two unauthorized disclosures.

Sincerely,
Pat Roberts
Chairman

One question that immediately springs to mind: why doesn't Senator Roberts call for a hearing on the damage done by the New York Times in its multiple attacks on covert programs during a time of war? Calling for an analysis sounds good, and gives the impression that the DNI has taken action of some kind. It keeps the heat on the Times, but doesn't advance the story.

A report of this kind will make moderate headlines at some media outlets for a day. Politicians will pose for the cameras and expound on the irresponsibility of Bill Keller and the New York Times (as well as the Los Angeles Times), and bloggers will quote its findings endlessly. After the news cycle moves to another day, it will disappear, and so will any attention to those who expose successful covert programs designed to catch terrorists before they kill Americans.

By itself, it's an out.

Roberts has the authority to schedule hearings on this topic. Live testimony from intelligence professionals can drive the point home that they have worked hard to find the trail of terrorists through communications and financial networks. Just as the 9/11 Commission painted our intelligence services as incompetent and underresourced, the SSIC could demonstrate just how reporters like Eric Lichtblau and James Risen sabotage their efforts to protect us. Rather than just sticking for one news cycle, those hearings would last for days, providing plenty of testimony and all of the reports we can hope to read at the end.

If Pat Roberts really wanted something done about these leaks, he wouldn't have written Negroponte at all. He would have written to Alberto Gonzalez demanding an investigation into the violation of laws pertaining to classified data. Roberts would have demanded that Gonzalez empanel a grand jury and subpoena everyone involved in the leaks, including Lichtblau, Risen, Keller, the reporters and editors at the Los Angeles Times, and all of the relevant personnel at the CIA and Pentagon with access to this information.

We don't need a report from Negroponte. We need our elected representatives to start taking national-security leaks seriously. This isn't even a good start towards that end.

Japan To Get Missile Defenses

The US will supply Japan with anti-missile systems in response to North Korea's recent escalation in staging a Taepodong-2 missile for launch. The Post reports that both nations have expedited the process in order to have some response ready for any subsequent missile tests from Pyongyang:

The Pentagon is reportedly speeding up plans to deploy advanced Patriot interceptor missiles on U.S. bases in Japan for the first time, a countermeasure seen as a response to the increasing threat of North Korean missiles. ...

The planned PAC-3 deployment underscores concern that Japan is emerging as the nation most threatened by North Korean missiles. Reports of a possible test-firing of a Taepodong-2 have spurred Japan and the United States to take further steps in a joint effort to construct an effective missile-defense shield.

The U.S. Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles are designed to intercept ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or aircraft. But experts said it was unclear whether the PAC-3 system would be capable of shooting down the Taepodong-2.

The Japanese have spent the post-war period trying to live down their militaristic past. That past includes some quite a history on the Korean Peninsula, where their actions still reverberate to this day. Make no mistake; Kim Jong-Il's threat against the Japanese comes not just from ideological motivations but also from a strong sense of vengeance for Japanese atrocities in the not-so-distant past. While Japan has changed tremendously since those final days of empire, they have yet to live down their actions in that region.

Now Japan may have to face the irony of re-militarization as a consequence of the atrocities of their grandfathers. It appears they have little choice, with North Korea wanting to make a habit out of launching missiles as "tests" over their territory. They agreed to send a small but significant force to Iraq, a singular event for a nation that had resolved to keep its military for strictly home defense. Now, with Pyongyang threatening their security, they may have to consider nuclearization as at least a negotiating tactic and possibly as a MAD strategy. Without doubt, they will need to make themselves part of the American umbrella against missile attacks, a defense that had been so controversial just a few years ago.

The Patriots have not yet arrived, and Tokyo still has reservations about their deployment. However, it seems clear that Japan will need to assume more of the effort in defending the Pacific Rim against the totalitarian threat posed by Kim Jung-Il.

UPDATE: CQ reader Unclsmrgl notes that this deployment is meant as a stop-gap measure. The Japanese will start manufacturing their own Patriot PAC-3 missiles, as described at Defense Industry Daily:

The United States has concluded a deal to allow Japan to license produce Lockheed Martin's Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missiles which will constitute the core of a joint missile defense system. The PAC-3 is the USA's most modern ground-based air defense system.

The Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that the two governments sealed a memorandum of understanding in March 2005 on the licensed production of Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) interceptor missiles, and Lockheed Martin Corp. is expected to sign a contract before March 2006 to license Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. for PAC-3 production. At the same time, Japan has also said that foreign export of such weapons may be considered under certain circumstances. ...

As noted in an earlier DID report, Japan plans to deploy an anti-missile shield consisting of the land-based PAC-3 as well as the seaborne Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) that is about to be installed on the Kirishima AEGIS destroyer. The naval SM-3s are designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside of the atmosphere, while PAC-3 missiles have a smaller engagement radius and are used more as a final defense.

That production starts in FY2008-9. Until then, the Japanese will purchase them from Lockheed.

Specter: Borders First

A key moderate in the Senate has apparently shifted away from an insistence on instantaneous comprehensive immigration reform, agreeing to support a borders-first approach. Arlen Specter, one of the more liberal members of the GOP caucus, has announced his openness to verification of border security and employer enforcement before any efforts at normalization commence:

The security of the border should be the No. 1 priority for an immigration bill, Sen. Arlen Specter said yesterday, and he's open to a compromise that sets goals for border and interior enforcement ahead of a guest-worker program and path to citizenship for illegal aliens. ...

"Are we out of touch with the American people? We may be, on the basis of what the American people know today," he said, adding that the broken borders and poor interior enforcement get most of the attention. But he said he's having hearings, beginning July 5 in Pennsylvania, to look at the need for a guest-worker program and to examine how to deal with current illegal aliens.

Mr. Specter said that although the Senate would insist on a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for many illegal aliens in the final compromise bill, he is open to legislation that would make those proposals contingent on having a secure border and improved interior enforcement.

"It may be down the line that we will come to some terms on a timetable, with border security first and employment verification first," he said.

Such an amendment was offered during the Senate floor debate, but failed by a vote of 55-40, with Mr. Specter joining most Democrats and some Republicans in defeating it. Yesterday, Mr. Specter said he understands the sentiment of those who want enforcement first.

Is Congress out of touch on immigration? Almost assuredly. Even Jane Harman, the California Democrat who represents a reliably liberal district, noted her surprise recentlty at the reaction of her contituents to the efforts at normalization. People in this country remember Simpson-Mazzoli all too well, and they will not support another normalization effort without finally completing the loop and getting serious about border enforcement. In this way, the American public has gotten themselves way ahead of their elected representatives.

The problem at this point will be in convincing the hardliners to accept any kind of normalization at all. The vitriol aimed at them during this time by the political elite has made them significantly less likely to compromise. They see themselves on the side of the angels on this issue, and now the politicians have discovered that they are certainly on the side of the voters. However, we will still find it almost impossible to get the border security we want without giving at least something on normalization. Otherwise, we won't have the votes to stop another filibuster.

