The Discerning Texan

Blue Fitzmas (by Cox and Forkum--click to enlarge)

Bill Kristol tells us in the Weekly Standard why October has not exactly been "the best of times" for the Democrats:

October, 2005 will turn out to be the left's cruelest month since . . . well, in a long time. A couple of weeks in, it seemed so promising. October was going to be the month that would mark the meltdown of the loathed Bush presidency. Iraq was failing, gas prices were rising, a weak Supreme Court nominee was under assault, and the White House was under siege from a special prosecutor. What more could a Bush-hater want?

But it was a false dawn for the left. On October 15, the Iraqi people voted for the second time this year, and progress--slow and difficult--gradually became visible on the ground. The economy, it turned out, was chugging along at a 3.8 percent growth rate. Harriet Miers withdrew--and President Bush followed that foul ball with a home run in the impressive person of Judge Samuel Alito. And the special prosecutor produced only one indictment, and one that will lead no further than a trial focused on what Scooter Libby said or didn't say to three journalists.

This late October reversal means this for November: The left will get even more heated in its rhetoric, even more extreme in its attacks, even more willing to distort and demagogue. And this in turn means the Bush administration needs not just to play effective defense, but to go on the offense--making the case for the war, its necessity, and the prospects for victory; explaining the role of the Bush tax cuts in producing economic growth, and fighting to make those cuts permanent; winning the Alito vote in the Senate and the constitutional debate in the country; and counterattacking against the criminalization of conservatives.

It will be a more interesting end of the year than most of us expected.

Rick Moran of the blog Right Wing Nuthouse has been writing for some time about the CIA's not so secret war against the Bush Administration, especially in light of the Agency's failures leading up to 9/11. Tonight, in the wake of the Libby indictments, the seeming exhoneration of Karl Rove, and the continuing attempt by Joe Wilson to construct lies around his visit to Niger and his subsequent report to the intelligence community, our man Rick wonders aloud whether a trial will finally reveal to the public at war the extent to which senior CIA officials have gone to discredit this President. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing (bold emphases are mine):

In a series of articles I began last July entitled “The CIA Vs. The White House,” I have tried to give context and meaning to the CIA’s war against the Administration and how that war has its roots in both partisan politics and bureaucratic infighting. But at bottom, what the Plame Affair reveals about the CIA is a culture of incompetence whose principals will do anything to avoid responsibility for their mistakes.

This is more than just simple bureacratic CYA. It is one thing for officials to hide some boondoggle or another in the Department of Health and Human Services. It is quite something else to miss 9/11 or be wrong about Saddam’s WMD’s.

One would think that by this time, the CIA would be used to owning up to its spectacular incompetence. Blessed with technical intelligence gathering capabilities that boggle the mind as well as some of the best minds in the country, one would believe that the CIA has its finger on the pulse of events around the world and with penetrating analysis, give our elected leaders a heads-up about what is coming down the pike that might be a threat to the United States and our vital interests.

Think again. While it is undoubtedly true that the CIA has assisted in heading off many threats to the US and its interests, it has also had several conspicuous and, in hindsight, puzzling failures. What these failures reveal is a system that does not punish incompetence – even when mistakes lead to the kind of tragedy we experienced on 9/11. Rather, a huge amount of effort is expended in either trying to explain away the errors or worse, attack those who attempt to find an explanation for the incompetence.

We have seen both tactics on display in the Plame Affair. The CIA’s failures in Iraq go all the way back to the first Gulf War when the Administration of George Bush #41 was taken completely by surprise when Saddam invaded Kuwait. This despite a huge build-up of Iraqi forces on Kuwait’s border prior to the invasion as well as many overt threats by Saddam against the Kuwaiti’s for pumping too much oil thus keeping the price depressed.

Following tactics that they repeated when it was discovered that Saddam’s huge stockpiles of WMD were a chimera, the CIA began to leak cherry-picked analysis which revealed that the the Agency did indeed believe that Saddam was going to invade, that it was the policymakers who missed the clear signals emanating from Langely. The problem, of course, is that those analyses were ignored in the run-up to the invasion as both the State Department and the CIA were telling the White House that Saddam was simply doing some saber rattling in order to get the Kuwaitis to cut back oil production.

The consequences of the CIA’s mistaken analysis about Saddam’s intentions were huge. It has since been revealed by former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that Saddam never anticipated the angry reaction from the United States that led to war. Just imagine what a strong statement from President Bush warning Saddam about the consequences of an invasion could have accomplished.

What the CIA analysis of Saddam’s intentions at that time revealed was a clear bias toward what has become known as the realpolitik faction in government who believed that Saddam was a vital ally and bulwark against radical Islam. There may have been a case to be made for such thinking prior to 9/11 as several high level Bush #41 Administration officials such as National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker believed. But as Howard Fineman points out in this article from October, 2003 in Newsweek, opposition to that policy came from the Department of Defense which, at that time, was headed up by current Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney:

Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq—Saddam Hussein and his Baathists—as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.

The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.

Choosing Wilson then to go to Niger to check out the yellowcake story does not seem such a stretch when placed in the context of a faction at the CIA who thought that their judgment about what kind of threat Saddam presented was superior to that of individuals who the American people elected to make those kinds of decisions. By sending Wilson, the CIA knew full well what the result of his “investigation” would be.

So why weren’t Wilson’s conclusions widely disseminated by the CIA? Speculation in this regard has run the gamut from a CIA “set-up” of the Administration to simple bureaucratic incompetence. Given a choice, I would settle on the latter. While it may be true that the CIA was trying to undercut the Administration’s case for war, it would be a stretch to believe that they knew there were no large stockpiles of WMD and thus, any use of Wilson’s “report” would be to demonstrate the “twisting” of intelligence charged by many on the left.

What may be true is that by not having Wilson sign a confidentiality agreement, they wished his “findings” to receive the widest possible distribution. Wilson’s contacts in the press included both Walter Pincus of the Washington Post and Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, two reporters who eventually did publish very selective information about his trip Wilson himself admits to shopping his story to reporters for months prior to his OpEd in the New York Times in early July, 2003. This would seem to indicate that the selective leaking of classified information carried out by a partisan cabal at the CIA for more than a year prior to the election last November was done not just to discredit the Administration’s Iraq War case but also to politically damage the President so as to cause his defeat for re-election.

For those who were puzzled by why the Bush Administration was trying to push back against Wilson more than a month prior to his public acknowledgment of the Niger trip as both Cheney and Libby were discussing Wislon-Plame in early June, one need look no further than the Administration’s recognition that they were in the midst of a partisan political attack by a known Democratic party sympathizer who was running around Washington trying to discredit the Bush Administration by giving a skewed account of his CIA “mission” to national security reporters. If they could connect Wilson to both the nepotistic actions of his wife and the partisan cabal in the CIA who, along with those seeking to cover up the Agency’s incompetence with regard to WMD’s wanted to show the Administration “twisted” intelligence on Iraq, Cheney-Libby would be able to blunt the impact of the attack.

What is the connection between lack of WMD and the Administration countering of Wilson? The answer is Valerie Plame whose associates in the Counterproliferation Department at the agency were responsible both for sending Wilson to Niger and giving the Administration uncredible reports with regard to WMD in Iraq in the first place. Any attempt to understand the prosecution of Libby must begin with Valerie Plame herself and her part in the leaking and bureaucratic backbiting that led the Administration to its current dilemma.

Will this part of the story ever fully be revealed? If Scooter Libby goes to trial rather than take a plea deal, it is very possible that the full role of the CIA and their war against the Administration will be revealed. Otherwise, the entire matter will simply remain an interesting footnote in the history of the Iraq War.

UPDATE
Powerline “gets it”...
“...[Is] there a serious journalist among the mainstream media who thinks the story in the Libby case might be the CIA’s efforts to defeat the president. Isn’t that the big story?”

Does Glenn Reyonolds “get it?”
“This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn’t care much about Plame’s status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.”

Once again, Mr. Reynolds proves that his gift for understating the obvious with devastating effect is the best around.

How about Tom McGuire?
Come on, we see through this – if the CIA prepared a formal report, it would be subpoenaed as evidence, and the jury would laugh out loud at the “no damage” assessment. So the CIA filed a criminal referral in 2003, got the White House tied up in a two year investigation, and now they are laughing out loud. Well played, especially if you like a spy service that shrugs off executive oversight by inventing crimes and playing dirty tricks.

Perfectly said.

This may sound far-fetched, but it almost makes one wonder whether Fitzgerald's has an entirely different goal in bringing these charges: exposing the CIA. Before you laugh this one away, consider the facts: Fitzgerald is in a no-lose situation. If Libby goes to trial, the CIA's role in trying to bring down a President of the United States will be revealed. If not, perhaps a minor sentence for Libby in a plea bargain? Although this indictment never should have seen the light of day--in that revealing Plame's name turns out not to have been a crime (or at least not worth pursuing in court)--it may be that Fitzgerald was sickened by what he saw, sickened that unelected elites conspired to bring down a President who they were supposed to be serving. Meanwhile even a Libby conviction for the charges will not severely damage the Bush Administration--whereas an indictment of Rove would have been a heavy blow. Far-fetched? Perhaps. Time will tell if the CIA will be exposed for what it has done.

But I will say this--as much as I was dismayed by the charges brought against Libby, and as much as I tried, I saw something in Fitzgerald's presentation and determination that was hard to dislike. And the end result of his actions could be that the cabal at the CIA--who tried to engineer a Coup d'Etat against a President at war against an enemy unlike one we have ever faced--will be tossed out like the traitorous chattel they all are.

UPDATE: Cliff Kinkaid of Accuracy in Media adds to what to Mr. Moran has done by exploring the role of Judith Miller in this matter; and it fits like a glove with the CIA treachery outlined above. Published in Real Clear Politics: this is a must read:

The savage left-wing attack on Judith Miller from inside and outside of the New York Times completely misses the point. She is under attack for being a lackey of the Bush Administration when she failed to do the administration and the public a big favor. She could have done a potential Pulitzer Prize-winning story that could have broken the Joseph Wilson case wide open. It is a story exposing the Wilson mission to Africa as a CIA operation designed to undermine President Bush.

For 85 days in jail, Miller protected her source, Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, but the fact remains that she never used the explosive information Libby gave her. Now we know, according to Miller's account, that Libby told her about a CIA war with the Bush Administration over Iraq intelligence and that he vociferously complained to her about CIA leaks to the press. But Miller decided that what Libby told her was not newsworthy. Why?

We were critical of Miller from the start because she went to jail rather than testify under oath and tell the truth before a grand jury. Eventually, she did testify, under questionable and mysterious circumstances. She claims she insisted that her testimony be restricted to her conversations with Libby. Clearly, Miller had a relationship with Libby as a source. On that matter, she is "guilty" as charged. But the media attacks on Miller really show her critics do not regard Libby as a source worth protecting. Libby, according to columnist Frank Rich, is a "neocon" who misled the nation to get us into the Iraq War. On the other hand, Wilson is supposed to be a hero and whistleblower. He came back from Africa, after investigating the Iraq-uranium link, and concluded that the Bush Administration was lying. His wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, had her identity revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak because Bush officials were upset that her husband had told the truth. At least this is their version of the facts.

But if Miller was too cozy with the White House, why didn't she rush into print with Libby's version of events and use him as an anonymous source? Miller couldn't even be counted on to do a story based on high-level information provided to her by the vice president's top aide. It was information that was not only true but explosive. Libby was letting Miller in on the real story of the Wilson affair--that the CIA was out to get the President, and that the agency was using Wilson to get Bush.

The fact that she didn't write a story has been cited many times, supposedly to prove that Miller should never have been called by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald before the grand jury. If she didn't write a story, we were told, she shouldn't have to be ordered to talk about her sources. Fitzgerald obviously believed the information she had about her sources was relevant to the case. And it was. But Miller didn't write any of this up at the time. That's mighty strange behavior for a pawn of the administration.

In my recent special report on this matter, former prosecutor Joseph diGenova called the Wilson mission a CIA "covert operation" against Bush. Like the Novak column, a Miller story about this matter could have raised questions about the purpose of the trip and who was behind it. But if Miller had done such a story for the Times, the impact could have been enormous. After all, the Times was the chosen vessel for Wilson to write his column claiming there was no Iraq uranium deal with Niger.

Miller could have revealed that Wilson was recommended for the mission by his own wife, a CIA employee. His wife's role was critically important because a truly undercover CIA operative would not recommend her husband for an overseas trip and then expect to maintain her "secret" identity as he proceeded to write an article for the New York Times and become a public spectacle because of it. Her role in the trip means that she was not undercover in any real sense of the word.

As I have noted previously, Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, says that Plame's involvement in sending her husband on the CIA mission to Africa meant that when Wilson went public about it, foreign intelligence services would investigate all of his family members for possible CIA connections. Those intelligence services would not simply assume that he went on the mission because he was a former diplomat. They would investigate his wife. And that would inevitably lead to unraveling the facts about Valerie Wilson, or Valerie Plame, and her involvement with the CIA. Romerstein says that Plame's role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her "cover" blown because she was not truly under cover.

By any account, she was hardly a James Bond-type. Plame's "cover," a company called "Brewster-Jennings & Associates," was so flimsy that she used it as her affiliation when she made a 1999 contribution to Al Gore for president. She identified herself as "Valerie Wilson" in this case. The same Federal Election Commission records showing her contribution to Gore also reveal a $372 contribution to America Coming Together, when the group was organizing to defeat Bush.

If Miller had done some extra digging, she would have discovered that, contrary to what Wilson said publicly in the Times, his findings were interpreted by many officials as additional evidence of an Iraqi interest in obtaining uranium. This kind of story, if it had been published in the New York Times, could have completely undermined Wilson's credibility. It would have made it ridiculous for the Times to subsequently demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush White House. The Times went ahead and made that editorial demand, only to have it backfire on the paper when Fitzgerald demanded Miller's testimony.

The CIA obviously knew the facts of the case. Nevertheless, with Wilson and the media, led by the Times, generating a feeding frenzy over the publication of his wife's name and affiliation, the agency pushed for a Justice Department investigation, on the false premise that revealing her identity was a crime. This is what started it all. It was the perfect way to divert attention from a much-needed investigation of the CIA, the ultimate source of the questionable intelligence that the administration used to make the case for the Iraq War.

Eventually, some members of the press caught up with some parts of the truth. Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post was honest enough to admit, when the evidence came out, that Wilson had misrepresented his wife's role. Schmidt reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee report found that he was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, "contrary to what he has said publicly." By then, however, the media feeding frenzy was well underway and the facts of the case were being buried or shunted aside. And this takes us to where we are today--wondering whether Fitzgerald will indict Bush officials for making conflicting statements about the facts of the case. If the investigation was a real desire for truth and justice, Fitzgerald would drop the case and accuse the CIA of pursuing the matter for an illegitimate political reason. It's the CIA--not the White House--that should be under investigation.

If Miller deserves criticism, it is for failing to write the story when Libby handed it to her on a silver platter. She had the perfect opportunity to set the record straight about some misinformation that had already appeared in her own paper. After all, it was Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who had asserted, in a May 6, 2003, column, that "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger." We now know that Wilson was the source of this information, and that it was false. He whitewashed the nature of the CIA role in the trip because he wanted to protect his wife. Wilson wanted people to think that the Vice President's office was somehow behind his mission.

We also know, because of Miller's account of her testimony under oath, that it was because of this misinformation that Libby talked to Miller and wanted to get out the other side of the story. The Vice President's office, said by the liberal press to be at the center of the CIA leak "conspiracy," was justifiably outraged over Wilson going public with misleading information about his mission and blasting the administration in the process. Miller also testified that she thought Plame's CIA connection "potentially newsworthy." You bet it was. But she didn't write the story. This is where Miller failed her paper and the public.

Consider the record of the Times in this case. Editorially, the Times called for the investigation but didn't want to cooperate with it. The paper also published the misleading Wilson and Kristof columns. And yet Miller, who didn't write anything, is the Times journalist under fire in the press because she wrote stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs before the war and later talked to Libby about how the CIA had gotten the facts wrong! Miller has become a target even though it's her colleagues who put the misleading Wilson column into the paper, published Kristof's erroneous account, and called for the probe that resulted in Miller serving jail time.

Miller's WMD stories are said by the hard left to be evidence of her reliance on the Bush Administration for information. In fact, it shows her dependence on the same sources that told the administration that Iraq had WMD. Those sources included CIA director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover, who told Bush that finding WMD in Iraq was a "slam dunk."

We are still left with the mystery of why Miller didn't write anything based on what Libby told her. She says she proposed a story. Miller and/or her editors may have been persuaded to drop it by other sources, who may have been in the CIA. It makes perfect sense. The CIA had been behind the Wilson trip from the beginning and, as Libby told Miller, had been trying to undercut the administration's Iraq policy and divert attention from the agency's poor performance on Iraqi WMD. The CIA did not want the full extent of its role uncovered and decided that the best way to divert attention from its own shabby performance was to accuse Bush officials of violating the law against identifying covert agents. This was one covert operation by the CIA on top of another. Miller watched the whole thing play out and refused to tell her own paper and the public what was really happening.

Miller says that she only talked to the grand jury about her conversations with Libby. She said she wanted to protect other sources she used on other stories. Miller's 2001 book, Germs, on "Biological weapons and America's secret war," has several references to her other sources. Some are unnamed "analysts" at the CIA.

My own recent special report on this matter struck a chord with readers, one of whom said it is a case of "the CIA undermining and eliminating a president." But Bush is still hanging on, dismissing the stream of stories on the case as "background noise." Staying above the fray, when he has come under assault by America's premier intelligence service, Bush is letting CIA director Porter Goss do the necessary job of cleaning house at this corrupt agency.

If some of Bush's aides now go down on dubious charges of having faulty or inconsistent memories about the case, they could try to blow the whistle on the CIA in court. The CIA would most likely try to censor the proceedings on grounds of "national security" and protecting agency "operations." For the sake of maintaining our democratic form of government and reigning in rogue elements at the CIA, the truth must come out.

(click to enlarge)

While we are on this Wilson/Plamegate business, JunkYardBlog has found evidence that the French may have been behind some of the misleading information on the yellowcake/Niger transaction. (Bold emphases mine):

Rocco Martino has admitted that the French paid him to make the fake Niger-Iraq uranium documents. If the Bush administration weren't in a fog largely of its own making, it would take this story and run with it. It locks in several important Iraq-related threads and thoughts as facts: The French are our enemies, the UN is corrupt, and Joseph Wilson isn't operating in good faith and never was.

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.

Let that sink in for a minute. The French paid a man to conjure up fake documents related to Saddam's WMD ambitions and floated those documents to the US and UK. Why would the French do this?

The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

It was a set-up to protect Saddam, who had been a close associate of French President Jacques Chirac since the 1970s. Oil-For-Food may have played a role as well; several officials close to Chirac have been caught out on that scheme.

Let's rewind back to summer 2003. These documents, which purported to show that a yellowcake transaction between Iraq and Niger had actually taken place, were the ones Joseph Wilson's Niger trip had helped debunk (the IAEA did the heavy lifting, Googling names on the documents that turned out to be wrong, proving the docs were fakes). In his anonymous whisper campaign to Nick Kristoff and in his own op-ed of July 2003, Wilson pulled a switcheroo between these documents and the infamous 16 words in the President's SOTU address of January 2003, claiming that his trip to Niger had debunked those 16 words. But the 16 words were not based on those documents, but rather on a British finding that they stand by to this day regarding Iraqi interest in purchasing yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Is it possible that Wilson pulled the switcheroo for the same reason that Martino created the documents in the first place--that he had paymasters who wanted him to? This next section is highly speculative, but intriguing. If the French could pay an Italian to make the documents to undermine the case for war before hostilities ensued, and we have the forger's confession that they did, why couldn't the French pay an American to use them to smear the Bush administration once hostilities had been underway for a few months? There has always been something puzzling about Wilson's obvious misstatements and obfuscations regarding these documents as they relate (or not, as it turns out) to the 16 words. After all these years, it can't just be an honest misunderstanding. Wilson knows what his trip did and did not do, yet has chosen to misrepresent its findings on the 16 words consistently for more than two years. French involvement at both ends of the document dupe would explain a lot. It looks like a coherent strategy to first protect Saddam from US-UK attack, then undermine the Coalition as it sought to fight off the insurgency and capture Saddam, who at the time of Wilson's smear campaign remained at large.

French authorship of the scheme would also help explain how the IAEA had been able to determine that the documents were forgeries so quickly--the French tipped them off. Recall that the IAEA Googled names on the documents to prove them false. Googling, while useful to bloggers, isn't yet a standard investigative technique for the UN's nuclear weapons proliferation watchdog agency. But if those who knew the docs were fakes tipped someone in the IAEA's offices off, well then Google works both to prove the forgery and to discredit the US and UK as being so incompetent as to go to war based on documents that a quick Google search would prove were fakes.
Even though we never went to war based on anything in those documents.

Let's hope Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation takes all of these new facts and leads into account.
(t2 Chris)

UPDATE: It turns out that Wilson's trip didn't even help debunk the documents at all. He lied about that to the Washington Post's Walter Pincus too. Which doesn't help Wilson's credibility, but does lend believability to the speculation that he was helping the French forgery have its intended impact.

The media should cover Wilson's credibility issues thoroughly as the Fitzgerald investigation winds toward whatever conclusion it reaches.

UPDATES: It may be asking too much of Fitzgerald to include anything relating to the origin of those fake Nigerian documents in his investigation--the story linked above is a little over a year old. Had you heard of it? Has the press made a big deal of it, and have the Democrats treated that story in anything resembling good faith?

But the French connection to those documents brings back to light one of the most curious lapses in journalism history, the widespread incuriosity about the role Oil-For-Food played in the run-up to the war. French fingerprints are all over that scandal:

Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.

"...a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council." How true. We have an Italian confessing to creating the Niger documents for French paymasters, we have Frenchmen and Russians--both permanent UNSC countries opposed the war, naturally--caught in various stages of Oil-For-Food undress, we have the UK's George Galloway up to his eyeballs in that same scandal. Is it even conceivable that no strategically-placed Americans got cut in on the action? Do I need to point out that the US is a permanent member of the UNSC? Do I need to point out how much undermining the case for war would have been in Saddam Hussein's interest?

Larry Kudlow, writing for National Review Online, sees the events of this past week as evidence that--contrary to the anti-Bush mainstream media's spin---the tide is beginning to turn...in FAVOR of the Bush Administration (bold emphases are mine):

So who exactly leaked to columnist Robert Novak? That was the big question that was supposed to be answered. The CIA leak probe was, after all, about a leak. In particular it was about the leak of classified government information, namely the clandestine intelligence service of Mrs. Valerie (Plame) Wilson. That was the mission of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But after a two-year tortuous investigation, he failed to complete his assignment. Instead, he produced a five-count indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, on a Martha Stewart-like technicality of perjury, making false statements, and obstructing justice.

Mr. Libby’s lawyer completely denies these charges, although it’s probable that Libby did make a bunch of mistakes in the course of the investigation. Still, in America, you are innocent until proven guilty. And Fitzgerald may have a devil of a time drawing a curious he-said-she-said conviction out of a series of alleged phone calls between Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, Judy Miller, and Scooter Libby.

In the meantime, we still don’t know the identity of the leaker.

Perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney simply called George Tenet over at the CIA and said, “George, who the hell is this Joseph Wilson guy? I never sent him to Niger or anywhere else. Why is he writing this crazy stuff in the New York Times questioning whether Saddam was seeking nuclear material?” That’s just my speculation about the origin of the leak. And whether it did or didn’t happen that way, Cheney never told Scooter Libby to mouth off to various big-shot reporters. The White House should have merely issued a statement saying they had no knowledge of Wilson’s assignment and left it that. But at least now we know there was no conspiracy running through the White House. Watergate-wishing Democrats will be sorely disappointed. There are no high crimes and misdemeanors.

The president’s chief of staff, meanwhile, appears to have escaped with his life. Fitzgerald bent over backwards to allow certain Karl Rove “corrections” into the grand jury record in return for total cooperation in the investigation. There’s more to be revealed on this front, but for now we have one indictment for allegedly not telling the truth in an investigation that seems to have not found any wrongdoing in the matter of the “outing” of a CIA operative.

That was quite a long time for so little of a result. Did Wall Street even notice? Not at all. The stock market was too busy rallying on the sensational economic news that gross domestic product grew 3.8 percent (while core inflation rose only 1.3 percent) for the third quarter. That’s a heck of a number when you consider the disruptions that two major hurricanes caused this country during the period.

Let there be no doubt about it: President Bush’s economy is recovered and roaring. His supply-side tax cuts are clearly working, and he has an excellent base on which to begin to recover his administration.

To be sure, the second-term White House looks tired, and could use an infusion of new blood in all the key areas, indictments or not. With the Harriet Miers pick having gone down to the cheers of constitutional originalists everywhere, a good strong conservative Supreme Court nomination is now a must. Bush’s conservative base is still with him, but he must produce results.

And while Bush has this economy working for him, he must take this opportunity to reinvigorate his entire policy machine. On the domestic side, the president needs to promote large spending cuts, tax-cut extensions, and pro-growth tax reform, all of which will put even that much more firepower into a resilient economy. He needs to start talking tort reform again, must outline a tough immigration-reform plan, and should also stop congressional Republicans from their Jimmy Carter-style anti-capitalist bashing of energy companies. On this last point, it’s our maligned fuel producers who are essential to economic growth, and who would love to invest in new refineries and nuclear plants if only government regulators would step out of the way. Declaring war on business is a Democratic ploy, and the president should stand up and say so. A hundred million investors and 140 million workers will back him on this.

Finally, Bush must keep the Iraq conversation alive, taking his message of freedom to the people, pointing out the success of the constitutional vote, and combating the stream of anti-war negativity that flows from the mainstream media.

Plamegate couldn’t deliver a leaker. And on the same day Fitzgerald produced his findings, a fat GDP number greeted Wall Street. I’m getting the sense that the winds are turning back in the favor of this administration. Bush must seize the moment.

Tom McGuire of Just One Minute has done a sensational job of pulling together lots of links and soureces that clearly answer the question most relevant to Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame case: Ms. Plame was NOT a covert agent; therefore revealing her identity to the press does NOT violate the standards of the federal statute protecting covert agents. While Mr. Fitzgerald seems to be fixated on getting someone for their "fuzzy" recollections of the exact chain of events, the problems Scooter Libby faces has much more to do with his own recollections vs. those of reporters, and relatively nothing to do with the fact that Ms. Plame's identity was revealed:

Joe Wilson, aka "Mr. Incredible" will be whining appearing on 60 Minutes about threats to his wife. Uh huh. Maybe, since Joe admitted to doing consulting work for the CIA in his NY Times op-ed (and the Senate revealed that he undertook a 1999 CIA mission), it is he that is imperiled. Or maybe the baddies are excited about the prospect of a twofer.

Closer to reality is Joseph DiGenova, a Washington lawyer and former US attorney who spoke to the Christian Science Monitor:

DiGenova adds that if the trial judge allows the references to classified information to remain in the indictment, defense lawyers will probably attack the CIA itself for failing to take the necessary measures to protect its own agent.
It was the CIA that enlisted the agent's husband, Joseph Wilson, for the sensitive mission in Africa, and it was the CIA that permitted Mr. Wilson to publicly disclose his role and publicly criticize the White House in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, diGenova says. In effect, the CIA set the stage through sloppy tradecraft for the disclosure of one of its agents.

Indeed - as the Boston Globe noted, her Brewster-Jennings cover was not designed to withstand any scrutiny at all.

