Lady Thompson in horse trough

In 1999, the (no longer young) members of the Rylstone Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire posed for a nude calendar as a fund-raising device to benefit a leukemia charity, producing an unexpected hit which raised more than a £1 million. The calendar was talked about around the world, and subsequently became the basis for a feature film, Calendar Girls (2003), starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Not altogether surprisingly, nude calendars, featuring femmes d’un certain âge, their assets artistically concealed, have become a charity staple in Britain and elsewhere.

The Telegraph reports that the latest beneficiary is to be the hound pack of Britain’s Oakley Hunt, whose country lies in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

They must basically like doing it, and are just looking for excuses, don’t you think?

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports the Judge Advocate General Corps’ military lawyers have grown far more numerous and influential, and that far too many of its members are on the wrong side:

Big brawl going on in the Pentagon between the JAGs (Judge Advocate General, the lawyers) and the operators (combat and intelligence types.) JAGs have become more important, decade by decade, over the last sixty years. This has happened in parallel with the growing influence of lawyers in civilian society. However, lawyers doing what they do has brought them into conflict with the operators. For example, the war on terror has created a murky legal area for captured terrorists. Many JAGs want to give the captured terrorists most of the privileges of civilians, or even soldiers, accused of criminal acts. This creates a conflict with the combat and intel officers, who do not want to give the terrorists access to the identity of informants within terrorist organizations, or other information they have on the terrorists, and how they got it. In the civilian world, the prosecution has to let the defense know all this stuff. That’s why there’s a witness protection program, or cases where the government will not prosecute in order to preserve valuable intel. But such procedures don’t work when most of your witnesses are living in a combat zone, and many of your intelligence collection techniques will be worthless if the enemy knows what they are, putting your own troops at greater risk.

On top of all this, the size of the JAG force has grown some ten percent since the end of the Cold War, while everyone else has shrunk by about a third. As a result, the senior JAGs in each service wants to be three star generals, instead of the current two star.

Now the JAGs are aware of the circumstances under which U.S. troops are fighting, and the importance of OPSEC (Operational Security, keeping info about your activities from the enemy). Even so, many JAGs seem to lose their perspective, and advocate strongly for giving the terrorists the information. Operators believe the JAGs are grandstanding, especially by saying one thing to uniformed people, and something else to the media and Congress. The situation has divided the JAG community as well, and it’s getting ugly.

The Iranians are supplying insurgents in Iraq with much more deadly ordinance, some of Chinese origin, General John Abizaid told reporters today.

The Turkish Press reports:

A new armor-busting rocket-propelled grenade believed to be of Iranian origin has shown up in Iraq in what may be “a hint about things to come,” the commander of US forces in the Middle East said Tuesday.

General John Abizaid said the weapon, an RPG-29, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

“The first time we saw it was not in Iraq. We saw it in Lebanon. So to me it indicates, number one, an Iranian connection,” he told defense reporters here.

“It`s hard to say in our part of the world that we operate in as to whether or not people have given us a hint about things to come,” he said.

He said only a single RPG-29 has turned up in Iraq so far, and it was unclear how it was smuggled into the country.

But he said it was the latest in a number of new and more sophisticated weapons that appear to be moving onto the region`s battlefields from Iran.

He said longer-range Chinese rockets that looked new also have been found in Iraq.

Abizaid said he believed the Chinese rockets ca
me from Iran although they may have been taken from the arms inventories of the former Iraqi regime and cleaned up.

“It looked brand new to us,” he said.

The new weapons are in addition to more sophisticated roadside bombs with explosively shaped charges that the US military has long charged are being manufactured in Iran and brought into the country by Iran`s Revolutionary Guards-Quds Force.

Andre Pachter does not believe these are old inventory weapons:

Military experts tell China Confidential that Iran supplied the rockets and that they are in fact brand new, Chinese-made weapons.
Energy-starved China and oil-rich, Islamist Iran have deepening economic, political, and military ties. Beijing, as we have reported for months, is firmly committed to blocking meaningful sanctions against America’s arch-enemy. And Chinese arms have been instrumental in Iran’s military modernization.

Abizaid also said that a new, armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenade has turned up in Iraq. The weapon, which was first used in Lebanon by Iran’s Shiite proxy, Hezbollah, in its month-long war with Israel, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

Citing links between Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq, the US commander said the RPG could be “a hint of things to come.”

An important skill for Gen Y software implementers, one gathers.

video

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has got to be an idiot. AP reports that Graham said:

If it‘s seen that our country is trying to redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of the CIA, why can‘t every other country redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of their secret police?” Graham asked.