The question then becomes how to craft a compromise that offers no reward for lawbreaking while still normalizing those illegals who have lived well among us. Perhaps that means less of them qualify for the program, or putting permanent residency rather than citizenship as the prize, with citizenship only available to those who agree to self-deport and re-enter through improved immigration procedures. Even with that, we still need to get the border security accomplished before any rational effort can be made towards normalization, and the timetables and thresholds have to be specific and hard-cast before anyone will trust the government to enforce it.

Specter's conversion gives hope that the Senate may finally have gotten the message from the American electorate about the primacy of border security. If we have Specter on board, then it looks much easier to get past a filibuster, and it may also prove beneficial in drafting some of the other moderates to the staged approach. In the end, though, we will need to see the thresholds they have in mind before we can really hope to see actual progress on border security.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Stays Dutch

The Netherlands has reconsidered its efforts to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the reformist Muslim, of her citizenship based on a technicality following her courageous efforts to push her coreligionists to demand an end to its oppressive practices of shari'a. Michael van der Galien reports from Dutch news sources:

NOS journaal reports that, during a meeting between different ministers - that lasted until well past midnight - the Dutch Cabinet decided that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, and will remain, officially Dutch. Although Minister Verdonk did not want to decide this last night already, her fellow ministers enforced a permanent decision. Verdonk will inform Parliament about this matter later today.

According to RTL Nieuws certain political parties, especially GroenLinks, have already announced that they will be giving Verdonk an extremely hard time during the next debate in the lower chamber about this matter. I won't be suprised if Parliament will force her to resign. Lets hope so: she damaged the Dutch reputation tremendously.

Verdonk tried to push The Netherlands into appeasement of the worst Islamist impulses by humiliating Ayaan publicly by branding her an illegal immigrant and a liar. Her actions caused an international storm of criticism, and many in the US demanded that our government offer her ayslum and residency. Instead, the Dutch have done right by Ayaan, and Verdonk will experience the justice of humiliation instead.

Be sure to read all of Michael's post. He's done an excellent job keeping up with this story, and he's also a key contributor to The Moderate Voice.

The Enduring Resolve Of The Gray Lady

In the wake of the decision by the New York Times to reveal covert tactics used by our nation to track terrorist financing as a means of defeating them, Bill Keller offered the following as part of his explanation:

Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight. We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them.

However, that doesn't quite square with what the Times wrote on September 24th, 2001, less than two weeks after Islamifascist terrorists killed almost 3,000 New Yorkers. Back then, the Times demanded that the federal government take action against the networks that support and control these lunatic jihadis. In fact, the Paper of Record demanded a very specific kind of action, one that the New York Times has now kneecapped in a bitterly ironic twist (via Hugh Hewitt):

The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also must be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies. ... Washington should revive international efforts begun during the Clinton administration to pressure countries with dangerously loose banking regulations to adopt and enforce stricter rules. These need to be accompanied by strong sanctions against doing business with financial institutions based in these nations. The Bush administration initially opposed such measures. But after the events of Sept. 11, it appears ready to embrace them.

The Treasury Department also needs new domestic legal weapons to crack down on money laundering by terrorists. The new laws should mandate the identification of all account owners, prohibit transactions with "shell banks" that have no physical premises and require closer monitoring of accounts coming from countries with lax banking laws. Prosecutors, meanwhile, should be able to freeze more easily the assets of suspected terrorists. The Senate Banking Committee plans to hold hearings this week on a bill providing for such measures. It should be approved and signed into law by President Bush.

Take a close read through that editorial. Back then, the Times stated it would not be satisfied with merely freezing the assets of terrorists and their supporters. They wanted the identification of all account owners mandated by Congress and, presumably, accessible to the "specialized investigators" the Times demanded. The Times also wanted the Bush administration to pursue greater cooperation between international banking authorities and these new investigators.

Doesn't this sound familiar? It should; it describes the SWIFT project that Bill Keller and his newspaper just ruined with its revelation about these same tactics the newspaper demanded five years ago. Now, suddenly, they see a civil liberties risk in pursuing terrorist financing abroad, even though SWIFT only handles certain large international money transfers, and that our efforts only focused on actors already suspected of terrorist ties.

One of the concerns many of us had at the beginning of this war was the question of the American capacity for resolve in seeing it to its conclusion. Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger have made themselves the poster boys for retreat.

UPDATE: CQ reader Marko has the link to the full editorial here. Power Line also reproduced it this morning. And thanks to Bryan at Hot Air for his link; be sure to read his comments as well.

Media To Challenge Canadian Publication Ban

The Canadian courts have imposed another publication ban on the trial of the 17 Muslims arrested for conspiring to conduct terror attacks in Toronto. Two American and two Canadian media outlets have filed challenges to this order, hoping to open the trial to the press and the Canadian public:

Four media organizations asked a judge on Monday to hear arguments on overturning a media blackout in the cases of the suspects charged with plotting to bomb buildings in southern Ontario.

The Associated Press, the New York Times, the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are challenging a publication ban a judge has imposed on courtroom proceedings for the 17 suspects arrested in the alleged plot. ...

Justice of the piece Keith Currie banned the media from reporting details of courtroom proceedings as the request of prosecutors on June 12. A notice of application to quash Currie's decision was filed last week and media lawyers met Regional Senior Judge Bruce Durno in an effort to set a hearing on the challenge.

"One justice of the peace has imposed a sweeping publication ban on all these hearings, and these hearings were the first opportunity for Canadians to learn more about the nature of the charges against these individuals and to assess the merits of the case against them," said Ryder Gilliland, a lawyer for the media. ...

Canada's Criminal Code allows judges to institute bans against publishing details from court hearings in an effort to protect the suspect's right to a fair trial.

Bans for bail hearings are often granted.

Of course, I have had a little experience with these publication bans. In the case of the Gomery hearings, however, the situation was somewhat different. That ban involved a public inquiry into corruption and malfeasance by elected officials and government programs. Gomery's squelching of the press did not prevent the attendees from learning firsthand, most of whom were well-connected to the political process as well as some of the media on whom the ban applied.

This ban involves a case with higher stakes, but at a level with lower likelihood of airing anything terribly substantive. Since this involves an arraignment, the Crown will likely present enough evidence to convince the judge to hold the suspects without bail, but not enough to really tip their hands. In any event, anything presented at the bail hearing will also get presented at trial later, so the public will get their chance to hear it, eventually.

Still, the judge should seriously consider waiving the ban. This case, as the AP report notes, has had a tremendous impact on the cosmopolitan Canadians, who have been shocked at the jihadis that grew out of their tolerant society, The people have their rights as well, and unless the judge plans to ask questions about covert intelligence methods, then he should allow the media to report on the danger they presented Canada.