The Washington Post surveys the damage done by the Plame leak, and delivers this reassurance:

There is no indication, according to current and former intelligence officials, that the most dire of consequences -- the risk of anyone's life -- resulted from her outing.

Bob Woodward's leaked version was even more reassuring:

WOODWARD: ... They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson's wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone and there was just some embarrassment.

The WaPo also presents a garbled paragraph that is more compelling in the re-edited version picked up by Newsday:

The CIA will not conduct a formal damage assessment until legal proceedings are complete.

Is that how it works when our national security is threatened and lives are on the line - the CIA waits a few years until the trials are over, then assesses the damage?

Come on, we see through this - if the CIA prepared a formal report, it would be subpoenaed as evidence, and the jury would laugh out loud at the "no damage" assessment. So the CIA filed a criminal referral in 2003, got the White House tied up in a two year investigation, and now they are laughing out loud. Well played, especially if you like a spy service that shrugs off executive oversight by inventing crimes and playing dirty tricks.

That said, Fitzgerald saw through their outing ploy, else, where are the indictments for the leaks to Novak and Pincus? However, Fitzgerald did not see through their mysterious "Forgettery Mind Ray" that was trained on Lewis Libby. Where is the justice?

Business as usual in the MSM

In a dead-on essay, Professor Victor Davis Hanson lays out a game plan for President Bush to recover his credibility with the majority of Americans, win the war, and save civilization as we know it (bold emphases are mine):

For good or evil, George W. Bush will have to cross the Rubicon on judicial nominations, politicized indictments, Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the constant frenzy of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party — and now march on his various adversaries as never before. He can choose either to be nicked and slowly bled to death in his second term, or to bare his fangs and like some cornered carnivore start slashing back.

Before Harriet Miers, conservatives pined for a Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, with a Justice Roberts and someone like a Janice Rogers Brown rounding out a battle-hardened and formidable new conservative triad. They relished the idea of a Scalia frying Joe Biden in a televised cross-examination or another articulate black female nominee once again embarrassing a shrill Barbara Boxer — all as relish to brilliantly crafted opinions scaling back the reach of activist judges. That was not quite to be.

But now, with the Miers' withdrawal, the president might as well go for broke to reclaim his base and redefine his second term as one of principle rather than triangulating politics. So he should call in top Republican senators and the point people of his base — never more needed than now — and get them to agree on the most brilliant, accomplished, and conservative jurist possible. He should then ram the nominee through, in a display to the American people of the principles at stake.

It is also time to step up lecturing both the American people and the Iraqis on exactly what we are doing in the Sunni Triangle. We have been sleepwalking through the greatest revolutionary movement in the history of the Middle East, as the U.S. military is quietly empowering the once-despised Kurds and Shiites — and along with them women and the other formerly dispossessed of Iraq. In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.

This is high-stakes — and idealistic — stuff. And the more we talk in such terms, the more the president can put the onus of cynical realism on the peace movement and the corrupt forces in the Middle East, who alike wish us to fail. Forget acrimony over weapons of mass destruction, platitudes about abstract democracy, and arguments over U.S. security strategies. Instead bluntly explain to the world how at this time and at this moment the U. S. is trying to bring equality and freedom to the unfree, in a manner rare in the history of civilization.

Yes, the Kurds and the Shiites need to compromise. The Sunnis must disavow terrorism. But above all, the American people need to be reminded there was no oil, no hegemony, no money, no Israel, and no profit involved in this effort, but something far greater and more lasting. And so it no accident that the Iraqis are the only people in the Arab world voting in free elections and dying as they fight in the war against terror.

Was Iraq naïve? Perhaps. Idealistic? Of course. But cynical or conniving? — not at all. That is the domain of the Arab kleptocracies, the corrupt Europeans, and increasingly the radical American Left — who all have much to lose if the United States can stop the petrol-theft of the Hussein legacy, expose its corrupt ganglia, establish a democracy, and prove that the United States found real security from terrorism only by bringing constitutional government to the Middle East.

The key to Iraq is enfeebling those around it who are weakening the country — namely Syria and Iran. The U.S. should be calling for democratic reform in both countries — constantly, without interruption, and in the same idealistic fashion as we appeal to the Iraqis. The president must focus world attention on just how awful those two regimes are. After all, an Iranian president threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map at precisely the time his government lies and connives to obtain nuclear weapons — which alone could bring that avowed sick Khomeineseque dream to fruition, given Iran’s conventional military impotence. Again, the government of Iran is not just talking about warring with the Sharon government or attacking the Israeli nation, but rather liquidating the Jewish people — as Hitlerian a promise of genocide as we have seen since the Holocaust. And he boasts like a leader who fully expects to have nuclear weapons in the near future.

Syria’s government is little more than Murder, Inc. Its assassination of Mr. Hariri slowed the entire Lebanese reform movement. It’s been a fine and noble thing that George Bush began to confront Syria, but he should go even further to call on the nations of the world to consider the young Assad the new Milosevic who, like the Iranian president, is an international outlaw deserving of sanctions, embargos, and global ostracism.

We should remind the world that our 2,000th fatality did not end our commitment to freedom and justice, but reminded us just how much we owe our dead so that their ultimate sacrifice was not in vain. We must make sure this sacrifice will lead to the defeat of the terrorists and the establishment of freedom in the greater Middle East. Once we went into Iraq, in the long run there was no living with either Assad or a nuclear Iranian theocracy — and both autocracies grasped that fact far better than we did, as evidenced by the constant stream of terrorists flooding in to kill Americans and undermine Iraqi democracy. The more we jawbone them, pressure them, and isolate them now, the less likely it is that we will have to use force later. Again, no “smoke ‘em out” or “bring ‘em on” braggadocio, but just something to the effect that we are taking great risks at great costs to join with the Iraqis to give freedom and equality at last a chance in the Middle East.

George Bush also should begin addressing his most venomous critics at home, by condemning their current extremism. He must explain to the nation how a radical, vicious Left has more or less gotten a free pass in its rhetoric of hate, and has now passed the limits of accepted debate.
In the last six months we have heard from various demagogues — though they are recognized as such due to their prominence in the media — that we were waging nuclear war in Iraq (Cindy Sheehan), that there was cannibalism in New Orleans (Randall Robinson), that George Bush and Dick Cheney should be shot (the novelist Jane Smiley) or executed (Al Franken). Alfred Knopf has published a book about the theoretical assassination of the president, and the Nazi slur is now commonplace in Democratic circles, where a Senator Dick Durbin or Ted Kennedy slanders American soldiers as akin to either Saddam’s torturers or even Nazis and Stalinists. The case needs to be made that we are seeing a new paranoid style — but from the Left, whose opponents are not to be out-argued, but rather deemed worthy of death or demonization as Nazis. The recent eclipse of George Galloway — due in no large part to Christopher Hitchens’ lonely and underappreciated pursuit of his perfidy — reminds us how hard these reprobates finally will fall.

All of these issues are interrelated. If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play. The more the president talks of principle and values, the more he can do so with zeal, and yes, real passion and occasional anger.

The odd thing is that so far the conventional advice to the president — keep the discussion on Iraq only to U.S. national security, not the upheaval of the existing corrupt order; reach out to the Democratic Senate; curb your idealistic rhetoric with Syria or Iran; ignore shrill enemies; nominate someone that the opposition will not seriously object to — has only emboldened critics here and abroad. It is time to go back on the offensive, both for the idealistic legacy of the Bush presidency and the immediate future of his ideas in the upcoming 2006 elections. The American people, both pro and con, are more than ready for a great debate to settle these issues one way or another.

I say "Amen, brother!"

Michael Ledeen is not impressed at all after reading this indictment. I've read it myself and I have to agree with him. The government's entire case seems to come down to two reporters'/talking heads' recollections vs. Libby's, himself an experienced attorney. This is a new low in the annals of "special prosecution". Here is Ledeen's take:

I think the indictment stinks. You have to parse it very carefully to figure out whether Libby is accused of lying to the grand jury or the FBI, or to journalists. Go look. I finally concluded that it says that Libby lied to the grand jury (and elsewhere the FBI) when he testified that he told (Cooper, Miller or Russert) things that in fact he did not tell (Cooper, Miller or Russert).If that is right, it means that this poor man may well have been indicted because his memory of those conversations differs from the journalists'. And Fitzgerald chose/wanted? to believe the journalists' memories. Pfui.

To this non-lawyer, that's not good enough to shake up the staff of the vice president of the United States. Isn't perjury a knowing lie? Why should Fitzgerald assume, even if he thinks he KNOWS that the journalists' memories are all reliable, that Libby didn't misremember the conversations? Footnote: that's why lawyers tell clients not to say anything unless they have a very clear recollection of something.

They can't prosecute you for having Halfheimer's disease... Then, I entirely agree with those who have said that Fitzgerald has introduced an entirely different rationale into this process. He was supposed to determine if anyone had outed a covert operative. In this indictment, and in his press conference, he just said that her identity was classified, and so he wants to prosecute people for improper use of classified information. I expect the defense will have fun with that one. Is it criminal to say that so and so works at CIA? If so, a lot of normal people and even some journalists should be prosecuted forthwith. I'm not impressed at all. I think he's straining, I think he's forcing this issue, I think it's unreasonable.

God I love Mark Steyn; he has such a way of getting straight to the heart of a matter. And no writer out there is quite so facile at getting me to laugh aloud almost every time I read him. And so it was no surprise when, in the frenzy of the hysteria over Tom DeLay and (now) Scooter Libby, Steyn brings us (and the rabid left) back down to earth, in his latest article in the UK Spectator (bold emphases are my own):

The ‘Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead’ fever rages on, disappointments notwithstanding. Hurricane Katrina was, at best, a wash. The more looters and welfare deadbeats who went on TV to whine that Bush wasn’t doing enough, the more most Americans remembered that New Orleans is a nice place to have a margarita with a topless transsexual but they wouldn’t want to live there and they don’t see why they should pay a gazillion dollars to those who do.

But in the wake of Katrina came a string of Category One or Two storms which the Democratic base and the media figure they can huff and puff into Category Four and total the White House. Tom DeLay has been indicted in Texas! Bill Frist is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission! Scooter Libby is up before the most zealous Federal prosecutor in the country! Can the impeachment of the President be far behind?

Look, you’re a well-informed Spectator reader: have you heard of any of these guys? Well, nor have most Americans. What’s that? You’ve heard of Scooter? No, you’re mistaken, you’re thinking of Skeeter — Skeeter Davis, the late country and western singer who had a top three hit in 1963 with ‘Don’t the-ey know it’s The End Of The World/ It ended when you said goodbye’, which is apparently what George W. Bush will be singing as Karl Rove’s led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs.

Just for the record, Tom DeLay is the House Majority Leader, Bill Frist is the Senate Majority Leader, and Scooter Libby is the highest-ranking Scooter in the administration, chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. By the time you read this, Scooter may have been indicted. For a week now, I’ve woken up to emails beginning ‘Happy Fitzmas, asshole!’ — a seasonal greeting from prematurely ejaculating lefty gloaters. ‘Fitzmas’ is the Left’s designation for that happy day when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments against Libby, Rove, and maybe Cheney, and — boy oh boy, who knows? — maybe Chimpy Bushitlerburton himself. Pat Fitzgerald has been making his list, checking it twice, found out who’s naughty or nice, and he’s ready to go on a Slay Ride leaving Bush the Little Drummed-Out Boy and the Dems having a blue blue blue blue blue-state Christmas in November 2006, if not before.

Well, I enjoy the politics of personal destruction as much as the next chap, and one appreciates that it’s been a long time since the heady days when Dems managed to collect the scalps of both Newt Gingrich and his short-lived successor within a few short weeks. But, as I’ve said before, one reason that the Democratic party is such a bunch of losers is because they’re all tactics and no strategy. Let’s suppose they succeed in destroying DeLay, Frist, Libby and a bunch of other names the majority of Americans aren’t familiar with. Then what? Several analysts are suggesting that the 2006 elections are shaping up like 1994, when Newt’s revolution swept the Democratic old guard from power. It’s a bit early for my reckless election predictions, but I’d bet on the Republicans holding both the House and Senate.

Though the electorate was disgusted by the sheer arrogance of Democrat corruption, 1994 wasn’t just a throw-the-bums-out spasm — despite ABC’s Peter Jennings’s sniffing that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. Au contraire, it was also a throw-the-bums-in election. Voters liked the alternative — a coherent conservative agenda. It’s quite possible that the electorate will have a throw-the-bums-out attitude to the Republicans in 12 months’ time, but I’d say it’s almost completely unfeasible that they’ll be in a mood to throw the Dems in. There are not a lot of competitive Congressional districts and those that are are mostly in Democrat blue states that, if not yet red, are turning distinctly purple. The Dems’ big immovable obstacle remains their inability to articulate a set of ideas that connects with the electorate. James Carville and Stanley Greenberg are said to be working on a Democrat version of Newt’s Contract with America, but Greenberg’s a pollster and Carville’s an attack dog. Whatever their charms, these aren’t the ideas guys.

The difficulty for the Left is that if the problem is Iraq, Katrina or pretty much anything else, the solution is not obviously the Democratic party. The future of Iraq is mostly a matter for Iraqis now and it’s not going badly, as you can sort of tell if you decode the headlines — ‘Bitterly Divided Iraqis Take Time Out From Trembling On Brink Of Civil War To Overwhelmingly Ratify New Constitution’, ‘Three Sunnis And Their Pet Camel Boycott Poll In Sign Iraq May Be Becoming Ungovernable’, etc. In fact, it’s Syria that’s bitterly divided and becoming ungovernable and, as noted here three weeks ago, Baby Assad’s fall will not be long now. Meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft, one of the foreign policy ‘realists’ from Bush’s daddy’s day, recalled a conversation with his protégée Condi Rice two years ago. ‘She says we’re going to democratise Iraq, and I said, “Condi, you’re not going to democratise Iraq,” and she said, “You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,” and she comes back to this thing that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years and so on and so forth.... But we’ve had 50 years of peace.’

Well, yes, if you don’t include the Iranian hostages, Lebanon, Lockerbie and a lot else on the long road to 9/11. Nonetheless, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, also chipped in. As the Financial Times reported, ‘Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.’

What does he mean by ‘hijacked’? Is Wilkerson saying that Cheney and Rumsfeld have imposed their foreign policy on the United States against the wishes of the President? I think not. If you read any Bush speech or talk to him for five minutes, it’s clear that he’s no supporter of the disastrously complacent State Department realpolitik herd mentality reflected by both Scowcroft and Wilkerson. Every word he utters on the subject suggests he inclines to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view of the world — or, rather, that they incline to his. The President sets foreign policy. He’s the pilot; he can’t ‘hijack’ his own plane. Wilkerson is a whining stewardess in a snit because she doesn’t want to learn a new spiel. ‘Do you want the chicken or the beef?’ She’s been serving up State Department chicken in Cairo and Amman and Damascus for decades, and she’s not comfortable with the new Texas beef. But the only hijack that’s going on is the State Department’s bland assumption that it has the right to block the President’s foreign policy.

I can’t claim to know George W. Bush, but as the years go by it strikes me that the caricature — the idiot sock-puppet manipulated by Cheney and Rove to do their bidding — is exactly backwards. The President is his own man — to such a degree that he seems not to notice that very few others are and, when he does, his response is to hunker down among a tight circle of loyalists. So, while he has a certain amount of stellar talent around him, most of his administration is either in the hands of active obstructionists like Wilkerson or trusted mediocrities like Harriet Miers. When I say Miss Miers is a mediocrity, that in itself is not a reason not to appoint her to the Supreme Court. For the first two centuries of the Republic, mediocre cronies were the rule rather than the exception. One thinks of Roscoe Conkling, appointed by Chester Arthur — or, rather, one doesn’t. It’s only in the revisionist interpretation of the Supreme Court as the ultimate nine-man omniscient parliament in which resides all true power to legislate the affairs of the nation that mediocrity would seem to be a disqualification. A decision of the court, according to Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ House leader, is ‘almost as if God has spoken’. Even in a robe, it’s hard to see Harriet Miers like that. But, on the other hand, one could argue that restoring the tradition of appointing hacks, creeps and time-servers to the court is a profoundly conservative act.

In their different ways, Miss Miers and Patrick Fitzgerald’s supposedly imminent indictments sum up the Bush administration, caught between the Scylla of third-rate cronies and the Charybdis of fourth-rate obstructionists.

The Fitzgerald investigation arises from the ‘leak’ to the media of the name of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame. Miss Plame is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, who in 2002 was dispatched by the Agency to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam was attempting to procure uranium from Niger. Ambassador Wilson spent a week ‘sipping sweet mint tea’ with old contacts from Major Wanke’s regime. (I suggested to the New York Times the scandal should be called Wankegate, but they seem reluctant to take me up on the offer.) If this rings a vague bell with you, it’s because I wrote about it in these pages back in the summer of 2003 and concluded:

‘If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up.’

That’s still the real scandal, and the only thing wrong with that judgment is that since then Musharraf and the ISI have reached a rough’n’ready modus vivendi that the Bush administration can only envy vis à vis the CIA.

Otherwise, everything that’s come out only confirms my original view. In his laughably misnamed book The Politics Of Truth: Inside The Lies That Led To War And Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, Wilson strenuously denies that ‘my wife had somehow influenced a decision to send me to the middle of the Sahara Desert.... Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter.’
Really? How about the memo she wrote to the deputy director of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division suggesting hubby was the ideal man for the job? (‘My husband has good relations with the PM and the former Minister of Mines,’ etc.) Or the meeting convened by Mrs Wilson at CIA headquarters on 19 February 2002 to introduce her husband to the relevant intelligence officials.

But Wilson’s curiously faulty memory of his wife’s role in getting him the assignment is as nothing compared with his recollection of what he ‘found out’ in Niger. The 2004 Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on pre-war intelligence has 48 pages on Wilson that exposes everything he’s said publicly about his mission as a lot of baloney. Not only did the Senate report and the Butler report in London and British Intelligence and French Intelligence think Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger, but so did a former Prime Minister of Major Wanke’s, who said so to Wilson, who said so to the CIA.

The scandal here is not that ‘BUSH LIED!!!’ about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, nor even that Wilson lied about Bush lying, but that the world’s most lavishly funded intelligence agency can do no better on a priority security matter than flying in a vain unqualified buffoon for a week of pseudo-spook tourism.

When Wankegate first erupted, the alleged ‘crime’ was that of leaking the name of a covert agent. Miss Plame was not in the least bit ‘covert’ and Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the relevant law, says no crime was committed. Wankegate may yet take down Libby and Rove, but so far all it’s done is drive the New York Times nuts. Judith Miller, a Times reporter and a peripheral figure in the Wilson farrago, went to jail for three months for the usual noble reasons, and the paper proudly stood by her. She got sprung from the big house just the other day, since when her colleagues have been trashing her name in daily 32-page pull-out supplements. Maureen Dowd, the paper’s elderly schoolgirl columnist, went for the jugular, and I haven’t seen a catfight like that since lesbian mud-wrestling night at Bud’s Roadhouse out on Route 123. If the Left were nimbler, they’d have figured that the whole thing is just a Karl Rove front operation to provoke the Times into tearing itself apart.

The Democrats are going to be mighty disappointed by the time this is all over, and still confronting their own identity crisis. Enjoy Fitzmas while you can, guys. You need a gift that keeps on giving, and this one won’t.

When someone talks about wiping another country "off the map", it is over the top. When the country in question is Israel and the "someone" is the terrorist, hostage-taking President of Iran (who is racing to get his hands on nuclear weapons), it has to be taken seriously. Of course, the world media, in full denial mode, gave the Iranian President the opportunity to revise his remarks. No sale (from Captain's Quarters):

Newly-appointed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed no remorse or signs of retreat after making a demand that Israel be "wiped off the map" at an Islamist conference in Teheran earlier this week. Instead, after facing near-universal condemnation even in Arabic countries, Ahmadinejad rejected the criticism as "invalid":

Iran's president has defended his widely criticised call for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

Attending an anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his remarks were "just" - and the criticism did not "have any validity."
Last Wednesday's comment provoked world outrage. Israel has called for Iran's expulsion from the United Nations.

Egypt said they showed "the weakness of the Iranian government". A Palestinian official also rejected the remarks.

In fact, Saeb Erekat said on behalf of the Palestinians that they had already accepted Israel's right to exist and that the extant question should be about adding Palestine to the map. In the UK, Tony Blair hinted about military options for the first time in conjunction with Iranian intransigence on nuclear disarmament, and in the background, the US presence in Southwest Asia looms as an ever-present threat. Ahmadinejad might delight the Iranian mullahcracy and its thin band of supporters with his genocidal rhetoric, but all it has done is to remind the international community why nuclear technology should be removed from Iran.

Even Kofi Annan rebuked Ahmadinejad.

If democratic activists in Iran ever intend on doing something about their present state and government, now would be the time. Their position vis-a-vis the radical Islamists that Ahmadinejad appears to be inviting to Iran will only get worse over time. As Iran continues to provide both provocations such as Ahmadinejad's speech and the refusal to comply with nuclear treaties, Western nations get closer to military options to stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear bomb. They will find it more difficult at that point to maintain their credibility in the debacle that will inevitably occur if it comes to that.

We can help, but the push should come from within. As Michael Ledeen says, "Faster, please." We stand ready.

Not THIS time, you anachronistic yahoos...

Despite the fact that the left and their willing cohorts in the mainstream media will attempt to paint Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw her nomination for the Supreme Court as a "defeat" for President Bush, both Ms. Miers' decision and the timing of it portent well for a strong rebound for the President and Republicans—just in time for the 2006 mid-term elections.

Initially, I supported Ms. Miers for several reasons, primarily because President Bush has had a tremendous record for picking judges for the Courts of Appeals, and for the Supreme Court (John Roberts), indicating to me that he was very serious about keeping his campaign promise to not appoint activist judges. Unlike his father, this President Bush has demonstrated clearly that he was committed to fill Court vacancies with judges who would interpret the Constitution, rather than to try to rewrite it. In fact, the initial anti-Miers rhetoric from the right seemed to me to be an incredible overreaction—especially considering Bush's aforementioned track record and his personal day to day dealings with Ms. Miers. But with all of that said, I cannot help but believe that Ms. Miers has done the President a tremendous service for a number of reasons:

1. She may not indeed have been a strict Constitutionalist as advertised – Although as I said I trusted the President, some documents surfaced yesterday that raised serious questions as to whether Miers truly is a Constitutionalist--or whether she is a Judicial Activist in disguise. In particular, some quotes in yesterday's Washington Post from the 1990's were real eyebrow-raisers for me:

Miers also defended judges who order lawmakers to address social concerns. While judicial activism is derided by many conservatives, Miers said that sometimes "officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: I did not want to do that -- the court is making me."

And then there was this:

Miers blamed the legislators for what she called an "unacceptable" school funding plan and for ducking tough issues such as imposing a state income tax.

"My basic message here is that when you hear the courts blamed for activism or intrusion where they do not belong, stop and examine what the elected leadership has done to solve the problem at issue," she said.

At a speech later that summer titled "Women and Courage," Miers went further. Citing statistics that showed Texas's relatively high poverty rates, Miers said the public should not blame judges when courts step in to solve such problems.

"Allowing conditions to exist so long and get so bad that resort to the courts is the only answer has not served our state well," she said. "Politicians who would cry 'The courts made me do it' or 'I did not do that -- the courts did' should not be tolerated."

This does not sound to me like someone who disavows Judicial Activism.

2. The Republican Base had begun to come apart at the seams – When the President nominated Ms. Miers, the initial reaction of the right truly came as a shock to me. After all, the President had been stellar in his nominations prior to the Miers appointment, and Judge Roberts made the Senate Democrats look like complete fools.

But immediately, people I respect a lot, such as Charles Krauthammer, Laura Ingraham, George Will, and Bill Kristol, seemed to come completely unglued. I didn't get it. And Senate Republicans did not seem to step up to the plate either (except for the barely-contained glee of opposition Democrat leader Harry Reid...) And it only got worse from there.

As Miers made the rounds in the Senate, from all appearances she was not in top form on a number of occasions--in fact she did not seem to garner the level of commitment necessary to win in the Judiciary Committee, much less on the Senate floor.

The second problem with the President straying from his base (or vice versa) was that he may really need that base to rally around him in the very near future. If a Martha Stewart-style indictment comes down tomorrow against Scooter Libby, the President needs more than anything a highly-energized base to go to the mattresses for this Presidency—because you know the media sharks will be in a feeding frenzy. Hell, Chris Matthews will probably implode if no indictments come down...

So...this is by no means an easy time to be President. One has to admire how steely Bush has been in staunchly supporting this just war against Islamofascism in the wake of an avalanche of Vietnam/Watergate era negative journalism. But if other Republicans are to rally behind President Bush--(as Republicans rallied around Reagan during Iran/Contra, and Democrats rallied around Clinton during Whitewater, Jennifer Flowers, Juanita Broderick, Travelgate, Document gate, and last but not least, Monica and the Impeachment of the President for lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice)--then President Bush has simply got to stay true to his principles and to the promises that got him (and his fellow Republicans in both houses) elected in the first place.

3. A battle was looming over confidential documents from the White House – Because Ms. Miers had virtually no paper trail, the hue and cry was loud and persistent for the President to turn over documents from Ms. Miers' current role of giving legal advice to the President. This put the President in the unfortunate position of appearing that he had something to hide in denying the Senate these documents--even if they would have helped Meirs' confirmation.

But the President was right in refusing to cave to this pressure: giving in to these clearly unreasonable demands so would not only have shattered the attorney-client privilege that every citizen has a right to, (much less the President of the United States)—it would also have made it very difficult for future Presidents to claim any level of Executive Privilege and conduct confidential business in the White House. Every President has a right to confidential legal advice. To have turned over confidential documents relevant to his current Presidency to save the candidacy of his nominee might have harmed President Bush, but it definitely would have done irreparable damage to the office of the Presidency. If the President's lawyer can't give confidential advice to the President, who can?

In a way, Harriet Miers showed the world today that, more than anything else, she is loyal to the man she serves as Counsel. And she showed that she is a class act in doing her President and her country a huge service by sparing him the humiliation of a divisive battle within his own party at a time when the support of that party might be critically important to his Presidency.

The other silver lining in this "cloud" is that the President has now been given the freedom to really rally and energize his base—and simultaneously deflect attention from this Plamegate farce—by nominating someone like Janice Rogers Brown (let me repeat those three words -- Janice - Rogers - Brown---oh, OK Mike McConnell would do too...) to the court and finally taking on head to head the failed ideology of the Democrats once and for all.

In a way Miers' unselfish act is going to allow the President an opportunity to take off the gloves and really show the country what he and the Republican Party stand for. President Bush now has a chance to take lemons and make sweet lemonade. But he must not blow it this time: this is indeed a crossroads in this Administration. If the President steps up to the plate--and nominates a jurist with the appropriate credentials, intellect, and reverence for the integrity of the Constitution as the unimpeachable law of the land--it could be the genesis of not only a Supreme Court that finally once again begins to reflect the true intent of the founding fathers, but of an overwhelming Republicn sweep in the 2006 elections. Once the Democrats and the left in general are shown to be the intellectually vacant frauds that they really are, for all the world and the American public to see, the public will make the right decision for its future.

Second chances like this must not be squandered. My guess is that this one will not be. Thank you Ms. Miers for your service to your country, and for taking one for the team.

And for you Mr. President, two words: "Batter up!"

