The Katherine Harris Follies Continue

Easily the most dysfunctional Republican campaign this year is the Senatorial bid of Katherine Harris in Florida. Her staff keeps walking out on her, and in a state where Republican Governor Jeb Bush remains very popular and George Bush won twice, she trails by almost 30 points to Bill Nelson. And just when the GOP thought Harris couldn't possibly get any worse, she told people that God wants the US to dump its secular traditions:

Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep religious people out of politics.

"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.

Harris, a candidate in the Sept. 5 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, said her religious beliefs "animate" everything she does, including her votes in Congress. ... Harris told the journalists "we have to have the faithful in government" because that is God's will. Separating religion and politics is "so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers," she said.

"And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women," then "we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our Founding Fathers intended, and that certainly isn't what God intended."

Well, great. If we go by the polls, it looks like God wants Katherine Harris to shut up, but Harris isn't listening.

The founding fathers never intended for religion to be banned from the public square, but they certainly didn't create a theocracy, either. Secular laws allow for all people to unite in a just and open society, where all religions can practice openly without fear of government suppression. People of faith can and should serve in elected office, and of course they should apply their values to the decisions they make on our behalf, but that doesn't equate to rejecting secular law for temporal government.

It's hard to understand what Harris means in her assertion that the founders never intended to create a nation of secular laws. The very first entry in the Bill of Rights states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion[.]" That doesn't mean that people have to be barred from religious expression in public, but it very clearly states that the new nation would stay out of the business of faith. The creators of the Constitution understood that this would bar them from passing anything but secular laws, and with just a century between them and the Roundhead revolt, that's exactly what they had in mind.

Besides, Christians aren't the only people who avoid sin, and not even all of us do that enough. Jews share the same sense of sin and atonement, and modern and moderate Muslims do as well. Atheists also understand the social issues involved in sin, even if they reject the concept of spiritual offense. In fact, if one wants to see what happens when someone puts a government in charge of stamping out sin, one only has to look as far as the Taliban.

I'd love to support the Harris campaign in Florida, but she makes it impossible. As a Christian American, I find it offensive to state that only Christians should be elected to public office, or that the role of our government is to enforce Christian law. Our values should influence the laws we create to regulate our society, but the secular structures of American government exist so that all people can join in that debate. If Katherine Harris does not recognize this, then she does not belong in office.

No Surprise

For some reason, people seem to believe that Joe Lieberman should campaign for Democrats who endorse his opponent. At least they seem surprised when Lieberman refuses:

Declaring himself a "non-combatant," U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, in remarks at a New Haven press event Friday, raised anew the question of whether his "independent" candidacy will help Republicans hold onto three Congressional seats in Connecticut -- and control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lieberman -- who after losing an Aug. 8 Democratic primary to Ned Lamont has launched a third-party bid to hold onto his seat in the Nov. 7 general election -- was asked whether he still endorses Diane Farrell, Joe Courtney and Chris Murphy, three Democrats looking to unseat endangered Republican incumbents Chris Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson.

“I’m a non-combatant,” Lieberman declared. “I am not going to be involved in other campaigns. I think it’s better if I just focus on my own race.” ... “It’s a little awkward for me now” to endorse the Democratic candidates in the general election, he said, “since they all endorsed my opponent,” Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont.

Well, no kidding. Why would Lieberman take time out of his tight race to support a party that has turned its back on him? I don't think that Lieberman expected anything different; after all, Ned Lamont won the party's primary, and the Democratic Party should endorse him. The expectation that Lieberman would then support the people supporting his opponent seems, well, rather strange.

However, for some reason, Firedoglake, MyDD, and even the normally reasonable Middle Earth Journal all claim shock and anger over this development. The same voices who called for Lieberman's expulsion from the party earlier in the week and have worked to defeat him despite a solidly Democratic voting record now fume because the man they spent the summer reviling won't endorse their other candidates. None of them answer the obvious question: if you detest the man so much, why would you want his endorsement?

Lieberman is exploring the many facets of independence in American politics, and the people who forced it on him still express surprise and anger over it. The only surprise here is that they're surprised.

Surprise!

Iran has unveiled its surprise and its answer to the Western package of incentives. A heavy-water plant opened in Khondab with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself performing the honors:

An Iranian plant that produces heavy water officially went into operation on Saturday, despite U.N. demands that Tehran stop the activity because it can be used to develop a nuclear bomb.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the plant, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.

The announcement comes days before Thursday's U.N. deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment — which also can be used to create nuclear weapons — or face economic and political sanctions. Tehran has called the U.N. Security Council resolution "illegal" and said it won't stop enrichment as a precondition to negotiations.

The Germans tried using heavy water for its own atomic-weapons program during World War II, and for a solid technical reason: it eliminates the need for uranium enrichment to fuel reactors, which can then yield weapons-grade fissile material. It seems as though the Iranians want to cover all their bases in creating the fuel for nuclear weapons; they continue to pursue enrichment in parallel.

Ahmadinejad's construction of the heavy-water plant puts a stake in the heart of the argument that Iran only wants peaceful nuclear energy. Their multiple-tracked efforts to achieve plutonium production shows quite clearly that they have spent more effort than necessary to get simple civil nuclear power production. The incentive package offered by the West would have given it to them in any case.

Predictably, however, Iran's allies on the Security Council will run interference for Teheran once again:

Russia’s defense minister said Friday that it was premature to consider punitive actions against Iran despite its refusal so far to suspend its efforts to enrich uranium as the United Nations Security Council has demanded.

Although Russia agreed to the Security Council’s resolution on July 31, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov’s remarks made it clear that Russia would not support taking the next step that the United States and Britain have called for: imposing sanctions against Iran or its leaders over its nuclear programs. The Council set Aug. 31 as the deadline for Iran to respond to its demand.

Russia has repeatedly expressed opposition to punitive steps, even as President Vladimir V. Putin and others have called on Iran to cooperate with international inspectors and suspend its enrichment activity.

But on Friday Mr. Ivanov went further, saying the issue was not “so urgent” that the Security Council should consider sanctions and expressing doubt that they would work in any case.

Ivanov may have a point about the efficacy of sanctions, but simply throwing up one's hands didn't solve anything either. That was the Russian position on Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as well, and in the latter case, Russia made itself one of the chief reasons that sanctions failed. Between Russia, France, and Germany, Saddam made a personal fortune off of the UN sanctions, further entrenching his power in Iraq while killing off Iraqis who found no favor with the regime. Russia appears to be strongly signaling that they will once again play an undermining role with Iran.

That leaves the US with few options short of war to stop the Iranian nuke. The Bush administration wants to still try to apply international sanctions, and may attempt a coalition of nations to join:

With increasing signs that several fellow Security Council members may stall a United States push to penalize Iran for its nuclear enrichment program, Bush administration officials have indicated that they are prepared to form an independent coalition to freeze Iranian assets and restrict trade.

The strategy, analysts say, reflects not only long-standing U.S. frustration with the Security Council's inaction on Iran, but also the current weakness of Washington's position because of its controversial role in a series of conflicts in the Middle East, most recently in Lebanon. ...

Under U.S. terrorism laws, Washington could ramp up its own sanctions, including financial constraints on Tehran and interception of missile and nuclear materials en route to Iran, Bolton said, and the U.S. is encouraging other countries to follow suit. "You don't need Security Council authority to impose sanctions, just as we have," he said.

The U.S. has had broad restrictions on almost all trade with Iran since 1987. Exceptions include the import of dried fruits and nuts, caviar and carpets. In addition, U.S. companies can obtain licenses to do limited trade in agriculture and medicine. The United States also initiated the Proliferation Security Initiative, involving a coalition of countries that have agreed to intercept shipments of materials to Iran that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.

"We will continue to enhance PSI to cut off flows of materials and technology that are useful to Iran's ballistic missile program and nuclear programs," Bolton said. "We will be constraining financial transactions under existing terrorism laws."

This does not hold out much hope of success. For sanctions to work, they must have near-universal acceptance and application. If a sanctioned nation has trading partners who can deliver the needed imports, they will simply trade more exclusively with those nations, although they may pay more for the goods. Russia and China can use Iranian money to broker those imports Iran deems critical. Nations could freeze Iranian assets abroad, but Iran will likely start liquidating those in the next few weeks, if they haven't already.

France also signaled that they have doubts about getting to that level of confrontation with Iran. Foreign Minister Phillipe Douste-Blazy, who recently referred to Iran as a "stabilizing force" in the Middle East, says that France is "almost alone" in attempting to avoid a conflict of civilizations. He claims that a confrontation between Iran and the West would be the "worst thing". Apparently, an Iranian nuke pales in significance to having to face Iran down before they develop one.

We need to recognize that few Western nations have the stomach to oppose Ahmadinejad and the mullahcracy. The UN will not act; Russia and China have made that impossible, and in any case, we have seem what the UN does with sanctions regimes. We need to gather as many nations together who understand the nature of Iran and the threat a nuclear-armed mullahcracy presents, and act to stop it. That doesn't necessarily mean war, but it does mean putting massive resources into whatever means we have to undermine the mullahcracy from within. Otherwise, if we continue to dither, war will be the only choice left open to us, and at some point, Iran will take that choice away from us as well.

Olmert Teetering On Political Oblivion

Ehud Olmert may have reached the end of his political rope, as almost two-thirds of Israelis want him out of office. Up to now, the ruling coalition that has kept the Kadima leader in power has not yet crumbled, but that may change soon:

DISCONTENT over Ehud Olmert’s handling of the war with Hezbollah has risen sharply, to the extent that most Israelis now believe that the Prime Minister should resign.

An opinion poll in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper yesterday showed that 63 per cent of those questioned want Mr Olmert to go. In contrast, support for his rival Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party has risen sharply.

The steep decline in Mr Olmert’s popularity has gathered momentum as the ranks of protesters dismayed by his Government’s management of the conflict have grown since the United Nations’ ceasefire began 12 days ago.

The Israeli public opinion has been further shaped by the reservists coming back from the battle of Lebanon. Their anger has amplified the deep dissatisfaction with the accomplishments of the four-week war, fought almost reluctantly by the Kadima PM. His hesitancy in fully committing to war and the lack of a coherent war plan has cut Kadima support.

Unsurprisingly, the Israelis are turning to a former PM who had his own problems in office but understands how to fight a war. Netanyahu has refused to join Olmert in a national-unity government, stating that the differences between the two are too great to overcome. He will bide his time until the inevitable collapse of Olmert's coalition, and then he will ride to office on a wave of pro-military sentiment so strong that even the Israeli Left has joined it.

In fact, this shows the danger to tentative politicians who lead a fully mobilized electorate. Even those Israelis who normally see their nation as an irritant in regional politics and who counsel a policy of modesty and isolation supported this war. Many of them wrote impassioned treatises on the folly of their former pacifism when confronted with intractable terrorism and enemies who will not be satisfied with anything less than a genocide. Now these former pacifists have the opportunity to display their martial sentiments by castigating the Olmert government for its perceived military ineptitude with all the passion of the newly converted.

Politically and strategically, I still think the Israelis came out ahead in this war. They forced Hezbollah to shoot off a third of its inventory and to lose a bigger proportion of their launchers, and they demonstrated that the rockets actually provide no deterrent to the Israelis. Instead, it showed them as a liability, a reason that Israel would consider a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. It also forced Lebanon to finally send its army into the sub-Litani region and gave Israel a reason to blockade Lebanon to keep arms from flowing into Hezbollah unmolested. Israel also established a much lower threshold for massive response, one that the proxies in the region and their hosts will remember for a long time.

However, there is no question that Olmert's strategic plan left a lot to be desired -- and that all of the above wins could easily come from a Netanyahu-led government more likely to apply them consistently. Olmert will probably be gone before Yom Kippur.

Centanni And Wiig Unharmed: Hamas

Kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig are alive and unharmed, Palestinian officials told the AP today. Yesterday, the Hamas government spokesperson said that he expected "good news" in the next two days:

Palestinian officials said Saturday they expect to have "good news" about two kidnapped Fox News journalists within two days and believe the hostages are unharmed. ...

On Friday, the Palestinian interior minister suggested some progress has been made in securing the hostages' freedom. Ghazi Hamad, the government spokesman, added Saturday: "I hope that we can hear good news within the coming two days."

Hamad did not give the basis for his assessment.

The Interior Ministry spokesman said the journalists are apparently unharmed.

"The information available to us is that they are fine, " said Khaled Abu Hilal. He said authorities were not negotiating with the kidnappers. "I want to clarify that the efforts are not negotiations," he said. "But we want to get to positive results which is their release and that is all."

That optimisim comes in contrast to the demands and deadline issued by the kidnappers themselves. They have demanded that the US release all of its Muslim prisoners -- everywhere, presumably including in state prisons and local jails. The US does not negotiate with terrorists under any circumstances, and certainly would not release criminals from prison because of their religious affiliation.

If this group has any sophistication at all, it knows this already. The demands seem designed for failure, which does not bode well for the two journalists. Rusty at My Pet Jawa reports that this group produces jihadi videos and has a pretty high level of sophistication, which seems rather bad. However, there are also conflicting reports that the abductors are Palestinian civil servants who wanted to pressure the government into giving them their back pay. And Hamas may play that into a chance to wear the white hat for the West, "negotiating" the freedom of the hostages and being the hero of the moment in an attempt to rehabilitate themselves with the Palestinian Authority's paymasters.

It's all wheels within wheels, as so often is the case in that region. If they're still alive now, it's because someone thinks their more valuable that way. If that changes, we hope that Centanni and Wiig have a head start to freedom.

The Great Minnesota Get-Together

It's that time of year again here in Minnesota, when it seems that half of the state congregates within a square mile to sample food on a stick and make carny barkers rich. It's the Great Minnesota Get-Together, our State Fair, and as always, the Northern Alliance Radio Network will broadcast live from the AM 1280 The Patriot booth. We'll be broadcasting both Saturdays and Sundays from the fairgrounds. On Saturdays, we will stick to our new expanded schedule of 11 am - 5 pm CT, while on Sundays we will broadcast from 12 - 4 pm CT. If you can't get down to the fair on either weekend, tune us in at 1280 AM or on our Internet stream.

We actually started the get-together last night at Keegan's Irish Pub, our sponsor and our favorite watering hole. Hugh Hewitt and Duane "Generalissimo" Patterson broadcast live from the fair the last two days and then joined us for the Big Trivia Championship. Hugh and his team, which included James Lileks and Dwight Rabuse, only managed a second-place tie with David Strom's Taxpayer League team. Our NARN brothers, Fraters Libertas, won with a whopping 22 out of 25 correct answers, three more than their closest competitors.

Mitch and I didn't do as well as we did last year, when we finished in second place and above the Hugh Hewitt-Michael Medved team. We even brought in a ringer who had won once on "Jeopardy!", but in the end we only scored a paltry 15 out of 25. Next year we get someone from "The Price Is Right". He or she may not know more about trivia, but instead can regale us with tales of retail pricing.

Hugh will be joining us this weekend on the air, kicking off a great fair schedule of special guests and eating contests. (Mmmmm .... eating contests!) We're also thrilled to be sponsored this year by the United States Marine Corps, members of which will make appearances on the show from time to time.

The busy schedule will make posting somewhat limited this weekend, but keep checking back in.

On My Desk: Blackfive's Book

Over the weekend, I will mention some of the books currently on my desk, in various states of review. However, I just received a new book, The Blog of War, that deserves a special mention. It's a collection of milblog essays compiled by one of the best milbloggers in the 'sphere, Blackfive -- under his real name, Matthew Currier Burden. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks just released it in the "trade-book" format. It looks like an excellent read, and I'm hoping to get to it as soon as I get through a prior commitment to another author.

In the meantime, however, CQ readers can beat me to the punch by ordering the book for themselves. Let's support one of our own in his new venture.

For Cantwell, Dishonesty Is The Best Policy

Maria Cantwell faces a tough re-election bid against businessman and former Slade Gorton aide Mike McGavick this fall for her Senate seat. Rasmussen shows her clinging to a six-point lead in Washington against her challenger, down five points from June. That lead will probably shrink or disappear after a dishonest shell game her campaign played today in issuing a vicious personal attack on McGavick after he revealed a DUI from 1993:

U.S. Senate candidate Mike McGavick, in an unsolicited confession of "the very worst and most embarrassing things" of his personal and professional life, revealed Thursday he was charged with drunken driving 13 years ago. ...

He said that to his knowledge, no news media or political antagonists had been aware of the DUI charge. Past news reports have mentioned the Safeco layoffs and the 1988 attack ad that aired when Gorton ran against Democrat Mike Lowry.

McGavick revealed the drunk-driving incident in a far-ranging interview with the AP and on his campaign blog. The confession came unprompted, although he also voiced regrets over an attack ad he quarterbacked for Gorton and left running even after it proved inaccurate, an issue that had already been mentioned in the campaign. He said that he did not want the DUI to come out as a surprise, and that he revealed it now because he felt Washington voters knew him well enough now to put his past into perspective.