Of course, if they don't, perhaps I may find another source ...

And Other People Have Need Of This As Well

The First Mate has had need of several blood transfusions in her fight against hemolytic anemia, and will likely need several more before she can turn the corner. We're lucky; our health insurance covers the cost of the transfusions. An extended family member in Texas (very distantly related through two marriages) is not so lucky. Her sister wrote a plea to friends and family this afternoon:

To all my family & friends that live out of the area:

My sister, Kathleen, is living on blood transfusions until she can get a stem cell transplant. This is costing her $3,000 for each unit of blood. We can help by donating blood in her name. You must make sure that where you donate the blood that will give credits in her name through the National Blood Exchange. They will ask for her information, which is

Kathleen Galaise
Carter Blood Center-Baylor Hospital, Dallas, TX
Acct. #042054

Thank you so much! Please feel free to share this information with any friends that may be willing to donate. We really do appreciate it.

Love, Gail

If you are in a position to donate blood and would like to offer it in Kathleen's name, her family would certainly appreciate it. The blood banks can use all of the donations they can get.

Please also accept my thanks for your generosity.

9/11 Commission Chairs Asked Keller To Shelve SWIFT Report

Outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose low-key leadership led to his eventual replacement, has ensured that he will make waves on his exit from the Bush Cabinet. Secretary Snow released a rebuttal to Bill Keller's wan explanation of his decision to expose covert tactics in tracking terrorist financing that all but calls Keller a liar. While Keller described efforts by the government to hold back publication of the story as "half-hearted", Snow reveals that Keller's association with the truth is half-assed:

Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times not to publish were "half-hearted" is incorrect and offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the past two months, Treasury has engaged in a vigorous dialogue with the Times - from the reporters writing the story to the D.C. Bureau Chief and all the way up to you. It should also be noted that the co-chairmen of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton, met in person or placed calls to the very highest levels of the Times urging the paper not to publish the story. Members of Congress, senior U.S. Government officials and well-respected legal authorities from both sides of the aisle also asked the paper not to publish or supported the legality and validity of the program.

Indeed, I invited you to my office for the explicit purpose of talking you out of publishing this story. And there was nothing "half-hearted" about that effort. I told you about the true value of the program in defeating terrorism and sought to impress upon you the harm that would occur from its disclosure. I stressed that the program is grounded on solid legal footing, had many built-in safeguards, and has been extremely valuable in the war against terror. Additionally, Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey met with the reporters and your senior editors to answer countless questions, laying out the legal framework and diligently outlining the multiple safeguards and protections that are in place.

When one has meetings with a Cabinet officer, his undersecretary, members of Congress, and the two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, and all of them urge the spiking of a national-security story, that cannot be described by anyone with a shred of honesty as "half-hearted". Not only has Keller revealed his arrogance, but also showed the lack of integrity that led to his decision to publish this story.

The inclusion of the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission is particularly telling. The Times urged the Bush administration to adopt the Commision recommendations in toto, parroting the Kerry campaign's demands after the publication of the Commission's final report. They considered the Commission's findings determinative, and brooked little dissent from the Bush administration when it hesitated to implement the entire set of recommendations. Now, however, Keller and Pinch Sulzberger finds them less than expert on matters of national security, and their efforts "half-hearted".

Well, one has to have a heart before one can put half of it into any effort, and as far as Keller has demonstrated, we lack evidence that he qualifies. His whiny excuse-making had already been rightly and roundly denounced as non-responsive. Now we know it was dishonest and misleading as well. The New York Times has descended rapidly into the mainstream media's equivalent of the Weekly World News. The Sulzbergers may want to rethink Pinch's oversight of the family business.

AQ Leaders Negotiated With Saddam Regime For Training

For those who keep insisting that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had no operational ties, the work of Ray Robison has provided explicit evidence in rebuttal. Fox News reports on the latest efforts of Robison in translating the documents captured by US forces but never translated by the CIA or Pentagon. His recent translation of a series of documents shows that AQ jihadists had negotiated with the Iraqi Intelligence Services for training facilities in Tajikistan or in Baghdad:

Newly declassified documents captured by U.S. forces indicate that Saddam Hussein's inner circle not only actively reached out to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and terror-based jihadists in the region, but also hosted discussions with a known Al Qaeda operative about creating jihad training "centers," possibly in Baghdad.

Ray Robison, a former member of the CIA-directed Iraq Survey Group (ISG), supervised a group of linguists to analyze, archive and exploit the hundreds of captured documents and materials of Saddam's regime.

The documents show that the IIS met with Taliban officials using a Pakistani mediator in 1999. The meeting has separate confirmation in other al-Qaeda documents captured in Afghanistan. The notebook Robison translated details two more meetings as well. The second meeting took place between Gulbulddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan member of Islamic Jihad, and the IIS. Hekmatyar, Fox notes, recently pledged his allegiance to AQ. The third meeting involved this IIS agent and a Bangladeshi jihadist, likely Fazlur Rahman Khalil, an AQ associate and a signatory to Osama bin Laden's fatwa against the United States in 1998.

Of the three meetings, the second has the most interesting information. Hekmatyar wanted Saddam's assistance in training jihadis for their holy war against the West, and apparently Baghdad found the idea intriguing:

6. “Iran helped us at the beginning and we brought 2,000 fighters but things changed at the time being. Also the Russians called to help but we do not trust them. Moscow and Iran want the war to drag on.” (RR: this is probably the Taliban vs. Northern Alliance conflict). This is why he is coming to Baghdad for help. Asked Baghdad to help open a center in Tajikistan or in Baghdad and they will bring them (translator’s note: not clear what them refers to) in through Iran or Northern Iraq.

He asked for help in printing Afghani money in Baghdad or help in printing it in Moscow.

Fox then quotes a State Department document from 1996 stating that Hekmatyar ran training and indoctrination facilities for foreign fighters coming to Afghanistan. Among those who came to his camps were jihadis in Tajikistan, supplying foreign fighters for those terrorist networks that suffered heavy losses in the mid-1990s. Because of the expansion of jihadism in Afghanistan, the continuing civil war with the Northern Alliance, and the efforts in the Caucasus to turn separatist rebellions into Islamist holy wars, Hekmatyar needed more training camps for foreign jihadis. He wanted them either in Tajikistan or Baghdad, or both if he could get them -- and the IIS appeared open for business. They certainly continued their contacts with the Taliban and Osama's jihadis as well.

Those ties look a lot stronger as more of these documents get translated and linked together. We have already seen operational ties between Saddam and terrorists in the region, and the evidence of his assistance to the same jihadi network that launched repeated attacks on American assets up to 9/11 grows stronger. We need a high-powered effort to get the rest of the thousands of IIS documents translated in order to gain the clearest picture of Saddam's connections to the terrorists arrayed against us.