Newest member of MoveOn.org

John Hindraker of Power Line has his priorities right for pointing us to this transcript. And John summed up the highlights quite well:

Tomorrow may bring indictments of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby on charges that can charitably be described as trivial. Tonight, one of our readers urged us to link to President Bush's great speech to the Joint Armed Forces Officers' Wives' group rather than being distracted by the minutiae of the day. Good suggestion. President Bush gave another magnificent speech; here are a few highlights:

Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. (Applause.)

The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 150 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence -- the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

No acts of ours involves the rage of killers. And no concessions, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans of murder. On the contrary; they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory. (Applause.)

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims -- and I quote -- "what is good for them and what is not." And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that this is the road to paradise -- though he never offers to go along for the ride. (Laughter.)

When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple -- the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. These militants are not just enemies of America or enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and enemies of humanity. (Applause.)

We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before -- in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields. Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination; they wish to make everyone powerless, except themselves.***

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in liberty are weak and decadent. Zarqawi has said that Americans are, "the most cowardly of God's creatures." But let us be clear: It is cowardice that seeks to kill children and the elderly with car bombs. It's cowardice that cuts the throat of a bound captive. It is cowardice that targets worshipers leaving a mosque. It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people; it is courage that keeps an untiring vigil against the enemies of a rising democracy. It is courage in the cause of freedom that will once again destroy the enemies of freedom. (Applause.)

Some observers look at the job ahead and adopt a self-defeating pessimism. It's not justified. With every random bombing and every funeral of a child, it becomes more clear that the extremists are not patriots or resistance fighters -- they are murderers at war with the Iraqi people, themselves. In contrast, the elected leaders of Iraq are proving to be strong and steadfast. By any standard or precedent of history, Iraq has made incredible political progress -- from tyranny to liberation, to national elections, to the ratification of a constitution -- in the space of two and a half years. (Applause.)

There's always a temptation, in the middle of a long struggle, to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world, to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder. That would be a pleasant world -- but it isn't the world in which we live. The enemy is never tired, never sated, never content with yesterday's brutality. This enemy considers every retreat of the civilized world as an invitation to greater violence. In Iraq, there is no peace without victory -- and we will keep our nerve and we will win that victory. (Applause.)

Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision -- and they end up alienating decent people across the globe. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that regimented societies are strong and pure -- until those societies collapse in corruption and decay. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that free men and women are weak and decadent -- until the day that free men and women defeat them.

It is rather pathetic, frankly, to compare the soaring vision of freedom that President Bush has elaborated over the past five years to the cramped, hateful hectoring the Democrats have produced during the same time.

UPDATE: A law professor with too much time on his hands (and with readers whose mouths should be washed out with soap, based on their comments on his site) claimed that my reference to the "trivial" charges against Rove and Libby somehow contradicted a statement I made, back in 1998, that the fact that Bill Clinton committed perjury was a serious matter. This professor evidently assumes that Rove and/or Libby is about to be indicted for perjury. I don't make that assumption. If it should happen, it would indeed be a serious charge, and if either man should be convicted of perjury, it would be, in my view, a very serious matter, just as it was when Clinton lied under oath. But, again, I know of no reason to expect that this will happen.

What I consider to be "trivial" is the claim that Rove and/or Libby discussed Valerie Plame's CIA desk job with a reporter, in the context of trying to respond to the web of lies that was spun by Joe Wilson, including his lies about how he came to be sent to Niger.

An "impressive" resume. Former hostage-taker at the US Embassy. Islamofascist. Repressor of women and human rights. And the "elected" leader of Iran (only Mullah's votes count, of course...). Yes, here he is Iranians, YOUR "El Presidente" (via Regime Change Iran; bold emphases are mine):

Agence France Presse:
Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday openly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and lashed out at Muslim nations who recognise the Jewish state."

The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran entitled: 'The World without Zionism'.

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he thundered in a fiery speech on what he called an "historic war between the oppressor and the world of Islam".

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel's eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at regime rallies. READ MORE

Addressing some 4,000 students gathered in an interior ministry conference hall, Ahmadinejad also called for Palestinian unity, resistance and "the annihilation of the Zionist regime".

His mere appearance at the conference drew chants of "Death to Israel", but Ahmadinejad quickly told students all of whom wore black and were sporting green headbands to shout the slogan louder."

The Islamic umma (community) will not allow its historic enemy to live in its heartland," said the president, an austere veteran of Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards who took office in August after scoring a landslide win in a June presidential election.

"Anyone who signs a treaty which recognises the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of the Muslim world," Ahmadinejad said, telling Muslim leaders who recognise Israel that they "face the wrath of their own people."

"We should not settle for a piece of land," he said of Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip.

His tone represents a dramatic change from that of former president Mohammad Khatami, whose favoured topic was "dialogue among civilisations" and who led an effort to improve Iran's relations with the West.

Ahmadinejad instead spoke of an "historic war" between Islam and the West."

It dates backs hundreds of years. Sometimes Islam has advanced. Sometimes nobody was winning. Unfortunately over the past 300 years, the world of Islam has been in retreat," he lamented.

"One hundred years ago the last trench of Islam fell, when the oppressors went towards the creation the Zionist regime. They are using it as a fort to spread its aims in the heart of the Islamic world."

The term "oppressor" is used by the clerical regime to refer to the United States, and in the plural form generally also includes Britain and Israel.

The one-day conference, organised by an Islamic students' association, also included a message from Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah."We should gather all means to annihilate the regime which occupies Qods (Jerusalem)," Nasrallah said in his message, read out by Hezbollah's representative in Tehran.

Also featured was a six-man choir dressed in dark grey who gave some harmonic renditions of Koranic verses. Prizes were also on offer for the best Zionist caricature and in a letter-writing competition also themed: "The world without Zionism".

The Tehran representative of the Palestinian militant group Hamas was also present, while the ambassadors of Syria and the Palestinian Authority put in a showing.

"We have a multitude of activities," event spokesman Saed Ramazan Ali told AFP. "We want to acquaint Iranian students with the evil aims of the Zionist regime."

Yes, if we would only listen to Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan and George Soros and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean--and just leave these people alone to live in "peace", pack up our tents and bring the troops home from Iraq, the world would be "at peace" again.

Right... And I have some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.

No guts no glory, as they say. Tom McGuire of JustOneMinute certainly seems to be living by that maxim. Today he pontificated on the results of the Wilson/Plame/CIA affair--he thinks Rove walks away clean and Libby gets indicted for lying about his recollections (or as Byron York put it the other day):

"At the end of the day," a former intelligence official told National Review last week, "this could end up being a situation where there wasn't a crime until there was an investigation."

Personally I think this investigation is ending up very much like the one of Martha Stewart. The crime she was being investigated for could not be proved, and so they did not go after her for that. Instead they got her on a lame "lying to the FBI" charge--which is my mind still does not not rise to the level of the commission of out and out perjury by a President of the Untited States to a Grand Jury about "spending time alone with Ms. Lewinsky". But what do I know? Anyway read the whole Byron York piece, it has a lot of interesting comparisons between this case and the Starr investigations of the Clintons.

In the meantime we have what is unquestionably going to be a media "firestorm" over what will, if anything, be a very minor charge. But it will played by the MSM as if Bush himself commited murder. So just be ready for it. The wolves are going to howl. Let them. That's all wolves do anyway, particularly these wolves in the MSM and the Democratic caucus...

Still Presidents, even "media despised" conservative Presidents, have weathered these kinds of storms before. Think Reagan during Iran/Contra: it can in fact be argued that Bush the First was elected purely on Reagan's coat tails. Therefore the important thing to me is--after all the dust has settled this week: how will Bush handle this? To me it seems that the most important thing that Bush can do will be to reunite his base. Will that mean that Harriet Miers decides to "step down"? Maybe. We'll know all of the above soon enough.

Bottom line, this Presidency can come out smelling like a rose, regardless, if the economy continues to be strong, if the war continues to go well, and if the President shores up his base, even should Tom McGuire's predictions (below) actually come to pass. It won't be long now:

Karl Rove walks - no indictment, nada. Jeralyn Merritt, who has been doing a superb job on this, keeps the flame flickering for a "False statements" charge based on Rove's early forgettery of his conversation with Matt Cooper of TIME. Based on the evidence leaked so far, it won't happen.

Think back to the controversial Martha Stewart case: Martha went down on a false statements charge, but as supporting evidence of her criminal intent the prosecution had evidence that she may have altered her records, supplemented by troubling testimony from her broker's assistant and a personal friend.

With Rove, as best we know, we have Karl failing to recall his conversation with Matt Cooper when asked by Federal investigators in 2003; the defense will have fun with the fact that the Department of Justice failed to ask about contacts with Matt Cooper in their original document request, so let's not underestimate Mike Copper Matt Cooper's forgettability.

Eventually, in response to a second set of subpoenas, the relevant email between Rove and Hadley was found, Rove's attorney notified the Special Counsel, and Rove corrected his testimony. As Jeralyn notes, and as MacRanger pointed out to me a few days back, if a person corretcs their testimony during the term of a grand jury before discovery was imminent, they are in good shape.

Based on the leaks so far, this is far from a Martha Stewart scenario.
OK, on to the fall guys:

John Hannah had CIA links, so he can't convincingly plead ignorance about Ms. Plame's status. He gets a wrist slap for misuse of classified information. (Q: Does a "wrist slap" mean "no jail time", or "short time"? A: Hmm, even "short" would seem long to me; no waffling here... No jail time it is. And get your own 8-Ball). Hannah's offense - he was Novak's primary source.

David Wurmser also has CIA links, and he gets a wrist slap for leaking to Walter Pincus of the WaPo.

And Libby? He goes to trial, or walks. My full psychic prediction is that he will turn down a plea deal (after negotiating about what might have been disclosed in the accompanying indictment) and say to Fitzgerald, "Bring it on, Irish".

*If* they are filed, charges will be perjury and obstruction, as well as a conspiracy to misuse classified info. However, Fitzgerald has very serious doubts about some of his star witnesses, such as Judy Miller. Both sides are weighing the implications of the venue for a trial - Libby knows it won't be Berkeley, but it still might not be favorable for him. However, it might be politically awkward for Libby to ask for a change in venue. Of course, getting tossed into stir can be awkward, too.

No waffling: Libby goes to trial. The good news with this scenario is that otherwise, we will never know what the heck happened. Libby better plan to win, or lose, by Jan 19, 2009.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Dennis Sevakis still thinks this has a chance to be a grand slam for the President (and it also provides a bit of endgame advice to the President should things not go as well). I wouldn't bet the house on the "rosy" scenario, but I will admit that it jives with what I was thinking about all of this earlier in the month:

When Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald unseals his indictments regarding Plamegate, assuming there are any, we’ll learn one thing for sure: whether the two-year investigation was a clever poker move insidiously initiated by President Bush to expose and discredit his enemies within the CIA while simultaneously and conveniently making the MSM look like a bunch of blathering idiots, OR, if the Administration is guilty of serious miscalculation by not publicly pounding the CIA regarding this matter as soon as the agency leaked the classified, that’s right, classified information that it had referred the matter to Justice. Were the Bushies very clever? Or too clever by a half?
If you’re not up-to-speed on this pending political detonation – assuming the whole thing doesn’t die because of a lack of life-sustaining indictments - here’s a compilation of juicy readings for your greater edification and enlightenment.
Forget Miers. This is the issue the President had better not pass on without coming out swinging. And he needs to hit a home run. Here’s what you need to read.

1. 2005.10.22 – Weekly Standard – Stephen F. Hayes – “One Good Leak Deserves Another” How the CIA got the ball rolling on the Plame investigation.

2. 2005.10.25 – Weekly Standard – Stephen F. Hayes – “The Incredibles” The only debate about Joseph Wilson’s credibility is the one taking place at the Washington Post and the New York Times.

3. 2005.10.16 – AIM – Cliff Kincaid – “Judith Miller Exonerates Bush Officials” The true facts in the CIA-leak case are now becoming astonishingly clear. New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s testimony, as she describes it in the Sunday edition of her paper, proves that the wrong people are under investigation.

4. 2005.10.21 – AIM – Cliff Kincaid – “Was the Wilson Affair a CIA Plot?” Former prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova says the real story is that the CIA “launched a covert operation” against the President when it sent Wilson on the mission to Africa to investigate the Iraq-uranium link.

5. 2005.10.24 – AIM – Cliff Kincaid – “The Untold Story: Joseph Wilson, Judith Miller and the CIA” The savage left-wing attack on Judith Miller from inside and outside of the New York Times completely misses the point.

All of the links above are definitely worth your time. And worth the President's as well.

(click to enlarge)

Every now and then you run across a story that really makes you smile in this crazy psychotic world. Today was such a day. Via Always on Watch and the Washington Post, a story about an American soldier in Iraq and his adopted dog:

Last summer, I posted an article about raising funds for outfitting dogs in our military. The following is a lengthy excerpt from a recent Washington Post article about one very lucky dog:

Laurel lawyer John E. Smathers, a captain in the Army Reserve, returned from a year in Iraq with a broken arm, a wrecked knee and a chest full of medals.

During his tour, Smathers helped thwart a bank robbery and assisted in recovering stolen Iraqi artwork. He survived an ambush and a high-speed auto crash.

But when he got back in March 2004, he was determined to complete a final mission: to rescue Scout, a dog he and other soldiers had adopted, from the increasingly bloody streets of Baghdad and bring him to his Howard County home. Scout was resolute, loyal. So was Smathers.

For 17 months, Smathers engaged in a campaign that involved intelligence gathering, secret Iraqi contacts and a foiled border-crossing into Jordan.

Finally, in late August, Scout was driven some 280 miles from Baghdad to Basra, where he was delivered to a British woman who runs an animal shelter in Kuwait.

Within days, Scout was on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport, where he was met by Smathers, dressed in desert camouflage so the dog would recognize him. Scout scampered out of his cage and went straight to Smathers, resting at his feet....

Smathers, 47, was a member of the Riverdale-based 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion, attached to the 3rd Infantry Division. His unit was among the troops that invaded Iraq in 2003.

After U.S. forces took control of the Baghdad airport in early April, Smathers's unit needed a place to stay for a few days and settled on an old catering building. Inside, Smathers and his fellow soldiers encountered a Canaan dog about 2 1/2 months old.

'He was alone, confused, didn't know what was going on,' Smathers recalled.

The unit adopted the puppy, which Capt. Kevin Guidry named Scout. When the unit left the airport for Baghdad, some 12 miles away, the soldiers took him along.

In Baghdad, the unit took over a two-story, three-bedroom house near the Tigris River. Worried about attacks by enemy fighters, the soldiers slept on the roof, their M-16s at their sides, while Scout stayed in front of the building.'

'Scout was our early-warning system,' Smathers said. 'If someone came by who he didn't recognize, he'd start barking.'

Smathers and Scout bonded. At 5:30 a.m. most days, Scout would put his paw through the mosquito net Smathers slept inside. Smathers would awaken, and the two would run by the Tigris.

'Sometimes he'd jump into the river. I'd yank him out by the scruff of his neck,' Smathers said.

At one point, Scout became gravely ill with parvovirus, a disease that leaves dogs dehydrated. For four days, Smathers and another soldier took turns administering intravenous antibiotics.

Scout and Smathers were inseparable until Smathers and other soldiers were ambushed Feb. 21, 2004...[when]the convoy was ambushed by fighters shooting AK-47s....

Three weeks later, Smathers was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, recuperating from the broken arm and a damaged right knee.

Via e-mail, Smathers kept in touch with members of his unit. One soldier wrote that for the first two weeks Smathers was gone, Scout remained outside the front door of the house, as if waiting for the captain.

Eventually, Smathers's unit left the house, and Scout was on his own. In an e-mail, a soldier told Smathers that Scout had been picked up by a dogcatcher and was going to be euthanized, but that he escaped by digging under a fence.

For four months, Smathers sent e-mails, sometimes with photos of Scout, to every soldier and civilian he knew in the area, asking if they had seen Scout. By then, Smathers was being helped by Bonnie Buckley, a Massachusetts woman who runs a Web site dedicated to helping soldiers rescue animals overseas.

On Aug. 5, 2004, a soldier sent an e-mail to Smathers and Buckley. 'Guys, I see Scout almost every day,' the e-mail said. 'No one is taking care of him. He is looking pretty skinny, and a vet needs to look at his left eye.' The soldier wrote that Scout hung out near the pool of a large house.

Smathers e-mailed a soldier and asked that Scout be captured, caged and taken to the Baghdad Zoo, where Smathers had become friendly with a veterinarian. Within days, Scout was at the zoo, where he would stay for a year.

'Smathers couldn't get Scout out on a military flight because U.S. soldiers are not allowed to bring back animals from foreign soil', he said....

Finally, Smathers said, Buckley found the British woman who runs an animal shelter in Kuwait, and she was willing to help. The woman took Scout to Kuwait, put him on a commercial flight to the Netherlands and then to Dulles, where Smathers met him Aug. 22.

Scout's life is much different now. Every Sunday, Smathers's six sisters bring their young children to his one-acre property, and the kids frolic with Scout.

Smathers is taking pains not to lose sight of Scout again. He erected an invisible fence, with an electric current, around his property and outfitted the dog with a tag that reads 'Scout. IRAQ WAR DOG.'

Probably most dog stories from Iraq do not have such a happy outcome. Muslims, in general, despise dogs and have all sorts of rituals to cleanse oneself from what they consider filthy animals.

Whatever the special connection between dog and master, I'm glad that the tale of Scout has worked out the way it did. I'm a sucker for a good pet-story every time!

Note: The title of the October 20, 2005 Washington Post article is a fitting one: "A War Dog's Faithful Friend."

Captain Ed draws our attention to the sudden evisceration of Judith Miller by her own employer, the New York Times. Morrissey thinks that this could have the effect of discouraging a Fitzgerald indictment of Libby (if one was ever indeed in the works--see my post from last night...). But why would the Times do this? I think the good Captain may be on to something in suggesting that in going after its own, its liberal agenda may indeed may be trumping loyalty to someone who did jail time on its behalf. Could they be trying to protect bigger fish who it believes might be indicted instead? can anyone say "Joe Wilson"? :

Josh Gersten at the New York Sun reports today that the ongoing attacks on the credibility of Judith Miller at her own newspaper may have an unintended, ironic effect on the grand jury investigation headed by Patrick Fitzgerald. Given that her testimony and writing has been central to the efforts to tie Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to an alleged conspiracy to discredit Joseph Wilson, the continued disparagement of her truthfulness might well result in an inability to use her in support of any prosecution:

Attorneys closely following the case said the sharp criticism Ms. Miller has received from her editors and colleagues may discourage the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, from bringing perjury charges against Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

According to Ms. Miller and others who have testified before the grand jury investigating the leak, Mr. Fitzgerald has shown significant interest in whether Mr. Libby or other White House officials testified truthfully about their involvement in an alleged effort to discredit a vocal critic of President Bush, Joseph Wilson IV, by disclosing that his wife is a CIA employee. ...

"If it's going to be a perjury case, he's got a hard case because his key witness is Judy Miller," a former federal prosecutor, Paul Rosenzweig, said.

"She has some issues as a witness."

Last week, the Times published a lengthy story containing unflattering anecdotes about Ms. Miller, including a claim that she referred to herself as "Miss Run Amok." On Friday, the newspaper's managing editor, Bill Keller, sent a memo to his staff asserting that Ms. Miller "seems to have misled" the paper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, regarding her knowledge about Mr. Libby's alleged campaign against Mr. Wilson. On Saturday, a Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, questioned Ms. Miller's candor and suggested that she no longer be allowed to write for the newspaper.

Mr. Rosenzweig, who worked on the independent counsel investigation of President Clinton, said the attacks on Ms. Miller would complicate any attempt to present her as a witness. "Can you imagine a defense attorney saying, 'So, I understand they call you Miss Run Amok?'" the ex-prosecutor said.

One could try to make the argument in court that Miller would testify against interest in order to build some credibility for her testimony, but while that makes a fine theoretical argument, it would hardly outplay "Miss Run Amok" with a jury. Perjury convictions require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If it comes down to Miller's word against Rove or Libby, it will be tough to hold Miller up as a paragon of virtue when her own employer calls her a liar in print.

In its zeal to indict Miller for using her extended contacts with the White House to get scoops inaccessible to the rest of the industry, the Exempt Media and most of the punditry have probably crippled a portion of Fitzgerald's work, regardless of whether he has garnered more information elsewhere. He obviously considered the Miller connections at least moderately important to his investigation. If he issues indictments that rely on her testimony, he may as well resign himself to the fact that the administration's opponents will have made it almost impossible to ever get a conviction.
This almost appears too unthinkingly foolish, even for the Gray Lady. I wonder if Bill Keller thinks that Fitzgerald might be aiming at another Times source instead of Scooter Libby, leading him to go out of his way to discredit Miller now. Perhaps these memos and editorials mean to protect Joseph Wilson instead?

UPDATE: John Podhoretz notes the strange strategy of the New York Times in his latest column for the New York Post:

Previously, when newspapers have taken their own work to task, it has resulted from one of two causes. A reporter was caught committing outright acts of plagiarism or fabrication — as with The Washington Post's Janet Cooke or the Times' Jayson Blair. Or the paper needed to clear the name of an innocent person whom the newspaper had effectively tried and convicted of a serious crime — as the Atlanta Journal and Constitution did to Richard Jewell, falsely accused of the 1996 Millennium Park bombing, and the Times did to Wen Ho Lee, falsely accused of spying.

THE issue that has ostensibly caused this unprecedented character assas sination is Miller's involvement in the public exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame. And in this case, no one at the paper is accusing Miller of making anything up — because she never published anything on the subject. Nor can anyone accuse Judith Miller of harming the reputation of an innocent — because, again, she never published.

So what is it she supposedly did wrong? The paper's managing editor, Jill Abramson, says Miller didn't get permission from her editor to pursue the Plame story. If true, that's hardly cause for someone to have her name dragged through the mud — and it may well not be true at all. Miller says flatly that she did get her editor's permission and that her editor, in this case, was Jill Abramson.

It's almost as if they want to create a huge distance between Miller and credibility -- and I doubt they're doing it to benefit Rove, Libby, or the Bush administration, although that may wind up being the overall effect. They want to discredit the WMD reports themselves, of course, but those have largely been discounted before now. So why this full-court press on Miller by her own paper?

UPDATE: Clarice Feldman also thinks that this latest wrinkle might not be bad news for the Administration:

Today’s New York Times breathlesssly reports that notes from Libby indicate he may have learned about Wilson’s wife’s role in his Mission from Cheney who heard it from Tenet. The Times notes,

“It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government’s deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration.”

But it suggests that Libby lied to the grand jury because he said he learned about this, not from the vice president, but from the media.

Looking at all we know, about the case, Tom Maguire, who has been covering the matter closely implies that Libby and his lawyers have always been truthful about this to the special prosecutor and have pulled a great head fake on the press.

Why do we think Libby testified to a “Blame the media” strategy? Do we think that is based on leaks from Fitzgerald? No. As many have noted, most of these leaks are coming from lawyers whose clients work for the Administration (a few reporter’s attorneys have been swept up as well, of course).

So, suppose Libby’s attorneys have been whiling away the summer months, and on into autumn, feeding the press a partially true cover story that Libby was blaming the Plame leaks on Tim Russert, and encouraging speculation about Judy Miller. Clinton’s team made the mistake of attacking the prosecutor and drawing return fire; this time, the White House was crafty enough to attack the press.(snip)

In this theory, Fitzgerald (if he reads the papers) is laughing out loud – Libby testified to Cheney’s role almost two years ago, and Fitzgerald doesn’t care about Cheney.

As to Libby’s “Blame the media” pose – his actual testimony may only be a bit different from the staged leaks. For example, perhaps Libby testified that he only talked with reporters about Wilson’s wife after hearing about it from other reporters, and in leaks to the press that conveniently morphed into “Libby only knew about it after talking with reporters”.

And why did Fitzgerald pursue the media so intently? Because he still needs to know who leaked, and Libby’s “blame the media” strategy” is relevant to that line of inquiry even if Cheney’s role has been fully disclosed.

Stay tuned. This may not be the disaster that it appeared to be. Has the press "Misunderestimated" the Bush Administration--again?

Isn't is lovely how what goes around so often comes back around. And there is no more appropriate recipient of this karmic law than the iconic leftist moron, George Galloway. Austin Bay has the story and a number of links to the proof of Galloway's complicity in the Oil for Food bribery--at the very time when he most vehemently opposed Tony Blair's entry into the war.

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet George Galloway, has been:

Yes indeedy. It looks like the chief apologist for Saddam and Middle Eastern fascism took cash from Saddam.

A couple of months ago I dubbed Galloway “Terror’s Lord Haw Haw.” Lord Haw Haw was a Brit who made propaganda broadcasts for Hitler. Someday historians will cast Galloway into the same outer darkness.

Galloway denies the allegations. Here’s the lede (from Bloomberg):
British lawmaker George Galloway denied allegations in a U.S. Senate subcommittee report of lying under oath after he was accused of profiting from oil money during former President Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq.
Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota and chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, yesterday said he had new evidence that showed an organization linked to Galloway and his wife received money from oil allocations under the United Nations Oil for Food Program. Galloway today dared the investigators to charge him with perjury so he can fight the claims in court.

“Charge me, please; prosecute me and I’ll be on the next plane to America,'’ Galloway said today. “Nobody has ever given me one thin dime from an oil deal or any other deal. And if they had you would have the evidence in front of you now.'’

The inquiry led by Coleman says Galloway “knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath'’ during the U.K. lawmaker’s appearance in May at a subcommittee hearing in Washington, according to a document published on Coleman’s Web site. The report said Galloway sought and was given oil allocations from Iraq during Hussein’s reign and that Galloway’s wife, Dr. Amineh Abu-Zayyad, got $150,000 in connection with one of those oil allocations.

The BBC offers a a short-take on Galloway.

Get this graf:

The Daily Telegraph focuses on a claim that Mr Galloway’s Palestinian-born wife, Amineh Abu Zayyad, received £100,000 derived from the UN oil-for-food programme.

The paper cannot resist the opportunity to fill in a little background information about Mr Galloway’s relationship with his (now estranged) wife.
It describes how he once said that his idea of happiness was “a hilltop in Portugal with… a Havana cigar and a Palestinian scientist running her fingers through my hair”.

Ah yes, call it anti-American bliss. Viva Fidel meets Lord Haw Haw. Red and brown fascism coalesces in Galloway.

Here’s a Telegraph article on Galloway, though not the one the BBC quotes. Remember, Galloway won a libel suit against the Telegraph. Galloway won 150,000 pounds from the Telegraph. The Telegraph’s claim? The newspaper published an article (based on documents found in Iraq) that Galloway had received pay-offs from the UN’s “Oil for Food” program.

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens adds another Galloway smackdown.

Hitchens’ lede:

Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred on the set of Bill Maher’s show in Los Angeles in mid-September, I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made on a public stage in New York. Maher’s producers had been asked, obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his prison diaries.That day has now been brought measurably closer by the publication of the report of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This report, which comes with a vast archive of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and contains the “smoking gun” evidence that Galloway, along with his wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers from Saddam Hussein’s regime and its criminal exploitation of the “Oil for Food” program. In particular:

1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and received eight oil “allocations” totaling 23 million barrels, which went either to him or to a politicized “charity” of his named the Mariam Appeal.

2) In connection with just one of these allocations, Galloway’s wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.

3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal, which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was secretly benefiting.

4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and “Mariam” allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or “surcharge” payments.

Another fine Hitchens graf:

For George Galloway, however, the war would seem to be over. The evidence presented suggests that he lied in court when he sued the Daily Telegraph in London over similar allegations (and collected money for that, too). It suggests that he lied to the Senate under oath.