Without a doubt, McGavick did some political calculations before revealing this black mark on his record. A similar incident nearly sunk George Bush's campaign when it came out the week before the election, even though it had happened over twenty years previously. McGavick knows that opposition researchers spend tremendous amounts of energy looking for precisely this kind of material, hoarding the information until the moment when its release will do the most amount of harm. He wanted to defuse it by admitting it himself, and early enough so that the impact would dissipate long before the election.

Under these circumstances, an opposing candidate does best by refraining from comment, especially that which will be seen as personal attacks on a man for being honest. Maria Cantwell pledged to do just that -- but as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports, her campaign hastily arranged for the Democratic Party to attack McGavick as a drunk on her behalf:

Cantwell campaign spokeswoman Amanda Mahnke said the senator had no reaction and would not be commenting on McGavick's admissions.

The Cantwell campaign then, however, alerted the state Democratic Party about the P-I query. Party spokesman Kelly Steele telephoned to say, "From privatizing Social Security to drunk driving, it becomes clearer every day that Mike McGavick and George Bush are cut from the same cloth."

That is a contemptible attack, especially given the pledge from Cantwell's campaign. The Democrats are so desperate to attack George Bush that they have no compunction about tasteless and completely inapposite insults. George Bush has long been open about his problems with alcohol, and McGavick released the DUI himself. Neither of them promote drunk driving; the Democratic response makes it sound as if the two Republicans endorse it as public policy. It's a cheap shot, and the Cantwell campaign's involvement in it after pledging to remain silent shows the dishonest nature of Cantwell and her campaign.

Washington voters have a choice in November. They can elect an imperfect but honest man, or they can endorse the bitter, dishonest, and underhanded woman who currently occupies the seat. Let's hope that they make the right choice.

McCain's Less Than Straight Talk Express (Updated)

Updated -- see below.

John McCain has used the nickname "Straight Talk Express" for his campaigns for years, but it may now be a violation of truth-in-advertising regulations, if they applied to poltical statements. McCain has hired Democratic political operatives (see update, not hired) after denying any interest in them to at least one reporter who specifically asked about it:

Senator McCain's latest additions to his 2008 presidential campaign team — a veteran of Democrat Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a former Bush administration State Department official — are setting Washington to speculating about the ideological direction Mr. McCain's run for the White House might take.

The new pledges of support for the Arizona Republican came from an Internet guru best known for Governor Dean's upstart presidential campaign in 2004, Nicholas Mele, and from a former State Department official and veteran trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick. ...

"I have long admired Sen. McCain's work on campaign finance reform and his independent streak," Mr. Mele, who is known as Nicco, wrote yesterday on his blog. "This is a personal decision for me based on my own first-hand experience. I like Sen. McCain—I think he should be president!"

Word of Mr. Mele's move touched off considerable debate in the blogosphere, particularly because of his prior ties to Dr. Dean, who was a darling of the Democratic Party's left wing in the last race and who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

It touched off more than just debate in the blogosphere. Jim Geraghty, the National Review reporter who blogs at his eponymous NRO site, angrily denounced McCain's staff for having lied to him -- twice:

So not long ago, I had heard that Nicco Mele, former webmaster for the Dean campaign, had signed on with John McCain. So I called up John McCain’s PAC, Straight Talk America.

You’ll recall that I had asked Craig Goldman, the executive director of STA, a while back if Patrick Hynes was working for McCain. The answer was, “Never heard of him.” Several days later, Hynes put up a press release announcing his firm had signed on with Straight Talk America. I called up Goldman, asked what was going on, and he said that he had heard of Hynes’ firm, but didn’t recognize Hynes’ name. When he had learned of his erroneous statement, he said he had been unable to find my number or a way to contact me.

Many folks read this sequence of events in a less charitable manner – contending Goldman lied, the press release from Hynes was a hastily-put-together and direct result of my inquiry, and both had hoped I would forget about this story. But I gave Goldman the benefit of the doubt; we all make mistakes, and my original inquiry asked if Goldman had heard of Hynes’ old firm, Marsh Copsey.

So back on July 31, I called up Goldman again and asked about Mele (and, at the same time, I asked about a poster on RedState with connections to STA, John Balbach.) He responded, via e-mail (as well as phone) “Nicco Mele: Has no official role with the PAC and is not on our payroll. He is one of the many people we talk to from time to time asking for advice or opinions on ideas.”

I asked again, seeking to clarify further, “From your description, I assume it’s safe to say that Mele has not been compensated for any of his advice or opinions on ideas. (Other than, say, a sandwich.) If I'm wrong, please correct me.”

Goldman responded, “Mele (Like the mutiple of others who call and offer free advice) has not been compensated for any of his advice or opinions on ideas (other than say a sandwich).”

Geraghty notes that the announcement of Mele's hiring referred to the months in which McCain's staff has courted the former Howard Dean advisor. Instead of giving Jim a "no comment", McCain's staff flat-out lied to him, and for the second time on matters of personnel. Jim notes that he understands that political recruitment has strong elements of secrecy, but that does not give license for politicians and their staff to lie to people about it.

Mele causes Republican heartburn for other reasons as well. Mele's company provides consulting services to Air America and the trial lawyer's lobbying organization. This isn't exactly the heart of the GOP, and one has to wonder why McCain feels it so necessary to engage the far Left. Of course, for readers of CQ, McCain's flirtations with the far-Left fringe comes as no shock; we documented McCain's connections to George Soros and to hard-liberal organizations through the Reform Institute last year. One also has to wonder why the McCain staff wants to get consulting services from a man whose associations have been with such spectacular disasters such as Air America and the Howard Dean presidential campaign. So much for competence in government.

McCain's aide John Weaver attempted to distance his candidate from Mele's political connections. He claimed that Mele had bought into McCain's policies, not the other way around. Weaver apparently expects us to trust the McCain campaign on this issue, because they've been so honest up to now in their hirings and associations.

The Straight Talk Express has gotten derailed somewhere around Machiavelli Street.

UPDATE: Patrick Hynes and I spoke earlier today about this story and its accuracy. Patrick posted the following at Ankle-Biting Pundits:

Because of my own history with Jim Geraghty at TKS–whom, by the way, I still like very much–I have purposely avoided writing about the Nicco Mele issue. But then I thought, what the Hell!? Those who want to trash me are going to trash me no matter what.

I understand Jim feels that he has not been treated fairly by Straight Talk America. But based on the quotes Jim provides in his blog post, I can’t see where Craig Goldman, the PAC’s Executive Director said anything to Jim that was inaccurate. ...

Nicco says he has no official, compensated role with Straight Talk America. Straight Talk America says Nicco has no official, compensated role. Campaign finance reports prove Nicco has no official, compensated role with Straight Talk America.

There's more to this statement, especially a polite point-by-point answer to Jim Geraghty, so be sure to read it. Patrick got in touch with me after reading this post and wanted to stress that Mele has no paid role with the campaign. Patrick insists that Mele's status is only that of a public supporter and casual advisor.

This doesn't make much sense to me, and I told Patrick so. Mele's client list represents the hard-line progressive cast of the Democratic Party -- Air America, trial lawyers, and so on, none of whom were happy to hear about Mele's latest political posture. Patrick insists, though, that the months of contacts between Straight Talk America and Mele were for free advice and support.

Patrick is a good guy, and he and I will talk more this weekend. I'm hoping to get a full interview with him so that CQ readers can get all sides of the McCain campaign.

TV Review: Inside The Twin Towers

As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11, television broadcasters have started airing documentaries on the attacks, focused primarily at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A&E and The History Channel have aired several of these shows over the last two weeks, recounting the heroism and the tragedy of the day. Most of these use footage that has not been aired for some time, as well as re-enactments of known narratives from inside the towers and computer graphics showing the structural issues that led to the collapse of both buildings. Without exception, these retrospectives have been moving and faithful to the men and women who lived and died in the attack.

Not long ago, The Discovery Channel contacted me to ask if I would preview their upcoming two-hour special on 9/11, Inside The Twin Towers. They sent me a DVD of the special, one that had no credits or introductions. That struck me as unusual, as if they had not quite put the finishing touches on the production. However, after watching the documentary, the stark and no-frills nature of the DVD seems fitting, given the uncompromising look TDC gives to the collapse of the towers.

Inside focuses on the human stories where some of the other documentaries spent more time on the physics of the collapse. (In fact, I would highly recommend The History Channel's The World Trade Center: Rise And Fall Of An American Icon for those who want the best exporation of that topic.) In the two hours of the documentary, it seems that very little time is spent on graphical representations of the attack and its effects. It serves as it should -- as an explanation of why the attack doomed so many people, and how some people managed to survive it.

Inside doesn't fall into the trap of telling just the happy endings or the heroics alone, but focuses on the ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. One very sad tale involves a man who could not bring himself to keep moving and the two men who encountered him in the stairwell. One man stuck with him to the end and died because of it; the other left when it became apparent that time had run out. The widow of the man who gave up credits the latter with making the right decision, but the survivor tells TDC that his actions were 'cowardly' -- a heartbreaking moment when you realize the pain this man will have for the rest of his life.

It also tells the story of the people who never had the chance to get out, those trapped above the impact zone in the North Tower. Phone records and the testimony of those contacted by people from the Windows on the World restaurant paint a portrait of victims who slowly realize that help will never come. Other survivors wonder why they didn't try to find more people.

To be sure, some of the more miraculous stories are retold here. The "miracle of Stairwell B" gets re-enacted again, as well as the rescue of Stanley Pramnaith by Brian Davis. The heroism of the NYFD and Port Authority PD comes through clearly, as it should. Unlike the other presentations we have seen, however, Inside allows the tragedy to overcome the fleeting moments of victory, as it should in considering the horrific losses of 9/11.

TDC also does a good job in presenting real footage taken on 9/11. They show all of the tragedy, including a brief shot of the jumpers -- images that the broadcast networks have embargoed since shortly after the attacks. The scenes of devastation and of devastated first responders when they experience the full scope of the loss will bring the day back as if it were yesterday, and the immediacy of the video amplifies that effect.

Inside is well worth the time, if viewers want to revisit that dark day. It's powerful and honest, even with re-enactments, which I normally do not like. In this case, it really is the only way to tell as many of the stories that TDC manages to give us in that short time frame. Be sure to set your DVRs for The Discovery Channel on September 3rd at 9 pm ET.

My Dinner With Andre The Terrorist

The Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer reports on the Mahdi Army and the Shi'ite death squads that have turned Baghdad into a sectarian gangland. While Knickmeyer's courage cannot be questioned, her report only echoes what we already know -- that death squads kill without compunction or even the barest excuse of justice, and that stopping them has to be the highest priority for American and Iraqi security forces in the capital:

In a grungy restaurant with plastic tables in central Baghdad, the young Mahdi Army commander was staring earnestly. His beard was closely cropped around his jaw, his face otherwise cleanshaven. The sleeves of his yellow shirt were rolled down to the wrists despite the intense late-afternoon heat. He spoke matter-of-factly: Sunni Arab fighters suspected of attacking Shiite Muslims had no claim to mercy, no need of a trial.

"These cases do not need to go back to the religious courts," said the commander, who sat elbow to elbow with a fellow fighter in a short-sleeved, striped shirt. Neither displayed weapons. "Our constitution, the Koran, dictates killing for those who kill."

His comments offered a rare acknowledgment of the role of the Mahdi Army in the sectarian bloodletting that has killed more than 10,400 Iraqis in recent months. The Mahdi Army is the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, now one of the most powerful figures in the country.

The death squads that carry out the extrajudicial killings are widely feared but mysterious. Often, the only evidence is the bodies discovered in the streets. Several commanders in the Mahdi Army said in interviews that they act independently of the Shiite religious courts that have taken root here, meting out street justice on their own with what they believe to be the authorization of Sadr's organization and under the mantle of Islam.

Knickmeyer does paint an interesting portrait of the range of victims that the Mahdis and other terrorist groups kill. It's not all about occupation; the Mahdis has slain people for suspicion of extramarital sex. Two more fortunate Christians were rescued by American forces after having been abducted by the Mahdis for selling alcohol and refusing to stop. This demonstrates that the presence of American forces has little connection to the rising violence, despite some of the rhetoric here at home. Baghdad's sectarian violence more resembles the conflict between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads than a reaction to occupation. The Mahdis want to impose a Taliban-like solution on Iraq and are terrorizing Baghdad to succeed.

If anything, this points to the need for America to ensure that its mission succeeds. We can see what awaits Iraq if we leave before the Iraqis can defend themselves from the ravages of extremists like Moqtada al-Sadr. Our retreat will guarantee the rise of a Shi'ite Taliban, controlled by Teheran and funded through the massive oil reserves in the country. Even if the Kurds could defend an independent slice of Iraq in the north, the Iranian-backed Mahdis and their ilk would seize power in the remaining portion and turn Iraq into a terrorist haven -- and we would abandon the Iraqis to a similar oppression from which we freed them three years ago.

However, none of this is exactly news, and one has to wonder why the Post sent her into this much danger to tell this story. The government has long acknowledged the threat of the militias in Baghdad, and their bloodthirstiness has been well documented. We know that these militias torture their victims and provide them no trial; it didn't take a dinner date with a terrorist to glean that information. It seems like a small payoff for the potential for harm she risked.

Doesn't Know Class From A Hole In The Ground

One of the sure signs of an incompetent is his impulse to catalog other's failures when criticized, instead of focusing on his own responsibilities. Ray Nagin will give a demonstration of that principle on Sunday, August 27th, in an interview with CBS News. When asked about the lack of progress in clearing the rubble from Hurricane Katrina, Nagin petulantly scolded New York for its "hole in the ground":

Confronted by accusations that he’s taking too long to clean up his city after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin defended himself by remarking on New York City’s failure to rebuild Ground Zero.

Nagin made the remarks in an interview conducted by CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts which will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. EDT.

On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned without the owners' permission. But when Pitts points to flood-damaged cars in the street and a house washed partially into the street, the mayor shoots back. "That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair."

Let's face it: Crescent City residents elected Nagin in part for his genial incompetence. Not long ago he busied himself by assuring people that New Orleans would remain a "chocolate city", then tried to explain that away by saying he meant milk chocolate. Despite these verbal gaffes and the lack of progress in the city, New Orleans continues to embrace him, even after his incompetence went from amusing to deadly in the first hours of the hurricane.

Viewers can see part of the reason why in this interview. While Pitts wants to talk about a clean-up that still hasn't completed a year after the hurricane -- and for which the city is responsible -- Nagin wants to sell his city a big dose of paranoia instead. On one hand, Nagin hails the upcoming Trump Towers condominium complex, which will stand 68 stories in a city that flirts with sea level in almost every sector. Almost in the next breath, Nagin talks about the "salivating" special interests that want to exploit the disaster and drive out the poor in order to make money on the rebuilding effort. Wouldn't that describe Donald Trump and the strange 68-story complex that Nagin just promoted?

Big Easy residents shouldn't worry too much about Nagin's future, though. Their city will remain a disaster area for years at the rate that Nagin has tackled the clean-up, but Nagin will find a way to blame it on Governor Kathleen Blanco, and Blanco and the media will find a way to blame it on the Bush administration. The rest of us, especially New Yorkers, will not be fooled and will see Nagin for the classless incompetent he is.

Iran Tries The 'Support Moderates' Ploy

The Guardian has received a copy of the Iranian response to the West's incentive package from sources inside the Iranian government as part of a warning about a Western refusal to accept it. The Iranians told the Guardian that this proposal represents a temporary victory of Iranian moderates, who will lose all standing if the West rejects it:

Details of its response delivered this week to diplomats, disclosed yesterday by two well-connected Iranian political scientists, claimed moderates in Tehran had won an important power struggle and were offering a negotiated settlement of the nuclear row.

If the US spurns the Iranian olive branch and forces through sanctions from the UN security council, "the stage will be set for a full-scale international crisis", the response's authors stated. ...

The US would have to lift decades-old sanctions against Iran and probably give assurances that it has no policy of regime change towards the Islamic republic to settle Iran's nuclear dispute with the west, according to leaks of the Iranian response.

Iran is demanding firmer guarantees on trade and nuclear supplies, a tighter timetable for implementing agreements and clearer security pledges from the west before it decides whether to freeze its uranium enrichment programme and explore an offer of a new relationship.

For those who have studied the coordinated diplomacy of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the late 1930s, this sounds depressingly familiar. Some people compared UNSCR 1701 to Munich, but this is much closer to that infamous Western collapse. In 1938, Britain and France rushed to dismember Czechoslovakia -- a democracy with highly defendable borders -- in order to assist the "moderate" Mussolini in appeasing the radical Hitler and keep him from waging war. Italy got what it wanted by appearing to be a rational actor, while Hitler got the Sudetenland and the most formidable natural defensive barrier in central Europe.

This sounds almost exactly the same, even playing on the West's analysis of Iran as two separate entities. The mullahs and the hard-line Islamists comprise one portion of the Iranian ruling class, while men like Mohammed Khatami supposedly offer a more reasonable partner for negotiations. It's hogwash. The ruling class in Teheran all share the same goals: an Islamist Caliphate in Southwest Asia with its seat in Teheran. Some of them just happen to have a better sense of Western public relations than Ali Khameini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but that does not make them more rational or less supportive of Islamist triumphalism.