UPDATE: We've mentioned it before, but ABC reported on evidence linking Osama and Saddam operationally back in 1999. You can see the video here. (Hat tip to CQ reader Andy B)

Bush: NYT 'Disgraceful'

George Bush weighed in on the controversial story published this weekend on the Swift project that exposed the covert tactics used to track terrorist financing. Speaking at a briefing in the White House, Bush called the Times disclosure "disgraceful":

President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a secret anti-terrorism program that taps into an immense international database of confidential financial records. "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful," he said.

"For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America," Bush said. He said the disclosure of the program "makes it harder to win this war on terror." ... "Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law," Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops in
Iraq.

"We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America," the president said. "What we were doing was the right thing."

The president appeared animated and visibly angered at the mention of the story published by the Times. He reminded everyone that the 9/11 Commission recommended that the government follow terrorist financing "robustly", and reminded everyone that no laws had been broken in the effort. When asked why the administration did not allow Congress to conduct oversight on the program, he visibly bristled at the suggestion. "Congress was briefed," he replied immediately.

Here's what the 9/11 Commission recommended (page 382):

Recommendation: Vigorous efforts to track terrorist financing must remain front and center in U.S. counterterrorism efforts.The government has recognized that information about terrorist money helps us to understand their networks, search them out, and disrupt their operations. Intelligence and law enforcement have targeted the relatively small number of financial facilitators—individuals al Qaeda relied on for their ability to raise and deliver money—at the core of al Qaeda’s revenue stream. These efforts have worked. The death or capture of several important facilitators has decreased the amount of money available to al Qaeda and has increased its costs and difficulty in raising and moving that money. Captures have additionally provided a windfall of intelligence that can be used to continue the cycle of disruption.

That sounds pretty clear. The 9/11 Commission, over which the Times has endlessly fawned, demanded that the US implement "vigorous efforts" to track terrorist financing in order to prevent another attack. As Bush points out, the Swift project did just that, without breaking laws or endangering civil liberties, according to the Times' own reporting. Bill Keller blew the program and tipped the terrorists anyway, in order to improve the finances of the Times.

New Yorkers who complained about DHS funding and demanded recognition as the #1 terrorist target in the US should ask themselves why their newspaper is assisting the terrorists instead of the nation's defense. If Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton do not condemn Keller and the Times for leaving us all just a little more vulnerable. If they stay silent, we know that, just like Bill Keller, all they care about is their own grasp of money rather than that of the terrorists.

UPDATE: Allahpundit has the video at Hot Air.

Kerry Splits Democrats With Renewed Presidential Aspirations

John Kerry has split Democrats with his race to the left in order to gain some traction for the 2008 presidential nomination, his hometown newspaper reports. The Boston Globe notes some approbation coming from the antiwar netroots, but the party establishment has little trust in the man they think blew a winnable 2004 election:

Senator John F. Kerry has intensified his quest to regain the Democratic presidential nomination with a sharp move to the left, presenting himself in high-profile speeches and Senate debates as an unfettered lawmaker and would-be presidential candidate who learned from his 2004 loss that he must fight harder for what he believes.

In passionate remarks on the Senate floor and before party faithful last week, Kerry spoke directly to grass-roots Democrats, many of whom remain angry over his defeat in an election they believe Kerry was capable of winning.

``I think I'm a much better candidate at this point in my life than I've ever been before -- much more knowledgeable, much more confident, much clearer and brief, to the point, and highly focused," Kerry said in an interview, noting that those campaign skills would apply equally to a 2008 run for the Senate or the presidency.

While many Democrats remain wary of Kerry, there were signs last week that party activists were welcoming his defiance of the Bush administration -- and some leaders of his own party -- on the war in Iraq, the makeup of the Supreme Court, and on environmental policy.

All of this sounds depressingly familiar. After all, John Kerry has practically made a career out of changing his positions for political expediency, and his latest effort seems the most transparent of all. He could not articulate a coherent war policy during the months in which he ran for President in 2004, when the effort seemed to paying few immediate dividends. Now that we have made tremendous strides in establishing a representative government and a strengthening security service, he suddenly feels that America has lost the war -- a position that will only find traction among the far Left that he failed to inspire two years ago.

As if on cue, however, those activists have warmed to his rhetoric:

While many Democrats remain wary of Kerry, there were signs last week that party activists were welcoming his defiance of the Bush administration -- and some leaders of his own party -- on the war in Iraq, the makeup of the Supreme Court, and on environmental policy.

``They like an aggressive Senator Kerry," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga , the influential Daily Kos Internet blogger . ``A lot of the hostility is dissipating. The first step is to have people not hate you anymore." ...

``There tends to be a sense of emancipation. You're free to talk about issues in ways you really would have liked to during the campaign," said Chris Lehane, a senior staff member on Gore's 2000 campaign who briefly worked for Kerry in 2004.

All Kerry has done lately is a repeat of what he did in 2004 when Howard Dean stumbled out of the gate: doppleganged his competition. He waited until Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha took the lead on opposition to the war, and only after several months has he basically stolen the issue from both of them. Kerry saw the media attention Feingold got for his calls for withdrawal while touring Iraq -- an egregious violation of the American tradition of unity abroad -- and decided to steal their thunder.

The last campaign should have taught all factions in the Democratic Party about Kerry's tactics and ethics. He waits until the winds get thoroughly tested, and then he jumps in front of what he sees as momentum. The man has not had an original thought in his head in his entire political career. Even his antiwar campaign post-Viet Nam had Kerry blindly following activist frauds such as those who conducted the Winter Soldier "investigations". His intellectual laziness, so in evidence in his Senate career, came through loud and clear in that 2004 campaign. And yet the very people on the Left who consider themselves the leading intellectuals of their movement seem content to hitch their wagons to this political dilettante.

If the Democrats wind up with another strong Kerry campaign in the primaries, the only beneficiary will be the eventual GOP nominee. If they're insane enough to renominate the man who couldn't beat George Bush at the height of Bush Derangement Syndrome, they may well position themselves for a McGovern-like spanking in 2008 that will haunt them for the foreseeable future.

Keller Offers Platitudes Rather Than Reasons

Bill Keller, having fled the scene according to his office as soon as the New York Times published the latest national-security revelations from Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, offers his readers a written explanation rather than give any interviews about his decision to reveal classified tactics. Unfortunately for Times readers, he doesn't offer much in the way of explanation in his open letter. Keller manages to dodge the real questions while actually blaming conservative critics for making this a bigger story than he imagined when he green-lighted it for publication.

The pushback against the right comes as his first excuse:

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

One has to go far before seeing a more disingenuous argument than this from any publisher or editor. It insults the intelligence, because Keller would have you believe that a front-page story in the New York Times would never have garnered any attention had it not been for conservative bloggers and talk-show hosts. Granted, if Keller remains in charge of the Times it may eventually come to that. However, Keller's argument appears to be that criticism of publication of classified material creates a larger national-security problem than the publication itself.