Here’s a link to the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee report Hitchens’ to which Hitchens refers.

And a link to Hitchens’ website.

Read the entire Hitchens essay. Laugh and weep.

(click to enlarge)

Professor Victor Davis Hanson, as only he can, discusses the implication of the recent Iraqi elections and how utterly successful our military intervention into this former nest of genocidal idiots has been to date, against all obstacles (and anti-American media hysteria):

Last week’s approval of the Iraqi constitution saw 10 million people freely vote in the Arab world’s first democracy. The jihadists cannot be entirely defeated without such a political solution. Yet Iraq’s democratic voters would never even have had an opportunity without American soldiers, whose sacrifices offered a chance of reform.

The United States military ousted Saddam Hussein from power in three weeks — in an effort designed to liberate Iraqis rather than aimed punitively against an entire nation. Some observers, however, on the eve of the war predicted a protracted effort to remove Saddam. Later, during the war itself, they warned further that we were supposedly bogged down in a sandstorm on the way to Baghdad.

In the ensuing 30 months, despite hundreds of horrific deaths and thousands of wounded, the military has never lost a single engagement with the terrorists. It has trained hundreds of thousands of Iraqi police and military units, and, now, with last week’s election, seen its hard work pay off in the ratification of the constitution. More parliamentary elections are slated for December.

Yet for almost two and half years of constant combat, the American military’s mission has been misrepresented or caricatured. Some said soldiers were fighting to secure oil, although since the invasion oil prices have skyrocketed and the Iraqis’ petroleum reserves have come under their own transparent control.

Others alleged the real reason for military operations was Halliburton’s profit or Israel’s security. But what our soldiers accomplished better revealed their reasons for being there: no more no-fly zones; no more Kurdish or Shiite state massacres; no more attacks on Kuwait, Iran, Israel or Saudi Arabia; no more assassination attempts against former presidents — and now a democracy in place of a terror state.

Throughout this entire war, we have asked our soldiers to do the near impossible: remove a dictatorship, put down jihadist assassins and create a democracy — while sometimes being shamefully derided by their own countrymen back home. Michael Moore praised the terrorists who were killing American soldiers and so-called jihadists as “Minutemen.” Eason Jordan, while a CNN news executive, implied — without evidence — that our troops were deliberately targeting journalists. Sen. Dick Durban, D-Ill., indirectly compared our military guards in Guantanamo Bay to those in service to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

When Saddam’s statue fell, nearly everyone praised the miraculous conduct of war — at one point, 74 percent of Americans expressed approval of the military’s incredible victory. Now only half of us say the mission was worth the effort and cost.

In between those highs and lows, we have endured the teeth-gnashing over George Bush’s flight suit, the blame game over the Iraqi archaeological museum looting, the controversy over the embalming of Qusay and Uday, the supposedly humiliating oral exam of a captured Saddam, the accusations of everyone from former security analyst Richard Clark to the errant ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, false reports of flushed Korans at Guantanamo, the abuse of Abu Ghraib compared by Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass., to Saddam’s own mass murdering, and troops in Iraq (but not in Okinawa, Germany or Korea?) supposedly shorting the effort in New Orleans.

Politics guides much of the media’s portrayal of our soldiers. There have been thousands of American heroes in Iraq, but instead the most discussed soldier in the public eye is still Army Pfc. Lynndie England, convicted of abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib. Likewise, there are almost 2,000 mothers of fallen Americans, yet the public recognizes the name only of Cindy Sheehan (“We are waging nuclear war in Iraq”).

When the military created the conditions to allow a critical January inaugural election, pundits back home claimed it should be delayed and would fail. When it succeeded with higher turnouts than our own presidential elections, former Clinton administration diplomatic aide Nancy Soderberg scoffed, “Well, there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s still hope for the rest of us . . . . There’s always hope that this might not work.”

To read the opinion columns is to shudder as flip-flopping insiders post facto write, “I told you so,” reaffirming, renouncing or hedging their support for the war based on the hourly pulse of the battlefield. Through all this, the U.S. military has fought a successful war first against Saddam Hussein, then ex-Baathists and now Islamic jihadists, battling beheaders, car bombers, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers and assassins.

The obstacles to protecting the democracy are almost surreal: Too much force threatens to alienate wavering Iraqis whose support is critical for the new constitutional government; too little and civilians might well join the terrorists’ side in expectation that it would win. We hear mostly of how much we’ve done wrong in Iraq, but last week we should have been better reminded of just how much we have done right — and only because of our mostly unheralded soldiers who gave freedom to 26 million without it in the hope that this might just work.

In today's Washington Post, David Ignatius writes that it is "High Noon for Syria." It is all coming to a head, and soon:

It's the Middle East equivalent of a "High Noon" showdown: This week, the United Nations special prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, will present his findings on who killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. If that report alleges Syrian involvement in the killing, as is widely expected, a deadly season will begin in Beirut and Damascus as the United Nations tries to bring the killers to justice.

Like a good sheriff, Mehlis isn't talking. But there are reasons to believe he has some evidence of a Syrian hand. I'm told by a source in contact with Mehlis's team that three of the four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals who were arrested in August are cooperating with the prosecutor. What's more, Mehlis has taken his investigation into the heart of Damascus, quizzing some close associates of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If the UN alleges Syrian involvement in the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri this week, as is widely expected, a deadly season will begin in Beirut and Damascus.

The next stage of the confrontation will come if Mehlis names individual Syrians. If so, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora is expected to ask the U.N. Security Council for new sanctions against Syria -- freezing the suspects' bank accounts, banning travel and otherwise pressuring the regime. The Lebanese leader will also ask the United Nations to allow Mehlis to keep working on the case for two more months.

The highest-stakes showdown is between Assad and President Bush, and not even the most devoted fan of the old Gary Cooper Western can predict how that one will turn out. The two leaders have been playing a game of chicken for months while the clock ticked down to this week's deadline.

The confrontation began with truculence on both sides. Syria sullenly withdrew its troops from Lebanon in April, but a campaign of assassination continued against anti-Syrian journalists and political figures in Beirut. The Lebanese capital today is a political ghost town, with many prominent politicians and journalists outside the country to avoid the Syrian-inspired car bombs or hit men they fear are targeting them.

An angry Bush administration, meanwhile, was actively exploring a policy of regime change several months ago. Bush was furious at Assad for not controlling the insurgents who are using Syria as a base for their attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, and the president pressed his national security team to explore whether there were good alternatives to Assad.

But the administration pulled back from its regime-change enthusiasm in recent weeks, and officials now speak of the need for "policy" change. A big factor is the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, and his analysts at the National Intelligence Council. They have been warning Bush that if Assad is toppled, the result isn't likely to be better in terms of regional stability, and it could well be worse. The analysts also note that there isn't now any coherent, organized opposition to Assad.

Over the past month, Washington and Damascus have been sending feelers -- so far to no effect. Assad has traveled to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where officials told him what the United States wanted on Iraq and the Palestinian issue as the price of engagement. In late September, Assad's brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, the chief of Syrian military intelligence, visited France and talked with intelligence officials there. I'm told by one U.S. intelligence source that Shawkat hinted at major Syrian concessions if France and America would make a deal. No takers, thus far.

A warning of the bloody denouement of this drama came last week, when Syria's interior minister, Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in Damascus of a reported suicide. Almost nobody takes that at face value. One version has it that Kanaan was killed (or handed the gun and told to do the honorable thing) as a fall guy in the Hariri killing. I tend to doubt that version, because Kanaan had been close to both Hariri and Washington. Instead, I wonder if his death was a counter-coup by pro-Assad operatives in Damascus who feared Kanaan as a potential rival. I'm told that Mehlis asked to examine Kanaan's body before it was quickly buried, but was refused.

The gunslingers are facing off, and the last act is about to roll. Assad claimed in an interview with CNN last week that if Mehlis names any Syrian, that person "would be considered a traitor and most severely punished." That looks like a man trying to get ahead of the power curve, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more Damascus "suicides." If Assad's grip weakens and he can't or won't clean house in Damascus, the season of coup and counter-coup will begin for real.

Although I have been saying for months now that the real target of the Fitzgerald investigation is (or should be) senior officials of the CIA, the buzz is that indictments are about to be handed down this week in the Plame affair that might include senior officials such as Scooter Libby or Karl Rove. And tonight, after reading this horrific scenario by James Lewis in The American Thinker, one can only hope that we are not about to be embroiled in the second coup d'etat to occur in the United States in the last 35 years.

Of course, for all of the consequences of an indictment of someone close to the President--as envisioned in Mr. Lewis' essay--to occur, a lot more needs to go terribly wrong besides the indictment of a Presidential advisor. But the conspiratorial paintbrush that Lewis uses produces a picture as scary and dangerous as anything that Osama bin Laden could possibly imagine.

Could it happen? Possibly. I will choose for the moment to remain optimistic--but Lewis' nightmare scenario below begins with an indictment that could come as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned. (bold emphases are mine):

Is Valerie Plame the new Deep Throat?

A few months ago it was finally revealed that Mark Felt, the Deep Throat of Watergate, forged the sword that destroyed Richard Nixon – not for some valid whistle-blowing reason, but to avenge Nixon’s choice of an outside Director to succeed J. Edgar Hoover. Mark Felt simply felt frustrated in his career ambitions at the FBI, and Nixon paid the price.

But Deep Throat could not have leaked top secrets for months and months without the knowledge of other top FBI officials. They must have quietly supported his attempt to destroy the President. There is no question that Watergate exposed some genuine rot. But the fact is that a duly elected President was overthrown, with the critical help of the secret government. It was Mark Felt and the FBI who provided the means to destroy President Nixon. That set a precedent.

Today, there are stunning parallels between Deep Throat and Valerie Plame, aided by her publicity agent and husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. The idea that national security is being protected is phony. As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for New York, has repeatedly pointed out, “The Agency wanted this out.” What we are seeing is a massive political assault on President George W. Bush, aided by a gush of highly selective and one-sided leaks coming from the top levels of the CIA.

The motivation: Power, careers, and leftist ideology. The means: getting a Special Prosecutor to indict the Bush White House for what the CIA has done for years, revealing sensitive secrets to the press. The sword: Valerie Plame and her husband.

Today’s media assault has all the earmarks of a CIA disinformation operation, just the sort of thing Plame and her colleagues are professionally trained to conduct. While it has layers of deception and coverup, the pattern seems clear enough. Dozens of commentators have now identified the many lies told by Joe Wilson over the past two years, with the quiet backing of Plame and her CIA backers. Notice that the CIA could have exposed Wilson’s fabrications at any time in the last two years. It did not, and by its deliberate silence has allowed those stories to flower into the partisan assault we see today.

As Howard Fineman wrote a few weeks ago, the now infamous outing of Valerie Plame isn’t primarily an issue of law. It’s about a lot of other things, like: the ongoing war between the CIA and the vice president’s office. The spookocracy has a very personal itch to want to destroy George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: It is facing a purge to finally get rid of entire layers of incompetents and saboteurs, revealed by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Congressman Curt Weldon, the Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has written:

The gross incompetence in the intelligence community over the last decade, combined with the current rebellion of intelligence community leaders, especially at the CIA, justifies a dismissal of present leaders in all agencies and across the entire intelligence community. The straightforward solution would be to fire everybody above the level of GS-15.

Well, today we have a new broom as Director of CIA, and the Old Guard is fighting for survival, just like Deep Throat at FBI. This is when the secret bureaucracy is the most dangerous.So now look at the Watergate similarities. The motivation? Top-level careers, power and leftist ideology. The instrument? Leaks of confidential information from the top of a giant secret agency. The target? A president who is trying to purge the spooks. And the political opportunity? A political war about national security. Nixon earned the undying hatred of the Left for opposing Communism. Bush II has done the same for his War on Terror.

According to former CIA Assistant Director Admiral Bobby Inman, the CIA dropped a constant stream of damaging leaks against the Bush Administration throughout the 2004 election campaign. Those who did the leaking that were never even investigated, much less prosecuted. What is at stake therefore is far more important than a trivial White House story, based on a vague remark, in a city that consumes quantities of selective leaks for breakfast every day. What seems to be going on is a plot to undermine a duly elected president, using a high-level faction of the CIA, in collusion with the Left and the media.

Dangers: If the Bush White House is badly damaged or destroyed, the consequences could be dangerous for the United States. A new President could copy Jimmy Carter: Pull the plug in Iraq, thereby allowing Iran, Syria, and their allied Islamic fascists to come to power throughout the Middle East. The Left would be on top again, just as the Democrats gained majorities in Congress and elected Jimmy Carter after the Watergate scandal. Hillary Clinton’s long ambitions could well become reality, all by means of a single hyped scandal.

Nixon’s downfall had devastating consequences: the chaotic downfall of Saigon, the Stalinization of Vietnam – including a new Gulag with tens of thousands of victims – and the genocide of a million Cambodians. Watergate nearly led to an ultimate American defeat in the Cold War. Many on the Left were fervently hoping for that. We would be living in a very different world today, had history swung the other way.

Nixon was followed by Gerald Ford, a badly weakened president, who was easily defeated by the disastrous Jimmy Carter. As president, Carter allowed the Shah of Iran to fall from power because he thought that Ayatollah Khomeini was much more democratic. We can see Carter’s Folly today in the rise of an Islamofascist Iran, which will soon have its own nuclear weapons.

It is Jimmy Carter, more than anyone, who is responsible for a new age of nuclear danger in the Middle East. But it all goes back to the coup d’etat against Nixon.Thus Watergate has had disastrous ripple effects, even decades afterwards and across the world. If the Plame-Wilson affair succeeds in destroying this White House, the ripple effects would spread through our domestic politics and into the War on Terror, placing every person in this country at risk.

The Left has hyped a rogue CIA for decades. Hollywood has shown it in movie after movie. But now that it is happening, they are all for it; anything to destroy the enemy – a duly elected President – just as the Left still celebrates the Deep Throat conspiracy to overthrow Nixon. This is not a matter of principle for them, but of raw expediency.

Conservatives, however, have to take this spectacle more seriously. A politicized CIA is doing immense damage to our rights and freedoms. They intervened blatantly in the 2004 election, and they are undermining the war on terror.

Perhaps Richard Nixon should have been made to resign for abusing power. But Watergate was more than a tale of high-level corruption. It also marked the rise to power of the monopoly media that has dominated the United States for the last thirty years. No event, other than Vietnam, has so shaped our world today. No doubt the first step of a resurgent Left in the United States would be to try to control talk radio and the internet, to regain its media monopoly. It could happen.Just as the Watergate scandal set a much-needed limit to abuse of power by presidents, it is now time to draw a bright line in the sand against meddling by the secret government in domestic politics. Our future is on the line.

This post from Gateway Pundit speaks for itself. The only question I would add is: why is the American public not being told about these facts by its "objective" news media? It would seem that the fact that the Iraq war is going to result in a far better Iraq is of little consequence of those who would influence our lives every day:

Listen carefully! Do you hear that? ** crickets chirping **

This past week we heard no comforting words of "occupation" from Cindy Sheehan (although she is planning more civil disobedience and Thanksgiving turkey in Crawford, Texas!), no Teddy Kennedy attacks on the US troops in Iraq, and word is out that Al Zarqawi may be focusing attention elsewhere.

The only coffins displayed this week were those of the victims from the 1983 Kurdish Barzani Tribe Massacre. Kurdish civilians stand beside scores of coffins that hold the remains of some 500 Iraqi Kurds from the Barzani tribe during a ceremony in Arbil, northern Iraq. The human remains were brought from a mass grave discovered in al-Muthanna province in southern Iraq. Iraqi forces, commanded by former dictator Saddam Hussein are accused of the 1983 massacre of the Kurdish tribe of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the founding father of Iraqi Kurdistan. Saddam's regime allegedly rounded up around 8,000 men from the tribe in northern Iraq took them into the desert and executed them. (AFP)

The only sounds coming from Iraq this week were the sounds of ballots being emptied on the table to be counted and then recounted, and the shuffling noise of paper.

The election in Iraq was another great success! Maybe you don't feel this from the media reports you've seen... or have not seen!

"Iraq the Quagmire" is maturing into "The MidEast Democracy Leader"! The strongest proof of this it that even the Arab League is backtracking from its previous stand. This group of power-brokers knows how to smell out a winner and has now decided to lead the push for Iraqi reconciliation:

Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa said Saturday his mission to foster dialogue and ease sectarian tension in Iraq had won crucial backing from the top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.After speaking with the revered senior Shiite cleric in this holy city south of Baghdad, Mussa said: "I obtained the blessing and support of Ayatollah Sistani, which made me glad."

It was an unprecedented meeting between an Arab League chief and the top Shiite religious figure in Iraq, and came three days after former dictator Saddam Hussein went on trial for crimes against humanity.

The Arab League must be absolutely resolved to success of the New Iraq. How else to you explain this? The representatives even made an historic visit to Kurdistan today:

Arab League chief Amr Moussa called for a new Iraq as he addressed the Kurdish parliament during a landmark visit aimed at drumming up support for a national reconciliation conference."

I hope Iraq will change, that we will see another Iraq where Iraqis from all walks of life live together in peace and love," he told MPs on Sunday at parliament, who greeted his speech with applause and a standing ovation.

The head of the 22-member Arab League arrived on Saturday to meet regional president Masud Barzani in a highly symbolic visit that marked Arab League recognition of the Kurdish autonomous region. The election results are due out tomorrow. We have already heard in passing that one of the Iraqi provinces turned it down. Yet, before the election, the western media was giddy that only three provinces had to turn it down to stall the democratic process. That didn't happen. And, even though there were concerns of fraud, that didn't happen either. Iraq is on its way to creating a vibrant and functioning democracy. Iraq is on its way to be the Model for Middle Eastern Democracy. Who knows how this will influence the rest of the region! A great time for rejoicing!

** crickets chirping **

Michael Yon has his own version on quiet in his Weekly Standard piece today:"All Quiet on the Baghdad Front"

The American Left would love for the public to believe that its desire to bring American troops home from Iraq is out of some sense of concern that American lives are being lost. But there are facts now being made public which suggest otherwise: the true agenda for many on the Left is not driven by concerned for the lives of American men and women; the real objective is to go to whatever lenghts necessary to ensure that American influence in the Middle East and the Global War on Islamist terror declines--even if that means that Radical Islamism, beheadings, worldwide terror, and continued genocide is the result. When it comes to defeating the spread of capitalism, globalization, and freedom, it appears that any end justifies the means.

Disagree? Then how do you explain the fact that the American Left is planning a series of parties when the 2000th American life is lost in Iraq. Little Green Footballs has the story and the supporting links:

Ghouls Plan "2000 Deaths" Parties

The American Friends Service Committee is planning to hold a series of parties all across the country when the 2000th US soldier is killed in Iraq: Not One More Death. Not One More Dollar. (Hat tip: Politics and Religion.)

Here’s the current list of locations.

UPDATE at 10/22/05 7:36:15 am:
This group of phony pacifists has previously been featured at LGF for an exhibit that callously uses the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, without asking permission from their families.

As always, Mark Steyn waxes about as eloquently as anyone breathing today. His latest target is the beyond ridiculous UNICEF "Bomb the Smurfs" ad campaign:

I yield to no one in my disdain for the United Nations and all its works, but I did find myself warming up to Unicef the other day. Last week, on Belgian television, the UN children's agency premiered the first adult movie featuring the Smurfs. By "adult", I don't mean it was a blue movie. Only the characters were blue. But it was an adult movie in the sense that the Smurfs were massacred during an air strike on their village, until, in the final scene, only Baby Smurf is left, weeping alone surrounded by wall-to-wall Smurf corpses. It's the first Smurf snurf movie.

Well, I thought, say what you like about the UN, but any organisation that wants to bomb the Smurfs can't be all bad. Instead of those wimps at Dudley council banning Piglet like a bunch of nancy boys, why couldn't they make some blockbuster video nuking the Hundred-Acre Wood and leaving Pooh to die in a radioactive Heffalump pit?

My mistake. Apparently Unicef made the short film as a fundraiser to highlight how children are the principal victims of war. As Baby Smurf wails amid the shattered ruins, we see the words: "Don't let war affect the lives of children."

Oh, well. It's not clear from the Smurf carnage whether their village is a sovereign jurisdiction - the ultimate blue state - or whether they're merely some hapless minority within a multi-ethnic nation, the Kosovars to Elmo's Slobodan. But either way the warplanes come and blue body parts are exploding all over the village.

Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.

In 2003, Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote a fascinating column in the East African musing on the resurgence of cannibalism, after reports that Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo were making surviving members of their victims' families eat the body parts of their loved ones.

"While colonialism is bad," he said, "the coloniser who arrives by plane, vehicle or ship is better - because he will have to build an airport, road or harbour - than the one who, like the Ugandan army, arrived and withdrew from most of eastern Congo on foot." Just so. If you're going to be attacked, it's best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy. Compared to being force-fed Grandfather Smurf's genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.

Why would Unicef show such an implausible form of Smurficide ? Well, whether intentionally or not, they are evoking the war that most of their audience - in Belgium and beyond - is opposed to: the Iraq war, where the invader did indeed have an air force. That's how the average Western "progressive" still conceives of warfare, as something the big bullying Pentagon does to weak victims.

But this week is a week to remember that there are worse things than war that "affect the lives of children". If I were Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want Baby Smurf to grow up in Saddam's Iraq. I don't mean just because we'd be the beleaguered minority of Smurfistan, to be gassed and shovelled into mass graves.

Even if we were part of Saddam's own approved class living in the Smurfi Triangle, it's still a life permanently fixed between terror and resignation, in which all a parent's hopes for his children are subordinate to the whims of a psycho state.

That Iraq is gone now - not because of Unicef and the other transnational institutions that confer respectability on dictatorships, but because America, Britain and a few others were prepared to go to war. As the Guardian harrumphed on Saturday: "People who opposed the war in Iraq will find it hard to stomach attempts to present the referendum as a triumph."

Fair enough. For my part, I find it hard to stomach the degrees of support offered to the "insurgency" by George Galloway, John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Michael Moore. But it's not about what I or the Guardian find hard to stomach. Peripheral though they may be to the concerns of the "peace" crowd, it is in the end about the Iraqi people, and, as with all the previous will-they-won't-they deadlines, at the eleventh hour they managed to rouse themselves and pull it off.
Sixteen out of Iraq's 18 provinces - including Sunni-majority ones - voted for the most liberal, democratic, federal and pluralist constitution in the Middle East. Sorry to make the Guardian throw up, but that is indeed a "triumph".

Whatever the Americans got wrong, they got one big thing right - that, if you persevered, Iraq had the potential to function as a free society in a part of the world where no such thing has ever existed.

That was a long shot, and much sneered at, not least by British "conservatives". But Washington judged correctly: given the radicalisation of the Arab world, and the Arabification of the Islamic world, and the Islamification of much of the rest of the world, in the end you have to fix the problem at source.

In his book The Clash Of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington has a section on "Islam's Bloody Borders". "The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts," he writes, "have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims."
That looping boundary is never not in the news. Last week, it was Nalchik in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Islamists killed more than 60 people. The week before, it was Bali, again. Different regimes on the looping boundary try different strategies: in Indonesia, appeasement; in Chechnya, the Russians have reduced Grozny to rubble and still not got anywhere. Pushing back the Islamists on their ever expanding margins will never work. Reforming the heart of the Muslim world just might.

Sometimes war is worth it. And, if you don't think so, look at the opening scenes of that Unicef video - Smurfs singing, dancing, gambolling merrily - and try to imagine living in a Smurf enclave in a province that wants to introduce Sharia.

Christopher Adamo has a superb essay up on The American Thinker today about the comparisons between the trumped up DeLay "scandal" and the non-stop whitewashing activities (most recently the conviction of Sandy Berger for theft of top secret documents) that occurred and continue to occur vis a vis the Clintons. The differences are both stark and telling about what those in the media would have us believe vs. what is real:

From the moment of Tom Delay’s indictment, liberal grandstanding has been relentless. Its most notable mouthpieces, led by the ever-shrill House Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, characterized the indictment as solid proof of a “culture of corruption” among the Republicans.
Similar Democrat caterwauling greets each new suggestion that some high-ranking Republican might have “outed” Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative. The left virtually salivates at the possibility that Presidential adviser Karl Rove could be the “fall guy,” despite the inarguable fact that neither was Plame’s work covert, nor her CIA status a secret at the time her name was disclosed.

Not wanting to end up on the wrong side of these controversies, many conservatives are reserving judgment on Delay and Rove, awaiting the official outcome of the judicial charades that must now follow. Unfortunately, their reluctance to directly confront such deception will only be perceived as weakness.

Such restrained behavior may once again do more harm than good in a political climate where the law is increasingly invoked, not as a guardian of justice, but as a weapon by which the powerful can dominate the weak.

For more than a decade, political posturing and spin, long a means of supplanting uncomfortable facts with glib soundbites, has become the primary tactic of the political left. To date nobody has engaged in such behavior more perniciously than former President Bill Clinton, abetted (and perhaps driven) by his wife Hillary.

In a newly released book My FBI, former director Louis Freeh outlines the incessant sleaze and scandal that ensued from the moment the Clintons ascended to power. Yet even the deeds covered in Freeh’s account, despicable though they are, pale in comparison to the worst betrayals of the country by the Clinton Administration.

One international event of this past week, if taken in its proper context, reveals the frightening truth of just how egregiously America’s security, and indeed its very future, was deliberately compromised by the Clintons.

For the second time in two years, China launched into space a manned space vehicle, this time carrying two Chinese astronauts, and retrieved it safely on the plains of Mongolia. This mission would have been impossible for the Chinese had crucial technology not been sold to them by such corporations as Loral Space Systems, with the blessing and enabling of the Clinton White House.
Predictably, the Chinese space program is thoroughly politicized and ambitious, with stated goals of a Chinese space station and manned moon landing by 2010. Whether or not the date slips, China clearly poses a far greater technological threat than it otherwise would have, absent the collaboration of the Clintons.

China is fighting a new Cold War, borne up by trade surplus dollars, which it fully intends to win. This time however, the administration of President Bill Clinton played the same role as did the Rosenbergs in the last one. Just as the infamous couple delivered critical nuclear technology to the Soviets in the late 1940’s, the Clintons allowed the sale of critical missile technology to the Communist Chinese in return for campaign contributions, the dubious nature of which vastly eclipses any accusation against Delay from even his most wild-eyed critics.

Counting on the technical ignorance of the X-Box generation, Clinton dismissed the strategic technology transfers as merely benefiting “commercial satellite technology.” But as any marginally savvy space enthusiast knows, the technology required to orbit a satellite is identical to that necessary to hurl a Chinese nuclear warhead into the American heartland.

It is unclear whether America should return to the moon and thus reestablish space supremacy, or simply pursue technology on the home front and, with regard to space feats, rest on its laurels from the 1960’s. In any case, the only unacceptable course is to return the country to those leftists who originally fomented the crisis.

In the wake of September 11, Clinton’s treacherous dealings with the Communist Chinese were shoved from the limelight. But even in the aftermath of that horrendous event, the sordid fingerprints of the Clintons were once again apparent, thwarting efforts to truly understand how such a thing could have transpired.

With Jamie Gorelick working from the inside and Sandy Berger on the outside, the 9-11 commission was capably prevented from identifying the culpability of the Clinton White House in leaving America vulnerable to attack.

More than four years after leaving office, the Clinton political machine continues to seriously endanger the interests of the nation. Yet Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will not even raise an eyebrow over the Clintons’ culture of corruption.