The Iranian leak is part of a calculated strategy to force the UN Security Council into retreat on its demands and into negotiations on Iranian terms. They use media outlets like The Guardian to "warn" of betraying these supposed moderates by not surrendering to their oh-so-reasonable demands. Hitler made this an art form, and Ahmadinejad has learned well from his example.

Unfortunately, we can probably count on the global community to play right into the hands of the mullahcracy. We will hear once again how the Rhineland is really their backyard peaceful nuclear energy is their right, and how dare the West impose its hypocritical restrictions on Iran? Russia has already warned the West to look for "nuances" in Iran's response and has backed away from its pledge to support sanctions if Iran refuses to stop its uranium enrichment.

In 1940, the West found its Winston Churchill, but only after war made it necessary. Will the West learn the same lesson in the same manner? One would hope not, but at this moment, it doesn't look too promising.

Conspicuous No More

After years of criticism and demoralization of the federal air marshal service (FAMS), its management finally has allowed their agents to dress in a manner that doesn't make them stick out like sore thumbs among airline passengers. Effective September 1 but likely already unofficially adopted, FAMS will allow air marshals to dress as casually as agents deem necessary:

Dana A. Brown, director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, said in a memo to air marshals that the dress code revisions will take effect Sept. 1 and replace a policy that some air marshals criticized for being so strict that they stood out on some flights.

Brown told air marshals in the memo that the policy was being amended to "allow you to dress at your discretion." He added that the new policy was designed to let air marshals blend in while concealing their weapons. ...

The previous dress code generally required air marshals to wear collared shirts, sport coats and dress shoes. The service loosened some of the restrictions a year ago, officials said.

FAMS never seemed to grasp that their mission required its agents to remain undercover. Instead, they enforced a standard that put its agents at greater risk, as well as the passengers around them. Terrorists who identified the agents ahead of time could make them their first point of attack; at the very least, their easy identification would lower the deterrent factor of having air marshals on board the aircraft.

Management insisted for years that the dress code would not blow the agents' cover, but the dress code they enforced seemed about thirty years out of date. Very few people fly wearing sport coats and dress shoes, even without the ties, as air travel has become less comfortable. The enforcement of the dress code made the agents about as covert as the narc at one's high school.

FAMS finally figured this out almost five years after 9/11. Let's hope that the government learned other lessons about security a little more quickly.

Jon Henke On Dean Vs Allen

Virginian and neo-libertarian Jon Henke delivers a spanking to Howard Dean, who went on Hardball yesterday to castigate George Allen for not thinking before he speaks. If that seems like a heapin' helpin' of projection, well, Jon would agree with you. In fact, Jon put together quite a collection of Howard's Greatest Hits, lest anyone not think that the DNC chair is not an expert at running the mouth while leaving the brain disengaged. Be sure to read the whole thing.

In fact, thinking about it, perhaps George Allen's staff might think about giving Jon a shout. They're looking for an intelligent blogger, one who understands politics and writes well about it. If Allen's team is serious, Jon would be a great choice, assuming he's interested.

Should New Stem Cell Procedure Unlock Federal Funding?

The announcement of a new, non-destructive method of deriving stem cells from embryos raised hopes that the Bush administration would lift restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem-cell (hEsc) research. The new process takes one or two cells from a blastocyst in a similar method as in-vitro fertilization checks for genetic abnormalities and then grows the cells into theoretically perpetual stem-cell lines. This eliminates the need for the destruction of the embryo and arguable removes the moral objection to funding the process:

Now a team at Advanced Cell Technology - a private company - has found that it is possible to create human stem cells using one or two cells from an early embryo, without doing any damage to the embryo.

In theory, the technique could be used to create both a baby and a set of immortal stem cells unique to that baby that might be used decades later to cure the baby - now adult - of diseases such as Parkinson’s or heart disease.

Much more likely, however, is that it will be used as a research technique to advance stem-cell science.

The technique is similar to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) where one or two cells are detached from a blastocyst - a very early embryo, created in the case by in-vitro fertilisation - and tested to see if it carries a genetic mutation.

Undoubtedly, this puts a much different light on hEsc research. In fact, it might force hEsc researchers to adopt this method regardless of the existence of federal funding, as any destruction of embryos will be demonstratedly unnecessary. In that sense, the new technique removes a cloud that has hovered over this science since its inception.

Will it be enough to allow for federal funding of hEsc? Politically speaking, I'd say yes. The primary objection to funding hEsc has been the destruction of human embryos. If that stops, then most of the current objections vanish. Certainly the science has other deep ethical issues, including the questions of cloning humans for medical purposes and ownership of the cells and cell lines. None of these, however, have been cited as a reason to block hEsc funding, and the same dilemmas exist for adult and placental stem-cell research anyway.

There are other problems with hEsc research and federal funding. The hEsc efforts have come up empty for the most part; the adult and placental pursuits have resulted in actual therapies and better-controlled processes. One of the reasons why hEsc researchers pressed for federal funding (and repeatedly mischaracterized the lack of such as a "ban" on research) is precisely because the science has shown no practical reward to this point. Private funding has gone towards the sciences that have delivered more tangible victories, resulting in a market decision that marginalizes hEsc.

The question of federal funding for hEsc is one that applies to most federal funding, and that is market distortion. Will federal dollars skew the research market to the point where scientists spend disproportionate resources on less-promising processes, further delaying medical advances rather than promoting them? Market forces can produce short-sighted perspectives, but I'd trust the market over the decisions of a handful of bureaucrats and political appointees about the potential of various directions in medical research.

However, I expect that these questions will not hold back the advocates of hEsc and the claims of miracle cures that privately-funded hEsc research has failed to produce. With the main ethical argument neutered (and with full recognition of the blessings of the new procedure), Congress and the Bush administration will probably rush to provide funds for hEsc research along these lines.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt is right about this being a victory for anti-hEsc forces. Without the economic pressure to find a non-destructive method to develop embryonic stem cells, how much longer would we have waited for this breakthrough? Would it have ever come?

Russell Simmons Brings Black Votes To Michael Steele

The endorsement of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons appears to have opened the African-American voting bloc to Michael Steele, Maryland's Lt. Governor running for Paul Sarbanes' Senate seat. The Washington Times reports that appearances by Simmons on Steele's behalf has impressed some of the traditionally Democratic voters in Prince George County:

The Maryland Democratic Party's traditional support among blacks appears to be slipping, now that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons -- who has helped register thousands of Democratic voters -- has endorsed Republican Michael S. Steele for the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Simmons is scheduled to hold a fundraiser tonight at Baltimore's Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park for Mr. Steele, the lieutenant governor and the first black to win a statewide office in Maryland.

"Russell Simmons is one of the leading progressive voices in America," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

"This is a major endorsement for Lieutenant Governor Steele that will help him attract young people, as well as black voters," Ms. Brazile said. "Once again, this should serve as a wake-up call to Democrats not to take their most loyal constituents and voters for granted."

The real effects of the endorsement may not be fully known for weeks, and the Times does not present anything more than anecdotal evidence of a shift in support. However, almost anything more than 10% would be seen as a major inroad on the last safe demographic of the Democratic Party, and some have estimated Steele's reach at 25% or more. That number came before the Simmons endorsement.

Some may be surprised to see Donna Brazile supporting the notion that Simmons could shift the election, but she has some motivation to do so. Brazile has argued that the Democrats should unite behind Kweisi Mfume and jettison the more popular Benjamin Cardin, who leads in the Democratic primary and outpolls Steele. Brazile understands the strategic long-term threat that serious black conservative candidates represent to her party, and wants to see them countered with Democratic candidates that engage African-American voters.

This gets back to a problem that the Democrats have glossed over for several years. The Democratic Party has locked up this voting bloc so tightly that they see no real need to put African Americans into leadership positions. They continue to offer the same policies of big government while inner-city children remain locked in badly-performing schools. These voters want to hear other ideas and may want to try new policies to change the economic paradigms which trap a disproportionate amount of African-Americans, and that means giving the Republicans a chance. With the rise of significant black conservatives in the party to national prominence, more and more of them may find themselves tempted to pull the lever for Republicans and to spread their political influence into both parties.

That will not happen in this mid-term election; it will only happen over a long period of time, as the GOP promotes more African-Americans to positions of real power and elects more of them to Congress and the Senate. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, though, and Brazile understands that Steele and Simmons gets the GOP off to a running start.

CQ readers can contribute to Michael Steele or any of our other Congressional candidates through our Rightroots initiative. We have raised $44,000 for these critical races in this midterm election. Be sure to support these fine candidates in their efforts to hold the House and Senate for the GOP. John Hawkins has a new interview with Rightroots candidate David McSweeney on his site today as well.

An Illusory Partner For Peace

Western diplomats have desperately held out Mahmoud Abbas as a partner for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but events over the past week have exposed Abbas as an empty suit in Palestinian politics. My new column in the Examiner explains why:

The Fatah leader that the U.S. and the West consider the best partner for peace in the region had to cancel orders to deploy Palestinian security personnel into the northern Gaza region where most of the rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad originate. Fatah’s own in-house lunatics, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, refused to stop attacking Israel, demonstrating the lack of power held by the West’s partner for peace.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Hamas was the only group that had accepted Abbas’s cease-fire. When his own band of militants refused to carry out Abbas’ orders, the deal fell apart.

The lack of influence on Abbas’ part shows a disturbing development in the territories: The lack of mandate for anything short of annihilation of Israel and the lack of authority in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

What options does this leave for the Israelis and the West? Not many, and none of them pleasant. Most of all, the West needs a strong dose of reality when it comes to the political situation among the Palestinians. Peace has no mandate among them, unless one considers the peace of total annihilation an option. Co-existence is a cause that no Palestinian leader will openly support because of the hostility of the Palestinian people to that solution. Whatever else their faults, Palestinian leaders appear to represent the desires of their constituents.

The Birth Of The Caliphate? Nice Try

Fatah leaders will conference for the next three days in Jordan to determine their relationship with Hamas. However, by the time they have that figured out, they will return to a Gaza that will be the seat of the new Caliphate -- at least according to an even more radical group than Hamas:

Meanwhile, a radical Islamic group called Hizb al-Tahrir (Liberation Party) is planning to declare the birth of an Islamic caliphate in the Gaza Strip on Friday. The relatively small party, which is seen as more extreme than Hamas, is said to have increased its popularity following what is perceived as a Hizbullah victory over Israel.

On Tuesday, thousands of the party's supporters staged a demonstration in Gaza City to mark the anniversary of the end of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was the first demonstration in the Gaza Strip in which demonstrators called for establishing an Islamic caliphate that would rule not only in the PA territories, but the entire world.

Buoyed by the large turnout, the party's leaders are now considering declaring an Islamic caliphate in the Gaza Strip during Friday prayers, sources close to the party said.

Jordanian security forces recently foiled a similar attempt by the party's followers in the kingdom and arrested most of their leaders. Ramzi Sawalhah, the leader of Hizb al-Tahrir in Jordan, was arrested shortly after he delivered a sermon in a mosque in which he called for replacing the monarchy with an Islamic caliphate.

Ruling the world from Gaza would indeed be a nifty trick, since the Palestinians have proven themselves singularly incapable of governing their own people within the territory. Jordan took the group seriously, however, especially when they called for an overthrow of the monarchy. They wanted to kneecap this movement before it could gain momentum.

Of course, that's precisely what the leaders of Hizb al-Tahrir want to create in Gaza -- political momentum. The Arab reaction to the Shi'ite Hezbollah, apparently one of their key allies, has created disunity and suspicion across the Arab world. Hizb al-Tahrir wants to rally Muslims with a call for a new Caliphate, one that would exacerbate tensions over a Jewish state in close proximity.

It's not likely to succeed. The Iranians want a new Caliphate -- based in Teheran. The Saudis want a new Caliphate -- based in Mecca. Arabs don't trust Persians, Sunni don't trust Shi'a, and so on. No one will trust Hizb al-Tahrir with the leadership of the Muslim world, and while some may humor the newcomers as a way to tweak the Israelis, none of them will take direction from upstarts among a people that they scorn except for their value in rabble-rousing in their own nations.

A Creepy Coincidence

It turns out that the Northwest Airlines flight that may have had terrorists on board also had another passenger with 9/11 connections. Tim Nelson, who originally tipped off the FBI about a suspicious flight student in my town named Zacarias Moussaoui, had a business-class seat and told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the flight:

A Northwest Airlines plane flying from the Netherlands to India was escorted back to the Amsterdam airport by Dutch F-16 fighter jets Wednesday, and police arrested 12 passengers whose behavior had aroused the crew's suspicion.

Coincidentally, among the 149 passengers aboard Northwest Flight 42, which originated at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport on Tuesday, was Tim Nelson, the tipster who first alerted the FBI to Al-Qaida operative Zacarias Moussaoui's odd behavior at a Twin Cities flight school five years ago. ...

Nelson said he was with a flight crew for a Northwest subsidiary, Classic Aviation, en route to Bombay, India, to ferry a plane with a mechanical problem back to Amsterdam for repairs.

About 15 minutes into the flight, he said, members of the cabin crew hurried past him and stood in the front of the cabin, pointing to the rear.

Nelson said the lead flight attendant then made an announcement over the plane's broadcast system advising everyone to stay seated.

Nelson didn't get to see too much of the action, as it turned out. He couldn't get a view of the cabin behind him when the activity began. He did praise the actions of the flight crew and the air marshals, and also offered his services if they needed an extra hand. Fortunately, that was not necessary and the flight landed safely after dumping its fuel.

The sense of deja vu had to be overwhelming for Nelson. Five years ago this month (in fact, last week), Nelson and and Hugh Sims separately notified the FBI after determining that their new flight student acted in a strange and irrational manner. (The flight school is located in the same town in which I live, and I pass it every time I take the First Mate to her dialysis treatments.) Nelson, the son of a cop, knew Moussaoui didn't add up when he started flashing cash for his lessons and claimed that he only wanted the lessons as an ego boost. Unfortunately, due to internal impediments between the Department of Justice and intelligence agencies, the arrest never led investigators to discover the 9/11 plot until it had already played out.

Nelson, I'm sure, could have lived without this trip through memory lane.

Why Not Just Give Him A Toll-Free Hotline?

The efforts of Islamist terrorists to exploit the Internet has been well known for years. Many of the conspiracies we have uncovered since 9/11 have either originated in chat rooms or forums, and the use of e-mail and anonymous Usenet articles for terrorist communication has become widespread. Groups like al-Qaeda maintain official websites to post statements and videos as well as commands to the faithful.

Knowing all of this, Indonesia allowed the mastermind of the first Bali bombing to have unfettered Internet access during his prison sentence, giving him the means to raise funds for another attack on the same area:

ONE of the plotters of the deadly Bali bombings in 2002 raised funds for a second attack on the island via an internet connection from his cell on death row, a senior Indonesian policeman admitted yesterday.

Imam Samudra, who has been sentenced to face a firing squad for his part in the nightclub attacks that killed 202 Indonesians and foreign tourists, advised fellow extremists on ways of raising funds for a second attack last year using a laptop with a wireless internet connection that had been smuggled into his cell.

The revelation, by Police Colonel Petrus Golose, of Indonesia’s anti-terror task force, testifies to the extraordinarily lax conditions, abetted by corruption among wardens, in some Indonesian jails.

According to Colonel Golose, Samudra communicated with a number of extremists, one of whom created a website setting out the best ways of murdering foreigners in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Two of his contacts, Mohammad Agung Prabowo, and Agung Setyadi, are in custody after being arrested last week in separate raids on the island of Java. They have not been charged.

Quite obviously, the Indonesians give little indication that they take terrorism seriously, despite having been victimized twice by bomb attacks. How else can one explain the use of a laptop computer -- with a wireless network connection -- by someone who sits on Death Row in their prisons? While the computer and the wireless interface both got smuggled to Samudra through a corrupt prison warden, one would think that the guards would have noticed the computer in Samudra's cell and asked a few questions. At the very least, someone should have heard Samudra typing on the keypad.

Instead, Samudra helped raise the funds necessary for the second attack on Bali while awaiting execution for the first. He didn't stop there, either. While awaiting execution, the Jemaah Islamiyah leader published a book on jihadi financing and credit-card fraud in pursuit of Islamist ventures. Even though he promised that the readers could generate more income in a few hours than Indonesian police earn in six months, he cautioned them to refrain from becoming too attached to the money itself. He wanted jihadis to use it to perpetrate attacks against the United States and its allies.

I'm surprised the Indonesian prison system hasn't arranged a book tour and signing stops.

Stop The ACLU Interviews Catholic League President

William Donahue may be many things, but boring is not one of them. The combative president of the Catholic League sat down for an interview with John Stephenson of Stop the ACLU, and John has posted it to the site. Here's a taste:

Q. In your opinion is the ACLU simply misguided or do they actually have a more malicious motive and agenda?

A. I have asked myself that question a million times or more. I guess that I think that some of them are just wrong headed and sincere while others are actually more malicious and seeking to actually destroy America from its foundation. Some that are just misguided yet sincere truly believe that they have to defend the extremist speech in order to protect all free speech. Others are actually malicious.