He then offers the standard platitudes about the role of a free press in democracy, and the heavy responsibility that he felt in making this decision. What he doesn't explain at all is the competing interests of the public right to know and the government responsibility for security, a decision that really shouldn't rest at the Times in any case. Oh, he thinks he explains it, but he leaves out a critical point:

It's not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective, but the story cites strong arguments from proponents that this is the case. While some experts familiar with the program have doubts about its legality, which has never been tested in the courts, and while some bank officials worry that a temporary program has taken on an air of permanence, we cited considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far. A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don't know about it.

Rather than discuss the non-secret fact that the government has infiltrated global financial systems to track terrorists -- a fact known by even the most detached American for the past four years -- but that the Times revealed the specific tactics used to track financial transactions. This would be akin to printing planned troop movements during a battle. It tips the enemy to our efforts against them, and allows them to take steps to avoid our reach.

Evem more to the point, Keller admits in this paragraph that the program he revealed is both legal and effective. Since the only real news value in blowing a covert operation is when it is either illegal or detrimental, the mind boggles at Keller's admission. If the Swift penetration broke no laws, which Risen and Lichtblau admitted, and effective, as the capture of Hamali demonstrated, then why should the New York Times publish the tactics on its front page? How can he argue that he balanced the news value against national security when a legal and effective covert operation has almost no news value whatsoever outside of sheer prurience?

As Wizbang points out, the entire Keller argument boils down to this:

Dear Reader:

1) We have no reason to believe the program was illegal in any way.
2) We have every reason to believe it was effective at catching terrorists.
3) We ran the story anyway, screw you.

I would add a fourth bullet point stating that the New York Times thinks its readers suffer from some form of brain damage if Keller thinks this letter explains any of the issues raised by their publication of this material. They have revealed the specific tactics of an effective covert program during a time of war, a program that has actually caught terrorists, and admits that its revelation neither shows it to break laws or threaten civil liberties. They sold us out for the money and used the excuse of a public right to know, the same excuse that gives us paparazzi shots of half-naked celebrities on the covers of supermarket tabloids. That is the Bill Keller legacy to journalism and the New York Times.

Who would have thought we'd get nostalgic for Howell Raines?

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a substantive roundup of reaction to Keller's letter. CQ readers should read Patterico's transcript of a radio interview between LA Times columnist Patt Morrison and Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus on their decision to run the story concurrently with Keller and the NYT. Money quote:

MCMANUS: ... So, it’s — this is a broader issue than an individual operation. In any case, we take the question seriously of whether our disclosure of this policy change and this program will be to the disadvantage of legitimate government efforts against terrorism, and we have to weigh that against the legitimate public interest in knowing whether the government is changing the rules, knowing whether the government is operating within the law, um, knowing what the government is up to.”

It does not fall to the Times to make that decision, especially when no laws have been broken -- as the NYT explicitly reported. The government (all three branches) , by the way, makes the rules; we elect them to do that. We don't elect the LAT or the NYT to arrogantly decide whether those laws have value or not. If they change the rules, we elect them to do that, too. As both newspapers reported endlessly in the wake of 9/11, a lot of rules needed changing in order to effectively protect us against the terrorists that want to kill us.

Didn't we demand that of Congress and the White House? If so, why did the Fourth Estate decide to blow covert tactics that worked within the law to do just that?

UPDATE II: I should have pointed people to the best takedown of Keller thus far, not surprisingly by Hugh Hewitt. My good friend Scott Johnson at Power Line has an excellent rebuttal as well. Don't miss either one.

Terrorists Use Crank Calls To Soldiers' Families

In one of the strangest developments in the war on terror, terrorists in Iraq have begun making crank calls to the families of British soldiers using technology that hacks into their cell phones while they call home. The Times of London describes this odd tactic, which has their Defence Ministry steamed:

WIVES and family members of soldiers fighting in Iraq have received telephone death threats from insurgents. Their numbers were obtained by Iraqi hackers from soldiers’ mobile telephones using an electronic device.

Disclosure of the threatening calls emerged after an investigation by the Royal Military Police into complaints from soldiers. The threats range from claims that a husband or son is dead or will be killed in Iraq to verbal abuse, according to reports. ...

The extent of the problem emerged at the weekend in a restricted Army document issued to soldiers of the London Regiment, a Territorial Army unit that has soldiers in Iraq.

The document is said to warn soldiers preparing to take part in operations that insurgents have managed to obtain home telephone numbers of soldiers using an electronic intercept device that can hack into mobile telephone systems.

Perhaps the strategic thought behind these calls could be that it demoralizes the British families back home and makes them less willing to fight, but that seems like a rather stupid idea. If any of the terrorists had bothered to read about the Blitz, they would know that the Brits do not intimidate easily and react to threats with stoic resolve. It's difficult to take this seriously anyway; I mean, what will the terrorists do next, ask for Prince Albert in the can?

One also has to wonder about their tactical priorities. Here they have some interesting, if not terribly useful, technology. I doubt the British use cell phones to coordinate their missions, but the Iraqis could confirm it one way or another with this hacking device; at the least, they may be able to triangulate their position, but since the cell phones are probably only used in established FOBs, that has little value. So what do the terrorists do? Continue to spend their time playing with the hack device and then make time-wasting crank calls.

Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have them doing that than building IEDs. However, it seems to me that this indicates a lack of better options for some of the insurgents, which makes them look more pathetic than frightening.

Delusions Of Grandeur Die Hard In Baghdad

Saddam Hussein has had a difficult time adjusting to life out of power and in the hands of the people he brutalized for four decades. That kind of life change can cause cognitive difficulties for someone in that position; the mind plays tricks on megalomaniacs, allowing them to believe that they still occupy the center of the universe. That would explain Saddam's latest delusions of grandeur:

Saddam Hussein believes the United States will have to seek his help to quell the bloody insurgency in Iraq and open the way for U.S. forces to withdraw, his chief lawyer said Sunday.

Khalil al-Dulaimi argued in an interview with The Associated Press that the former leader is the key to returning stability to Iraq.

"He's their last resort. They're going to knock at his door eventually," the lawyer said. Saddam is "the only person who can stop the resistance against the U.S. troops." ...

Al-Dulaimi said Saddam brought up the topic during a meeting Tuesday, and indicated he would be willing to help the United States — "for the sake of saving both peoples — the Iraqis and Americans."

He quoted Saddam as saying:

"These puppets in the Iraqi government that the Americans brought to power are helpless. They can't protect themselves or the Iraqi people. The Americans will certainly come to me, to Saddam Hussein's legitimate leadership and to the Iraqi Baath Party, to rescue them from their huge quandary."