And America has only begun to pay the price.

Day by Day by Chris Muir (click to enlarge)

Been extremely busy with business in Sao Paulo Brazil. I have been keeping an eye on the "news" as portrayed by CNN, the only game in town. They of course are treating the Saddam Hussein trial as an "illegal" act. I guess that means the Nurenberg trails were "illegal" too. After all, we need to have compassion for a guy who has murdered hundreds of thousands of political opponents. Especially if it will paint Bush in an inappropriate light.

All I could think of yesterday when Saddam was refusing to give his name were the lyrics:

"Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game..."

Personally this "devil" is not getting much "sympathy" from these quarters.

I will close my posting for today with this absolute gem from Mark Steyn, which uses the recent Islamist terror in Russia to illustrate a point that simply (in my opinion) cannot be emphasized enough: the enemies of our civilization are as much the elite journalists who pretend to be protecting it as they are the monsters who would kill millions of westerners. For the two go hand in hand.

Blogging may be light this week; I am off to Brazil on business and do not know at this time how often I will be able to post. But if I can leave my readers with one article to ponder and consider this week, it would be Steyn's scathing expose of the evil that is the supression of the truth, disguised as political correctness. The journalists and their masters are as guilty of prolonging this war as are the monsters who blow up innocent women and children for jihadist "glory". Definitely do not hesitate to read this whole column--it is Steyn at his best. Bold emphases are mine:

From Thursday's New York Times:
''Nalchik, Russia -- Insurgents launched a series of raids today in this southern Russian city, striking the area's main airport and several police and security buildings in large-scale, daytime attacks that left at least 85 people dead.''

"Insurgents," eh?

From Agence France Presse:
"Nalchik, Russia: More than 60 people were killed as scores of militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

"Militants," you say?

From the Scotsman:
"Rebel forces battled Russian troops for control of a provincial capital in the Caucasus yesterday . . ."

"Rebel forces,'' huh?

From Toronto's Globe & Mail:
"Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of rebels launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

"Rebels," by the score. But why were they rebelling? What were they insurging over? You had to pick up the Globe & Mail's rival, the Toronto Star, to read exactly the same Associated Press dispatch but with one subtle difference:

''Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

Ah, "Islamic militants." So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.

When the NPR report started, I was driving on the vast open plains of I-91 in Vermont and reckoned, just to make things interesting, I'll add another five miles to the speed for every minute that goes by without mentioning Islam. But I couldn't get the needle to go above 130, and the vibrations caused the passenger-side wing-mirror to drop off. And then, right at the end, having conducted a perfect interview that managed to go into great depth about everything except who these guys were and what they were fighting over, the Russian academic dude had to go and spoil it all by saying somethin' stupid like "republics which are mostly . . . Muslim." He mumbled the last word, but nevertheless the NPR gal leapt in to thank him and move smoothly on to some poll showing that the Dems are going to sweep the 2006 midterms because Bush has the worst numbers since numbers were invented.

I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."

What happened in Russia on Thursday was serious business, not just in the death toll but in the number of key government installations that the alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology managed to seize with relative ease. The militantly rebellious insurgers of no known religious affiliation have long said they want a pan-Caucasian Islamic state from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and the carnage they wreaked in the hitherto semi-safe-ish republic of Kabardino-Balkaria suggests that they're more likely to spread the conflict to other parts of the Russian Federation than Moscow is to contain it.

Did you see that news item in Stavropolsky Meridian last October? "Strontium, Uranium And Plutonium Found In Train To Caucasus." When a region already regarded as a Bud's Discount Warehouse for nuclear materials is getting sucked deeper into the maw of Islamism, why be so sheepish about letting us know the forces at play?

The Russians couldn't hold on to Eastern Europe. They couldn't hold on to Central Asia. Why would they fare any better with the present so-called Russian "Federation"? The country is literally dying. It's had a net population loss every year since 1992, one of the lowest fertility rates in the world -- 1.2 children born per woman -- and one of the highest abortion rates: some 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis -- not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list.

Yet, within their present territory, there remain a few exceptions to the grim statistics cited above, parts of Russia that retain healthy fertility rates and healthy mortality rates. And guess what? They're the Muslim parts. Or, as the New York Times/NPR/Agence France Presse/Scotsman/Toronto Globe & Mail would say, they're the insurgent rebel militant parts. Many of these Russian Muslim areas -- like Bashkortistan (and no, I didn't make that up, it's a real stan. Check it out in the World Book Of Stans) -- are also rich in natural resources.

If you're an energy-rich Muslim republic, what's the point of going down the express garbage chute of history with the Russian Federation? The Islamification of significant parts of present-day Russia is going to be a critical factor in its death spiral.

I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing who it is we've lost to. C'mon, guys, next time something happens in the Caucasus, why not blame the "Caucasians"? At least that way, we'll figure it must have been right-wing buddies of Timothy McVeigh.

Austin Bay has comprehensive coverage and commentary on the Iraqi Constitutional elections. So far, things seem to be going very well, besides certain large New York elitist papers suggesting otherwise:

Major players are coming more and more to realize that dialog, alliances, common interests and just plain politics is the way to win– not violence, intimidation and terror. So this [lesson] is apparently slowly “sinking in” in our confused and frightened Iraqi mentality.

That’s The Iraqi’s assessment. Read his entire email below.

First a quick survey of initial press reports from Iraq. It appears voter turnout in Iraq’s constitutional referendum was strong and violence limited. (The violence in Toledo, Ohio, however, continues…)

ABC News reports:
Iraq’s deeply divided Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds voted in large numbers on a new constitution Saturday a referendum mostly free of insurgent violence and aimed at establishing democracy after decades of Saddam Hussein’s repressive rule. …

Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jaafari:
“The constitution is a sign of civilization,” Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said after casting his ballot. “This constitution has come after heavy sacrifices. It is a new birth.”

Kaafari echoes a sentiment I heard last year while serving on active duty in Iraq. Several Iraqis I spoke with told me they knew democracy was “our big chance.” One man said it was Iraq’s chance to “escape bad history.” To paraphrase a couple of other Iraqis: toppling Saddam and building a more open society was a chance “to enter the modern world.”

Here are the initial voter turnout stats:
Overall turnout was about 61 percent and surpassed 66 percent in seven of Iraq’s 18 provinces, including key Sunni Arab-majority ones, according to initial estimates, election officials said Saturday.

Here’s an AP link, via The Guardian. The AP’s lede:
Sunni Arabs voted in surprisingly high numbers on Iraq’s new constitution Saturday, many of them hoping to defeat it in an intense competition with Shiites and Kurds over the shape of the nation’s young democracy after decades of dictatorship. With little violence, turnout was more than 66 percent in the three most crucial provinces.

The constitution still seemed likely to pass, as expected. But the higher-than-forecast Sunni turnout made it possible the vote would be close - or even go the other way - and cast doubt on U.S. hopes that the charter would succeed in luring Sunnis away from the insurgency.

Washington hopes the constitution will be approved so Iraqis can form a permanent, representative government and the 150,000 U.S. troops can begin to withdraw.

A quick comparison to January’s presidential election:
Overall national turnout in the January elections was 58 percent, but only 2 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots in Anbar province. Turnout was also low in the Sunni Arab provinces of Ninevah and Salahuddin.

Not for “The Iraqi.” Every so often “The Iraqi” sends me emails. His topic today is the constitutional referendum. I have made a couple of minor edits and have highlighted a few points that strike me as particularly acute.

Constitution Day
Boxes are sealed, at least 61% of those eligible voted today for the new Iraqi constitution, most are expected to say yes and we have to wait for 3 more days before the final results are announced and we will see if the naysayers mustered two thirds of 3 governorates to effectively veto it.
Again there were some discrepancies but of no great statistical value, what was noticeable is [the following]:
a. Successful security measures with more Iraqi forces in sight
b. big turnout in Mosul and Falluja
c. Major players are coming more and more to realize that dialog, alliances, common interests and just plain politics is the way to win– not violence, intimidation and terror. So this [lesson] is apparently slowly “sinking in” in our confused and frightened Iraqi mentality.
The consensus there seems to be… OK enough misery we need a stable government that can provide its first order of business [Security] lets say yes and since it is not a divine thing we can always change it.
This was helped by the most recent amendments that set a precedent and drawn on the experience of Zalmay Khalilzad. No drastic changes will happen but things should improve with more accountability and more public pressure, 8 years are needed to give rise to political parties that are religion free and civil movements to be created as jobs are created and filled.
Yes we could manage that, but eyeing the kind of neighbors we have (hint: Basra) we will still need babysitting by major powers at least to keep them at bay. [ED: The Iraqi means Iran.]
Let me stray aside and say that if the trial of Saddam Hussein did really happen next Wednesday my wish is that it be fair and transparent by all current international standards, even if that means putting pressure on the government to make it so. We just cannot promulgate fairness and justice without implementing it, there are great pressures in this society to execute him for 2 or more crimes that he is convicted with, I think he should be tried for all even if that took 4 more years as each of those should be exposed, judged and entered in the annals of Iraq’s history.
-- “The Iraqi”October 15 2005

UPDATE: The NY Times’ headline warns “turnout is mixed.”
Key grafs:

But the Sunni turnout - high in some cities like Mosul, low in others like Ramadi - appeared to be insufficient to defeat the new charter, and Iraqi officials predicted that it would pass.
Turnout appeared to be highest in Shiite and Kurdish areas, although in many places, including Baghdad, it seemed not to approach the levels seen in January, when throngs of voters stood in long lines to cast their ballots for an interim government. Both Shiites and Kurds were expected to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the constitution.
The day unfolded relatively calmly, with only scattered attacks on polling sites and troops around the country. Most vehicular traffic was banned, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American troops and police officers were out in force.
Iraqi elections officials said that final voting results would probably not be ready until the middle of the week.

Ah, but pessimism persists:

The mood on the streets of many Iraqi cities, even in Shiite areas, appeared markedly less enthusiastic than on Jan. 30, when millions of Iraqis braved an onslaught of violence to cast ballots and celebrate in a vast outpouring of pro-democratic sentiment.
On Saturday in Baghdad, streets were noticeably bare of pedestrians, polling centers were less busy, and voters exhibited little enthusiasm.
“I sense that the turnout will be lower this time,” said Zainab Kudir, the chief poll worker at the Marjayoun Primary School in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. “People feel their needs have not been met. There is no security. There are no jobs.”
Looks like overall participation is up three points, 61 percent to 58 percent.
A couple of interesting sidelights (the article is written by John Burns and Dexter Filkins– both superb correspondents):
At Al Afak Elementary School in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mufrek in Baquba, more than 1,000 people voted in the first four hours. By late morning, the lines were backed up into the school’s inner courtyard.
Voting centers were also set up in the American-run prisons at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca for some 13,000 detainees, many of them suspected insurgents. There was even a polling station at Camp Cropper, where Mr. Hussein is incarcerated. There was no word on whether he had cast a ballot.
But is this cause for optimism, as we approach the end of the article?
Of 6,100 polling stations across the country, about 128 did not open, mostly for security reasons. A roadside bomb struck an Iraqi Army patrol in Saadiya, north of Baghdad, killing three soldiers.
On Jan. 30, when more than eight million Iraqis went to the polls to choose the Shiite-led transitional government that led the drafting of the constitution, American military commanders reported nearly 350 insurgent attacks, including numerous suicide bombings, the highest level of violence for any day of the war. On that occasion, American troops were a highly visible presence on Baghdad’s streets, providing outer security at many checkpoints leading to polling centers.
On Saturday, the 150,000-member American force was much less evident, with perimeter security at the polling centers left mostly to the fast-growing Iraqi security forces.
In many areas, the only sign of the American military occupation came from low-flying Apache attack helicopters circling over known areas of insurgent strength, and occasional patrols by armored Humvees, with turret gunners scanning the streets.
Maj. Muhammad Faris Ali , a military intelligence officer responsible for a wide area of northwestern Baghdad, attributed the relative calm to the Iraqi army’s takeover of duties that were still assigned to Americans in January. “We are Iraqis, and we know our people,” he said. “The Americans have a good army, but they don’t know Iraqis as we know them, and that makes for much better security.”

Could it be that Iraqi security forces are really improving?
Of course. On January 3, 2005 I appeared on CSPAN’s Morning Journal and discussed the Iraqi forces’ positive trendline. But no, we’ve had to endure ten months of doom mongers and naysayers.

UPDATE 2: Roger L. Simon has noticed something.
Key grafs:
Because the mainstream media has done its best to hypnotize the public into believing the “failure” of the American democracy project in Iraq, it is worth comparing some dates:
Operation Iraqi Freedom - began March 19, 2003Election to ratify constitution for a democratic Iraq - October 14, 2005
That’s two years and seven months.
US Declaration of Independence - July 4, 1776Completion of US Constitution - September 17, 1787 (took effect 1789)
That’s eleven years and two months. (I could have begun with the Boston Tea Party which would have added another three years.)
Anybody want to take a bet about how history will regard Operation Iraqi Freedom? No wonder the New York Times is singing a (relatively) different tune this morning.
FWIW, I used to live down the street from Zabars, Roger. And a genuine smorgasbord it is.

Yes, Iran is involved in the Iraqi resistance to democracy. Via Regime Change Iran:

Iran Focus: a pro-MEK website:

Ten Iranian agents have been arrested in Iraq, according to an Iraqi television channel.The agents were arrested along with 88 other insurgents, al-Diyar reported on Thursday, quoting the Iraqi Interior Ministry.The ten Iranians had entered Iraq illegally, the report added.Iraqi officials frequently accuse Tehran of dispatching undercover military or intelligence agents to Iraq disguised as pilgrims.

click to enlarge

David Horowitz weighs in on the shame and disgrace that hover like a dark cloud over solidly entrenched institutionalized Black racists on the left. It should make any person of color with half a brain take pause--and ask themselves which party really is for the advancement of more and more black Americans into prosperity and power, and which party in reality only retains power by keeping the brothers down--so they can keep on portraying intelligent men and women of color as "victims" and continue to rake in the big bucks from limousine liberal Dems. I am saying it and I am saying it proudly--the party of racial equality is the Republican, not the Democratic party. Horowitz's post is a timely reminder of this fact:

George Bush has appointed more blacks to higher positions of authority than any president in the history of the United States, and indeed has appointed blacks to higher positions of authority in this country than any comparable minority in any country in the history of the world.

Yet an NBC poll this week reveals that only 2% of blacks "approve" the president's performance. Two percent! What could account for this failure of vision? Perhaps black Americans have been persuaded that Bush caused Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf and also that only blacks died in the hurricanes? And that all those whites who risked their own lives to rescue them were only a mirage. After all this is the impression conveyed by the leaders of the Democratic Party and the entire "liberal" media.

Whereas the (ignored) truth is that if any individual is responsible for black deaths in New Orleans it is New Orleans black mayor Ray Nagin, who failed to evacuate his citizens even though the means, the time, and the warnings were all available to do so and it was his responsibility (and not George Bush's) to see that it was done.

This Saturday, as millions of Iraqis go to the polls to vote on the first democratic constitution in the history of the Arab Muslim world -- courtesy of George Bush -- millions of African Americans will be focused on a march in Washington led by a racist kook who has proclaimed that George Bush not Osama Bin Laden attacked America on 9/11 and followed up this feat by blowing up the levees that protected New Orleans in order, presumably, to drown its black citizens. What a disgrace this spectacle is. What a travesty this march. And the usual black leaders will be there to join Minister Farrakhan, including Al Sharpton, recent Democratic presidential candidate who has the blood of 8 lynch victims on his hands but is treated by all and sundry as a veritable statesman.

This is the last popular racism in America: The racism that blames whites for everything bad that happens to blacks and the racism that holds blacks accountable for nothing.

All that said, the Captains Quarters offers some caution in taking the 2% figure at face value:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005610.php

On the other hand, the low percentage of black approval ratings for Bush does reflect the racist propaganda coming from the Democrat/"liberal"/left side of the argument.

In what could be a very interesting meeting, Secretary of State Condi Rice is travelling to a high stakes meeting with Russian President Putin. If she is able to get concessions from Putin in backing down from its support of Iran's nuclear ambitions--it could be the beginning of a serious look at Ms. Rice as the next Republican candidate. Dick Morris sure as hell thinks so:

As she tours the continent after her Senate confirmation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is like a rock star — her every movement, her every meeting covered by an adoring media.America’s first black female secretary of state is doing in public what she has always done in private — speaking frankly about America’s priorities and the realities of the post-Cold War world. As she jokes with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, loosening up his dogmatic anti-American policies, lectures Russia about freedom and warns Israel of tough decisions ahead, one thing is obvious: A star is being born.Traveling without the entourage customary for secretaries of state, on time, mapping out in advance her first six months of travel, Rice is a new force in American politics.

As the Republican Party casts about for a viable presidential candidate in 2008 to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) out of the White House, attention will inevitably focus on Rice, the woman who may stand between Clinton and the presidency.Since Bush’s success in Iraq has laid the basis for negotiation in the Middle East, there is every prospect that Rice may preside over a diplomatic triumph in catalyzing the discussions between Sharon and Abbas. The firm American stand in Iraq will also make more likely success in Korea and Iran, all of which would add to the prestige of Rice.The political fact is that a Rice candidacy would destroy the electoral chances of the Democratic Party by undermining its demographic base. John Kerry got 54 percent of his vote from three groups that, together, account for about a third of the American electorate: African-Americans, Hispanics and single white women. Rice would cut deeply into any Democrat’s margin among these three groups and would, most especially, deny Clinton the strong support she would otherwise receive from each of them.

Rice’s credentials for a candidacy are extensive and will grow throughout her tenure at the State Department. As former chancellor of Stanford University, she would have much in common with the pre-political careers of Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower, presidents of Princeton and Columbia universities. Her service as national security adviser during a war and her current efforts as secretary of state demonstrate her ability to handle crises and to conduct herself with dignity and impact on the world stage.As a social conservative and deeply religious person, she would face no bar in winning the votes of the Christian right, so crucial to winning the Republican nomination. Unlike former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani (R) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — both of whom could probably win in November — she would be very attractive to the pro-life, anti-gun-control, anti-affirmative-action base of the GOP.America longs to put the period on the disgraceful chapter in our nation’s history that began when the first slave arrived at Jamestown, Va., more than 400 years ago. We also want to send a message to every girl, and every African-American or Hispanic baby, that there is no ceiling and that you can rise as far as your ability will carry you. The day Condi Rice is sworn in as president, regardless of the fate of her administration, that message and the punctuation of our history of racism will be obvious.Of course, she isn’t running — nor is there any indication that she is harboring thoughts of a candidacy. But as her visibility increases, so will her viability. It may just be possible to draft Condi into the race. A real presidential draft movement hasn’t happened since 1952, when Republicans urged Eisenhower to get into the race. A draft-Condi movement seems almost antiquated in this era of ambitious and self-promoting candidates, but it may well fill a deep need in the electorate to vote for someone who is running in response to a genuine call of the people.

Condi Rice is a work in progress. Her rise has been impelled by her merits and achievements rather than any efforts on her part to curry favor in the media. She is still working and still progressing. But keep your eye on this political star. It is rising and may one day be ascendant.

The report of Rice's trip to Russia was obtained via Regime Change Iran:

Reuters:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will lobby Russia to pressure Iran over its suspected nuclear arms programmes at talks in Moscow on Saturday, U.S. Officials said.

The former Soviet specialist will squeeze a Russian leg into a previously scheduled trip to France and Britain that focuses on shoring up support for the U.S. Hard line against the Islamic Republic.

If you thought last night's revelations about France's waist-deep complicity in the Oil for Food scandal was reason enough to flush the entire French government down the toilet, get a load of this report about the French government--under the Marxist Mitterand--providing support and financial backing for the genocidal Hutus in Rwanda; even as the bodies were piling up. If you will recall, it was the Hutus who massacared hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in the horrific Rawandan genocide--made so famous by films like "Hotel Rwanda"--while the world, including the UN, did absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter.

Which begs the question--is there anything that the morally bankrupt French government is not capable of? Collaboration with the Nazis as they filled mass graves and crematoria with French Jews? Actively supporting genocide in Rawanda? Aiding and abetting Saddam the monster--even as he stole millions meant to feed his own starving people, and instead used that money to grease the palms of the French while developing WMD's and filling the mass graves in Kurdistan? Talk about a history of shame...the French have been on the wrong side of monsters for a good portion of the 20th century.

So what again was that argument for keeping this utterly corrupt government on the Security Council? Via The American Thinker:

Running low on reasons to hate France? Here’s another one: Rwanda. I’m not talking about the blame poured on the U.N. and the West in general for negligence; I’m talking about France actually helping commit genocide.
France not only trained and armed the Hutu genocidaires in advance of the genocide, it armed them, gave them safe harbor, refused safe harbor to Tutsis, and sent its own troops into Rwanda to defend the Hutus during the genocide of the Tutsis.

The narrative of France’s aiding and abetting genocide in Rwanda is well described in the recently published book, The Fate of Africa, by Martin Meredith. I should point out that Rwanda is not the focus of this book. In fact, it is only covered in Chapter 27, out of 35 chapters and 752 pages. The book does not even concentrate on France. But the plain facts speak loudly enough.

• In 1990, the Rwandan government was led by Hutu extremists, headed by president Habyarimana. French President Francois Mitterand sent his own son, Jean-Christophe, to head France’s special Africa Unit. Jean-Christophe was popularly known in Africa as Papa m’a dit, or “Daddy told me to”.

• In early October 1990, the opposition Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) gathered in neighboring Uganda to stage strikes into Rwanda. President Mitterand authorized French troops to help the Hutu government fight the RPF. Jean-Christophe remarked, with a wink, “We are going to send him a few boys, old man Habyarimana. We are going to bail him out. In any case, the whole thing will be over in two or three months.”

• With France’s help, Habyarimana expanded his armed forces by over 300%. France contributed training, expertise, weapons and foreign contacts for more weapons. Rwanda spent an estimated $100 million on arms at that time, a huge amount for such a small country.

• In 1992 a ceasefire was signed between Rwanda and the RPF, but the abuse of Tutsis continued.

• Despite a 1993 human rights report accusing Habyarimana of “massacres, torture, arbitrary detention and other abuses against Tutsis”, France continued its program of support for Habyarimana.

• Within 3 months in early 1994, Rwanda imported more than 500,000 machetes, enough to arm a third of the adult Hutu population.

• On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, perpetrators still unknown, and the killing began. “The first victims were carefully selected… with lists prepared well in advance.” Soldiers hunted down moderate Hutus. One of the first targets was the Hutu prime minister. Ten Belgian UN peacekeepers, sent to defend her, were “taken prisoner, driven to a military camp, beaten up, tortured and killed.” The prime minister and her husband were also caught and killed. The slaughter of Tutsis started at the same time.

• “During a mass for some 500 Tutsis, a killing squad burst into the church. ‘The militia began slashing away,’ a survivor recalled. ‘They were hacking at the arms, legs, breasts, faces and necks.’ The killing lasted for two hours. Similar massacres broke out across the country.” “Across Rwanda, church buildings where Tutsis desperately sought sanctuary became the scene of one massacre after another. More people were killed there than anywhere else.”

• On April 8, the RPF announced a return to war and prepared to advance on the capital. On April 9, French troops landed in the capital to protect, not Tutsis, but Hutu extremists, who were put on the first plane out. Upon arrival in Paris, some of the Hutu extremists received hefty sums of money and a personal audience by President Mitterand. On the other hand, the French refused to evacuate the five children of the murdered prime minister and long-standing embassy employees, most of them Tutsi.

• According to Human Rights Watch, France continued arms shipments to the Rwandan army in May and June of 1994, the middle of the genocide.

• In June, Mitterand sent troops into Rwanda. Military officers in Paris talked openly of “breaking the back of the RPF”.

• The Hutus greeted the arriving French troops as heroes, waving banners saying ‘Vive la France’ and praising Mitterand. Radio broadcasts called for “you Hutu girls to wash yourselves and put on a good dress to welcome our French allies. The Tutsi girls are all dead, so you have your chance.”

• Despite France’s attempts to help the Hutu government and to defeat the RPF, it was the RPF’s victory that ultimately brought an end to the genocide.

• “In the space of 100 days some 800,000 people had been slaughtered – about three quarters of the Tutsi population. More people had been killed more quickly than in any other mass killing recorded in history.”
The genocide was brought to an end by the opposition RPF, the very force that France fought, directly and indirectly, both before and during the genocide. France helped the extreme Hutus, the genocidaires, both before and during the genocide, with training, arms, money and its own troops. France gave safe harbor to the Hutu genocidaires at the same time it refused to help Tutsis.

And this all happened with full knowledge and participation by French President Francois Mitterand. He sent his own son to be on site in Africa. He personally met with Hutu extremists. He ordered French troops into Rwanda during the genocide, not to protect the Tutsis from slaughter, but to protect the Hutu genocidaires.

For its part, Rwanda is now trying to do something about it. At a ceremony in 2004 to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Rwandan President Paul Kagame stated

“As for the French, their role in what happened in Rwanda is self-evident… They knowingly trained and paid government soldiers and militia who were going to commit genocide and they knew they would commit genocide… There are people who hide behind diplomacy.”

Rwanda undertook its own investigation into France’s responsibility for the genocide. It claims that “Paris knowingly armed the killers and provided an escape route after their defeat” and allowed “perpetrators of the genocide to escape when it launched an operation in south-western Rwanda in June 1994”.

We might ask what motivated France. Some hints are provided by the BBC, where we find that Jean-Christophe Mitterand (aka Papa m’a dit, and “Mr. Africa”) was arrested in 2000 for illegal arms deals and the misuse of company funds involving the sale of Russian weapons and equipment to Angola in 1993 and 1994.

“But France’s “Mr Africa” was once right at the heart of the very particular relationship between the French Government and the African continent.

“Most of these countries were run by autocratic presidents who liked to deal directly with President Mitterrand, bypassing the Foreign Ministry and other official channels.

“Discreetly they could ask for favours – arms, money, help with troublesome opponents, a good word on their behalf with the IMF, a comfortable retirement if things got difficult at home.

“And the favours flowed both ways.

“Their support raised France’s international profile, their contracts always went to French companies, and several African leaders are believed to have made substantial donations to French political parties.”

And what just happened this week? According to Reuters,

“Police have detained a former French ambassador to the U.N. Security Council for questioning in a corruption inquiry over the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq.”

The sophisticated French.

State of the Union by Carl Moore (click to enlarge)

John Hindraker makes some really excellent points about the utter corruption of the French government--see my bold emphases below. (Mainstream media? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller....Bueller....Bueller?....).

But seriously, isn't it time we made a change and sent these yahoos home to their vinyards without their coveted Security Council permanent seat? Of all the many betrayals after WWII, giving the Nazi-collaborationalist Vichy Frogs a permanent seat on the UNSC ranks right up there with handing Eastern Europe over to the Sovs--and we are still reaping the results of whatever mental giants made that decision:

This story came out yesterday, and we just haven't gotten to it: France's former Ambassador to the U.N., who also served as Kofi Annan's "special adviser," has been indicted by French authorities for "influence peddling and corruption of foreign officials." The official, Jean-Bernard Merimee, is alleged to have received kickbacks in the form of oil allocations from Saddam Hussein as part of the Oil-for-Food fraud.

Merimee is one of those imposing, sophisticated Continental bureaucrats of whom John Kerry and the Democrats in general are so much in awe. It is people like Merimee who would have decided, in a Kerry administration, whether the United States had passed the "global test." Thankfully, that day never arrived, and Merimee won't do much "testing" from a French prison.