Norman Siegal is one of the few who I believe to be honest and sincere in their passion for civil liberties. He has at least come out and debated his point of view and that is something that is due some respect. So many others are cowards with another agenda that works against the best interest of the country.

Donahue does not mince words. Be sure to read the entire interview.

Technorati Tags: Catholic, ACLU

Dueling Nuclear Surprises

The Jerusalem Post hints that Iran will unveil a nuclear "surprise" in the next few weeks, but the Israelis may have beaten them to it. This comes as the fragile consensus at the UN Security Council on Iranian defiance appears to have unraveled:

A senior official in Teheran said Wednesday that in the next few days, a "surprise" was expected regarding Iran's nuclear program, Al-Jazeera reported.

Teheran's apparent refusal to suspend uranium enrichment set the stage for a showdown at the UN Security Council later this month.

Given the hype over the supposedly apocalyptic impact of August 22nd, it's difficult to get too excited over this latest assertion. The only surprise that Iran could possibly unveil is a functional nuclear device -- and many already figure they have at least a few. Perhaps the only way we could be surprised is if the Iranians renounce the uranium enrichment that has the UNSC threatening sanctions.

Or, it did have them threatening sanctions. As the Post reports, Russia and China have now backed away from their earlier support for sanctions. The pair have once again opted to trust in the sweet words of Ari Larijani and defied their own earlier votes to impose sanctions if the Iranians refused to stop their enrichment program. Now that the Iranians have countered with offers for more talks but insisting on continuing their program, the Russians and Chinese want to continue their appeasement.

However, the Israelis have the real nuclear surprise waiting for Iran. They have bought two nuclear-capable submarines from Germany, giving them a potential mobile platform for their own nuclear-tipped missiles:

WITH Iran confidently defying pressure to curb its nuclear programme, Israel has signed a contract with Germany to buy two more submarines capable of firing nuclear missiles, it emerged yesterday.

Israeli security sources said the submarines are needed to counter long-range threats from countries such as Iran, whose president has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

Israel has been expanding its military in the light of Iran's nuclear ambitions. It already has three Dolphin-class submarines which can fire nuclear missiles, but the newer models can remain submerged far longer.

One of the key issues with Israeli deterrence against Iranian aggression was its lack of ability to attack Iran directly. The new submarines solve that problem very nicely. The Israelis can easily sail the submarines through the Suez Canal and back up the Straits of Hormuz. From their the Israelis can easily sink Iranian shipping and destroy their ports -- or if Iran launches a missile at Tel Aviv, the Israelis can answer with multiple launches at Teheran and other strategic targets in Iran.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot off his mouth at every opportunity about the need to wipe Israel off the map. The Israelis took him at his word, even while other diplomats downplayed the significance of Ahmadinejad's rhetoric. Israel has now shown that they have the means to apply a little Mutually Assured Destruction, a capability that the mullahs have not taken into consideration until now.

Another Sky Plot Foiled?

Initial reports of trouble on airliners nearly always turn out to be something less threatening, although sometimes just as strange, as the Catherine Mayo incident a week ago proved. Today, however, a diverted flight and the quick action of air marshals appear to have stopped some sort of mid-flight mischief between Amsterdam and Mumbai:

Twelve passengers were in custody Wednesday after a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Mumbai, India, returned to Amsterdam with a fighter jet escort, Dutch police said. ...

Some of the passengers pulled out cell phones during the flight and appeared to be trying to pass the cell phones to other passengers, a U.S. government official said.

In addition, some passengers unfastened their seatbelts while the light requiring they be fastened was still illuminated, the official said.

That was enough for U.S. air marshals aboard the DC-10 to break their cover. Flight attendants ordered the passengers to heed the orders of the marshals, the official added.

There was no intelligence indicating the flight was at risk, and authorities are still evaluating how much of a threat the passengers posed, officials said.

The passengers who were arrested were looking into plastic bags and were busy with their cell phones, an airline source in Amsterdam said.

That kind of activity seems very unusual and somewhat coordinated, at least from the initial descriptions. Many times these first reports turn out to be wild exaggerations, as was the case with the two "Asian" men who supposedly said that they had thirty minutes to live after getting on a plane in Malaga. In this case, official sources confirmed the sequence of events, and the dozen suspects will face unspecified charges and continued detention.

CNN has no report on whether the crew or investigators found any potential explosives on the airplane. This could have been a dry run, although the activity was so obviously conspicuous that it would be difficult to imagine that terrorists would have seriously thought theuy could succeed in completing such a test. The cell phones could have been intended to trigger a detonation -- perhaps in the checked luggage in the cargo hold of the plane, or maybe something planted on the aircraft by a crew member. That would explain why the twelve pulled their phones out so early in the flight, as cell service would be uncertain at best when the plane reached higher altitudes. It would also explain why Northwest grounded the flight for a full day rather than just refuel and get back in the air without the twelve troublemakers -- to free the craft for a detailed inspection, or to swap it with another plane altogether.

This incident shows the benefit of having air marshals on flights in the post-9/11 world. Apparently they remained incognito enough to surprise the suspects, and their quick action in taking over the cabin may have saved hundreds of lives. Congress needs to ensure that the program's funding remains high enough to guarantee sufficient protection for American travelers.

You Can Lead A Horse To Slaughter ...

... but you can't make Congress think. Actually, while we have watched at least one and maybe two terrorist plots against airlines get stopped at the last moment this month, Congress has busied itself with making sure that the feds can stop you from leading a horse to slaughter, as I've posted on today's Heritage Foundation Policy Blog:

H.R. 503 will amend the Horse Protection Act to enact federal bans on sales, donations, transport, and possession of horses for slaughter. That may be bad enough for fans of federalism, who will rightly wonder about the constitutional basis for federal protection of horses. However, the text at the end of the bill should get some attention -- "Section 12 of the Horse Protection Act (15 U.S.C. 1831) is amended by striking “$500,000” and inserting “$5,000,000”."

In a month when we have seen at least one, and now possibly two, terrorist plots against American airlines, Congress seems more interested in the safety of horses. Not only does Congress have some priority and jurisdiction issues, the financial impact seems highly strange. Did the dangers of human consumption of horses suddenly expand tenfold?

There's more to this as well. The $5 million doesn't come close to funding this mandate, something that the bill's 203 co-sponsors should have to explain but probably will not. Read the whole thing.

When Harry Met Harvey

The New York Post runs a column from yours truly in today's edition, an adaptation of an earlier post that reviewed the relationship between Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Nevada developer Harvey Whittemore. Harry and Harvey combined their efforts to create a new commercial and residential development outside of Las Vegas that will enrich Harvey, has put tens of thousands of dollars of contributions into Harry's coffers, and resulted in gainful employment of one Reid son as a lawyer and a lobbyist -- including lobbying his father:

The leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid, took contributions from clients of convicted influence-peddler Jack Abramoff and intervened on their behalf at least four times. Abramoff, for his part, hired one of Reid's staffers and started holding fundraisers for the senator in the Abramoff offices.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports on the "culture of corruption" surrounding Reid and a new real-estate development outside of Las Vegas, in the desolate valley of Coyote Springs. Reid has intervened on behalf of powerful developer Harvey Whittemore to gain government concessions, while the developer puts money into Reid's campaigns - and, the Times reports, pays salaries to two of Reid's sons, one of whom is his personal lawyer.

If you missed this post earlier, be sure to read the column today. Hopefully this will remind people that unchecked power leads to corruption, not one's party affiliation.

UPDATE: Well, crud. Forgot to include the link the first time around.

UPDATE II: And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Hang Right tipped me to the story in the beginning.

Wanted: Conservative Blogger Liaison

Hillary Clinton took a look around the blogospheric Left in the midst of its Ned Lamont campaign and decided she needed an ambassador to bloggers, and hired Peter Daou. According to National Journal's Hotline, George Allen's campaign has reached a similar conclusion about the blogospheric Right:

Burned by a blog-induced firestorm over an an off-hand comment at a campaign rally, Sen. George Allen's campaign is seeking a conservative blog maven who can blunt future attacks and help rally conservatives in the state and elsewhere behind Allen's campaign.

The search is one of several steps Allen's brain trust will take in the next few weeks to retool his campaign. Several Republicans close to the campaign said Allen was deeply frustrated at what one Republican called "the inept response and lack of ability of his team to handle crisis management in an effective and professional manner."

Today, Allen's campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, sent allies an e-mail memo blasting the media for refusing to accept Allen's apology. The memo suggests that that the campaign may try to focus support for Allen by portraying him as a victim of a liberal media elite.

"Apparently the media's standard for candidates is now that they must be perfect, not human, and that no mistake or verbal gaffe is to be forgiven, no matter how much the candidate apologize," Wadhams writes in the memo. "Will the Washington Post hold it's candidate for the U.S. Senate to the same standard? We will see, but I'm not holding my breath."

Bloggers have to write quickly and effectively about breaking news stories, the same kinds of skills needed to succeed in political damage control. The more successful bloggers have influence with a number of other bloggers, gaining at least enough credibility for their positions for a fair hearing. For these reasons, I predict that national campaigns will eventually start hiring well-known bloggers for their campaigns, as a necessity for the new political environment that bloggers have created.

Will a blogger help Allen recover from the "macaca" gaffe? It might be a chicken-soup solution: it certainly wouldn't hurt. Ultimately, if candidates go out of their way to say foolish things and exhibit poor judgment, all of the bloggers in the world won't undo the damage. What would help would be a respected voice to broadcast an apology for a single misstep and to provide an explanation that made more sense than the Allen campaign's initial statements provided. In the best possible relationship, a well-connected blogger would have consulted on the response to ensure it didn't make matters worse.

If any conservative bloggers feel like joining Allen's staff, it appears they're very receptive at the moment. If nothing else, it might provide a front-row seat in Senatorial and Presidential politics over the next two years.

Fast-Food Jihadists In Britain

Der Spiegel provides an extensive look at the background of the British conspirators who plotted attacks on international flights, now detained by the UK. After repeatedly noting neighbors' evaluation of the young men as "nice boys", DS makes an interesting point about the twisted perspective of homegrown jihadis:

About 100,000 people live in this idyllic commuter town, which seems to have preserved many of the more pleasant aspects of old England without ignoring the present. When the British Empire disintegrated, about 15,000 Pakistanis moved to High Wycombe, which would eventually boast one of the island's first ethnic Asian mayors. The town is widely seen as a "successfully integrated community."

But for at least one resident of High Wycombe, Jennifer Baker, the world is no longer what it once seemed. Baker lives at Number 17, Hepplewhite Close. Late in the night of August 10, several police cars stopped in front of a house down the street, Number 31, and dragged a man from a red Nissan Micra, a man Baker says was always a "particularly nice boy."

This particularly nice boy was named Don Stewart-Whyte until six months ago, when he converted to Islam and took the name Abdul Waheed. He and 23 accomplices were accused of having plotted to blow up 12 airliners en route from Britain to the United States. According to Home Secretary John Reid, the authorities had amassed "substantial evidence" against the would-be attackers. This evidence presumably includes intercepted emails and wiretapped phone conversations, but also large sums of money, weapons and bomb-making chemicals. A suitcase containing explosive chemicals was found in woods near High Wycombe on Thursday. Videos featuring the likely martyrs surfaced on Friday, and on the same day authorities in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur arrested Matiur Rehman, a high-ranking al-Qaida terrorist believed to be behind the thwarted attack.

The story seems eerily similar to the report on the Toronto homegrown jihadis written by the Globe & Mail two months ago. Once again, a Western nation has a number of its citizens, the children of apparently fully-integrated immigrants, turning into Islamist terrorists. The same disaffection with Western culture appears as a theme in both stories, along with the helpful appearance of charismatic Islamist imams and teachers who help transform the young adults into walking timebombs, quite literally.

Der Spiegel refers to these converts as "fast-food jihadists", and the description has its advantages. None of them seem particularly oppressed by the culture they rejected, either in Britain or in Canada. Most of them came from middle-class families. Yet all of them went through some kind of identity crisis that one would have expected from their immigrant parents and not from the assimilated generation of native-born Britons and Canadians. The suspects went shopping for a new philosophy and seized upon the easy, quick, and satifying answer that everyone around them was to blame for their unhappiness.

However, Der Spiegel's description of a "fast-food Mohammed" doesn't ring true. If anything, it is the West that has a fast-food image of Islam's founder, a military conqueror and a strict administrator whose history hardly embodies the concept of peace. The description of Mohammed's exploits in the Qu'ran is what attracts these followers; they do not accept the historically illiterate notion of Mohammed as a peace-bringer. Moderate Islam teaches the history of Mohammed in its historical context; after all, those centuries were a time of conquest, an era that only ran out in the early 20th century. Literal teachings of Mohammed do not give a warm and fuzzy image to the first Muslim, and Der Spiegel seems confused at best in that passage.

One question may nag readers: why have we not seen the homegrown jihadis here in the US? Well, we have, but not to the extent that the British and Canadian examples show. That does not mean they don't exist -- it means we have not discovered any at this time. The only analogous examples we have are John Lindh and Jose Padilla, and the less-than-intelligent ring of would-be terrorists captured in Florida. AQ would love to have native jihadis carry out an attack here, and I'd be surprised if they haven't met with some success in organizing something.

How can we prevent these disaffected citizens from transforming into traitors? Perhaps we can start by teaching children early about why Western freedoms and liberty hold the best promise for prosperity and happiness, and that life has intrinsic value. If we stop derogating our own culture and history, our children may learn to value it. They won't then be tempted to sample drive-through philosophy in any form, especially the most virulent kinds.

A Meaty Mandate, With A Caveat

The mandate for the expanded UNIFIL force turned out more robust than first thought. According to the Associated Press, it allows for offensive military action in support of the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 (and 1559 by implication):

Proposed rules of engagement for an expanded UN force in southern Lebanon would allow troops to open fire in self-defense, protect civilians and back up the Lebanese army in preventing foreign forces or arms from crossing the border, according to a UN document obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The 20-page draft was circulated to potential troop-contributing countries last week by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which is trying to get an additional 3,500 troops on the ground by the end of next week to strengthen the 2,000 overstretched UN peacekeepers already there.

The rules of engagement for the expanded force - which is authorized to grow to 15,000 - have held back some potential troop contributors - notably France - because of concerns that their soldiers would be required to disarm Hizbullah, which has controlled southern Lebanon.

The timing on this mandate brings into question France's sudden reversal on its participation in UNIFIL. The rules of engagement clearly intend on allowing UNIFIL the latitude of addressing all of the points in 1701. The requirement to actually shoot weapons when threats arise appears to have scared the French right out of the UNIFIL leadership position.

This may address some Israeli and Western concerns about the usefulness of the UNIFIL contingent. Unlike before, the UNSC will allow them to act as an actual military force with a specific set of mission goals rather than the lightly-armed bystanders they have been over the past several years. It even plans for an independent commander on the scene who can react in military fashion based on conditions on the ground, rather than acting as a conduit to a perpetually divided UNSC.

It does contain one flaw, perhaps unavoidable but a flaw nonetheless. The mandate specifically calls for these military actions to be taken at the request of the government of Lebanon. The AP does not include the exact language, but as described, it sounds as if the interdiction of illegal arms transfers could only occur with Fuad Siniora's approval. That would be very problematic for UNIFIL and for the Israelis, who expect the UNIFIL force to change the situation in the sub-Litani region. Siniora's previous support for Hezbollah strongly indicates that such approvals will not easily come from his government.

Israelis Cancel West Bank Withdrawal

The Israeli push to withdraw from the West Bank has become a casualty of the Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon. With Israelis increasingly angry about the performance of the government in the conflict and disgusted with the results of conciliatory gestures, Ehud Olmert has little choice but to shelve plans to pull out of the occupied territory:

The plan, which propelled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to victory in March elections and was warmly endorsed by President Bush as a way of solving Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, is no longer a top priority, Olmert told his ministers last weekend, according to one of his advisers.

Instead, the government must spend its money and efforts in northern Israel to repair the damage from the war and strengthen the area in case fighting breaks out again, Olmert said. ...

Even without the financial considerations, the plan for unilateral withdrawal from some settlements is dead, other political figures and analysts said. The seizure of Israeli soldiers and the renewed fighting in the Gaza Strip -- from which Israel withdrew last year -- and in southern Lebanon -- from which Israel withdrew in 2000 -- have left the Israeli public with little appetite for additional pullouts.

The pullout of Gaza is now considered a mistake, given the attacks on Israel which intensified over the last few months. Despite the unpopularity of the Lebanese occupation, Israelis now feel that their withdrawal there bought them little peace, just a shift of battlefields. Both withdrawals had their political and military advantages, especially the latter, but the Israelis are in no mood for further concessions. The nature of the summer conflicts have apparently united Israelis across the political spectrum on the nature of their enemies in the region and the existential nature of their conflict.