If George Bush has already heard this, it has to have provided him with the best laugh he's had in months. The notion that the US wants Saddam for anything other than a windchime in the courtyard of a Baghdad prison has to be the craziest idea yet from the former Iraqi dictator. However, it is exactly the kind of delusion that sociopaths often create when their deeds finally catch up to them. The world has to center on them; they cannot conceive that they do not occupy the thoughts of everyone around them.

The Americans will not soon ask Saddam for assistance in any way, shape, or form. They have almost as much use for him as the Shi'ites and the Kurds, who may want him dead a little more than Washington and for better reason. Saddam may not psychically survive the realization that he is both impotent and irrelevant to the future of Iraq, but the facts remain so.

The most humorous part of this story is the way the AP reports it. Jamal Halaby actually provides serious analysis that informs the reader that the Kurds and Shi'ites would likely "be enflamed by his presence". No kidding; the man practiced genocide against both populations. Only an idiot or an AP reporter would take this seriously enough to spend time discussing how the Americans could throw the trial to allow him to work to restore legitimacy to Iraq.

Apparently Saddam isn't the only one suffering delusions.

UNSCAM Trial Starts Tomorrow In NY

The trial of Tongsun Park starts tomorrow in New York. The Times of London looks forward to revelations of links between Saddam Hussein and former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in one of the first UN Oil-For-Food trials:

LINKS between Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former UN Secretary-General, and an alleged agent for Saddam Hussein will come under the spotlight when the first American trial of a major figure in the Oil-for-Food scandal gets under way today.

The judge has ruled that prosecutors can present evidence of Dr Boutros Ghali’s relationship with Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman on trial in New York for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Saddam’s Iraq.

The North Korean-born Mr Park was dubbed “the oriental Gatsby” after he played a central role in the “Koreagate” bribery scandal in Washington in the 1970s, although the judge has ruled that evidence of that role is not relevant to this case.

Mr Park, 71, is accused of plotting to make pay-offs to two top UN officials to secure favourable terms for Iraq in the creation of the Oil-for-Food programme during the 1990s.

If CQ readers wonder why Boutros-Ghali has any connection to the notorious bribery figure of the 1970s, please refer to my post from last January when American officials arrested Park. As the London Telegraph reported back then, the FBI has evidence of Park attempting to give a million-dollar bribe to the former UN honcho:

The indictment, released on Friday, refers to attempts to buy the influence of two unnamed UN officials. A separate investigation - led by Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman - into the scandal concluded that Mr Park and another accused man tried to pass $1 million to the former UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

The report said there was no evidence that Mr Boutros-Ghali received or agreed to receive the money. The Volcker commission also found that in 1997 Mr Park invested $1 million in a Canadian company linked to the son of Maurice Strong, a close aide to Kofi Annan, the current secretary-general, in an attempt to secure his help for Iraq. The report found no evidence that Mr Strong was involved.

Park's trial may wind up giving us an interesting look into the UNSCAM machinations that have not yet been made public. Claudia Rosett will be all over this, of course.

Tech Notes

A few weeks ago, I asked for some assistance on improving the performance of my computer. Thanks to all of the assistance offered by my readers, the laptop performs much better. I added memory, defragged the hard drive, and eliminated some unnecessary background programs.

When I added memory, most of that had not yet taken place, and the installing tech got a little frustrated with the boot time of my laptop. One of his recommendations was to get rid of Norton Anti-Virus, which has lots of features but throws a lot of processes into the background. He recommended PC-Cillin instead. His store sold both (as well as other brands) but I decided to hold off on making that change, mostly because I still had a few more months on my subscription. However, with all of the down time I'm facing, I figured that this might be the best time for me to play around with it, and I picked up a copy on a rare field trip this afternoon.

So far, it appears to work pretty well. It has all of the same features as Norton, but it initiates significantly fewer processes. My programs launch more quickly, and their commands seem to work faster as well. Of course, the true measure of an anti-virus program is how well it protects you, and I haven't had enough time with this product to know that. So far, I'm pretty pleased.

I've also been testing Internet Explorer 7.0 for the past month. This beta release has the same kind of tabbed browsing that Firefox has. I've still got Firefox as my default web browser, but I use IE7 to manage the website through MT. IE7 has a nice spell checker that allows me to quickly verify that I haven't misspelled anything in a post before finishing it. So far, I like it, although I doubt that I'll stop using Firefox.

Palistinians Claim WMD Capability

The Fatah terrorist faction has claimed the capability of chemical and biological weapons and has threatened Israel with a WMD attack, according to the Jerusalem Post. Leaflets distributed in the Gaza Strip state that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has spent the last three years developing the capabilty, the start of which seems oddly coincidental to the fall of Saddam Hussein (via Reliapundit):

The Aksa Martyrs' Brigades group announced on Sunday that it its members have succeeded in manufacturing chemical and biological weapons to be used against Israel.

In a leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip, the group, which belongs to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party, said the weapons were the result of an effort that has lasted for three years.

The statment was a response to an Israeli Security Cabinet decision to give the IDF the green light to prepare all the forces necessary for a military operation against Gaza terror cells. As of 9:00 p.m. large amounts of Golani and Givati Brigade infantry troops were amassing on the Israeli side of the Gaza security fence.

According to the statement, the first of its kind, the group managed to manufacture and develop at least 20 different types of biological and chemical weapons.

The group said its members would not hesitate to add the new weapons to long-range rockets that are being fired at Israeli communities almost every day. It also threatened to use the weapons against IDF soldiers if Israel carried out its threats to invade the Gaza Strip.

If they're bluffing, they're making a very big mistake. And if they're not bluffing, then they have just signed the death warrants of both Hamas and Fatah and quite possibly the Palestinian Authority.

If these terrorists have acquired chemical and biological weapons, the IDF will rightly assume that they know have a choice only between which genocide will succeed. Given their history and strong sense of survival, they will certainly make the right choice -- and that will mean the end of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The only reason the Israelis don't push them into the Jordan and Egypt is because of their identification with Western values that rejects ethnic cleansing as any solution.

Once the first chemical or biological weapon gets launched against Israel, that decision will have been taken out of their hands. The Israelis will almost certainly launch a massive strike against the Palestinians in both directions -- and while Hamas and Fatah do moderately well at targeting unarmed civilians, the IDF will slice through them like butter. And if the Palestinians expect the West to stop them, they will have miscalculated badly.

The question will be where they acquired these weapons. They do not have the research facilities to have developed WMD on their own. If they actually do possess them, it seems a probablility that someone supplied Fatah with WMD.

Who has WMD? What country stocked them, until three years ago? And where does Hamas and Islamic Jihad, at least, have themselves established? Syria -- who has long rumored to have received the Iraqi stockpiles in 2002 and 2003, just ahead of the American invasion.