You have to wonder, though. Annan's son and "special adviser" were corrupted by Saddam, along with several other U.N. officials--and those are just the ones known so far. On the French end, Merimee, the U.N. ambassador; Interior Minister Charles Pasqua; Patrick Maugein, a friend of Jacques Chirac, and others apparently were on Saddam's payroll.

But it didn't matter! The French government assures us that there was "'no link' between French diplomats' alleged contacts with Saddam's regime and France's decision not to support the U.S.-led war in 2003 that toppled the Iraqi dictator."

Well, that's certainly a relief. Sometimes when people pay bribes they expect results in return. But Saddam apparently wasn't that kind of guy.

It really is getting to the point where the media might as well move its offices to Riyadh or Damascus. Any protest about the word God in the Pledge of Allegiance is front page news and leads the nightly news. Meanwhile as Radical Muslims continue to slaughter innocent people all over the globe you barely can even FIND a reference to religion at all. The double standard I posted about last night is alive and well (via Michelle Malkin):

Yesterday, I wrote about the MSM whitewashing Islam out of news reports. Today's coverage of the violent Muslim terrorist outbreak in Russia underscores my point:

60 killed as Chechen gunmen attack cityChechen rebel attack fuels growing unrestChechens attack Caucasus townPolice battle militants in Russia
Look how far down you have to read those stories before you are told that it is Islamic radical terrorists wreaking havoc and murdering innocent people, not just plain-vanilla "gunmen" and nondescript "militants" run amok.

This Bloomberg article gets it right in the lede graf. So does this AP story. But so far, the only headline I've seen that puts the I-word up front is this one in The Moscow Times:Islamic Militants Raid Nalchik, 24 Dead

I noted the same trend in reporting (or rather, non-reporting) of the Beslan massacre last year.

The sins of omission continue to pile up.

Thomas Lifson makes a salient point (not by any means an unusual occurrence...) about the left's sudden anxiety about indictments that might be coming on the Plame-Wilson-CIA affair. Why would a leading journalist for the left suddenly be spooked about indictments--unless the entire house of cards the press has built up about Rove, Libby, et al is about to come tumbling down. Thus, when it comes to indictments I (like Lifson) say: bring them on! :

Left wing pundit Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, all of sudden has second thoughts about the desirability of the Plame grand jury issuing indictments. Why now? After all the leftist hysterics about exposing the identity af a CIA desk jockey who used to be an undercover agent, could it be that the prospect of other crimes coming to light is making some people queasy?

Just a thought…

UPDATE: A further thought: If the grand jury were to issue no indictment and no report, the left would be able to cry “Cover-up!” That would form yet another leftist myth, to accompany “Bush lied” and “Bush stole the election.” The MSM knows that in complicated stories, most of the faithful and many in the middle will just look at the headlines and conclude that where there’s smoke there might be some fire.

All the more reason to hope for indictments.

Peggy Noonan is one classy lady, and she is also wise to the inner workings of the White House. In today's Wall Street Journal, Ms. Noonan pretty much threw the chances of the Miers nomination under the bus. Although it is not clear if this is wishful thinking on her part or a valid read of the "tea leaves", reading something like this from Peggy Noonan is for me cause for concern for this nomination:

Can this marriage be saved? George W. Bush feels dissed and unappreciated: How could you not back me? Conservatives feel dissed and unappreciated: How could you attack me? Both sides are toe to toe. One senses that the critics will gain, as they've been gaining, and that the White House is on the losing side. If the administration had a compelling rationale for Harriet Miers's nomination, they would have made it. Simply going at their critics was not only destructive, it signaled an emptiness in their arsenal. If they had a case they'd have made it. "You're a sexist snob" isn't a case; it's an insult, one that manages in this case to be both startling and boring.

Is there a way out for the White House? Yes. Change plans at LaGuardia. Remember the wisdom of New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who said, "I don't make a lot of mistakes but when I do it's a beaut!"? The Miers pick was a mistake. The best way to change the story is to change the story. Here's one way.

The full Tim McCarthy. He was the Secret Service agent who stood like Stonewall and took the bullet for Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. Harriet Miers can withdraw her name, take the hit, and let the president's protectors throw him in the car. Her toughness and professionalism would appear wholly admirable. She'd not just survive; she'd flourish, going from much-spoofed office wife to world-famous lawyer and world-class friend. Added side benefit: Her nobility makes her attackers look bad. She's better than they, more loyal and serious. An excellent moment of sacrifice and revenge.

The president would get to announce a better nominee--I'd recommend continuing the air of stoic pain--and much of the conservative establishment would feel constrained to go along. Some would feel the need to prove their eagerness to be supportive, and how thwarted their natural impulse to loyalty was by the choice of the unfortunate Harriet. They have a base too, which means they pay a price for marching out of lockstep. Mr. Bush will have an open field. He could even shove Alberto Gonzales down their throats! Or, more wisely and constructively, more helpfully and maturely, he could choose one of the outstanding jurists thoughtful conservatives have long touted: Edith Jones, Edith Clement, Janice Rogers Brown. (Before the Miers pick a man could have been considered, but to replace Ms. Miers now it will have to be a woman. Sometimes you just can't add more layers to the story.)
Connected to this is the the modified Dan Quayle. When George H.W. Bush chose Mr. Quayle to be his vice presidential candidate, the 41-year-old junior senator from Indiana should have said, "Thanks, but I'm not ready. Someday I will be, but I have more work to do in Congress and frankly more growing to do as a human being before I indulge any national ambitions." This would have been great because it was true. When his staff leaked what he'd said, a shocked Washington would have concurred, conceding his wisdom and marking him for better things. He'd probably have run for president in 2000. He could be president now.

The best way to do the modified Quayle comes from Mickey Kaus: "How about appointing Miers to a federal appeals court? She's qualified. Bush could say that while he knows Miers he understands others' doubts--and he knows she will prove over a couple of years what a first-rate judge she is. Then he hopes to be able to promote her. Semi-humilating, but less humiliating than the alternatives. And not a bad job to get. . . . Miers could puncture the tension with one smiling crack about being sent to the minors. The collective sigh of national relief would drown out the rest of her comments." That's thinking.

If Ms. Miers did what Mr. Quayle didn't do--heck, she could wind up on the Supreme Court.

How can the White House climb down after 10 days of insisting Ms. Miers is the one? Mmmmm, sometimes you don't climb down. Sometime you just let gravity do what it's doing. You drop like an apple. Three days of silence and then the trip to LaGuardia.

The White House, after the Miers withdrawal/removal/disappearance, would be well advised to call in leaders of the fractious base--with heavy initial emphasis on the Washington conservative establishment--and have some long talks about the future. It's time for the administration to reach out to wise men and women, time for Roosevelt Room gatherings of the conservative clans. Much old affection remains, and respect lingers, but a lot of damage has been done. The president has three years yet to serve. That, I think, is the subtext of recent battles: Conservatives want to modify and, frankly, correct certain administration policies now, while there's time. The White House can think of this--and should think of it--as an unanticipated gift. A good fight can clear the air; a great battle can result in resolution and recommitment. No one wants George W. Bush turned into Jimmy Carter, or nobody should. The world is a dangerous place, and someone has to lead America.

Personally, I still believe that a confirmable "stealth constitutionalist" is vastly preferable to a bloody battle that could end in a vote on the "nuclear option". I think the conservatives have done themselves, their President, and their party a great disservice in this matter, and I am concerned that a withdrawl could cost us big in the upcoming mid-term elections.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt spoke with Karl Rove about this and maintains that Rove is 100% behind Miers staying on:

I spoke to Karl Rove an hour ago. His support for the Miers nomination is not merely enthusiastic, but adamant and even vehement. The judicial philosophy question? She has been a member of the White House's judicial selection committee for three years, not the one I had thought, as the Deputy Chief of Staff sits on the committee, along with the White House Counsel and a handful of other senior aides, including Karl Rove. Every judicial nomination the president has made for the past three years has come through this committee. Prior to the discussion in the committee, every nominee's work is assembled and analyzed, and interviews are conducted by the committee members. The briefing books are prepared by the junior staff which is made up of all the sort of lawyers you'd expect, with all the right law schools and clerkships. The committee pores over the binders and then meets and debates the candidates, and a recommendation is made to the president. Rove described her role as detailed and deep, including as it did for all committee members the careful examination, analysis and discussion of candidates' opinions and writings.

Miers' participation in this process for three years presents opponents of her nomination with more than just a question of how the president's nominees reflect on Miers' --and the committee's judgment. More importantly, her participation in the process described discredits any idea that her core philosophy is unknown to the president or other senior aides. It defies common sense to imagine three years of such meetings leaving other senior staff and the president in the dark about her commitment to originalism.

The Truth hits Home

Mark Steyn makes an excellent point about the double standard that the secular left holds for Christianity vs. Islamism:

Of all the total non-stories reported by the British media since 9/11 - the brutal Afghan winter, the non-existent Jenin massacre - has there ever been a bigger waste of space than the column inches devoted to "Bush: God Told Me to Invade Iraq"? That was the Independent's headline. The Guardian, like the Indy, led with a front-page picture of the President aglow in his own personal halo, but preferred the caption: "George Bush believes he is on a mission from God." And my old comrade Mark Lawson piled on with a full columnar sneer at the President's "Manichean convictions".

The source for this story was essentially a BBC press release for a forthcoming documentary. Nabil Shaath, the so-called Palestinian "foreign minister", told them (the BBC) that Bush told him (Shaath) that God told him (Bush) to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House said this was "absurd" and the only other Palestinian present at that meeting, Mahmoud Abbas, has denied Shaath's account of the conversation. As evidence of Bush's "Manichean convictions", the whole thing's a lot of Manichean piss, as the Belgians would say.

One suspects a few of those excitable British editors realised that, even as they stampeded to the picture desk to work up some shots of the President looking insanely beatific under the "It's Official: Bush 'Religious Nut' Says Respected Palestinian Intifada Apologist" headlines. One day, when they're sifting through the ruins of post-Christian Europe, archaeologists will marvel at the energy expended on the gleeful mockery of open religiosity.

Well, not all religiosity, of course. If there's anything worth jeering at or condescending to about a certain other big-time religion much in the news these days, the lads at the Guardian and Independent seem far less eager to lead the charge.

Now why would that be? In the Cold War, the elites at least felt obliged to genuflect toward the theory of "equivalence". This time round, who needs equivalence? "Bush is more religious than Saddam," pronounced Martin Amis two years ago. "Of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive." Of course.

If Britain is under threat from anybody's "Manichean convictions", it's surely not evangelical Christians'. To recap from seven days ago: last year I made a joke about banning Porky Pig on the grounds that a porcine cartoon was grossly insensitive toward Muslims, only to discover the other week that Dudley council has banned Piglet as part of its pre-Ramadan crackdown on cultural insensitivity.

So last Tuesday, in the course of a column about Piglet, I made a joke that British Muslims ought to complain about having to put up with a grossly offensive head of state who is an uncovered woman. And lo and behold, in that very morning's Daily Telegraph, I find an item that the English flag - the cross of St George - has been banned from prisons because it might be "misinterpreted" as a racist symbol.

So, for the moment, I'm holding off on any gags about the first imam to be made Archbishop of Canterbury or the Queen demonstrating her commitment to multiculturalism by becoming the fourth wife of a Saudi prince. Official Britain seems to have lost all sense of proportion and one doesn't want to give them any more ideas.

The prohibition of England's flag in England's prisons was put in place by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, who is concerned about the "lack of cultural understanding" at Wakefield jail.

As far as I can tell, specific examples of "lack of cultural understanding" were confined to an insufficient range of hair products for black prisoners and the display of the offensive national emblem: "We were concerned to see a number of staff wearing a flag of St George tiepin," she wrote in a report on Wakefield jail. "While we were told that these had been bought in support of a cancer charity, there was clear scope for misinterpretation."

There always is, isn't there? The other day, a state-funded imam at Werribee Islamic College in Australia told his students that the Jews were putting poison in bananas and that Muslims shouldn't eat them. Allowing Aussie greengrocers to continue to display bananas offers "clear scope for misinterpretation", too. But misinterpretation is in the eye of the misinterpreter, and pandering to it ensures there will be a lot more.

We hear endlessly about "systemic racism" in British institutions, but the really rampant contagion seems to be systemic auto-racism, a psychologically unhealthy predisposition to believe the worst only about one's own culture. And the trouble with the Anne Owers school of pre-emptive misinterpretation is that the perpetually aggrieved interpret it all too accurately.

Thus, Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, already feels Ms Owers's ban is insufficient. The cross of St George, he explains, is offensive to Muslims because it was carried by English crusaders in the 11th century.

Hmm. Would that be the 11th century that ended nine and a bit centuries ago? When a fellow's got hang-ups about things that happened a millennium ago, there's no point trying to assuage them; he'll only unearth some earlier grievance, demanding the Natural History Museum be dismantled because some stegosaurus was disrespectful to Muslims back in the Jurassic era.
So Mr Doyle wants England to find a new flag which "is not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with". How about we simply swap with the Yanks? Give Crusader Bush the cross of St George and England can have the Stars and Stripes? The stars would be the 50 shards of a pork scratching crushed underfoot by a Dudley council official, with 13 horizontal yellow streaks representing the prostrate backbones of the nation.

Why is George W. Bush's utterly unremarkable evangelical Christianity so self-evidently risible but complaints from British Muslims hung up over the 11th century are perfectly reasonable and something we should seek to accommodate? Where is the secular Left's "insensitivity" when you need it? No doubt the bien pensants will still be hooting at born-again Texans on the day the House of Lords gives a second reading to the Sharia Bill.

It may be time to open a book on when precisely that will be. Any guesses? Whoever is closest wins a one-way, first-class air ticket out, with complimentary in-flight bacon butty and Zionist banana.

The captured letter from al Zarqawi last week has been translated and analyzed--and it is speaking volumes. Not only is it clear that heavy quantities of Kool Aid have been consumed by this sociopath (kind of reminds me of Manson, actually); it pretty much obliterates any argument that ridding the earth of this insect is an inappropriate objective.

It is clear from this analysis (via Austin Bay) that: (a) Zaraqwi's evident desparation tells us that he is convinced that we are winning this war, decisively; and (b) that the war that absolutely must be fought until it is won against these depraved death cultists. Be sure and follow the links as well:

Here’s a link (via the Director of National Intelligence) to an English language translation of the recently captured Zawahiri letter.

This week’s column discusses that letter (via StrategyPage and RealClearPolitics). Zawahiri vacillates. At one level he knows Al Qaeda’s losing. But the US may buckle, folks, cut and run like Vietnam. Heck, Boxer, Sheehan, Kennedy, and the DailyKos, give Zawahiri hope.

Zawahiri understands that Iraq is now the critical battleground, and he hasn’t given up on the vision of the caliphate:

I want to be the first to congratulate you for what God has blessed you with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world, which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam’s history, and what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era, and what will happen, according to what appeared in the Hadiths of the Messenger of God @ about the epic battles between Islam and atheism. It has always been my belief that the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world, specifically in the Levant, Egypt, and the neighboring states of the Peninsula and Iraq; however, the center would be in the Levant and Egypt. This is my opinion, which I do not preach as infallibile, but I have reviewed historical events and the behavior of the enemies of Islam themselves, and they did not establish Israel in this triangle surrounded by Egypt and Syria and overlooking the Hijaz except for their own interests.

Here are his “four stages” of war:

If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly-according to how it appears to us-in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices-God permitting-are a large step directly towards that goal.So we must think for a long time about our next steps and how we want to attain it, and it is my humble opinion that the Jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals:

The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq.

The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate- over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, is in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans, immediately upon their exit and before un-Islamic forces attempt to fill this void, whether those whom the Americans will leave behind them, or those among the un-Islamic forces who will try to jump at taking power.There is no doubt that this amirate will enter into a fierce struggle with the foreign infidel forces, and those supporting them among the local forces, to put it in a state of constant preoccupation with defending itself, to make it impossible for it to establish a stable state which could proclaim a caliphate, and to keep the Jihadist groups in a constant state of war, until these forces find a chance to annihilate them.

The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.

Now the issue of popular support — fish in the sea of the people:

(1) If we are in agreement that the victory of Islam and the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet will not be achieved except through jihad against the apostate rulers and their removal, then this goal will not be accomplished by the mujahed movement while it is cut off from public support, even if the Jihadist movement pursues the method of sudden overthrow. This is because such an overthrow would not take place without some minimum of popular support and some condition of public discontent which offers the mujahed movement what it needs in terms of capabilities in the quickest fashion. Additionally, if the Jihadist movement were obliged to pursue other methods, such as a popular war of jihad or a popular intifadah, then popular support would be a decisive factor between victory and defeat.

(2) In the absence of this popular support, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted or fearful, and the struggle between the Jihadist elite and the arrogant authorities would be confined to prison dungeons far from the public and the light of day. This is precisely what the secular, apostate forces that are controlling our countries are striving for.

Zawahiri concludes:

Therefore, the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve, if there is no contravention of Sharia in such avoidance, and as long as there are other options to resort to, meaning we must not throw the masses-scant in knowledge-into the sea before we teach them to swim, relying for guidance in that on the saying of the Prophet @ to Umar bin al-Khattab > : lest the people should say that Muhammad used to kill his Companions.

Zawahiri muses over the implications of an American “Vietnam-style” retreat and the wisdom of fighting with Shia Muslims. Then we learn that strategically things may not be so promising for Al Qaeda:

However, monitoring from afar has the advantage of providing the total picture and observing the general line without getting submerged in the details, which might draw attention away from the direction of the target. As the English proverb says, the person who is standing among the leaves of the tree might not see the tree.One of the most important factors of success is that you don’t let your eyes lose sight of the target, and that it should stand before you always. Otherwise you deviate from the general line through a policy of reaction. And this is a lifetime’s experience, and I will not conceal from you the fact that we suffered a lot through following this policy of reaction, then we suffered a lot another time because we tried to return to the original line.

“Scenes of slaughter” –Al Qaeda’s massacres– have backfired. Instead of sowing fear they have cost Al Qaeda political support. (See my column on this point.)

Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable - also- are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the shaykh of the slaughterers, etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you in particular by the favor and blessing of God.And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than slaughtering?

Read the entire document.

I wrote my column on this letter earlier this week, before I had access to Zawahiri’s entire letter. Here line from the letter the NY Times summarized and I quoted in the column. (The Times said Zawahiri told Zarqawi to attack Americans rather than Iraqi civilians and to “refrain from the kind of gruesome beheadings and other executions that have been posted on Al-Qaida websites. Those executions have been condemned in parts of the Muslim world as violating tenets of the faith.” )

Therefore, the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve, if there is no contravention of Sharia in such avoidance, and as long as there are other options to resort to, meaning we must not throw the masses-scant in knowledge-into the sea before we teach them to swim, relying for guidance in that on the saying of the Prophet @ to Umar bin al-Khattab : lest the people should say that Muhammad used to kill his Companions.

The column says “When Al-Qaida’s zealots blow up trains in Spain or subways in London, those are attacks of their choosing conducted on “infidel terrain.” The genius of the war in Iraq is a brutal but necessary form of strategic judo: It brought the War on Terror into the heart of the Middle East and onto Arab Muslim turf. In Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s theo-fascists have been spilling Arab blood, and Al Jazeera has noticed that, too
Zawahiri knows this to be true, and he confirms it:

The Muslim masses-for many reasons, and this is not the place to discuss it-do not rally except against an outside occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is firstly Jewish, and secondly American.

UPDATE: Re-read Zarqawi’s own captured letter to Al Qaeda (from February 2004). This is the letter when Z-Man says he fears democracy.

Here’s that quote:

We fight them, and this is difficult because of the gap that will emerge between us and the people of the land. How can we fight their cousins and their sons and under what pretext after the Americans, who hold the reins of power from their rear bases, pull back? The real sons of this land will decide the matter through experience. Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter.

UPDATE 2: This column from January 2003 discusses the “Iraq as fatal attractor” strategy. It provides some background on the two strategic goals I discuss in this week’s column. In the Summer of 2003 a couple of Internet sites dubbed this “the flypaper strategy.” I prefer “fatal attractor.”

Key graf:

The massive American build-up around Iraq serves as a baited trap that Al Qaeda cannot ignore. Failure to react to the pending American attack would demonstrate Al Qaeda’s impotence. For the sake of their own reputation (as well as any notion of divine sanction), Al Qaeda’s cadres must show CNN and Al Jazeera they are still capable of dramatic endeavor.

This ain’t theory. Al Qaeda’s leaders and fighters know it, and the rats are coming out of their alleys…

UPDATE 3: John Hinderaker comments at Powerline. John’s conclusion is dead on.

UPDATE: That was seriously good--but HERE is al Zarqawi's text, with annotated "interpretations" by Confederate Yankee. I laughed aloud!

Michael Barone makes an excellent point in his US News "blog": yes, the Republicans have had a really rough month; on the other hand most Republicans happen to actually love America (what a novel idea!)--they actually believe in this place we live, in its form of government, and in and everything it stands for. And we are quickly getting to the point if ww have not already gotten there, where one cannot say the same for the Democrats. Arguably, a majority of Democrats do not fit the above description. Barone's lengthy piece (which deserves a thorough reading) concludes:

Samuel Huntington notes in his book Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity the emergence of "denationalized elites" in this and other countries—highly educated people who feel a loyalty more to secular liberal principles than to their own country. Such elites and their nonelite counterparts now constitute a large and, in 2004 at least, dominant segment of one of our political parties. Powerlineblog Tuesday morning contained a letter from its Iraq correspondent Major E., who reports that after he returned to his home in northern California he contacted local organizations and offered to speak to them about what he had observed in Iraq.

I contacted county leadership for both Democrats and Republicans, along with non-partisan church and civic groups, and have received numerous requests from churches, non-partisan groups, and Republican organizations – but zero from Democrats, despite following up with them several times.
I hope it is an anomaly, but I wonder if the fact that Democratic leaders in my county would rather accuse the troops at Gitmo of running a "gulag" than hear about the experiences of a service member who just returned from Iraq might be driving some folks away from their tent of "tolerance," not just here in Northern California but around the country.

After a talk to a Republican group the other night, one couple came up to me and explained that they grew up in strongly Democratic families, joking that they knew about both God and FDR, but were unsure about who came first. But today's Democratic party, they said, had strayed so far from their beliefs that they can no longer vote Democratic. . . .

That is unfortunate because our nation needs two parties that believe in America as a great country, even if each has a different strategy for making it better. Two parties are needed so that a healthy balance can become at risk in any society if there is only one perspective. Yet, until the rank-and-file Democrats start choosing leaders who represent America's values and genuinely support American troops, I fear they may continue to be a party that even die-hard Democrats from the Greatest Generation will find themselves unable to support.

As far as the situation in Iraq is concerned, suffice it to say that things are going much better over there than is being reported, and I am confident that the voter participation in the upcoming constitutional referendum and in December's elections will confirm that.

The anti-Iraqi forces seem to win the battle for daily headlines, but we win on the big events–because, as on January 30th, the victory was so big as to be undeniable. More important that scoring PR points, though, is the fact that life of the average Iraqi is improving and the legitimacy of the new government is growing.

The phrase that stuck out for me: "Our nation needs two parties that believe in America as a great country." I think Galston and Kamarck would agree. I certainly do.

click to enlarge

History News Network writes today about the miracle that is unfolding before our eyes--and no one is covering it. Be sure and follow the links:

WE ARE WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR IN IRAQ
That is the irrefutable message of Bernard's Haykel's op ed in today's NYT, yes, the same NYT which Ed Koch so correctly takes to task for denigrating the war on terror. Haykel writes:

The simple fact is that many jihadis believe the war in Iraq is not going well. Too many Muslims are being killed. Images of that slaughter, conveyed by satellite television and the Internet throughout the Muslim world, are eroding global support for the jihadi cause. There are strong indications from jihadi Web sites and online journals, confirmed by conversations I have had while doing research among Salafis, or scriptural literalists, that the suicide attacks are turning many Muslims against the jihadis altogether.

Do finish reading the descriptive part of this article along with Sunni Sheikhs criticizm of Zarqawi's Declaration of War Against the Shi'ites. It proves what my guts have been telling me all along. The vast majority of Muslims and even Islamists recoil from the daily pictures of Sunni mass murder of Shia in Iraq. Even Al Qaeda's number two understands as much and "in a letter made public last week, Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cautioned Mr. Zarqawi against particularly gruesome executions and attacks on Iraqi civilians for fear of their negative impact on the global jihadi cause." It also encouraged Sunni leaders to cut a deal about the constitution. Why do you think Nazi sympathizers try to deny the Holocaust? Is it because they are proud of it?

Blowing up Westerners may seem like romantic justice to ideological radicals. Blowing up hapless fellow Muslims less so. In other words, the Islamists may have to give up on Iraq and permit an establishment of a democratic form of government there which would accelerate significantly the reform process already underway in the Greater Middle East.

Nor would it be easy for the Islamists to intensify their campaign in the West without causing major difficulties to their Diaspora which includes their own leadership. The home grown London bombing began to put an end to their cherished safe haven of Londonistan. The rest of the West is going to follow suit even more vigorously after the next bombing.

In other words, we are continuing to win ugly the war on terror and we are doing so in Iraq provided we do not listen to Haykel's plea and ease the pressure on the Jihadists in the West. Giving the enemy time to reassess and come up with new, improved strategies are not in out interest and, certainly, not in the interest of the innocents who will be blown up while Islamists do so. On the contrary, it is time to ratchet up the pressure and, finally, exploit success in the manner we failed to do immediately following the overthrow of Saddam.

Two posts from Michelle Malkin today highlight an unnerving number of coincidences around the bombs turning up in the past two weeks on college campuses--and she wonders aloud why all of the weird incidents involving students and bombing and stolen airplanes in the last two weeks are not getting ANY news coverage. And I'd say she has a very good point. First there was this post about a fellow with an Islamic-sounding name committing hari kari in San Diego--as police were about to discover a hidden chemical labaratory:

Bunch of readers and bloggers are sending word of this weird story:

A man who fatally shot himself in his University City condominium during a standoff with San Diego police was identified Saturday as a 29-year-old student.

An autopsy is scheduled tomorrow on the body of Khaled Yasufi, medical examiner Investigator Sal Rodriguez said.

Police were sent to the 8700 block of Costa Verde Boulevard after someone reported a strong odor coming from a condo about 1 p.m. Friday, SDPD Sgt. Jim Schorr said.

A man in the condo told officers everything was fine and shut the door, Schorr said. Within a couple of minutes, a gunshot was heard, prompting police to clear the building, Schorr said.

Police eventually sent in a camera-equipped robot, which transmitted images of a body in the unit. When officers made entry after a standoff of about six hours, a chemical lab was found in the bathroom of the condo, police said.

Smash asks: What's going on?

Maybe CBS News will look into it.

Eric at Classical Values has an excellent related post: "Official rules of disengagement?"

See also The Jawa Report for thoughts on coverage and non-coverage of the Oklahoma bomber incident.

Then Malkin points to the incidence of a missing jet airplane turning up outside Atlanta--at right about the same time that bombs are found at Georgia Tech:

I'm hearing from many Atlanta-area readers in the wake of the Georgia Tech explosive device discoveries. Some are chalking up the incident as a run-of-the-mill prank. Could very well be.

In a post-9/11 world, though, such incidents can no longer be taken lightly. The local cops were right not to rule out the worst possibilities. A couple of readers point to Georgia Tech's central role as an information/computing hub for counterterrorism/first responder research as reason the campus might be targeted by non-pranksters.