With the dimunition of Mahmoud Abbas, it now becomes increasingly apparent that no partner for peace will be found in the Palestinians nor among the terrorist-sponsoring states of the region. This will also impact Western aid and involvement in the push for a long-term settlement to the conflict. If Abbas cannot deliver on a simple cease-fire, using the formal powers of his proto-state, then the US has no incentives to offer Israel in any push to gain concessions on the settlements. Indeed, the best strategic plan in the case of chaos would be to hold as much ground as possible to gain better positions to fight the terrorists when they attack.

Besides, the root of the problem does not lie in the occupation of the West Bank any more than in Gaza. The Hezbollah war showed clearly that the root of the problem lies in Damascus and Teheran. Max Boot suggests that the Israelis respond to the threat directly rather than fight the proxy war both capitals have enjoyed:

Syria's importance as an advance base for Iran — the two countries concluded a formal alliance on June 16 — cannot be exaggerated. It is the go-between for most of the munitions flowing to Hezbollah. It is the sanctuary of Hamas honcho Khaled Meshaal. It is also, according to Israeli intelligence sources, the home of a new Iranian-Syrian intelligence center that tracks Israeli military movements and relays that information to terrorist proxies.

State Department optimists dream that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can be weaned from Iran through concessions from the United States and Israel, such as the return of the Golan Heights. But since the early 1990s, the United States has tried repeatedly to strike a deal with Syria and never gotten anywhere. More economic pressure, especially from Europe, would be helpful, but it could probably be offset by increased subsidies from Iran.

History suggests that only force, or the threat of force, can win substantial concessions from Syria. In 1998, Turkey threatened military action unless Syria stopped supporting Kurdish terrorists. Damascus promptly complied. Israel may have no choice but to follow the Turkish example.

Indeed, Shlomo Avineri, a former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, argues that his country fought the wrong war: Instead of targeting Lebanon, it should have gone after Syria. The Syrian armed forces are less motivated than Hezbollah, and they offer many more targets for Israeli airpower.

I argued this at the start of the conflict. Boot later says that the Syrians are willing to fight Israel to the "last Lebanese", and he's correct. So far the war has cost them nothing, although Boot does leave off one strategic setback for Teheran and Damascus: the Israelis negated the extortive power of Hezbollah's rockets by shrugging them off, making their diminished rocket capacity much less powerful psychologically as well as numerically. That also plays into greater Syrian vulnerability -- a missile attack resulting from an Israeli attack on Syria would hardly provide much of a distraction any more.

Syria needs to understand the risk involved in a proxy war. Some would see this as an unprovoked attack on the part of the Israelis, but Syria's hosting of Hamas leadership while the group attacked Israel from Gaza is enough to justify a military response; after all, it's the same casus belli that we had with Afghanistan after 9/11. One bloody nose would probably convince Syria to back down, although it would have to be a good one, taking out their air force and blunting their armored units in the initial hours of the conflict. A protracted war might encourage others to join Syria.

On the other hand, Israel may not need to attack first. Bashar Assad announced that he would form a Hezbollah-like group to take back the Golan Heights after seeing Israel's reluctance to go after the Lebanese government during this war. That kind of action would allow Israel to respond with a full-scale war, as apparently Assad failed to understand the nature of government-supported militias within the rules of war. Olmert (or more likely Netanyahu) will not have to wait long for the first border raid to give a green light for a massive attack on Syrian armed forces and the too-long-delayed consequences to the Assad regime for conducting proxy wars.

Then, perhaps, we can finally get Palestinian leadership that will negotiate with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution. Until that leadership materializes, the conflict will never find resolution, and continued engagement remains pointless if not counterproductive.

Now We Know Why Comedy Central Put 'Trapped' Back In Rotation

Viacom has cut its ties with Tom Cruise, and done so in an unusually public manner. CEO Sumner Redstone cited Cruise's odd public behavior and controversial statements regarding Scientology and psychiatry as reasons that Viacom unit Paramount Pictures severed the relationship with Cruise's production company:

Paramount Pictures will end its longstanding relationship with Cruise/Wagner Productions, actor Tom Cruise's production company, citing his erratic behavior, according to a report published Tuesday.

Sumner Redstone, CEO of Paramount owner Viacom, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Cruise's controversial behavior over the last year - including advocating for Scientology and denouncing the use of antidepressant drugs - was the cause for the move.

The movie company is concerned that Cruise's behavior hurt his most recent film, "Mission: Impossible 3," said the report.

"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," Redstone was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal. "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

Redstone is hardly alone in these concerns. Steven Spielberg reportedly cooled his friendship with the star of War of the Worlds after his antics cut into that film's business. Kate Capshaw, AKA Mrs. Steven Spielberg, has a deeper grudge against Cruise after Scientologists staged a protest outside the offices of a family member's psychiatrist -- shortly after she had mentioned him to Cruise. Cruise tried doing some suck-up routines afterwards, according to the Slate article from five weeks ago, but it has not had much effect, at least not on Capshaw.

Unlike some critics and moviegoers, I think Cruise has talent and likeability. Unfortunately, he has chosen to squander both recently in what can charitably be called a mid-life crisis of enormous proportion. Regardless of his relationship with Katie Holmes -- and what single guy wouldn't trade spots with Tom Cruise? -- his public behavior has overshadowed his middling talents and erased his nice-guy attraction. Even before the psychotic romp on Oprah's couch (parodied unmercifully in Scary Movie 4), he publicly and without provocation attacked Brooke Shields for using anti-depressants for her post-partum depression, and then lectured Matt Lauer on the Today show on psychopharmacology without the benefit of having any education in the field outside of L. Ron Hubbard's teachings.

Seeing these incidents come in a sudden string of bad press, Redstone made the smart decision to cut bait and let Cruise go elsewhere. That decision may have been foreshadowed in the recent but unheralded decision to allow South Park's "Trapped In The Closet" episode back into the rotation, along with the "Bloody Mary" episode Viacom unit Comedy Central had suppressed after their initial airing. The Emmy nomination received by Trey Parker and Matt Stone forced Comedy Channel to re-air "Trapped" despite their earlier announced decision to keep it off the air. The episode returned in re-airings afterwards, indicating that Viacom's earlier reluctance to anger Cruise had dissipated along with Cruise's reputation.

Tom Cruise will make more movies, and whatever fans he has left will still enjoy them, assuming that he pulls his head out of his nether regions sometime soon. His reputation as a power broker will not soon be restored, however, and his choice of roles may narrow considerably with Redstone and Spielberg dropping him from their Rolodexes. His sins are hardly as egregious as those committed by Mel Gibson and Andrew Young, and he doesn't deserve to lose his career over some mid-life weirdness. On Hollywood's Richter scale of strange, he barely registers.

Taylor Conflicted?

The judge who ruled against the government and ruled the NSA terrorist surveillance program unconstitutional may have had an undisclosed conflict of interest. Anna Diggs Taylor also serves as a trustee and officer to an organization that donated $45,000 to the Michigan chapter of the ACLU -- which happened to be one of the plaintiffs in the case (via Hot Air):

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and judicial abuse, announced today that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who last week ruled the government’s warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, serves as a Secretary and Trustee for a foundation that donated funds to the ACLU of Michigan, a plaintiff in the case (ACLU et. al v. National Security Agency). Judicial Watch discovered the potential conflict of interest after reviewing Judge Diggs Taylor’s financial disclosure statements.

According to her 2003 and 2004 financial disclosure statements, Judge Diggs Taylor served as Secretary and Trustee for the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan (CFSEM). She was reelected to this position in June 2005. The official CFSEM website states that the foundation made a “recent grant” of $45,000 over two years to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, a plaintiff in the wiretapping case. Judge Diggs Taylor sided with the ACLU of Michigan in her recent decision.

As Allahpundit notes, this does not appear to violate the legal canon of ethics, at least not explicitly, but it does seem rather too close for comfort. Many judges probably either belong to the ACLU or have given it support, but in this case it would appear unseemly for Taylor -- as an officer of an organization that is a major benefactor -- to have presided over a lawsuit the Michigan chapter brought. I doubt she will get any official sanction, but I also think it will dent her reputation than her opinion in the case has already done.

However, we should not get too triumphal about this development. The defendants of the lawsuit will almost certainly raise this question on appeal, but the real questions about the legality of the program still must find an answer. Even if the appellate court dismisses the decision on this basis, it only postpones a truly substantive review of the issue -- which Taylor didn't bother providing in the first place. The sooner that the Supreme Court reviews the issue, the better off we all will be.

Sanctions Next

Iran didn't bring the world to an end on August 22nd, but they may have ended hopes of resolving the nuclear crisis without an escalating series of adversarial actions. To no one's surprise, Iran rejected the requirement of uranium-enrichment suspension, instead offering a counterproposal to the incentive package backed by the West:

IRAN yesterday turned its back on an international package of incentives designed to stop it developing a nuclear bomb, paving the way for possible United Nations sanctions against Tehran.

Iran hand-delivered a 20-page document offering a “new formula” to resolve the nuclear stand-off to Tehran-based ambassadors from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland, which was representing the United States. ...

Ali Larijani, the country’s top nuclear negotiator, said that the Islamic Government was ready for “serious negotiations”, state television reported.

“Although there is no legal justification for the Security Council’s illegal action, based on [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan’s recommendation, we prepared the response to the proposed package with a positive view,” he said.

But a diplomat involved in the discussions told The Times last night that Iran’s response did not satisfy international demands. “As expected, it was neither acceptance nor rejections,” the diplomat said. “They raised legitimate questions they could have raised in July. They know some of the points won’t satisfy us.”

Everyone expected this outcome, which amounts to little more than a punt and a play for more time. Technically, Iran still has nine days to change their mind, as the UN Security Council will not take the issue under consideration again until August 31st. The US will almost certainly push for a sanctions regime, and the UNSC will have few other options left after this display of Iranian intransigence. Ali Larijani attempted to put the most diplomatic face on the response, but it still amounts to a gigantic MYOB.

Will the UNSC have the gastric fortitude to apply sanctions? Larijani probably let Russia and China off the hook with this counteroffer; the two veto-holding nations will almost certainly insist on further talks before any enforcement activity by the UNSC. The French and the British appear resolved to attempt enforcement, even if that means losing some lucrative economic ties to the mullahcracy. However, if Russia and China balk, the French will likely give up as well, and the UK and US will be isolated once again while trying to get the UN to have the courage of its own convictions.

In this manner, it will replay the entire Iraq issue all over again, only this time in less than twelve years. The UNSC teeters on the brink of extinction as it continues to follow the League of Nations playbook. If the UNSC gets stymied in its attempt to halt Iranian nuclear development, then the delay of the past several months may come back to haunt the region if Iran achieves success. In fact, if the UNSC cannot agree to unite against the mullahs in Teheran, they may well push the Anglosphere into military options as the only course of action left to us that have some chance of stopping the Islamic Nuke.

Once again, we have tried to engage the global community to stand fast against nuclear extortion and terror-supporting states. If the global community surrenders again, we hope that the multilateralists among us will finally take notice of the futility in engaging nations too committed to appeasement to act in their own defense, let alone ours.

Earmark Reform: It's The New Black!

My new post at the Heritage Foundation Policy Blog takes a look at the gathering momentum for earmark reform, even during a Congressional recess. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the energy unleashed by the Sunlight Foundation's new Exposing Earmarks website.

Let's continue to push to make pork an unhealthy political diet.

New Security Plan Working?

After seeing violence in Baghdad and its environs escalate constantly during the first half of the year, the Bush administration and the Maliki government in Iraq scrambled to find a better security plan. Although not too many news outlets have reported this, the new plan appears to have had an effect (via Big Lizards):

Violence in Baghdad has declined in the past two weeks and all but ended in some formerly deadly neighborhoods, the U.S. military said in a cautiously upbeat report on Tuesday on a major security clampdown in the city. ...

Twenty-two raids in the past week against such groups in the capital had led to 37 arrests, Major General William Caldwell told a news conference. He presented statistics showing a 16 percent drop in the daily average of attacks in Baghdad since August 7, at 21 compared to 25 in the preceding two months.

"What we have seen in August is a downturn," Caldwell said, two weeks after beefed up U.S. forces and thousands of Iraqi troops and police launched a new phase of what Iraqi and U.S. leaders have called a make-or-break operation to pacify Baghdad.

In three particularly violent areas where intensive raids to root out militants have been completed this month, life was returning to normal and attacks were rare, Caldwell said -- a sentiment endorsed by a number of residents in the mainly Sunni areas of Ghazaliya and Amriya and the mixed district of Dora.

Two weeks is not much of a sample by which to extrapolate future performance. However, this does demonstrate that the US has finally applied force to the problem of the militias on both sides of the sectarian divide. Despite some initial griping from Nouri al-Maliki about the targeting of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army -- Sadr is a political ally of Maliki -- the Iraqis appear pleased with the results.

Over the past couple of weeks, supporters of the war in Iraq, including myself, wanted to see some strategic and tactical adaptation to the sectarian violence. Clearly the militias had adapted themselves to the security patterns of American and Iraqi forces and had plans to escalate the violence in the capital until we responded. The new security strategy that has seen more troop commitments, and more importantly, the resolve to address the militias, has made a positive difference, at least initially.

We cannot afford to lose Baghdad to sectarian militias; we have the means to prevail over them; all we need is the will to do so. For the last few months it appeared that the Bush administration had gotten so caught up in their efforts to show some troop drawdowns that the overall mission had gotten lost. Bush himself made it clear yesterday that he would not allow that to happen in the time remaining of his term, and these results appear to bear him out. Let's hope that we continue this renewed sense of mission and dispense with the petty politics.

Iraqis Keep Reporting For Duty

A week ago, I wrote that the United States needed a commitment to win in Iraq, rather than playing not to lose, or we should get out of the country. Rick Moran said much the same thing in his essay from yesterday. However, the Iraqis still show that they have committed to self-government and the rule of law, even in the difficult province of Anbar:

More than 500 Iraqi men have joined the police in restive Anbar province — a focal point of the Sunni Arab insurgency — in the most successful recruiting drive in the region by U.S. and Iraqi forces, the U.S. military said Tuesday. ...

U.S. Marines screened thousands of applicants earlier this month in various regions along the western Euphrates River valley before shortlisting the recruits for the Anbar police force, said a statement by the U.S. command.

Most American deaths this month have been in Anbar province west of Baghdad, where support for the Sunni Arab insurgency runs deep. The latest casualties in Anbar were two Marines and a sailor who were killed in combat Sunday. All three belonged to the Regimental Combat Team 7, which conducted the three-day police recruitment.

Maj. Lowell Rector, head of the police transition team for RCT-7, called the recruiting drive the most successful the U.S. and Iraqi forces had launched since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the statement.

Yesterday, George Bush told the nation that the US will not abandon Iraq as long as he remained President. He also discussed the redeployment of forces freed from police duty in other areas of Iraq to the Sunni Triangle in order to help secure an area blighted with sectarian and political violence. These are good steps, but we need to start seeing overwhelming force applied to the militias that have undermined the authority of the government and official security forces.

The Iraqis haven't quit yet, not even in Anbar. We need to muster the will to help these men quell the violence and restore security to central Iraq before it falls completely apart.

Do Electronic Voting Machines Pose A Threat To Democracy?

Most of the opposition to electronic voting machines comes from the same lunatic left that insisted on replacing punch ballots with high-tech solutions in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. To a nation sick of hearing about pregnant, dimpled, and hanging chads, this appeared to be a good investment in electoral confidence. Now, however, touch-screen voting and the venerable Diebold corporation appear at the center of every paranoid conspiracy theory, the latest version of which came from Cynthia McKinney after Hank Johnson beat her like a bass drum in a marching band.

Marc Danziger argues in today's Washington Examiner that we should not leave the issue with just the conspiracy theorists. He says that electronic voting machines are far less secure than the average nickel slot in Laughlin, a situation that should concern all voters:

Let me be very clear: The machines in use to count your vote aren’t remotely as secure as the video poker machine that you lost $5 to at the airport in Las Vegas. Seriously. You can look it up. Go over to the Gaming Standards Association (www.gamingstandards.com) and surf around. If voting machines were as well-tested, none of us would worry about them.

Bad as the machines’ security is, the voting systems surrounding the voting machines are so laughably insecure that no modern American corporation could use them, for fear of a Sarbanes-Oxley indictment of executives and directors.

Consider the recent special election here in California. The local San Diego County Registrar set up the election by allowing local precinct workers to take the machines home with them the night before.

I don’t think that specific election was hacked. But one of these days, one will be. And worse, as faith in the plumbing of democracy fades, what’s going to happen is that — like the proverbial banana republic — the losers in our elections won’t walk away vowing to do better next time. Instead, they’ll be convinced that the game is fixed, the referees bought, and that there’s no reason to participate in electoral politics.

That’ll lead to a whole other kind of politics, and I don’t think we’ll like it very much.

This entire mess sprang from the insistence on the Left that people could not possibly be relied upon to complete a ballot with punch cards, despite decades of experience telling us otherwise. The "butterfly ballot" that received such universal condemnation (and that was designed in the Florida election by a Democrat) had been used in California for years; I learned to vote with butterfly ballots. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out, and in case anyone got confused, the booth had instructions that reminded voters to make sure their punched holes were free of chads.