The Palestinians have just tipped us off to where the WMD went, and now we know where at least some it may have ended up. The Israelis may not be alone in marching through Gaza and the West Bank.

Taliban Calls For Truce

The Taliban in Afghanistan has proposed a month-long truce in order to reach a permanent arrangement with the Pakistani government. The Waziristan region has seen fierce fighting involving Pakistani troops, and as the Americans and Canadians press an offensive in Afghanistan, the two-front war has taken its toll on the Taliban:

The militants, also known as local Taleban, have set the government four main conditions.

They want a withdrawal of army troops from the region within a month, and the removal of all new check posts from North Waziristan, their spokesman Abdullah Farhad told the BBC.

He also demanded the restoration of salaries and jobs and other incentives for local tribes and the release of tribesmen arrested during military operations against al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters in the region.

The governor of North Western Frontier Province, Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, said a decision on these conditions would be taken in talks with the militants.

He promised to reciprocate with a goodwill gesture but did not elaborate.

This follows a similar arrangement in South Waziristan, where a truce has held for the past month. The Taliban would like nothing more than to lick their wounds in the mountain regions while offering support for their allies in Afghanistan. It appears that the Musharraf government might also like to get out of Waziristan and focus their efforts elsewhere, a move that would likely cause some friction with Washington if it results in increased fighting in Afghanistan.

A truce with Islamists in this region sounds like a bad deal for the US, and it might impact our previous reluctance to conduct cross-border missions. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have long been rumored to hide in these regions, and an end to Pakistani military operations would at first blush mean greater security for the al-Qaeda masterminds and a renewed opportunity for them to rebuild some operational connections to their network.

We shall see what this means; perhaps the deal might require the betrayal of bin Laden and Zawahiri, who after all ordered two assassination attempts on Musharraf. We can only hope that the Pakistanis remain firm in their efforts to stop Islamofascist terror.

UPDATE: Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakly, the commander of the forces in Afghanistan, tells Fox News that this both impacts his fight in Afghanistan and is a result of their successes against the Taliban. He notes that the cease-fire only applies to Pakistan, and he has no intention of letting up on the enemy. He's not surprised that the Taliban has fought back recently. The Canadian additions allowed the Coalition to expand their pressure on the Taliban in areas that had not been touched before.

Palestinians Invade Israel From Gaza

The Palestinians have escalated their continuous attacks on Israel from Gaza, which no longer qualifies as occupied territory, by raiding Israel. 'Militants' crossed over into Israel using tunnels, killed two soldiers and apparently kidnapped another, before crossing back into Gaza:

Palestinian militants launched on Sunday their first deadly raid into Israel from Gaza since an Israeli pullout last year, killing two soldiers and abducting another in an assault in which two attackers died.

The infiltration, through a tunnel militants dug under the Gaza border fence to reach an army post, raised tensions along the frontier to their highest point since Israel completed its withdrawal last September after 38 years of occupation.

Israeli forces scrambled into the Gaza Strip to search for the missing soldier, who the army said had been kidnapped. There was no immediate claim from any of the militant groups that took part in the dawn raid that they were holding him.

A strong Israeli military response to the assault, claimed by the armed wing of the governing Hamas group and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) after recent air strikes that killed 14 Palestinian civilians, seemed likely.

The Israelis have fired missiles into Gaza in response to missile attacks by Islamic Jihad that started almost immediately after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza. The Palestinian Authority has refused to take any action to stop the rocket attacks by the Islamist terrorists, and Israel shortly afterwards started returning the fire.

Now that the Palestinians have escalated the conflict by invading Israel, we can surely expect a response in force by Israel. Their withdrawal from Gaza makes the invasion an act of war, although Israel will not likely try to invest Gaza again. What they will likely do is stage a raid in force by the IDF to clear out the region where the attacks originate and create a buffer area that they can patrol for long enough to make their point. They will also escalate their targeted attacks on terrorist leadership, including that of Hamas.

This will undermine both sides in the pending Palestinian civil war. Ismael Haniyeh will find himself having to go underground to avoid Israeli attacks, especially if their kidnapped soldier turns up dead. Abbas' efforts to return to negotiations will have to wait for the Israeli military response to reach its conclusion, and that may take a while. The best Abbas can expect will be a quick raid that might capture some of the rocket-launching terrorists, removing a headache for Fatah. Otherwise, both factions will find it difficult to reach any kind of understanding on proceeding with peace talks, and that will push them towards civil war.

Conservative Convergence Coming

Newsweek has an interesting article on a project about which CQ has long known: the conversion of the durable Townhall website into a merging of conservative talk radio, weblogs, and opinion leaders to create an unprecedented media convergence. When Salem Radio bought Townhall, Hugh Hewitt and Salem dared to dream big, and that dream is about to launch:

Hugh Hewitt is a master of multitasking. Week after week, the sanguine, persistent pundit hosts his "center-right" talk radio show from a nondescript office in Orange County, Calif.—and more than a million people tune in. Two computers flank his mike. While on the air, Hewitt uses the first to surf news sites, then swivels to the second during breaks to update his well-trafficked blog. "Both spoken words and written words are powerful," he says. "Acting in harmony, the effect is exponential." Just ask Rick Santorum. In May, he urged Hewitt's listeners to fork over campaign funds, and the host, ever eager, posted a link. Donations shot up 500 percent.

Chances are Santorum won't be the last candidate between now and November to benefit from Hewitt's brand of blog-broadcast synergy. On July 4, Salem Communications, one of the country's largest radio-station owners, will relaunch an old Web war horse called Townhall.com as a hub for its stable of stars (including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved and Hewitt himself). The hope? That "Web 2.0" wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall's 1.4million unique monthly visitors and you've got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web's biggest political blog. "We will overwhelm them," he says.

Full disclosure: This project also involves CQ, indirectly at least, in my role as a co-host of the Northern Alliance Radio show on Saturdays. Our podcasts will now come through the new Salem portal, and our blogs will also get links from the site. So far, that has been the limit of my direct involvement, although that may evolve later.

Hugh has always been a visionary in the revolution in communications. Among nationally-syndicated talk show hosts, Hugh first realized the force multiplier that blogs represented for his efforts. As far back as 2003, Hugh made efforts to encourage his listeners to start blogging to build conservative strength on line. Our association in Minnesota began that year; in fact, I was the last member added to the Northern Alliance of Blogs in November 2003, after a series of gag initiation rites that included photoshopping James Lileks with a Hummel and writing an epic poem mentioning at least ten other blogs and insulting Fraters Libertas.

One of the qualities people miss the most about Hugh is his sense of humor -- and that sets him apart from most other talk-show hosts, as well as his ability to parry live with his ideological opponents. Hugh strikes a tone that attracts thoughtful bloggers and repels dishthrowers, and that sensibility will no doubt be reflected in the new Salem portal.