In the meantime, there's far more troublesome weirdness in Gwinnett County. Several readers point to this story of a stolen plane that mysteriously appeared at Briscoe Field (via WXIA-TV):

A stolen airplane mysteriously showed up at Briscoe Field in Lawrenceville this past weekend, but no one knows where it came from or how it got there.
Investigators know someone piloted the plane, owned by St. Augustine, Fla.-based Pinnacle Aviation from there to Gwinnett County, but they say they have no idea as to who.
Police say the 1995 Cessna Citation arrived at Briscoe Field sometime between 9 p.m. Saturday and 6:30 a.m. Sunday.

Briscoe Field, Laura Mansfield points out, is the airport where "two of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, trained for their terrorist mission" and also where this former fugitive illegal alien pilot trained.

Ok. How does a $7 million charter jet just disappear from Florida and mysteriously appear in Atlanta without anyone finding out until after the plane has landed and the pilot(s) disappeared?

More details from the Gwinnett Daily Post:

The flight crew responsible for the plane was on a chartered flight to St. Augustine. Crew members discovered the jet was missing when they went to check on it Monday morning, said Sgt. D. Mattox of the Gwinnett County Police Department.

A check of Gwinnett airport records revealed that the jet landed here between 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 6:30 a.m. Sunday, Mattox said. Whoever stole the jet didn’t file a flight plan, which authorities said is somewhat unusual for that size of aircraft.

The jet suffered damage to the front edge of one wing, but it was not disabled. Police believe the suspect is an experienced pilot who has flown through Gwinnett in the past. Briscoe Field is the third-busiest airport in Georgia.“It had to be somebody that knew or had experience with this type of aircraft,” Mattox said. “You can’t just walk over from one of these smaller planes and fly this.”

Mattox said planes are easy to steal if you know how to fly them, because they usually don’t require a key to start the engines.

Homeland security? What homeland security?

Let's hope there's a non-terrorism-related explanation for this. Which would make it just slightly less discomfiting.

***
Photo Dude adds perspective to the Georgia Tech story and is also bothered by the stolen jet timeline.

Where in the hell is the media???

Tom DeLay's attorney Dick DeGuerin has 12 questions for Ronnie Earle and has issued a subpoena for information related to Earle's mad scramble to "fix" his flawed indictment with three different Grand Jury panels. It could be that the answers to the questions might indeed get Earle into some very very hot water. From Power Line:

Tom DeLay's office has forwarded a copy of the letter attorney Dick DeGuerin sent to prosecutor Ronnie Earle today in connection with the Travis County criminal proceedings involving Delay. The letter formulates 12 questions regarding "the five days of panic" between September 28 and October 3, the relevance of which is explained below. Here is the text of the letter minus DeGuerin's questions for Earle:

This letter is intended as a courtesy to give you fair notice that I have requested subpoenas for you, Rosemary Lehmberg and Rick Reed seeking testimony concerning the events that occurred during the five day period from September 29 to October 3, 2005. The subpoenas seek all documents, notes, telephone records, and other relevant materials that you or your staff may have in your possession relating to the events that transpired during that period.

I am determined to put of record the steps taken by you and your staff to obtain a replacement indictment against my client, Tom DeLay during the five day period mentioned above. The first indictment for "conspiracy to violate the Texas Election Code," charged a crime that did not exist in Texas law. I have filed a motion to dismiss the later indictment on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct and with those subpoenas seek evidence in support of that motion. I will soon file additional motions.

In the meantime, however, it would expedite our inquiry if you would agree to an immediate deposition to answer the questions set out below, and, given the highly public nature of this matter, I believe it would be in the interest of justice.

Since it appears you have already violated the grand jury secrecy laws (by discussing pending grand jury matters with citizens who were no longer serving as grand jurors and by encouraging form Grand Jury Foreman William Gibson to speak to the press) your answers to questions about those conversations are not protected. Foreman William Gibson's extensive public discussion of the case, which he says you approved, has already revealed information about Grand Jurydeliberations. The media has reported several conversations with grand jurors on these matters; thus you should not hide behind the grand jury secrecy law.

***

If you did nothing improper you should not be concerned about answering these questions. I urge you and your staff to cooperate in my effort to quickly and fairly reconstruct the events of the five day period. Eventually, all the information will come out. It always does. In such cases it is always better for public officials to voluntarily disclose, and do it quickly, rather than to be forced to do so by a court of law.

I trust you are aware of the provisions of TEx. CRIM. PROC. CODE ANN. art. 20.02(d) that permit release of grand jury information upon the showing of a particularized need. This letter is attached as an exhibit to our Motion for Disclosure of Grand Jury Information pursuant to Art. 20.02 of the Code of Criminal Procedure...

I also remind you and your staff to preserve all documents and avoid any conversations among yourselves or with the other potential witnesses that might interfere with our quest for the truth. Needless to say, our allegation of prosecutorial misconduct concerns due process and fairness for the accused. I can think of no particularized need that is of more importance in our system of criminal justice. As indicated in the text of the letter, DeGuerin has now filed a motion to quash the original conspiracy indictment on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. He has also served a subpoena for documents relevant to the issue of prosecutorial misconduct. The AP story covering today's developments is here. Stay tuned.

JOHN adds: Ronnie Earle is a bully who now finds himself in a fair fight. It's fun to watch. From the moment Earle procured the first indictment of Tom DeLay, DeLay's lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, has had him on the defensive. It looks to me as though Earle is now hanging on by his fingernails.

The cover of the current issue of Newsweek headlines an article about purported corruption in the Republican Party, with photos of DeLay and Bill Frist. If, as I expect, the two phony indictments of DeLay are dismissed, it will be interesting to see whether Newsweek puts a smiling Tom DeLay on its cover, with an article about the Majority Leader's vindication.

UPDATE: The AP link above is to a story in the UK Guardian stating the following:

Lawyers for indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on Tuesday subpoenaed the prosecuting Texas district attorney in an effort to show he acted improperly with grand jurors.

The subpoena for Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, filed in Austin, asked that the prosecutor and two of his assistants appear in court to explain their conduct.

The lawyers previously had filed a motion asking for dismissal of the conspiracy and money-laundering charges against DeLay, who stepped aside as House majority leader because of the indictment.

Dick DeGuerin, DeLay's attorney, also asked that grand jurors be released from their secrecy oath so they could answer questions about the prosecutor's conduct.

DeGuerin wants Earle to answer 12 questions about conversations he had with grand jurors, including whether the prosecutor became angry when a grand jury decided against an indictment of DeLay and why the decision was not publicly released.

He also wants to know the details of Earle's conversation with William Gibson, foreman of a grand jury that indicted DeLay on conspiracy charges and whose term has since ended.

``If you did nothing improper, you should not be concerned about answering these questions,'' DeGuerin said in his letter to Earle.

Earle, leading a Texas campaign finance investigation that indicted DeLay and two political associates, went to three grand juries. He presented evidence on DeLay's alleged role in funneling corporate money to Texas legislative candidates in violation of state law.

The first grand jury indicted DeLay on conspiracy charges, the second failed to indict and the third indicted him on an allegation of money laundering. DeLay has said he is innocent of wrongdoing.

DeLay has accused Earle - a Democrat - of pursuing the case against him for political reasons. Earle has denied any political motives.

In a motion filed last week, the defense team said that from Sept. 29 through Oct. 3, Earle and his staff ``unlawfully participated in grand jury deliberations and attempted to browbeat and coerce'' the grand jury that refused to indict DeLay.

The motion said Earle then attempted to cover up and delay public disclosure of the refusal, and also ``incited'' the foreman of the first grand jury to violate grand jury secrecy by talking publicly about the case - in an effort to influence grand jurors still sitting.

The lawyers said Earle then spoke about the case with members of the first grand jury, whose work was finished, to get their opinion of what they might have done if they had known their conspiracy indictment was flawed - as defense attorneys alleged.

Earle then submitted the grand jury opinions to the third grand jury to persuade it to hand down the money laundering indictment, the defense team contended.

The indictments against DeLay triggered a House Republican rule that forced him to step aside - at least temporarily - from his post as majority leader.
Both indictments of DeLay focused on an alleged scheme to move money around and conceal the use of corporate contributions to support Texas Republican legislative candidates. State law prohibits use of corporate donations to support or oppose state candidates, allowing the money to go only for administrative expenses.

DeGuerin is asking for all documents, notes, telephone records and other relevant materials from Earle's staff.

``I am determined to put on record the steps taken by you and your staff to obtain a replacement indictment against my client, Tom DeLay,'' DeGuerin said in a letter to the prosecutor.

It only took CBS over a WEEK to get to this one. But therein lies the ultimate power of the blogs and why the blogosphere has become the "big media" of the future. We are like the ultra-quick Texas "D": we get there first.

(ps - Contrats to the Horns. Could this finally be their time in the sun?)

Day by Day by Chris Muir (click to enlarge)

George Will is usually opinionated, but reserved, and it is not often that I disagree with what he writes or says. Ann Coulter--well, she is entertaining in a Bill Maher kind of way and I agree with her often too. But I am in full agreement with James Lewis on this one. I think these people are more concerned for their own "image" than they are about the Republican party. It is time for them to put others ahead of themselves. For they are undermining the very cause that they purport. And what is wrong:

The conservative punditocracy is spittin' mad at the President for nominating Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. I've never seen anything like it --- rioting pundits! Ranting constitutionalists! All the big names, it seems, are agin' Ms. Miers in a unified towering rage. We've learned to expect this sort of outburst from Ted Kennedy and Moveon.org, but not the level-headed thinkers of the Right.

In fact, what's really going on may resemble the rantings of the Left. It has the same quality of narcissistic entitlement. We know that Ted Kennedy always felt entitled to be President, and is still enraged at his own failure every time he denounces George W. Bush. We know Moveon.org believes with passionate intensity that it is the vanguard of the working class, or the feminist movement, or the gay rights coalition, or some other self-satisfied group of narcissists who know with all the certainty of divine revelation that they are the answer to all our problems. It is disappointing, to say the least, to see the conservative elite reacting in the same overwrought way to its sense of lost power in the Harriet Miers case.

The elite of conservative opinion feels entitled to control President Bush's Supreme Court nominations. In their minds they own the short list of candidates, because they have worked and slaved and argued for a true conservative jurisprudence for three decades. Well, bless them for their dedication to a good cause. But who elected them? Last time I looked, the Constitution gives the power of nomination to Presidents, with "advice and consent" to the Senate. None of the pundits have won an election.

In fact, every single conservative commentator owes his or her success to somebody's intuitive judgment. George Will owes his influence not just to his talent and insight, formidable as they are. He owes his job to Katharine Graham, or whoever else it was at the Washington Post that made the decision to hire and keep him. And their decision was outstanding, even though they could not predict the future George Will any more than we can predict the future John Roberts or Harriet Miers.

How do I know this? Having sat on my share of graduate admissions committees, I know darned well that no one can predict, based on GRE scores, recommendations, essays, or any other known bit of information, who will succeed in graduate school and who will not. That question has been studied for a century since Alfred Binet created the first IQ test, and we still don't know how to do it. Even less can we predict who will make a wonderful scholar after graduate school, or who will make a great lawyer or judge. This is a simple statistical fact: At the upper end of the distribution there are no provable differences between talented people.

If we can't do that in the case of admissions to competitive graduateschools, how likely is it that we can do it at the Supreme Court level,several career leaps beyond any graduate school? Maybe John Roberts is one nose ahead of Harriet Miers in the statistical horse race. I'll bet that on any objective measure of intelligence or achievement the difference is statistically close to zero.

What we do know is that lifelong habits and beliefs predict future actions. Harriet Miers directed the reviews of all of George W. Bush's judicial appointments. If we want to guess at the future, we cannot do better than to look at all those appointments, and ask, "What kind of woman would vet so many judges with a consistent judicial philosophy and habit of mind? How likely is that to shape her view of future Supreme Court cases?"

I'm sorry to say that my heroes, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and my heroines like Ann Coulter are now committing exactly the same rationalistic fallacy for which they justly criticize the Left. They believe they know the answer, when in fact they have merely fallen in love with their own intellectual image.

On the heels of his new book--which puts the crosshairs of blame directly on the Clinton Administration for accepting "donations" from the rulers of Saudi Arabia in exchange for keeping the FBI out of the investigation of the murder of American servicemen in the Khobar Towers bombing--Louis Freeh, former Director of the FBI during the Clinton years levels some serious charges at the ex-President (post from Atlas Shruggs--How the Left Destroys the Nation):

Must see interview on 60 minutes, Mike Wallace and Louis Freeh.........rips the mask off the Clinton years. Video here or DOWNLOAD and view video here.

“The problem was with Bill Clinton, the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction. His closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out.”

Freeh says he was preoccupied for eight years with multiple investigations, including Whitewater, Jennifer Flowers and the Monica Lewinsky affair.

He found it deeply awkward and frustrating to be constantly investigating his boss and says it became ‘theater of the absurd’ when special prosecutor Ken Starr asked him to get a DNA sample from the president to compare with that notorious stain on Lewinsky’s dress.

Freeh says the entire scenario of getting a blood sample from the president was like a bad movie.

“Well, we went over to the White House. We did it very carefully, very confidentially,” remembers Freeh. The president was attending a scheduled dinner and pretended he had to go to the bathroom. Instead, Clinton went to a room where the FBI had people waiting to take his blood.

Freeh thought Clinton disgraced the presidency; Clinton felt Freeh was out to get him, and that Freeh was an insufferable Boy Scout.

As FBI director, Freeh operated strictly by the book and annoyed the president in his first week on the job when he returned his White House pass after learning the president was under investigation for Whitewater.

“The implications of a White House pass would mean I could go in and out of the building any time I wanted without really being recorded as a visitor,” explains Freeh, adding “I wanted all my visits to be official. When I sent the pass back with a note, I had no idea it would antagonize the president. I found out years later that it did.”

We were told that relations between the two men had deteriorated so badly, that former Chief of Staff John Podesta says Clinton always referred to the FBI director as ‘Effing’ Freeh.

“Well you know, I don’t know how they referred to me and I really didn’t care. My role and my obligation was to conduct criminal investigations. He, unfortunately for the country and unfortunately for him, happened to be the subject of that investigation,” says Freeh.

Freeh says he stayed on longer as FBI director because he didn’t want to give Clinton a chance to name his successor. “I was concerned about who he would put in there as FBI director because he had expressed antipathy for the FBI, for the director. I was going to stay there and make sure that he couldn’t replace me.”

Freeh had another reason for wanting to outlast Clinton. It was the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, where 19 U.S. servicemen died and more than 370 were wounded.

President Clinton had sent the FBI to investigate and promised Americans that those responsible would pay. “The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Let me say it again: we will pursue this. America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished,” the president said.

But Freeh says the President failed to keep his promise.

The FBI wanted access to the suspects the Saudis had arrested but then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar said the only way to get access to prisoners would be if the president personally asked the crown prince for access.

Freeh says Clinton did not help him. He writes in his book:

“Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudi’s reluctance to cooperate, and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.”
“That’s a fact that I’m reporting,” says Freeh.

It’s a strong charge. And 60 Minutes wanted Mr. Clinton’s side of all this. He declined to talk to 60 Minutes.

There are two fronts in the war against Islamist jihadists. The front lines are in Iraq. But equally important to the war effort are the battles being waged here at home. The goal of our enemies in the war on our shores is to eviscerate the American soul--to make the average American ashamed of his or her own country. To so devalue being American that a patriot is in outcast is his or her own country. And defeating this enemy on the home front is every bit as important to the ultimate victory in the war for our civilizations as are the actions of our brave men and women in far away places like Fallujah and Tikrit and Baghdad. Victor Davis Hanson makes this picture even clearer in an excellent essay entitled "The Trenches of the Culture Wars":

Welcome to the trenches of the culture wars, where academic notions of political correctness, multiculturalism and cultural relativism meet the brawling American street.

— New York’s governor, George Pataki, just nixed the idea of an International Freedom Center to be located next to the proposed new World Trade Center and its own 9/11 memorial. The center’s overseers — architects, academics and corporate elites — felt that by also focusing on the horrors of slavery, segregation and genocide, they could use the shrine of Sept. 11 to further a more universal agenda to support the oppressed.

Most of the families of the 9/11 victims, along with police and firefighters, begged to differ. So they organized to “take back the memorial.” They feel that there are better places for political lessons than Ground Zero, where their family members and friends were incinerated by fascistic al-Qaida terrorists.

— The current Hollywood hit “Flightplan” has incensed airline flight attendants and officers, many of whom are boycotting the movie. The film portrays some of them as rude and dense, and others as playing around, while criminals divert their airplane under their noses. Two of the plotters are, in fact, a female flight attendant and an air marshal!

The obvious touchstone for the movie is 9/11, a mass murder in which airline employees did all they could to stop one of the four hijacked planes from crashing into the U.S. Capitol. Some had their throats slits by murderous terrorists from the Middle East — the birthplace of airplane hijacking in the 1970s. But Hollywood reversed historical reality, making the flight staff in the film either clueless or culpable as innocent Middle Easterners on board are unfairly put under suspicion.

— Recently, a federal judge granted an American Civil Liberties Union motion to release most of the remaining photographs and videotapes from Abu Ghraib. The ACLU’s lawyers argued, and the judge concurred, that a free society like our own must air all its dirty laundry.

Soldiers, on the other hand, responded that, in this war, more lurid photos beamed worldwide without context will only help the killers. Those in harm’s way fighting the terrorists will find it even harder to win the hearts and minds of civilian populations.

— Then there is the question of balance. There have been multiple investigations of Abu Ghraib, several publicized trials and numerous convictions, and plenty of exposes by journalists — far more coverage than what is devoted to the beheading and torture of American captives or the daily murdering by terrorists.

On the one side of all these controversies seem to be architects, curators, academics, CEOs, journalists, script writers, actors, lawyers and judges. Their utopian views of what their fellow Americans should see, think and feel are at odds with those of grieving families, police, firefighters, flight attendants and soldiers.

Those on museum boards, in Hollywood studios and in the courtroom seek to fashion the intellectual landscape in which those who put out fires, arrest criminals, serve food and shoot terrorists are to operate. The latter fight back. They try to match elite influence with public outrage, and so appeal to their elected officials and unions, and to talk shows, the blogosphere and cable news.

The issue is not just one of class division, but rather also concerns theory when it translates into actual practice. A privileged group speculates about abstract issues, and then others must concretely bear the consequences of this contemplation.

The families of the 9/11 victims, with good cause, fear they will hear from tourists to a new WTC with an adjacent International Freedom Center that we deserved Sept. 11 due to America’s treatment of Native Americans or African-Americans a century past. Airline attendants suspect that their future passengers may become a little more skeptical of their efforts to enforce FAA protocols, while troops in Iraq who dodge bullets know it could now be more difficult to convince civilians to provide intelligence.

In the worldview of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a backer of the International Freedom Center, or the ACLU, to be good, America must be nearly perfect — broadcasting past sins even at Ground Zero, where its citizens were murdered by fascists, or replaying ad nauseam to the world the crimes of a few rogue soldiers of a million-man military.

But others in heavy boots and coats who carry hoses upstairs or soldiers sweltering in body armor in the desert seem happy enough to do the best they can. Or in the words of one of the organizers who stopped the Freedom Center, “We want a place that projects the goodness of people.”

The irony of it all?

It used to be that liberalism was also populist. Yet lately the Left has often adopted a condescending attitude toward the so-called people, trivializing the folks in the trenches in assorted uniforms and camouflage who supposedly need guidance and moral enlightenment by their elite betters.

As Michelle Malkin reports, the Islamists appear to have targeted the second college campus in two weeks (and possibly the third; another device was found at UCLA)--it appears that we are have been getting very lucky...stay tuned:

Checking it out (from WXIA-TV in Atlanta via Drudge):

Three explosive devices found in a courtyard between two Georgia Tech dormitories on the East Campus Monday morning were part of a "terrorist act," an Atlanta police official said.

One of the devices exploded, injuring the custodian who found them inside a plastic bag. Two others were detonated by a bomb squad.

The custodian suffered ringing to the ears and was treated at a local hospital. The events led to a temporary evacuation Monday morning.

"It is a terrorist act at this point and depending on the outcome of the investigation it potentially could become a federal violation as well," said Major C.W. Moss of the Atlanta Police Department.

The custodian found the three devices about 9 a.m. in a plastic-type garbage bag, Moss said. When he picked up the bag, one exploded, as it was designed to do when handled. The explosives were made up of chemicals placed inside plastic bottles and could have seriously injured someone, officials said. Numerous agencies were on the Georgia Tech campus to search for suspects...

Recall that in the Oklahoma University bomb incident, per Mark Tapscott's reporting, that Joel Hinrichs' car contained "13 plastic bottles" in the trunk.
Cam Edwards is still wondering why the Hinrichs search warrant was sealed by the DOJ. We'll see how the feds handle this Georgia Tech incident, given that the Atlanta police have already declared it a terrorist act.

***A few more details via AP:
About 100 students were evacuated from Cloudman and Glenn residence halls after the janitor found the suspicious bottle at 8:45 a.m., said spokeswoman Amelia Gambino...Police still are working to determine what chemicals were in the bottles. The incident prompted authorities to contact the Georgia Department of Homeland Security.

Here's a campus map. Cloudman and Glenn residence halls are buildings 13 and 16.

***145pm EDT update. Scouring the Atlanta Journal Constitution site, which didn't have any news of the Georgia Tech bomb discoveries, but did have a brief report on a separate incident involving a "suspicious device" found earlier this morning at a different location:

A busy Gwinnett County intersection was shut down for about two hours Monday morning after a suspicious device was found in a parking lot, police said.
The "very suspicious device, about the size of a mini-flashlight," was discovered shortly before 9 a.m. in the parking lot of the QT gas station at Satellite Boulevard and Merchant's Way near Gwinnett Place Mall, said Gwinnett police spokesman Darren Moloney.

The gas station, as well as a nearby restaurant and strip shopping center, were evacuated, and police closed off the intersection.

Moloney said the device was rendered safe and removed by the arson squad, and the roads and businesses were reopened by 11:15 a.m.

No further information was released about the device.

Maybe coincidence. Maybe not.
***
Stephen Bainbridge notes than an explosive device was discovered on the UCLA campus last Friday. He adds:

Let's hope it's just an odd coincidence, but, when coupled with the recent University of Oklahoma bombing, one also hopes that there will be a complete investigation.

Ditto that.

Day by Day by Chris Muir (click to enlarge)

Count Mark Steyn (and me) in with the "let's support Harriet" crowd. I think there is ample evidence there that Miers is no David Souter. Would I have picked someone else? Yes, I thought Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen deserved it, especially with what they had to put up with to get onto the Court of Appeals. But, as I have said before--I trust this President. And it is good to see someone I respect as much as Mark Steyn saying the same thing:

For what it's worth, my sense is that Harriet Miers will be, case by case, a more reliable vote against leftist judicial activism than her mercurial predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor. Why do I say this? Well, she's a strong supporter of the right to bear arms. The great Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel says you have to go back to Louis Brandeis 90 years ago to find a Supreme Court justice whose pre-nomination writings extol gun rights as fulsomely as Miers. According to an old boyfriend, Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, she packs heat -- a Smith & Wesson .45 -- which I can say with certainty the other lady justice, the far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never has. She also's personally very opposed to abortion.

In other words, what seems to be emerging is a woman Bush responds to as a fellow cultural conservative and evangelical conservative (she's a born-again Christian), rather than as a judicial conservative -- a label Judge Bork dislikes, preferring quite correctly that we distinguish judges not as conservative or liberal but as either originalists or judicial activists. I find it hard to discuss Miers seriously in those terms, but on balance she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons. She's thus another representative of Bush and Karl Rove's belief in incrementalism: that the Republican majority can be made a permanent feature of the landscape if you build it one small brick at a time. Miers is, at best, such a brick, at a time when conservatives were hoping Bush would drop a huge granite block on the court. But, given that she started out as a Democrat and has been on the receiving end of the partisan attacks on the administration for five years, she seems less likely than any detached effete legal scholar to be prone to the remorseless drift to the left that happens to Republican Supreme Court nominees.

You won't see this story in the "Blame Bush" MSM. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Acting New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Thursday that as many as 40 officers from the department's 3rd District, including the commanding captain, are "under scrutiny" for possibly bolting the city in the clutch and heading to Baton Rouge in Cadillacs from a New Orleans dealership."

It is a subject that is under review," Riley said, stopping short of saying he has launched a formal investigation. Asked if Capt. Donald Paisant, who replaced Capt. James Scott as the 3rd District commander, was a part of that review, Riley said, "Certainly the commander of that district is under scrutiny."

Last week, after reports surfaced that the Louisiana attorney general's office was investigating the alleged theft of about 200 cars from Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet, possibly by NOPD officers, Riley revealed his own internal investigations. All told, Riley said 12 officers were under investigation for looting or failing to combat looting in their presence, four officers had been suspended and one had been reassigned.

He acknowledged then that an unspecified number of officers were being looked at for their alleged involvement in the Sewell incident, which took place in the first four days after Katrina ripped through town.

With a hat tip to Little Green Footballs, the eye-opening site at TheReligionOfPeace.com has a devastating tabular accounting of all Islamist murders committed SINCE 9/11. Page down once the page loads; and get ready not to be surprised....

Will be little to no blogging tonight and tomorrow due to a big event in any Discerning Texan's household--the Texas-Oklahoma game. We'll see you on Sunday, and in the meantime: Hook 'em Horns!

Harriet Miers received a very influential endorsement from the the author of the conservative "Contract With America" himself, former Speaker and possible Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich:

Conservatives should feel confident with the selection of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court for a simple reason: George W. Bush selected her.

Much has been made in the press about conservative unhappiness with the White House on issues such as spending and immigration and most recently with the selection of Ms. Miers. However, while these tensions are not insignificant, the president has stayed remarkably true to conservative principles on every major decision he has made since winning the Republican primary.

He unabashedly ran as a conservative in the election and even selected Dick Cheney - a man of impeccable conservative credentials - as his vice president. Once elected, he assembled a Cabinet of conservatives, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and Condoleezza Rice. He proceeded to cut taxes as promised, and did it again in 2002.

After 9/11, President Bush resisted the prevailing wisdom in Washington that terrorism should be dealt with as a crime, instead treating the attacks as acts of war that required a military response. And after the 2004 election, Mr. Bush put himself front and center as an impassioned advocate of transforming Social Security into a system of personal accounts.

In both of his presidential campaigns, Mr. Bush stated his intention to nominate judges who "will faithfully interpret the law and not legislate from the bench." And his appointments to the federal courts - including the hotly contested appeals court selections - fit that description.

Similarly, Mr. Bush's pick of John G. Roberts Jr. to be chief justice reflected this philosophy. During his confirmation hearings, the nominee repeatedly stressed his view that a federal judge is not a legislator and therefore must carry out his or her responsibilities with a clear understanding of judicial limitations.

At the nomination news conference, Ms. Miers' first remarks were reassuring in this regard: "It is the responsibility of every generation to be true to the founders' vision of the proper role of the courts and our society." She promised to "strictly apply the laws and the Constitution."

Conservatives should also be confident that Ms. Miers has the tenacity to remain committed to these principles while under the pressures and scrutiny of the nation's highest court. As the leader of the Texas Bar Association, she proved to be a very effective leader opposing the American Bar Association's official stance in support of abortion, including active support of taxpayer-funded abortions.

Despite divisions within the Texas bar about the practice of abortion, Ms. Miers was able to get unanimous support from all members in her campaign to urge the ABA to move away from a position of outright support.