As a result of the so-called conspiracy to confuse the voters in several Florida counties, the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on touch-screen voting machines so that voters could select the face of the candidate they wanted. Now that system apparently has too many holes in it to be reliable. Danziger rightly notes that insecure systems will erode confidence in our electoral system, but how many times must we change machines to appease the same tinfoil-hat brigades that determined that a time-tested system of balloting had to be tossed into the garbage?

Here in Minnesota, we use optical-scanned ballots for voting. The voter circles the candidate they desire rather than punch a chad or tap a screen. When complete, the ballot gets fed into a scanner and the voter waits to see if the ballot is accepted. If no double-voting has occurred, then the voter gets a stub from the ballot and goes upon his merry way. This system allows for quick tabulations of votes in all races and still produces a paper trail that can be used for recounts.

Perhaps we can get the rest of the country to adopt the optical-scan system and put all of this nonsense behind us. However, I'm sure that as soon as we do, we will start hearing about conspiracies to replace the optical pens with markers that don't get scanned when certain paranoidal politicians lose elections. Let's just make sure that the rest of us rational people have a system with which we can remain confident.

Airline Data Still Out Of Reach Five Years After 9/11

The US and European governments want to gain greater access to customer data from airlines and reservation companies to detect patterns and connections that might identify terrorists before they strike. Predictably, civil libertarians have objected as they have in the past, even with the exposure of the latest terror plot against transatlantic flights.

Does this sound like a chapter in a future post-attack commission report?

A proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would allow the United States government not only to look for known terrorists on watch lists, but also to search broadly through the passenger itinerary data to identify people who may be linked to terrorists, he said in a recent interview.

Similarly, European leaders are considering seeking access to this same database, which contains not only names and addresses of travelers, but often their credit card information, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and related hotel or car reservations. ...

The proposals, prompted by the recent British bomb-plot allegations, have inspired a new round of protests from civil libertarians and privacy experts, who had objected to earlier efforts to plumb those repositories for clues.

“This is a confirmation of our warnings that once you let the camel’s nose under the tent, it takes 10 minutes for them to want to start expanding these programs in all different directions,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The US wants to conduct targeted searches on the data available to reservation agents and the airlines, provided voluntarily by the travelers. With flagged names as a starting point, intelligence agencies and law-enforcement personnel could explore links to other names and destinations, and then start tracking the travel connections used by suspected terrorists and their associates. The US and other nations could add these people to no-fly lists and block the travel of suspected terrorists and their sympathizers into our nations.

Critics complain that the natural progression of these efforts would create vast databases of personal information on millions of people who have no connection to terrorism. However, that misses the point, at least to an extent. The databases already exist, and the data is already provided by those who travel by air. The government wants to gain access to private databases, presumably without warrants, in order to find travel connections to known terrorists and those suspected of material support.

Moreoever, the government would not want to keep its own data on these transactions. The private sector does this better than the government would, and it would represent unnecessary duplication. Besides, the most efficient use of databases creates the need to exclude data, not maintain ever-expanding databases of inapplicable information. Investigations work more efficiently by sorting and searching targeted information.

In less than a month, we will observe the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in the US. The terrorists used our airliners as guided missiles, exploiting our own transportation system to kill us by the thousands. This very month, we discovered that they still plot to kill us with our airplanes. One would think that Americans would understand the critical need to garner as much information about our enemies to keep more Americans from dying in terrorist attacks. The reluctance to allow for these common-sense investigative techniques puts lives at risk. At some point, we will have another attack, another bipartisan commission, and another round of scolding over a failure to "connect the dots". If our defenders cannot gain access to the dots, how the hell are they supposed to connect them?

New Leak Investigation Ordered By Judge

Outrage over leaks by government employees is no longer limited to the executive branch. A federal judge in New York has ordered the Department of Justice to discover how CBS News learned of the FBI's espionage investigation into AIPAC:

A federal judge has ordered a Justice Department probe into how CBS News obtained a story two years ago disclosing an FBI investigation into a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Judge Thomas Ellis III issued the order last week in connection with the prosecution of two former Aipac employees, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. The two men are facing criminal charges of conspiracy to acquire and disclose classified information.

Judge Ellis instructed the Justice Department "to conduct an investigation into the identity of any government employee responsible for the August 2004 disclosure to CBS News of info. related to the investigation of defendants/whether the investigation relied on info. collected pursuant to" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an entry placed on the docket of the Alexandria, Va.-based court yesterday. A more detailed opinion explaining the judge's ruling is under seal.

It is not clear whether Judge Ellis wants the alleged leak prosecuted, but disclosure of information from a foreign intelligence wiretap is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

The media, especially national organizations, used to have a silent immunity from these kinds of investigations, but two developments changed all of that. First, the media used to understand the impact of the disclosures they made and to coordinate them with the federal government to minimize the damage. That era appears to have ended, largely with the New York Times, which has blown several intelligence programs during wartime despite the warnings of the White House and members of Congress.

Secondly and more importantly, the press brought it on themselves in the Plame leak. The New York Times, hypocritically, took the lead in hysterically demanding a federal probe into the kind of leak that they regularly publish on their front pages. Somehow the media mavens who took their lead from the Gray Lady never considered the fact that an investigation into leaks would require subpoenaed testimony from the reporters that received them.

Too late, they realized that the public storm they created would rain down all over themselves. They have tried to paint the subpoenas and the resulting contempt-of-court threats as an indication of an oppressive Bush administration, declaring war on the media. This order by Judge Ellis should put an end to that misapprehension. The media created this demand for investigations into leaks of classified information, and jus because they were too foolish to understand that all roads led back to them is no reason to feel much sympathy for their plight.

Why Do We Keep Buying Into Ahmadinejad's Millenialism?

If you're reading this, you know that the world has not ended, despite the best efforts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

While no extra safeguards are in place, U.S. law enforcement are not ignoring the possible significance of tomorrow's date, August 22, a date that marks an important historic event on the Islamic calendar.

Internet websites have been full of speculation that it could be a target date for terrorists in commemoration of the return of the 12th imam, a supposed day of reckoning for Shiites. ...

This year, August 22 marks the holy day on the Islamic calendar that is the day of reckoning for Shiites. Some Shiite sects believe that August 22 could correspond to the end of the world. And just today, after much hype, Iran has announced that it will continue to develop its nuclear program. To followers of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, this is a well-timed affront to Israel, the United States and the world. The United Nations had given Iran until the end of the month to respond, but Ahmadinejad had made it clear to all Iranians and the world that he intended to respond on the eve of August 22.

Whether or not this announcement is the end of Ahmadinejad's plans for August 22, one expert says we will have to wait and watch.

Maybe we can buy popcorn and take some pictures, too, but who would develop them later?

Seriously, the fact that this tabloidy speculation gained such breathless coverage should embarrass the Western media and blogosphere. Ahmadinejad will spend today laughing up his sleeve at the shakes some commentators appeared to have over this propaganda -- and he will know that the West still has something to learn about resolve.

Ahmadinejad may want to try to bring the 12th Imam out on his timetable to speed up the end of the world as we know it. We still have the ability to end Ahmadinejad's world in a hell of a hurry, and that a thousand times over. The 12th Imam won't even have climbed aboard his winged horse before we can turn Teheran into a glass farm. Why don't we recall that we are not helpless children in the face of Islamic millenial nonsense?

UPDATE: Some commenters make the argument that the British sky plot may have been targeted for today, and so we should take this millenialism seriously. Perhaps, but it's important to remember that al-Qaeda is a Wahhabist group, and they reject the Shi'a as much as they do the West, if not more so. Ahmadinejad is a Shi'ite, and the 12th Imam is strictly a Shi'a expectation.

We Still Wait And Hope

Up to now, I have not mentioned the kidnapping of Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and his free-lance cameraman, Olaf Wiig, due to missing the story initially and the lack of developments afterward. Eight days later, the kidnappers have not taken public responsibility nor issued demands -- and that is the kind of no-news that actually is news, as Centanni's colleague Michelle Malkin notes today on her blog:

Fox News Channel reporter Steve Centanni and freelance cameraman Olaf Wiig are still missing. It has now been more than a week since their kidnapping at gunpoint in Gaza by unknown terrorists. FNC top management, the journalists' families, and Palestinian journalists continue to press for their release.

Following up on my post late Sunday night, some media types are now musing that one possible reason the story is not getting the attention it deserves is that there aren't any "new" developments to report. Vaughn Ververs, CJR Daily, and Stephen Spruiell at The Media Blog weigh in. TV blogs are covering the story: check TV Newser, Johnny Dollar, and Inside Cable News.

My opinion: No news is news. So is unchecked terrorist thuggery against Western journalists. The disappearance of Centanni and Wiig is at least as newsworthy as--and far more threatening to our national security than--people falling off cruise ships or getting eaten by alligators or attacked by bees.

It's a hell of a lot more newsworthy than developments in what should have been a local news story on an unsolved murder in Boulder, CO. Yet even Centanni's own network seems much more interested in the latest Jon Benet Ramsey updates than on Centanni (although not, one should definitely note, on Brit Hume's Special Report).

The latest news on Centanni and Wiig is the deployment of a New Zealand diplomat, Arabic-speaking Peter Rider, to Gaza for a special assignment to free the pair:

Senior Wellington diplomat Peter Rider arrived in the Middle East in the weekend to lead efforts to secure Wiig's release.

Mr Rider, an Arabic speaker, was sent from Wellington to take over the diplomatic role in the crisis from New Zealand's Turkish ambassador, Jan Henderson, who was scheduled to return home from her Ankara posting.

Speaking from Jerusalem Mr Rider told National Radio he spent yesterday in Gaza meeting with the Palestinian Prime Minister, security forces and senior Fatah leaders.

"We got a lot of assurances that people are working very hard on this and I was very please to get a personal commitment from the Prime Minister that he is doing everything he can and exercising a lot of authority over his staff and forces to try and find what has happened to Olaf and his Fox News colleague."

So far, it doesn't sound promising. The lack of bragging and demands either means the kidnappers didn't realize who they took and want to find a quiet way to get out of their jam -- or something worse. Let's hope that it's the former and the kidnappers will just settle for a taped statement of their political manifesto, using Centanni and Wiig as producers. In the meantime, keep the pair and their families in your prayers, and maybe post about it to let the media know that we consider the kidnapping of Western journalists a more serious affair than the in-flight meal of a twisted pervert being extradited from Thailand.

Abbas Retreats On Cease-Fire

Mahmoud Abbas had to retreat on his announced efforts to stop rocket fire from Gaza into Israel after almost all of the various armed groups in the territory rejected his plan. Even Fatah's own in-house lunatics, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, refused to stop attacking Israel, demonstrating the lack of power held by the PA president:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was forced earlier this week to call off plans to deploy PA security personnel in the northern Gaza Strip when several armed groups, including militias from his own Fatah movement, threatened to attack these forces, PA officials here told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Abbas had planned to deploy several hundred PA policemen and security officers in an attempt to stop the armed organizations from firing rockets at Israel, the officials said, noting that the proposed move had won the backing of the US and Israel.

"Those who are firing Kassam rockets at Israel from the northern Gaza Strip are acting against the interests of the Palestinian people and are providing Israel with an excuse to continue its aggression in the Gaza Strip," said one official. "President Abbas has a serious plan aimed at stopping the rocket attacks, but the armed groups are refusing to cooperate."

Last week, Abbas announced that the Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip had accepted his call for a unilateral cease-fire with Israel. The announcement came after a series of meetings Abbas held in Gaza City with PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a number of Hamas officials.

Another PA official told the Post that Hamas was the only group that had accepted Abbas's proposal to halt rocket attacks. "The main problem we have is with Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and with Islamic Jihad, which have rejected the cease-fire proposal," he said.

According to the official, Abbas and the rest of the Fatah leadership have almost no control over the various Fatah militias operating in the Gaza Strip. "Fatah has at least seven or eight armed groups in the Gaza Strip and some of them are receiving financial aid from Hizbullah, Syria and Iran," he said. "The situation in the Gaza Strip is very problematic."

In this case, we don't even have the usual triangle offense usually employed by the Palestinians. Abbas could not even get his own faction to abide by his plan to de-escalate tensions between the PA and Israel. The lack of influence on Abbas' part shows a disturbing development in the territories.

Outside influences in Gaza and the West Bank used to come primarily from Hamas, based in Damascus, and Saddam Hussein. Now Hezbollah has begun to take over the AAMB, providing funds and political direction. This provides at least an indirect connection to Iran, and in this context one can see some coordination between the action in Lebanon and the activity in Gaza.

Israel and the US have held Mahmoud Abbas up as a rational partner for peace. They presume that Abbas controls Fatah in the same manner as Yasser Arafat before him, and that Fatah is still a voice for secular rule. Increasingly, that is no longer true, and Abbas has become more marginalized through his attempts to negotiate with the Israelis. This outcome has been entirely predictable ever since the Palestinians elected Hamas to a parliamentary majority. The Palestinians do not want peace -- they want a war of annihilation, and they keep proving this to everyone except the Westerners who refuse to accept it.

If Abbas cannot convince his own faction to stop fighting, then why bother negotiating at all? Let Israel give them the war they want, and keep everyone out of it until one side or the other surrenders. Everything else is a waste of breath.

Was Armitage The Plame Leaker?

Enthusiasts of the Valerie Plame leak case have long offered Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's aide at State in that period, as one of the likely suspects.  The Armitage option gained some credibility this evening as the Associated Press reports that Armitage met with Bob Woodward on June 13, 2003, in the same time frame as Plame's connection to Joe Wilson got communicated to reporters:

Then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter
has testified an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame.

Armitage's official State Department calendars, provided to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show a one-hour meeting marked "private appointment" with Woodward on June 13, 2003. ...

When contacted at home Monday night, Woodward declined to discuss his meeting with Armitage or the identity of his source in the CIA leak case. Instead, he referred to his statement last year that he had a "casual and offhand" discussion about Plame with an unidentified administration official in mid-June 2003.

A person familiar with the information prosecutors have gathered, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the material remains
sealed, said Woodward's meeting with the confidential source was June 13, 2003.

This scenario makes some sense.  After all, Wilson worked in the State Department as an ambassador earlier, and Armitage would have been familiar with Wilson and his connections to the CIA.  Armitage also would have had some motivation to explain the motivations of Wilson and his wife in her arrangements for the Niger mission and his serial leaks afterwards. 

Unfortunately for the Fitzmas crowd, Armitage makes a poor villain.  He worked for Colin Powell and not Dick Cheney, which would mean that either the conspiracy theorists would have to include Powell in the plot, or drop the idea altogether.  Armitage has repeatedly distanced himself from the Cheney team in foreign policy, and it's doubtful that he would have carried any water on behalf of the Vice President, especially with something as politically dicey as the deliberate exposure of a CIA agent.  He'd be more likely to have blown the whistle on that kind of conspiracy rather than partake in it.

If Armitage sourced the Plame connection, it would also explain the lack of prosecutorial interest on the part of Patrick Fitzgerald.  An Armitage lead pretty much stops at Armitage, given his relationship with the rest of the administration.  The fizzling of Fitzmas becomes more comprehensible.

Of course, no AP report on this subject would be complete without a little misinformation:

Wilson reported back to the Bush administration that he was unable to
verify the claim, but the administration continued to use the
information to bolster its argument for war. Wilson has cited the
decision to rely on the bad intelligence in his criticisms of the
administration.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has long established that this version is nothing more than fiction.  Wilson reported that the Nigerien PM believed that an offer from Iraq for secret trade involved uranium, and that he had rejected the overture.  The Bush administration said that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium, based on British intelligence that the UK still insists is accurate.  Wilson twisted his report to claim that Iraq had not purchased uranium, which was true -- but the Bush administration never claimed it had.

Maybe once we establish the actual source of the Plame leak, we can get the press to establish the truth about Wilson's claims.  Unfortunately, we will probably wait at least as long for that development as we did for the Armitage/Woodward meeting to come to light.

21st Century Iran Sounds Like 1930s Germany

Der Spiegel checks with the Iranian in the street to determine whether the radical nature of the mullahcracy has any support from its citizenry.  The responses sound depressingly familiar -- wan assurances that the hostile rhetoric and fascist statements are just for show:

Like most of the people one meets in Tehran, population 15 million, Abash is disarmingly friendly and hospitable. Indeed, even the lawless, lane-less highways are absent of road rage. But next to the highways, one sees evidence of the other Iran -- the Iran that concerns many in the West. On the left, a steady stream of posters passes by depicting Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah thrusting an automatic rifle into the sky. On the right, painted murals flash by glorifying Iran's young martyrs who died in the country's devastating war with Iraq in the 1980s.

Arash, though, continues with his proclamations of Iranian good faith. You just have to "ignore that propaganda," he says.

With Iran likely on the eve of rejecting a European Union incentive package meant to encourage Iran to abandon its nuclear program, ignoring the propaganda is becoming an increasingly tall order. Indeed, on Monday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei provided a taste of what is apt to come. "The Islamic Republic of Iran has made its own decision," Khamenei said according to Iranian state television. "And in the nuclear case, God willing, with patience and power, (Iran) will continue its path."