It has a huge head start, thanks to Salem's clever and fortuitous purchase of Townhall. Originally, Salem wanted to start its own portal from scratch, which would have taken more effort to attract new readers, even with its high-powered talk-show lineup. Now it will leverage the existing readership of Townhall and the listeners of Salem, combine it with blogging heavyweights, and create a powerful force for conservative activism. And make no mistake, Hugh and Salem intend on creating a site that will produce activists and not just passive readers.

Will this overwhelm the Kos-Armstrong activist efforts on the Left? It would have that potential. Kos and Armstrong reach hundreds of thousands of people, but Salem Radio has millions of listeners even without the combined forces of the blogs. With Salem marshalling that audience, it can transform itself into a powerful political force -- more powerful than any group or think tank in the field today. The Left simply has no analogous media outlet to compete with it.

What does that mean for conservatives? Looking at the Salem line-up, it portends a strengthening of the center-right rather than conservative extremism. The hosts on Salem tend towards that direction, especially Hugh himself. Dennis Prager and Michael Medved also offer shows that rely on dialogue with opposing views and focus on finding common values to reach larger consensus on political issues. Bill Bennett has a more socially conservative slant, and Laura Ingraham tends towards hard-line conservatism, but the thrust should enable the center-right and put a positive face on the Right.

I'm excited to have a small part in this project.

How Secret Information Can Catch Terrorists

Ha'aretz shows how secret information can catch terrorists when it remains a secret. The US got Western Union to assist our intelligence services and the Shin Bet in order to catch Palestinian terrorists attempted to move money through their network:

From the spring of 2003 until autumn 2004, the Shin Bet security service tracked down Palestinian terror cells in the West Bank thanks to information from the Western Union money transfer service, which was passed on by the FBI. ...

In early April, 2003, an Islamic Jihad activist went to a Western Union office in Lebanon and ordered a money transfer to Hebron. The Justice Department authorized Western Union to release this information to the FBI and the CIA, and eventually to the Shin Bet. According to Suskind, all this took just minutes, enabling Israeli intelligence to track the person who collected the transfer in Hebron and to uncover the terror cell.

According to the book, this method was used successfully many times over the next year and a half, until autumn 2004, when Palestinian operatives realized that their Western Union transfers were being used to trap them.

Ron Suskind revealed this operation in his book, The One-Percent Solution, and Ha'aretz's sources confirm it. The operation started with Western Union's parent company, First Data, offering its assistance to the FBI in order to help in the war on terror. The existing relationship allowed the FBI and Shin Bet to quickly capitalize on their intelligence, and for over a year First Data's help allowed American and Israeli intelligence to track Islamist terrorists and their funding. This money could not have been tracked through the Swift program, nor through any surveillance focusing on banks.

The terrorists eventually learned through hard experience that the wire transfers had been identified and used by Western intelligence and stopped using it. That explains why Hamas has had to rely on suitcases to move cash into Gaza and the West Bank; every other means of financial transfer has Western eyes watching it. At least it did until the New York Times blew the Swift project out of the water; now that they have exposed it, Swift will come under pressure to end its cooperation from at least some of its clients.

Suskind did no damage to our national security by revealing a long-defunct but successful program in tracking terrorist money. Eric Lichtblau, James Risen, and Bill Keller have done great damage by exposing the specific methods of a successful and ongoing program, one that broke no laws and had no impact on individual civil liberties, for no other reason than notoriety and profit. We can only win this war if we keep our national-security programs clandestine and quit tipping our hand to the people who want to kill us.

CIA Officer Writes Book About Being Overruled

We will soon have another new book from a disgruntled former CIA officer about his experiences of being overruled by the Bush administration, and he has received the traditional Page 1 launch in the Washington Post. Tyler Drumheller's upcoming tome on his work in the WMD program will highlight his participation in the mobile-labs controversy and with "Curveball", the discredited Iraqi defector, and the Post uses that as its lead this morning:

While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.

Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech. Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."

The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.

"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. "I didn't know the name Curveball until months afterward."

One of the problems with Curveball was that he wasn't an American asset. The Germans had Curveball, and the CIA had to rely on information supplied by the Germans on his intelligence. The Germans had reviewed his extensive details on the science of his information on Iraqi WMD and concluded that he was a credible source on WMD, and communicated that to the Americans. They refused to stand behind it when the US wanted to use the information as part of their overall argument for deposing Saddam Hussein, which Drumheller and the Post spins as relating to Curveball's credibility with the Germans. However, given German involvement with Saddam Hussein, that could have been a political calculation rather than an intelligence evaluation, something the Post and Drumheller never bother to address.

On the question of the mobile labs in particular, that question hardly seem closed. As shown here five weeks ago, the Iraqis themselves apparently thought that these mobile labs served a military purpose, belying the common wisdom that they amounted to nothing more than hydrogen generators for weather balloons. The Iraqi document translated by Joseph Shahda and confirmed by two independent translators was addressed to the Military Industrialization Commission, the Iraqi bureau tasked with managing their WMD programs, and discussed an order for two of the labs in late 2002, when Iraq was busily preparing for the impending American invasion.

The key portion of the memo deals with the payment for the two labs:

1. Develop and enlarge existing laboratories, 178,000,000 Dinars

2. Prepare MOBILE LABORATORIES , In Iraqi Dinar 128,413,00 + 273,445 Euros with 10 Dinar/Euro, 27,344,500, 155,757,500 Dinars.

Total 333,757,500 Dinars

Twenty-seven million Euros at that time equalled roughly $33 million per laboratory. Given that the MIC had to be rather occupied with fighting the Americans and that the MIC would have little to do with Iraqi weather observation, having them spend $33 million on two devices for hydrogen production seems highly suspicious. No one has ever explained a need for mobile hydrogen production in Iraq, either. Iraqi oil production would naturally produce plenty of hydrogen, certainly more than enough for any weather balloons -- and it would be much less expensive to transport hydrogen in tanks than to produce it in mobile laboratories. Hydrogen production does not require precision rotation or vibration, nor does it need an X-ray tester, all of which are listed in the memo as components of the labs.

In order to believe that these facilities were meant for peaceful purposes, we have to believe that the bureau that ran the Iraqi WMD program suddenly concerned itself with weather observation to such an extent that it spent $66 million for two trailers, for the sole purpose of producing hydrogen locally when it could easily and cheaply been transported in tanks from its oil refineries, all while the Iraqi command watched the Americans debate an invasion of Iraq all summer long. The alternative to this scenario is that the US hid that memo in a stash of captured documents, sat on them for over three years, had to release them untranslated only after Congress forced them to do so, and then hoped that some civilian might get around to reading it in a document dump of thousands of such documents, in the off chance that they could then finally use that false information to bolster their WMD argument.

Can anyone buy that with a straight face? Apparently Drumheller can, and the rest of the WMD deniers.