"If we were going to take a position on this divisive issue, the members should have been able to vote," she argued.

Ms. Miers' dedication in that struggle shows that she is deeply committed to the conservative ideal that the people themselves, not an unelected elite, should be able to decide about deeply held values. She was unwilling to allow an umbrella organization to dictate to its chapters what position it must take on controversial issues. It was this type of toughness and commitment to core principles that led Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to refer to Ms. Miers as "a pit bull in size-six shoes."

In addition, Ms. Miers brings an important type of diversity to the bench: diversity of experience. Like Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Ms. Miers brings experience to the court from outside the judicial chamber. As a former commercial litigator, she will offer a real-world perspective on business cases that has been missing for years on the court.

And perhaps most important, Mr. Bush has worked closely with Ms. Miers every day since his days as governor. The president knows her and knows what kind of justice she will make. Ms. Miers was instrumental in the selection of conservative federal appeals court candidates such as Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown - appointments that have greatly distressed liberals. She also was involved in the selection of Chief Justice Roberts and was part of the team that coached him through the confirmation process.

Mr. Bush governs with a very straightforward methodology: He says what he's going to do. He does it. And then he does it again. This has been true with taxes, the war on terror and now with judges.

In both presidential campaigns, the president repeatedly promised to appoint justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court.

With the president's knowledge of Ms. Miers, his stated commitment to rebalancing the judiciary and his conservative record - not only in appointing judges but on big decisions in general - conservatives should feel comfortable in taking the president at his word that he has just now delivered another nominee in that tradition.

BREAKING NEWS:

Congressman Tom DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, has filed a motion in a Travis County court today, accusing DA Ronnie Earle of "prosecutorial misconduct". This motion, if carried, could result in punitive action against the overzealous Earle, and could also result in dismissal of Earle's strawman of a "case" against DeLay. Here is the AP story, via Breitbart.com and Drudge:

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's legal team asked Friday for his Texas indictments to be set aside, accusing the prosecutor of misconduct.

DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, alleged in a court motion that Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle unlawfully participated in grand jury deliberations when he went to a second grand jury last week to seek a second indictment against the congressman.

DeGuerin also alleged that Earle "attempted to browbeat and coerce" the second grand jury to change its decision not to indict DeLay so there would be no public record of a rejection.

DeGuerin said the indictment forced DeLay to step down from his job as majority leader, the No. 2 position in the U.S. House, for a crime that did not exist in Texas law.

DeLay was indicted Sept. 28 on a charge of conspiracy as a grand jury's term was expiring. But questions were raised about whether the law on which the indictment was based was in effect at the time of the alleged conspiracy.

Earle went to a second grand jury still in session, but that grand jury declined to vote an indictment. On Monday, a third grand jury indicted DeLay on money laundering charges.

Earle's office did not immediately comment.

[...]

Two people familiar with the proceedings of the grand jury that "no- billed" DeLay said that Earle tried to persuade the grand jurors that DeLay tacitly approved the scheme and that the prosecutor became angry when they decided against an indictment. The people familiar with the proceeding insisted on anonymity because of grand jury secrecy.

As details continue to come out about Ronnie Earle's laughable indictment against Majority Leader DeLay, the mainstream media suddenly is nowhere to be found. Fortunatlely the truth cannot be supressed. Generation Why has an excellent acccount of the events that occurred between Earle the Zealot and three different grand juries between Friday and Monday of last week:

Finally after years of prosecuting and six months of grand jury review, Ronnie Earle thought he had his man. But almost as soon as the ink on the indictment dried, it was promptly laughed about by those in the legal profession.

Even the foreman of that grand jury admitted his mind was made up before any evidence was presented.

So Ronnie Earle tried a do-over on Friday. This time, according to a written statement Earle released yesterday, he tried presenting a new money-laundering charge. This seventh grand jury to review the case promptly No-Billed it.

So he tried again. This time he had to wait over the weekend for a new grand jury to be empaneled on Monday. Within hours of the jury empanelment on Monday, he had gotten his new indictment. He claims the new charges were based on "learn[ing] of new evidence over the weekend". But these were the same charges he took to a new grand jury on FRIDAY. This is so transparent it's laughable.

What's worse, Earle's staff admits to calling the members of grand jury #6 to ask them about strategy for going after Delay on new charges. It's not often you see prosecutors asking jury members for help prosecuting their case.

So here we have a known political hack prosecuting a highly effective politician for years. He finally gets an indictment on the brink of the deadline to do so and it promptly gets ridiculed for its obvious ridiculousness. The indictment doesn't really allege any crimes and the charges it does allege are based on a law enacted a year after the alleged acts took place. So the prosecutor shops the case around some more and promptly gets rejected by yet another grand jury. He rushes to the courthouse on Monday morning and tries again. This time he gets a new indictment on charges based on "evidence learned over the weekend", yet he had already presented such charges to a 7th grand jury before the weekend.

This case would be laughable if it wasn't obvious the primary objective had already been achieved - that of removing the second most powerful Republican in Washington from his leadership position in Congress.

It now appears that Earle will have to do some serious scrambling--not only to keep the indictment of DeLay in effect, but also to defend himself against the charges of his abusing the Texas Criminal Courts system, and punitive action that could occur under such circumstances. It would not surprise me to see this case either dismissed very soon--or at the very least the unethical conduct of Earle will come under a lot more legal, local, and even national scrutiny.

Just saw a Fox News interview with Heritage Foundation member and fellow blogger Mark Tapscott--to whom who we have linked to in our coverage this week--to the effect that a bombing that was presented to the public as a mere suicide at the University of Oklahoma last Saturday night instead appears to have been a bungled part of a larger Islamist-related plot.

It is heartening to see that at least one major network--arguably the "conscience" of the MSM-- is choosing to explore this story in more detailon this story (Fox); but where is everyone else? Is an attempted terrorist attack on American soil no longer as newsworthy as Nancy Pelosi's daily slander against a principled President? Or is the media afraid that such a revelation might increase support for fighting the terrorists in their backyard rather than ours.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has other details that have come out today:

WND's Jayna Davis and Jon Dougherty report on the Justice Department's move to seal the search warrant in the Hinrichs case:

The warrant used to execute a search of Oklahoma University bomber Joel "Henry" Hinrichs III's apartment, where an undetermined amount of explosives were found, has been sealed by a federal court at the request of the Justice Department.

Hinrichs blew himself up yards from Oklahoma Memorial Stadium Saturday night while tens of thousands of fans watched an OU-Kansas State football game.

Bob Troester, first assistance U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, said the department requested the warrant be sealed, but declined to elaborate when asked why it was necessary to do so given previous media reports that a depressed Hinrichs acted alone and on a whim.

"You can draw whatever assumption you like," he said. "We don't comment on any sealed indictments."

Troester also said he could not divulge details about what items were found inside Hinrichs' home, and he could not say if or when the warrant would be unsealed at some point in the future.

The attorney did confirm the incident was still "currently being investigated," but again declined to provide any specifics.

If this was merely a troubled student committing suicide (who had WAY more explosives found in his apartment than would be needed to do so, why would he try to buy a large quantity of ammonium nitrate (the material used in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing). What of the reports that Hinrich was a Muslim convert, whose roommates were from Pakistan. And if this was only a suicide as is the "illusion" currently being perpetuated for the public, why in the world would the DOJ seal the search warrant??

I do not think they are going to be able to keep the lid on this for long. It is understandable if secrecy is needed to possibly apprehend individuals who otherwise might feel they are "in the clear". But the fact that an attempted bombing in the US, by who may well have been a "home-grown" Jihadist, is big news--and if we are to win this war on Islamist terror, the country has a right to know that the murderers are still trying to attack us.

Captain Ed reports (via a Washington Post story) that Coalition authorities have discovered documents in Iraq that point at long term strategic plans of Al Qaeda:

An important document from al-Qaeda's Number Two leader and strategic thinker, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Iraqi minion and terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has given the coalition important insight into the planning and long-range thinking of the terrorists, in and out of Iraq. The letter makes clear that AQ wants much more than the Americans to leave Iraq, and that they see our withdrawal as a necessary condition for their ultimate success, not an end in itself:

The United States has obtained a letter from Osama bin Laden's deputy to the leader of Iraq's insurgency that outlines a long-term strategic vision for a global jihad, with the next phase of the war to be taken into Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, according to U.S. officials. ...

The letter of instructions and requests outlines a four-stage plan, according to officials: First, expel American forces from Iraq. Second, establish a caliphate over as much of Iraq as possible. Third, extend the jihad to neighboring countries, with specific reference to Egypt and the Levant -- a term that describes Syria and Lebanon. And finally, war against Israel. ...

But bin Laden's deputy also purportedly makes clear that the war would not end with an American withdrawal and that anything other than religious rule in Iraq would be dangerous.

"And it is that the Mujaheddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal. We will return to having the secularists and traitors holding sway over us," the letter reportedly says.

The Washington Post reports more on the scolding that Zawahiri gives Zarqawi for the brutality of his attacks, especially beheading hostages and releasing the videos. Robin Wright hears from her Coalition sources that this message did not get through to Zarqawi, evidenced by his use of that tactic even as recently as the last couple of weeks. Zawahiri doesn't want further alienation from the Muslims in the area, who so far appear to approve more of a democracy than a re-established Caliphate.

It also asks for money for other AQ operations. Given the stretched nature of the Zarqawi network in Iraq and the difficulties they have in fighting the Americans and growing Iraqi forces, that request appears rather extraordinary. Has the Coalition been able to damage AQ's operational capability through the little-publicized financial war George Bush pledged to wage? Given the central role Zarqawi's success would have to play in any overall execution of Zawahiri's plan, one would expect AQ to support Zarqawi and not the other way around.

This does show that President Bush had it right in his speech yesterday; AQ and its associates don't fight to push the Americans from Southwest Asia. They terrorize people in the hope of re-establishing a dictatorial and absolute Caliph that will run all of the former Arabic lands, including Israel. Pulling our troops out will only bring them that much closer to success.

Hugh Hewitt quotes the immortal Benjamin Disraeli in yet another good argument why the right needs to back off its vocal opposition to the Miers nomination:

I submit Disraeli for the defense:

Gentlemen, I am a party man. I believe that, without party, parliamentary government is impossible. I look upon parliamentary government as the noblest government in the world, and certainly the one most suited to England. But without the discipline of political connection, animated by the principle of private honor, I feel certain that a popular assembly would sink before the power or the corruption of a minister. Yet, gentlemen, I am not blind to the faults of party government. It has one great defect. Party has a tendency to warp the intelligence, and there is no minister, however resolved he may be in treating a great public question, who does not find some difficulty in emancipating himself from the traditionary prejudice on which he has long acted. It is, therefore, a great merit in our Constitution, that before a minister introduces a measure to Parliament, he must submit it to an intelligence superior to all party, and entirely free from influences of that character.

There are many persuasive reasons beyond "Party" to support Harriet Miers, but "Party" ought to have at least tempered some of the most strident critics of the nominee. Nothing lasting will be accomplished with SCOTUS unless the GOP remains in power beyond 2008 and 2012. If the current seven veterans linger, and the GOP is crippled because of intra-party quarrels, how will President Hillary's and Vice President Obama's justices rule?

There is a great deal to be said for "Party," including the willingness to accept that the good must not be the enemy of the perfect, and that at least 25% of the time you are going to be disappointed with the Party's decision. There are occasions when you have to leave, and Churchill the younger lived that principle. There are even times when you ought to resign leadership because of principle --Lord Randolph Churchill taught that. (Of course you might end up as Lord Randolph, without the syphilis, that is.) But there is honor in heading for the exits when you can't abide the leadership's consistent pattern of decision making on the most important issues.

The nomination to SCOTUS of a ten-year veteran of George W. Bush's team --a team that has been rock-solid on judicial appointments-- is not one of those occasions. No Senator of the Party has stepped down from a Committee Chairmanship. No one has "crossed the aisle." In fact, as far as I can tell, no one has refused a White House invitation. Thousands of words have been written, but no one has said "This far and no farther," which makes me think that opposition to Miers is not that deep.

The debate ought rather to be an occasion for asking "What does the president know that I do not know?" and even, "Has the president earned my trust in this area?" It is easy for some to dismiss Cheney, Rove, Card, Dobson, Colson, Sekulow and many others, but what is the argument for not delaying the assault on Miers until the Administration had enough time to get her writings and bio out? That they didn't think you important enough to brief before the announcement? What is the argument for trashing as "not impressive" her many accomplishments which have many millions of Americans of similar resumes wondering, "What am I, a potted plant?"? The series of posts she has held --Texas Bar president, Dallas City Council, and especially managing partner of a large law firm-- all speak to her abilities which disappointment seems to forbid critics from recognizing. There are many hundreds of thousands of GOP faithful who have held similar posts. How wonderful to telegraph to them that their efforts are fine, for a certain class of people.

UPDATE: Thomas Lifson's argument the other day in favor of Miers is the best I have yet seen:

President Bush is a politician trained in strategic thinking at Harvard Business School, and schooled in tactics by experience and advice, including the experience and advice of his father, whose most lasting political mistake was the nomination of David Souter. The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court shows that he has learned his lessons well. Regrettably, a large contingent of conservative commentators does not yet grasp the strategy and tactics at work in this excellent nomination.

There is a doom-and-gloom element on the Right which is just waiting to be betrayed, convinced that their hardy band of true believers will lose by treachery those victories to which justice entitles them. They are stuck in the decades-long tragic phase of conservative politics, when country club Republicans inevitably sold out the faith in order to gain acceptability in the Beltway media and social circuit. Many on the right already are upset with the President already over his deficit spending, and his continued attempts to elevate the tone of politics in Washington in the face of ongoing verbal abuse by Democrats and their media allies. They misinterpret his missing verbal combativeness as weakness.

There is also a palpable hunger for a struggle to the death with hated and verbally facile liberals like Senator Chuck Schumer. Having seen that a brilliant conservative legal thinker with impeccable elite credentials can humble the most officious voices of the Judiciary Committee, they demand a replay. Thus we hear conservatives sniffing that a Southern Methodist University legal education is just too non-Ivy League, adopting a characteristic trope of blue state elitists. We hear conservatives bemoaning a lack of judicial experience, and not a single law review article in the last decade as evidence of a second rate mind.

These critics are playing the Democrats’ game. The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars of an era. Like any small group, it is better off being able to draw on abilities of more than one type of personality. The Houston lawyer who blogs under the name of Beldar wisely points out that practicing high level law in the real world and rising to co-managing partner of a major law firm not only demonstrates a proficient mind, it provides a necessary and valuable perspective for a Supreme Court Justice, one which has sorely been lacking.

Ms. Miers has actually managed a business, a substantial one with hundreds of employees, and has had to meet a payroll and conform to tax, affirmative acttion, and other regulatory demands of the state. She has also been highly active in a White House during wartime, when national security considerations have been a matter of life and death. When the Supreme Court deliberates in private, I think most conservatives would agree that having such a perspective at hand is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Other conservatives are dismayed that the President is playing politics (!), rather than simply choosing the “best” candidate. But the President understands that confirmation is nothing but a political game, ever since Robert Bork, truly one of the finest legal minds of his era, was demonized and defeated.

The President’s smashing victory in obtaining 78 votes for the confirmation of John Roberts did not confirm these conservative critics in their understanding of the President’s formidable abilities as a nominator of Justices. Au contraire, this taste of Democrat defeat whetted their blood lust for confirmation hearing combat between the likes of a Michael Luttig or a Janice Rogers Brown and the Judiciary Committee Democrats. Possibly their own experience of debating emotive liberals over-identifies them with verbal combat as political effectiveness.

In part, I think these conservatives have unwittingly adopted the Democrats’ playbook, seeing bombast and ‘gotcha’ verbal games as the essence of political combat. Victory for them is seeing the enemy bloodied and humiliated. They mistake the momentary thrill of triumph in combate, however evanescent, for lasting victory where it counts: a Supreme Court comprised of Justices who will assemble majorities for decisions reflecting the original intent of the Founders.

Rather than extend any benefit of the doubt to the President’s White House lawyer and counselor, some take her lack of a paper trail and a history of vocal judicial conservatism as a sign that she may be an incipient Souter. They implicitly believe that the President is not adhering to his promise of nominating Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. The obvious differences between Souter, a man personally unknown to Bush 41, and Miers, a woman who has known Bush 43 for decades, and who has served as his close daily advisor for years, are so striking as to make this level of distrust rather startling. Having seen the Souter debacle unfold before his very eyes, the President is the last man on earth to recapitulate it.

He anticipates and is defusing the extremely well-financed opposition which Democrat interest groups will use against any nominee. Yes, he is playing politics by nominating a female. A defeated nominee does him and the future of American jurisprudence no favors. By presenting a female nominee, he kicks a leg out from under the stool on which the feminist left sits. Not just a female, but a career woman, one who has not raised children, not married a male, and has a number of “firsts” to her credit as a pioneer of women's achievement in Texas law. Let the feminists try to demonize her.

If they do so, almost inevitably, they will seize on her religious beliefs and practice. Some on the left will not be able to restrain their scorn for an evangelical Christian Sunday school teacher from Dallas, and this will hurt them. They will impose a religious test against a member of a group accounting of a third of the voting base. Speculation on her being a lesbian has already started. "She sure seems like a big ol' Texas lesbian to me," as one of the Kos Kidz put it.

They are going to make themselves look very ugly.

The President must also prepare himself for a possible third nominee to the Court. With the oldest Justice 85 years old, and the vagaries of mortality for all of us being what they are, it is quite possible that a third (or even fourth) opportunity to staff the Court might come into play. Defusing, demoralizing and discrediting the reflexive opposition groups in the Democrats’ base is an important goal for the President, and for his possible Republican successors in office.

Then there is the small matter of actually influencing Supreme Court decision-making.

This president understands small group dynamics in a way that few if any of his predecessors ever have. Perhaps this is because he was educated at Harvard Business School in a legendary course then-called Human Behavior in Organizations. The Olympian Cass Gilbert-designed temple/courtroom/offices of the Supreme Court obscure the fact that it is a small group, subject to very human considerations in its operations. Switching two out of nine members in a small group has the potential to entirely alter the way it operates. Because so much of managerial work consists of getting groups of people to work effectively, Harvard Business School lavishes an extraordinary amount of attention on the subject.

One of the lessons the President learned at Harvard was the way in which members of small groups assume different roles in their operation, each of which separate roles can influence the overall function. The new Chief Justice is a man of unquestioned brilliance, as well as cordial disposition. He will be able to lead the other Justices through his intellect and knowledge of the law. Having ensured that the Court’s formal leader meets the traditional and obvious qualities of a Justice, and is a man who indeed embodies the norms all Justices feel they must follow, there is room for attending to other important roles in group process.

According to a source in her Dallas church quoted by Marvin Olasky, Harriet Miers is someone who taught children in Sunday School, made coffee, brought donuts: "Nothing she's asked to do in church is beneath her."

As the court’s new junior member, the 60 year old lady Harriet Miers will finally give a break to Stephen Breyer, who has been relegated to closing and opening the door of the conference room, and fetching beverages for his more senior Justices. Her ability to do this type of work with no resentment, no discomfort, and no regrets will at the least endear her to the others. It will also confirm her as the person who cheerfully keeps the group on an even keel, more comfortable than otherwise might be the case with a level of emotional solidarity.

But there is much more to it than group solidarity, important though that ineffable spiritual qualty may be. Ms. Miers embodies the work ethic as few married people ever could. She reportedly often shows up for work at the White House at 5 AM, and doesn’t leave until 9 or 10 PM. I have no doubt that she will continue her extraordinary dedication to work once confirmed to the Court. She will not only win the admiration of those Justices who work shorter hours, she will undoubtedly be appreciated by the law clerks who endure similar hours, working on the research and writing for the Justices. These same law clerks interact with their bosses in private, and their influence intellectual and emotional may be more profound than some Justices might like to admit.

The members of the Supreme Court all see themselves as serving the public and the law to the best of their abilities. Their self-regard depends on their belief in the righteousness and fairness of their deliberations. They must listen to the arguments of the other Justices. But their susceptibility to viewpoints they had not yet considered is matter of both an intellectual and emotional character. Open-mindedness usually requires an unfreezing of deeply and emotionally-held convictions.

Having proven herself capable of charming the likes of Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, is there much room for doubt that Harriet Miers is capable of opening up opponents emotionally to hear and actually consider as potentially worthwhile the views of those they might presume to be their enemies?

George Bush has already succeeded in having confirmed a spectacularly-qualified intellectual leader of the Court in Chief Justice Roberts. If conservatives don’t sabotage his choice, Harriet Miers could make an enormous contribution toward building Court majorities for interpretations of the Constitution faithful to the actual wording of the document.

Matthew Heidt aka Froggy, a former Navy SEAL, discusses the McCain "reasonable treatment" amendment that he tacked on to the Senate's GWOT appropriations bill, and why it is a bad idea. Since the House passed this bill without the amendment, let us hope that the Senate-House conference on this bill will result in the amendment being dropped. For if the amendment is left in, it might be you or me who pay for this interference in Executive Branch matters with our very lives. Bold emphases are mine:

“My benevolence is upset and so is my pride, that’s why I took my b*tch for a ride…”, the poetry of one Anfernee Jefferson from the movie High School High starring John Lovitz. Suffice it to say that Mr. Jefferson would not be counted amongst the greats, but that excerpt sums up nicely the attitude of a bipartisan group of bedwetting Senators working to codify techniques and procedures available to military interrogators to use against captured enemy combatants. In a 90-10 vote, Senators passed this amendment in an ill advised and hubristic attempt to tell the President that anything more than pattycake with hardcore terrorists is somehow beneath the United States and should be outlawed.

The amendment was sponsored by Senator McCain, who is perhaps the only person in the Senate with a history of being the object of actual torture in a real POW camp in North Vietnam. While Senator McCain most certainly has every right to extrapolate his experiences and attempt to apply them to his job as a legislator, he is forgetting a crucial difference between his POW experience and that of detainees in the GWOT. McCain was a legal combatant and Vietnam was a signatory of the Geneva Convention making the retributive acts perpetrated upon him objectively illegal and demonstrably in conflict with a signed treaty. AQ terrorists are not legal combatants under any conceivable definition, and AQ is not a party to the Geneva Conventions. The organization’s stated goals and tactics are in direct opposition to the spirit and letter of the Geneva Convention and therefore its members are entitled to treatment commensurate with their own actions.

During Special Report with Brit Hume, Mort Kondrake noted “waterboarding” as a tactic that should be disallowed and would be ostensibly made off limits if the Senate got its way. Waterboarding or Chinese water torture (which is what we called it for some reason) consists of taking a piece of cloth material that can be breathed through and holding it across the subject’s face while pouring water from a canteen, hose, etc. over the target’s mouth and nose. The water doesn’t really go down the target’s throat so much as it changes the characteristics of the cloth such that it is no longer able to allow air to pass through. It is this change in conditions that produces the extreme anxiety in the target. One moment they can breathe through the cloth and they feel somewhat relieved although they are subject to the control of some angry looking SEALs. The next moment, when the water makes the cloth impermeable, that relief is rapidly destroyed and the target feels completely helpless, terrified, and VERY willing to talk. This sh*t works, and it only takes one canteen to get the job done. It is completely safe physiologically, but it produces immediate and positive results.

One of my platoons conducted a Maritime Interdiction Operation (MIO) in which we stealthily boarded a target vessel and quickly moved to and secured the bridge. We were looking for a terrorist hiding somewhere aboard, and my platoon commander asked the captain where he might be found. The captain, feeling his oats apparently, demurred and brusquely refused to divulge this information. In response, my platoon commander socked him in the face, and with the assistance of other guys held him down, pulled his t-shirt over his face and poured maybe a half a canteen of water over his mouth. After making noises reminiscent of a nubile young co-ed laying eyes on Jason Vorhees for the first time, he couldn’t tell us fast enough where this idiot was hiding. By the way, this was a training operation and the captain was a US Naval officer aboard his own vessel. This was many, many moons ago and the statute of limitations (if there is a UCMJ violation here) has run, and besides, this captain didn’t tell anyone about it. In fact, after the op was called, we debriefed him and he praised us for our effectiveness and skill!

The lesson being that if you need to know something RIGHT NOW, there are ways to do it without ripping off fingernails or taking a ball peen hammer to somebody’s nut sac. When detainees are dying or being severely injured in US custody it should be vigorously investigated, but that is a very small minority of cases. US forces should be authorized and encouraged to take captured terrorists WAY out of their comfort zones when necessary. In fact, these kinds of techniques should be formally taught to SOF and Infantry units conducting Direct Action. What that captain came to understand was that by the time we were aboard his vessel, he and his crew did not have a chance to stop us. He persisted in his intransigence thinking incorrectly that we were not willing to do what it took to get the information that he had. Our actions merely confirmed to him that not only were we viciously professional, but we were mercilessly serious about the mission we were sent to accomplish.

The importance of this perception amongst our enemies cannot be understated. It is this perception and not the verbal games played by professional interrogators (of which I am one) that ultimately break the will of a captured enemy combatant which results in timely and accurate intel. In my opinion, the Bill of Rights does not apply outside the United States in general nor should it apply to those deemed illegal combatants specifically no matter what their geographic location is.

The Senate would be advised to not meddle in the President’s prerogatives as the Commander in Chief in the GWOT not only to prevent the usurpation of powers specifically enumerated to the Executive Branch, but also because the President is the only person with the balls to wage it. Producing an “off limits” techniques list for internet publication seems to be an obvious error, but as usual, the Senate is “stuck on stupid”. Those profound words from Anfernee Jefferson demonstrate a body full of itself, high on its own PR appropriate morality trying to score some points with liberal elites against the President by kicking him when he is down. But as his speech today brought into sharp relief, this President gets it and knows how to take the fight to the enemy. I don't appreciate 90 blowhard Senators trying to take ME for a ride and make a b*tch out of our war effort against a bunch of evil murders just so they can pretend to be benevolent with power they don't have.

Tell it, brother!

It is time for us to get off the "bench" and into the game

It took President Bush a little over four years to finally say what everyone knows to be the case, but would never say. Our war is not a war against "terror", which is an emotion, but against Islamist terror, which is a noun--and more importantly it defines the enemy for who and what it is. Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping, a man whose son who recently left to join our noble and critical cause in Iraq, has a lengthy but superb analysis of the President's speech today. Needless to say, Sensing speaks for many of us when he states that this was a speech that has been overdue. Bold emphases are mine.:

As I posted earlier today, I think this morning’s speech by President Bush was one of the finest (probably the finest) he has given on this subject, and really on any subject. It was lucid, well organized and detailed. Herewith my commentary on the first half or so. Second half to follow.

After introductory pleasantries, noting the recent fourth anniversay of the 9/11 attacks, the president got right to the point:

We will confront this mortal danger to all humanity. We will not tire, or rest, until the war on terror is won.

This is not the same as saying, “stay the course.” This is an affirmation that the United States will not be “the weak horse” that Osama bin Laden promised Muslims it would be. War is, as has been endlessly noted, a contest of wills. The president affirmed that our will is and will be unbroken. The rest of the speech he explained why it must be so.

[Al Qaeda’s] ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus—and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.

A bit of a mixed message here, I’m afraid. On the one hand it reiterates, as needs be done, that the war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam. On the other, denial of religious freedom for non-Muslims is not a radical idea in Islam, it’s a solidly central tenet. The “Muslims from other traditions” means the Shiites, especially of Iraq, who are being targeted by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). But the vituperation of Shia Muslims, who account for about eight percent of all Muslims, is again a central tenet of millions of Sunnis, especially Ara