Sound familiar?  It should; Germans made the same mistake about the Nazis when they first came to power.  Forget the shouting and the demonstrations, they would explain; that's just for show, a motivational display intended to unify a demoralized nation. 

Now we hear the same rationalizations from Iranians, and we have to recall how well the dismissal of fascists worked in the past.  The Iranians know better than this, and one has to presume that an admission of their trouble causes too much cognitive dissonance to countenance.  Denial, after all, absolves one of the responsibility to correct a problem.

Iranian denial isn't complete, however.  Despite the regime's argument that they want nuclear power to solve a chronic pollution problem, most Iranians do not have illusions about their true desires.  Many of them also see the reasons for the mullahcracy's single-minded pursuit of nukes: they want to protect themselves from their own people as well as the West.  The Iranian in the street does not appear perturbed enough by this to do much about it, but at least understands the stakes involved.

This fatalism is more disconcerting than the denial.  Iranians appear to have given up hope on a peacefu transition to democracy and more secular government.  The West, especially the US, has a rapidly closing window in which to motivate democracy activists and help Iranians free themselves from the autocracy of the Guardian Council.  Even before the mullahs get the bomb, the people may surrender to its inevitability.

UNIFIL Teeth Sharpened?

The Jerusalem Post reports that Kofi Annan will modify the rules of engagement for UNIFIL to allow them to open fire on armed Hezbollah positions and troops. This change, if true, would constitute a major departure for the UN and its hapless observer forces in the region:

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to recommend Monday that the rules of engagement of the enhanced UNIFIL force to be deployed in Lebanon include opening fire on Hizbullah where necessary, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

While UN Security Council Resolution 1701 mandated an enhanced UNIFIL force to help the Lebanese Army deploy south and along the border with Syria, it did not spell out the operational procedures of this force.

Israel has been pushing for the need for an effective force, arguing that one of the criteria would be the ability to open fire on Hizbullah if the force saw, for instance, Hizbullah launching rockets toward Israel. This matter came up at a meeting Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni held last week in New York with Annan. ...

"This is to date the most explicit expression of the upgrade to the UNIFIL force that has yet been received," one senior diplomatic official said. Nevertheless, even if the UNIFIL forces had authorization to open fire, whether they would indeed do so and subject themselves to a firefight with Hizbullah is questionable. Officials in the Prime Minister's Office reserved judgment, saying they wanted to see the recommendation before responding.

Modifying the ROEs would certainly go a fair piece to establishing some credibility for UNIFIL. Previously, UNSCR 1701 only committed to defensive action on the part of UN troops, and not the enforced disarmament of Hezbollah terrorists. The raid near Baalbek may have shaken Annan from his vacuousness and forced him to start addressing some of Israel's concerns.

However, the order to fire will not come from Arabs in the UN contingent. The plans to use Muslim troops, especially from nations hostile to Israel, effectively negates any notion that UNIFIL will operate in a manner that uses the new ROEs to reduce Hezbollah's grip on southern Lebanon. Only NATO forces would react in a military fashion to maintain the peace in the region, which is probably why Annan went to the ummah rather than the US-European military alliance.

The public acknowledgment of 1701's inherent flaw of credible enforcement comes as a pleasant surprise, as does the proposed solution. If we had a hope in Hades that the UN would actually deploy the kinds of troops that would execute such orders, we'd almost say this was progress.

McCain Burnishing Bush Credentials, But Why?

John McCain continues his efforts to lock up the Republican nomination for President as early as possible, and as the New York Times reports, he's doing so by hiring political operatives before his competitors. McCain has leveraged his PAC money and his connections in DC to create a network of campaign support far ahead of most other presumed candidates:

Senator John McCain is locking up a cast of top-shelf Republican strategists, policy experts, fund-raisers and donors, in a methodical effort to build a 2008 presidential campaign machine, drawing supporters of President Bush despite the sometimes rocky history between the two men.

Mr. McCain’s effort to woo a diverse lineup of backers and scare off rivals has augmented his travel schedule on behalf of Republicans — which this week and next includes trips to Iowa, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio and Florida.

The effort is fueling a fund-raising operation that has helped him build loyalty throughout the party by doling out more than $800,000 to candidates since the start of last year through his political action committee.

Other Republican presidential hopefuls are doing likewise, but Mr. McCain is widely judged to be farther along in assembling the kind of national network necessary to sustain a long, expensive campaign for his party’s nomination to succeed President Bush.

At the heart of this article is the question as to whether McCain is the logical choice to bear the Bush mantle into another election. However, outside of war policy and taxes, many Republicans may ask themselves if they want to continue the policies of George Bush at all, especially on domestic spending. And this is where McCain has the advantage.

Conservatives have increasingly become disaffected from the current administration as federal spending grows. Even leaving out war spending, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have expanded discretionarly spending far past the rate of inflation -- and conservatives have no interest in even maintaining the size of government. They want to see it reduced, along with the intrusive reach of Washington DC into areas of policy that should not fall under federal control.

McCain offers these conservatives a better champion than the Bush administration ever was on this score. McCain has long been a deficit hawk, although his impulses have sometimes led him towards taxes than cuts. He initially opposed the last of the Bush tax cuts, but supports it now, and this squishiness may become an issue during the primary if a strong challenger on the right emerges. McCain's support for open-government efforts like the federal budget database (S. 2590) also endears him to these conservatives, and contrasts with the less-than-open Bush White House.

Fiscal conservatives will want a candidate who can merge two impossible tasks: create an atmosphere of bipartisanship and attack entitlement spending. Right now, the GOP has three possible candidates for Mission Impossible -- Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and McCain. Of the three, McCain probably has the clearest reputation for both bipartisanship and spending opposition.

However, McCain still has to answer for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the monstrosity that put political-speech restrictions into American law. Conservatives have opposed this strongly since before it passed Congress, and are not likely to trust McCain with executive power while he continues to support government restrictions on political speech. Had it not been for the BCRA, McCain could probably have won the nomination by acclaim. Now, however, with conservatives hoping to repeal the BCRA at some point, they will not blithely put the veto pen into the hands of its author.

Nor will they easily trust him with judicial appointments, not after his Gang of 14 grandstanding manuever. McCain gave liberals cover for their assertions that prominent jurists like Henry Saad and Janice Rogers Brown were either incompetent or too radical to sit on appellate courts. He unnecessarily complicated the appointment process and usurped powers from the presidency, as well as acted to protect a particularly undemocratic Senatorial process. Under these circumstances, conservatives rightly wonder what kind of jurists a McCain administration would sent to the Senate for confirmation on our nation's highest courts.

McCain may collect all of the political operatives he can muster, but he can't outrun these black marks on his record. Conservatives will continue looking for a better candidate and hope to outrun McCain in the primaries.

New Saddam Trial Starts Today

The long wait by the Kurds for justice has ended. Today Saddam Hussein finally stands trial for the most notoriious genocidal attacks of his reign of terror. The Iraqi tribunal will begin court proceedings on another series of criminal charges arising from the brutal oppression of Saddam and his henchmen, primarily his cousin, "Chemical Ali":

The chemical bombs were part of a 25-day siege of Sergalou and Bergalou by the Iraqi army involving jets, helicopters, rocket launchers and thousands of elite Republican Guard troops. Today, Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad charged with genocide over the siege and other military operations against the Kurds.

After holding out against vastly superior firepower, the Kurdish fighters eventually withdrew along with some 3,500 villagers. They made a hazardous trek through snow-bound mountains to safety across the Iranian border, but many were killed along the way.

As soon as they had gone, the bulldozers moved in. Crops were uprooted, and livestock slaughtered; wells were filled with concrete and every structure in Sergalou, Bergalou and at least 25 surrounding villages was razed. The pattern was to be repeated with increasing ferocity across rural Kurdistan over the next six months. The residents of Sergalou were the victims of the first phase of a campaign codenamed the Anfal, taken from the Qur'anic verse justifying the killing and looting of "infidels".

Under the guise of counter-insurgency measures against Kurdish rebels, who were accused of aiding Tehran in its war with Iraq, the government in Baghdad designated huge swaths of Iraqi Kurdistan along the borders with Iran and Turkey as "prohibited zones".

Thousands of villages were bombed; some were gassed. Surviving residents, including many women and children, were rounded up, taken to detention centres and eventually executed at remote sites then buried in unmarked mass graves. Human Rights Watch has estimated that during the eight stages of the Anfal operation, which lasted from February to September 1988, at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 Kurds were systematically killed. At least 2,000 villages were destroyed.

The Iraqis may unravel over the future of their nation, but few dispute its past, and they intend to ensure it gets recorded into history properly. The Kurds have a claim on Saddam that few others can match. Saddam and his regime targeted them like no others, considering the Kurds to be too close to the West. He was determined to eliminate them, and so he gassed them, pulled down their villages, slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their farms -- eliminating every possible means of subsistence. Men, women, children -- all of them got targeted by the Tikriti faction, and many of them were murdered and maimed.

It is perhaps the greatest revenge of the Kurds that their areas have been rebuilt faster and better than the rest of the nation. Western-style cities have sprung up in the Kurdish region, and the local governments have even begun tourist campaigns in the West. Investment from Europe and America has flooded into these new showcases of the Iraqi embrace of open-market economics. They enjoy a better standard of living now than most Iraqis, thanks to the umbrella of Anglo-American protection during the twelve-year quagmire at the UN following the first Gulf War.

However, the Kurds want to ensure that Saddam accounts for his attempts to erase their people from the face of the Earth, regardless of whether Saddam gets the death penalty for the Dujail retribution case. That verdict will come in two months, giving the tribunal plenty of time to make its evidence public. Not everyone wants to see this, however, and some have pretty strange arguments for halting the trial.

One of the strangest comes from Human Rights Watch, the organization that has detailed many of Saddam's atrocities. Richard Dicker twists the legal meaning of genocide to insist that the court prove that Saddam specifically wanted to kill all of the Kurds, rather than eliminate political opponents. HRW already admits that the Kurdish genocide killed women and children, so how Dicker can insist that the court should give the benefit of the doubt to Saddam that this was just a political purge beggars belief. Besides, is the specific motivation really at issue when the defendant razed over 2,000 villages and killed tens of thousands of Kurds? Does Dicker really want to argue that this may all be just a ghastly coincidence?

Saddam faces the correct tribunal in the correct venue. The Hague has no role to play; Saddam should be tried in the country he brutally tyrannized for four decades. The victims of his merciless rule have the right and the jurisdiction to try him, and they have provided a much more just environment than Saddam ever did, and more so than most of their neighbors as well. Let justice be done on Saddam, and let the people of Iraq decide how to deliver it. They've earned that right.

Europeans Starting To Understand Nature Of Islamofascist Enemy

Germans have begun to wonder why terrorists hate them, especially since they have steadfastly stood against the Iraq War, but hate them they do. As one man goes on trial for attempting a deadly terrorist strike on the German rail system, the Times of London reports on the panic felt by the Germans themselves:

A LEBANESE student suspected of trying to paralyse the German railway network with a bomb concealed in a suitcase appeared in court yesterday, as a huge police hunt for a second suspect continued. ...

His arrest has thrown the country into panic since it coincides with Berlin’s emotionally charged decision to deploy troops in the Middle East for the first time since the Second World War. Suddenly Germans, too, are beginning to feel that they have become a target.

“The terrorist threat has never before come so close to us,” Wolfgang Schäuble, the Interior Minister, said. Police patrols on railway stations have been stepped up but the scale of the problem — 5,700 railway stations and 4.3 million passengers a day — makes it impossible to impose the security measures being put in place in airports in Britain and elsewhere.

Americans learned this lesson on 9/11, and other nations have been slower to recognize it. Free societies cannot possibly apply the kinds of security procedures that would make mass transit completely safe, not if they want to remain free societies. We can adopt better technology and hopefully screen airline passengers more effectively, but in truth that approach alone always puts us behind the terrorist curve. They only have to be successful once; we have to be successful every single time, and still protect the civil liberties of the travelers in our nations.

The only way to effectively fight terrorism is to fight it somewhere else. The Germans have consistently failed to grasp this, but that may come from a lack of attacks on their own assets. This plot has awaken some to the danger of the strict law-enforcement model. If every counterterrorism strategy relies on waiting until the terrorists have come to the Western nations they target, then this war is lost.

Germany understood that the terrorists had come to their territory, and so they have even less excuse for their willful myopia on the threat. The 9/11 conspirators came from an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, and terrorists used Germany on several occasions for meetings and support tasks. Perhaps the Germans convinced themselves that Islamofascists only hated America, and that as long as they remained publicly neutral on the war, terrorists would bypass them in favor of more attacks on America and Britain.

This obviously has failed, and for obvious reasons. Radical Islamists do not just hate America -- they hate Western culture and its freedoms. They hate sexual expression, voting, secular humanism, modern art, pork, the exposure of skin on women, and the economic success of others. Any nation which exhibits these characteristics will find themselves in the crosshairs of al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. Appeasement works just as well as it did in the 1930s, a lesson the Germans should understand better than almost anyone.

Maybe the Germans will start taking seriously this war and the forward strategy of the US to engage and kill terrorists where they live rather than where we live. We're not going to just sit around and try to catch them in the act of killing us, and hope our timing is good. That strategy has shown itself over and over again to be a loser, and the Germans have provided just another example of this.

Israel Rejects Peacekeepers Who Reject Israel

Israel has formally rejected the UN's plan to comprise its bolstered UNIFIL force with nations who do not recognize Israel. Ehud Olmert has warned Lebanon and the UN that it will not abide by 1701 if the UN stations hostile troops on its northern border:

ISRAEL said last night that it would veto the presence in Lebanon of peace-keeping forces from nations with which it does not have diplomatic links.

Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, ruled out countries that do not recognise Israel, complicating the already difficult task of assembling 15,000 troops to oversee the United Nations’ ceasefire resolution and bolster Lebanese forces.

Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh — Muslim states that do not have diplomatic links to Israel — are among the few countries that have offered troops for the stabilisation force that is expected to be led by European troops.

This arises from the collapse of French fortitude after having them push through their own requirements for the cease-fire itself. Annan expected 5,000 French troops and French command of UNIFIL during the deployment, but Jacques Chirac complained about the rules of engagement that his own government insisted on establishing in 1701. Now the French contingent has dropped to 200 additional troops to the 200 already in UNIFIL.

That gap forced Kofi Annan to start begging for pledges. The only countries besides Italy showing significant interest in contributing troops to the sub-Litani came from Muslim nations openly hostile to Israel. Only an idiot would expect Israel to sit quietly while a hostile Muslim force joined Hezbollah near the Blue Line, and apparently Annan and Fuad Siniora are idiots. Both earlier dismissed Israeli complaints by stating that Israel had no say on the composition of UNIFIL.

Both Lebanon and the UN may discover their error very quickly. With new holes opening up in 1701 by the hour, Israel may just decide to take its chances on war rather than commit suicide. The UN and Lebanon have no standing to issue diktats to the Israelis, and they have made clear that any such effort will prove counterproductive in the extreme.

The Hippocratic Oaf

A doctor faces charges of supporting terrorism in Manhattan for having taken an oath of membership into al-Qaeda and pledging his medical services to fellow terrorists. Dr. Rafiq Sabir and his attorneys argue that his Hippocratic oath requires him to attend to all who are ill or injured, and therefore he has done nothing wrong:

Dr. Sabir, of Boca Raton, Fla., is one of four co-defendants charged with a loosely connected plot to aid Al Qaeda that prosecutors made public last year. In a Bronx apartment in late May 2005, Dr. Sabir swore fealty to Osama bin Laden and pledged to provide medical assistance to jihadists who were wounded while training, a criminal complaint charged.

But in a recent court filing, Mr. Sabir's attorneys, Edward Wilford and Natali Todd, argue that the prosecution is unconstitutional because it impinges on a doctor's ability to practice medicine.

"As a medical doctor, Dr. Sabir is committed to saving lives, regardless of the status of the individuals because to do otherwise, would be to violate his cannons of ethics," his attorneys wrote. "A doctor, similar to an attorney, should not be limited to who he can treat, however unpopular such an individual may be."

I've looked through my copy of the Constitution this morning, and I do not see any language that grants doctors a guaranteed right to practice. In fact, the law has a built-in presumption against medical practice, as doctors must have state licenses in order to treat patients. Failure to do so usually results in prosecution, in some cases felony prosecution. These lawyers must have learned constitutional law in the same colleges that perceive a right to health care in the founding document, as well as the right to abortion.

Of course, this defense hinges on an absurd notion that doctors can conspire with anyone and avoid legal responsibility as long as they act as a medic at some point. What's next, Mafia doctors who do ride-alongs with button men to treat wounds received on jobs that go bad? Anyone acting in support of a criminal conspiracy has legal responsibility for the underlying crime, regardless of which professional skills they bring to bear.

The prosecution has one big hurdle to overcome, and that is the material support statute itself. It contains an exception for providing medicine, and the defense will also rely on that language to argue that Sabir cannot be prosecuted for pledging his medical skills to the terrorists. Congress hardly intended to allow Islamist doctors to escape the law when they joined terror cells; the intent was to keep federal prosecutors from charging doctors who treated injured or sick terrorists as part of their normal practice. Sabir should not have the ability to join terrorist groups without fear of prosecution simply because he made it through medical school.

Kerry Couldn't Find Mainstream With Both Hands And A Flashlight

John Kerry pontifcated about Joe Lieberman on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous, claiming that Lieberman doesn't represent mainstream Connecticut:

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., blasted a fellow Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, for continuing his bid in the Connecticut Senate race despite a narrow loss to newcomer Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary earlier this month.

"I'm concerned that [Lieberman] is making a Republican case," Kerry told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" in an exclusive appearance.

Kerry accused the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate of "adopting the rhetoric of Dick Cheney," on the issue of Iraq.

"Joe Lieberman is out of step with the people of Connecticut," Kerry added, insisting Lieberman's stance on Iraq, "shows you just why he got in trouble with the Democrats there."

Kerry called Lieberman's independent bid a "huge mistake" and applauded businessman-turned-politician Lamont as "courageous" for challenging Lieberman on the war.

Democrats seem intent on painting Joe Lieberman as a pariah these days. The ever-ridiculous Kerry has to push it even farther with a ludicrous comparison to conservative Dick Cheney. I doubt that Cheney ever garnered a 75 rating with NARAL (identical to Chris Dodd), nor did the VP's legislative voting record land him square in the middle of the Democratic caucus, as does Lieberman's.

Voters in Connecticut, who may have a better idea of the mainstream in the Nutmeg State than Kerry, obviously consider Lieberman a part of it. Rasmussen's first post-primary poll in Connecticut put Lieberman ahead of Ned Lamont by five points on August 9th. A week later, Quinnipiac's poll puts Lieberman ahead of Lamont by 11 points, and Lieberman has 53% of all likely voters -- in a three-way race.

In case Kerry doesn't recognize it, and there's no particular reason why he would considering his own legislative track record, that's the mainstream in Connecticut. And unless the state has suddenly turned into Texas, Connecticut voters see little resemblance between Lieberman and Cheney. Maybe Kerry needs to reconsider his own relationship to the mainstream instead.

British Night Goggles Go From Iran To Hezbollah

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Israelis have found sensitive night-vision goggles on Hezbollah fighters that originated in the UK. The tactical equipment appears to come from a shipment sent from the British government to Iran in 2003, intended to help interdict narcotics. Instead, the Iranians put them to another use entirely (via The Asylum):

Israeli intelligence officials have complained to Britain and the United States that sensitive night-vision equipment recovered from Hezbollah fighters during the war in Lebanon had been exported by Britain to Iran. British officials said the equipment had been intended for use in a U.N. anti-narcotics campaign.

Israeli officials say they believe the state-of-the-art equipment, found in Hezbollah command-and-control headquarters in southern Lebanon during the just-concluded war, was part of a British government-approved shipment of 250 pieces of night-vision equipment sent to Iran in 2003.

Israeli military intelligence confirmed that one of the pieces of equipment is a Thermo-vision 1000 LR tactical night-vision system, serial No. 155010, part No. 193960, manufactured by Agema, a high-tech equipment company with branches in Bedfordshire, England, and San Diego. A spokesman for Agema in San Diego denied all knowledge of the system.

The equipment, which needed special export-license approval from the British government, was passed to the Iranians through a program run and administered by the U.N. Drug Control Program. The equipment uses infrared imaging to provide nighttime surveillance that allows the user to detect people and vehicles moving in the dark at a range of several miles.

The UN-brokered program has allowed the UK to sell military equipment to the Iranians despite the standoff over the nuclear program in Teheran. The Iranians were supposed to use the goggles to track nocturnal movements of drugrunners trying to get heroin and opium over the Afghanistan-Iran border. Instead of stopping the flow of drugs, however, the goggles allowed Hezbollah guerillas to track the nighttime manuevers of the IDF, making it possible for them to kill more IDF soldiers.

The British have requested the serial numbers and model types involved to track the shipments to specific buyers, but the IDF isn't playing dumb. They have stated that the only way Hezbollah could have obtained these goggles would have been through the Iranian government, which seems a lot more likely than the British selling them directly to Hassan Nasrallah. It should not come as much of a shock in any case, since the Iranians supply Hezbollah with rockets and missiles as well as the goggles.

However, it does show the problem of engagement with terror-supporting states, even on issues like drug interdiction or other cooperative ventures. The Iranians care much less about the drug trade than they do about destroying Israel, and the British showed remarkable naivete in their dealings with Teheran. One suspects that they will not make this same mistake again soon.

The Culture Of Corruption Redux

When the Democrats adopted the "culture of corruption" meme as their campaign theme earlier this year, we noted that the culture hardly respected party lines. The leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, Harry Reid, took contributions from clients of Jack Abramoff and intervened on their behalf at least four times, and Abramoff hired one of Reid's staffers and started holding fundraisers for the Senate Minority Leader in Abramoff's offices.

Now COGirl at Hang Right Politics points us towards a Los Angeles Times report on the "culture of corruption" surrounding Harry Reid and a new real-estate development outside of Las Vegas. Reid has intervened on behalf of a powerful developer to gain government concessions while the developer puts money into Reid's campaigns -- and pays Reid's sons' salaries:

One of the most inhospitable places in the country, Coyote Springs Valley is so barren that, until recently, its best use was thought to be as a weapons test range.

Yet the valley — an hour northeast of Las Vegas — is on its way to becoming a real estate development of historic proportions, with as many as 159,000 homes, 16 golf courses and a full complement of stores and service facilities. At nearly 43,000 acres, Coyote Springs covers almost twice as much space as the next-largest development in a state famous for outsized building projects. ...

Over the last four years, Reid has used his influence in Washington to help the developer, Nevada super-lobbyist [Harvey] Whittemore, clear obstacles from Coyote Springs' path.

At one point, Reid proposed opening the way for Whittemore to develop part of the site for free — something for which the developer later agreed to pay the government $10 million.

As the project advanced, Reid received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Whittemore. The contributions not only went to Reid's Senate campaigns, but also to his leadership fund, which he used to help bankroll the campaigns of Democratic colleagues.

Whittemore also helped advance the legal careers of two of Reid's four sons. One of the two, Leif Reid, who is Whittemore's personal lawyer, has represented the developer throughout the Coyote Springs project, including in negotiations with federal officials.

The story of Coyote Springs sounds like a Horatio Alger story. The land Whittemore bought in 1998 from a defense contractor who intended on using it for target practice had a number of restrictions on its use. A quarter of it was subject to a federal power-line right of way. Another quarter had federal protection for the desert tortoise, an endangered species that also is Nevada's official state reptile. The land had a fragile series of streams and washes that required special permission on which to build without ruining the desert's ecosystem.

None of these obstacles proved too difficult for Whittemore, at least not while he had his friend Harry Reid running interference in Congress. Interior refused to relocate the tortoises for over five years, until the Bureau of Land Management agreed to swap the land for another parcel abutting a federal preserve elsewhere. No one ever did an analysis to determine whether the deal was fair to either party, nor did the BLM go to Congress for approval on the changes to a project that Congress had explicitly legislated.

In 2002, Reid worked on the power corridor. He inserted obscure provisions into a land management bill that relocated the power corridor, freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500 acres that Congress had previously held -- which means that someone else now had to lose property value for Whittemore's benefit, and for no cost whatsoever. That bald move caused raised eyebrows at the BLM and the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Reid backed away -- for the moment. Less than two years later, Reid tried again to give Whittemore the land for a song ($160,000), but Congress balked again. He finally settled for freeing the land for development and allowing Whittemore to buy it at a fair market rate, and forcing the government to relocate the power corridor.

In 2005, Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign conducted a series of interventions with the EPA to eliminate the final obstacle -- the environmental impact on the fragile ecosystem in Coyote Springs Valley. When the agency blocked Whittemore's efforts, Reid and Ensign held several meetings with EPA officials to pressure them into submission. Whittemore used another Reid son, Lief, to lobby his father's office for assistance. In the end, the pressure paid off, as the EPA backed down from its opposition after winning a few concessions on the development plan.

What did Reid get in exchange for all of this support? According to the Times, Whittemore contributed $45,000 to Reid and his PACs since 2000. He also gave the DSCC $20,000 in 2000, when it pushed Reid as a leader for the party in the Senate. Reid's son Josh got $5,000 for his unsuccessful campaign for a city council seat; his other sone Rory got $5,000 for his successful effort to win a spot on the Clark County Board of Commissioners.

Money talks. And Harry Reid walks. If you wondered why the Democrats have abandoned the corruption theme for these midterm elections, now you know.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

LA Times Attacks Gibson, Silent On Young

Two days after the bigoted tirade Andrew Young unleashed in a Los Angeles periodical against Jews, Koreans, and Arabs, the Los Angeles Times attacks anti-Semitism ... by bashing Mel Gibson:

WHAT DOES IT TAKE to get yourself excommunicated from the church of celebrity? Allegations, even unproved, that you slaughtered your ex-wife (O.J. Simpson) or that you are a child molester (Michael Jackson) can make you radioactive, but it remains to be seen whether Mel Gibson's poisonous anti-Semitic tirade is enough to end his Hollywood career. Judging from Gibson's offer (made during his sentencing on drunk driving charges Thursday) to make public service announcements, he doesn't seem to think so.

Let's hope he is wrong. Gibson is guilty of more than just driving with a blood-alcohol level of 0.12%. He broke one of Hollywood's most sacred rules — never let the public see what you're really like — proving himself to be a megalomaniacal, sexist anti-Semite. That should disqualify him from being held up as a role model worthy of a public service announcement.

Gibson should be declared celebrity non grata, left to wrestle with his own demons in private, as most other bigoted people get to do. Obscurity would be the most fitting punishment for the man.

This is a perfectly rational position to take, within the context of Gibson alone. Some have called for his excommunication from the church of Hollywood celebrity, and that's understandable, if a bit harsh. Gibson apologized, took complete responsibility, disavowed his statements in the strongest terms, and pledged to work with those he slandered to provide atonement. Some may choose to accept that atonement (if he delivers on it, which is still an open question), and some may not.

However, since Andrew Young said much the same thing while stone-cold sober and only apologized for saying it outside of Atlanta, one has to wonder why the Los Angeles Times does not use its editorial bully pulpit to cast out the former UN Ambassador from received society as well. Why no calls to shun Atlanta's mayor for his racist and anti-Semitic remarks? Young didn't even bother to offer to work with Jewish, Korean, and Arab community leaders to explore the dark recesses of his soul whence this rhetoric sprang.

Indeed, Young didn't even really disavow the sentiments. He said, “It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.” Speaking in the context of Atlanta? Perhaps if one considers Cynthia McKinney and her father as representative of Atlanta -- which as elected officials, one could do so. And I note that the Times has not called for the shunning of either McKinney, nor Louis Farrakhan, for that matter.

Maybe the Times' editorial board should keep a running feature on their pages, a list of those who should be shunned for their bigotry. If they want to start calling for this kind of reaction, then they had better stay consistent. Otherwise, we will have to conclude that they have other agendas than just the eradication of bigotry in mind.

Rudderless Research At DHS

For those who wonder why British passengers lacked so much confidence in airport security that they boycotted a flight out of Malaga, this report on counterterrorism research here in the US provides an explanation. Spencer Hsu writes about the bureaucratic disaster behind the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, and it sounds like the first chapter in a future bipartisan report on the next catastrophic terrorist attack:

The federal research agency in charge of countering emerging terrorist threats such as liquid explosives is so hobbled by poor leadership, weak financial management and inadequate technology that Congress is on the verge of cutting its budget in half.

The Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate has struggled with turnover, reorganizations and raids on its budget since it was established in 2003, according to independent scientists, department officials and senior members of Congress.

At the same time, the Bush administration's overriding focus on nuclear and biological threats has delayed research on weapons aimed at aviation, a controversial choice that was questioned anew after a plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners from London was made public Aug. 10. ...

In a 2007 spending bill awaiting a vote after the August congressional recess, the Republican-led House would cut spending by the Science and Technology Directorate from $1.3 billion to $668 million. Congress noted about $250 million in unspent agency funds.

Republican and Democratic senators are offering the agency $712 million, but in a budget report cited the agency's lack of goals, mystifying accounting and unspent money, and called it a "rudderless ship."

Our technology should give us a significant advantage over the terrorists, as well as our native production capacity to implement it. In previous wars, this industrial potential proved the difference between victory and defeat, especially for our allies, who would have starved of the necessary materiel with which to fight the enemy. This report tells us that we are squandering perhaps our largest defensive advanatge, and we're losing it because no one can provide the necessary leadership to set priorities and then plan to meet them.

This failure gets spread between Congress and the Bush administration equally. Congress has played games with the budget and provided little oversight on this program, and the White House -- especially Michael Chertoff -- seems uninterested in pursuing technological solutions. In the meantime, billions of dollars have been wasted in an effort no one wants to own and no one seems interested in investigating.

I have argued that technological solutions alone will not stop terrorists, and the explosives detectors mentioned in this article would not have stopped the British conspiracy in any case. We need to focus on the terrorists, and not exclusively on the materiel they use in their fevered plans to commit mass murder on ghastly scales. The Israelis have had decades of success in this strategy. We need to perfect the methods for ourselves in the small-scale pilot programs currently in place and put them into wide use, and start catching terrorists instead of nail clippers.

However, that does not mean that we cannot pursue technological solutions in parallel to such efforts. Since Congress and the White House continues to spend money on these R&D efforts, they both have the responsibility to see that the funds get used efficiently and in some sort of strategic manner, rather than the chaotic and unproductive manner which Hsu describes here. When the situation deteriorates to the point where Congress feels it necessary to spend less, then we know that action must be taken to correct the breakdowns.

UPDATE: The first commenters on this story point out that criticizing a government agency for not spending money seems rather ... counterproductive to fiscal discipline. I'd agree if the Directorate had produced results and implemented them efficiently, providing better security for American travelers. That certainly does not appear to be the case, and the continuously shifting priorities and strategies that have stymied the Directorate shows a problem in mission definition and execution.

Fuad And Kofi: Big Fans Of Newspeak

The war peace in Lebanon keeps getting stranger. Fuad Siniora and Kofi Annan seem intent on standing themselves on their heads rhetorically to ensure that they can blame Israel when Lebanon and Hezbollah violate the terms of the cease-fire. Although Lebanon has rejected the key component of UN Security Council 1701 -- the disarming of Hezbollah -- Annan made sure that he blamed Israel for violating the agreement to which Lebanon agreed:

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Saturday night that the raid in Baalbek constitutes a violation of the UN cease-fire resolution that went into effect on Monday.

A statement issued by Annan's spokesman said that the UN chief spoke with both Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Olmert about the fighting. "The secretary-general is deeply concerned about a violation by the Israeli side of the cessation of hostilities," it said.

"All such violations of Security Council Resolution 1701 endanger the fragile calm that was reached after much negotiation," said the statement, issued by spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

That agreement died when the Siniora government and the UN itself refused to enforce the provisions of the agreement. Paragraph 3 explicitly calls for the implementation of UNSCR 1559, which demanded in 2004 the disarming of Hezbollah and all other militias. Paragraph 3 of 1559 states very clearly that the UNSC "Calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias[.]" Lebanon refuses to comply, and the UN refuses to enforce it. That means that the agreement died hours after its supposed implementation.

Israel is now free to act in its own self-interest. So far they have chosen to withdraw while the Lebanese Army deploys to the south -- because that is what they wanted all along. If they determine that it is in their best interest to launch offensive operations, they will not have violated 1701 any more than Lebanon and the UN have already done. Siniora's cowardice and Annan's duplicity have done the damage already.

Lebanese defense minister Elias Murr put some of his own duplicity on display as well. In an attempt to provide cover for Hezbollah, Murr made a public case this morning for Israel firing rockets on itself in order to get an excuse to attack Lebanon again:

Lebanon's defense minister said Sunday any group breaking the cease-fire in southern Lebanon would be "decisively dealt with" and would be considered a traitor.

Defense Minister Elias Murr's comments apparently were to air concerns that factions other than Hizbullah, which he said is committed to the cease-fire, may attempt to draw Israeli retaliation by firing on the Jewish state.

"We consider that when the resistance (Hizbullah) is committed not to fire rockets, then any rocket that is fired from the Lebanese territory would be considered collaboration with Israel to provide a pretext (to Israel) to strike," he told a news conference at the Defense Ministry.

That sounds like an invitation to Hezbollah to start launching rockets at their earliest convenience. It can't be Hezbollah, Murr will claim; they promised not to do it -- and so it must be the Israelis themselves! Besides, how many other groups in Lebanon have rockets and launchers? And isn't that what the Lebanese Army is supposed to be doing in the sub-Litani region -- taking control and assuming sovereignty? Anything launched out of Lebanon and into Israel is the responsibility of the sovereign government, regardless of any pre-excuses Murr tries to establish.

The cease fire has held longer than I expected, but it sounds as if it will not last much longer than this. Hassan Nasrallah knows a gilt-edged invitation when he sees it, and the rockets will follow forthwith.