The entire point of the Geneva Conventions is reciprocity. A signatory only promises to take prisoners, treat them decently, not use germ warfare or poison gas, not because they are trying to prove who is more humanitarian than whom, but merely so that their own troops will enjoy the decent treatment and the enemy’s restraint.
But our enemies, in recent years, have rarely been civilized European states, like Germany, who are signatories. Our enemies lately have been terrorists and illegal combatants, who simply torture, murder, and mutilate the remains of any Americans so unfortunate as to fall alive into their hands.

It is the misapplication of the Geneva Convention, and the unwarranted extension of its privileges to latrunculi (pirates and brigands), which jeopardizes US troops, by preventing just punishment for violation of the customs and usages of war. Obviously, the way you protect your own troops is to deny Geneva Convention protections to those who do not live up to its prescriptions, not by giving away Geneva Convention status to to our adversaries, however they choose to behave.

“Oh, I say, old boy, go right ahead and kill every prisoner out of hand. Use poison gas and germ warfare, if you like. Butcher all the non-combatants you please. But we Americans are simply too good, and fine, and pure to stoop to mistreating you. Keep the secret of the location of the diabolical device which will blow up one of our major cities, and kill a hundred thousand Americans. We certainly won’t beat it out of you.”

Nathan Sharansky discusses the current covert form of warfare in the LA Times:

IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin told me a story that I have been unable to get out of my mind. We were meeting in the Kremlin, and I raised the grave danger facing the world from the transfer of missile technology and nuclear material to the Iranians. In Putin’s view, however, the real danger came not from an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile or, for that matter, from the lethal arsenal of any nation-state.

“Imagine a sunny and beautiful day in a suburb of Manhattan,” he said. “An elderly man is tending to the roses in his small garden with his nephew visiting from Europe. Life seems perfectly normal. The following day, the nephew, carrying a suitcase, takes a train to Manhattan. Inside the suitcase is a nuclear bomb.”

The threat, Putin explained to me a year before 9/11, was not from this or that country but from their terrorist proxies — aided and supported quietly by a sovereign state that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty — who will perpetrate their attacks without a return address. This scenario became real when Al Qaeda plotted its 9/11 attacks from within Afghanistan and received support from the Taliban government. Then it happened again this summer, when Iran was allowed to wage a proxy war through Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But this time, the international community’s weak response dealt the global war on terror a severe blow.

Five years ago, after 9/11, such a lack of culpability seemed inconceivable. That was when President Bush abandoned the conventional approach to fighting terror by vowing that the United States would henceforth make no distinction between terrorists and regimes that support them. You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.

The problem is that Bush has not fulfilled that promise.

In the case of Hezbollah, the Palestinians are surrogates for Iran, which is something of a surrogate for China. The US really does not want to confront on the basis of both military and economic consideration.

But, for whom is Al Qaeda a surrogate? It is just not possible for a band of guerillas to wage warfare, to recruit, train, transport, arm, and supply themselves. War is expensive. Al Qaeda’s operations, and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, must be being funded by Islamic sources. It would economically disruptive to go after those sources, but there is no realistic other option. Until all the Near Eastern sources of funding are forced to stop waging proxy way, the war will continue.

——————
Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Canada Free Press has already taken back an earlier story identifying Adnan al-Shukrijumah aka El Shukrijumah as a 1998 Engineer and Physics graduate of McMaster University named Ciro Vitolo.

Hat tip to Riehl World View.

James H. Billington, in the Wall Street Journal, contrasts two famous churches of the Eastern Schism, identifying in the architecture of St. Basil’s, in Moscow (above) the centralizing impulse of the Muscovite despotism, and finding -—by contrast—- in the design of the Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi in Karelia the echo of the very different individualistic culture of Hanseatic Novgorod.

AP confirmed what bloggers learned via tips from military sources last April, AP photographer Bilal Hussein was detained, after being captured by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”…
In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.
The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

No?

Well, how about looking at these photos? or these? AP’s Tom Curley finds nothing inappropriate? Ridiculous. US forces should detain him.

LGF provides a bit more detail on Hussein’s capture.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

The New York Times reports that democrats, relying on polls showing public approval numbers for President Bush dropping, are making opposition to Bush the main focus of their campaigns.

Mr. Bush’s image this fall is being invoked by Democrats as a proxy for Americans who want change in Washington; who oppose the war in Iraq; who think Mr. Bush has not done enough to protect the nation from future terrorist attacks; or who are angry with changes Mr. Bush has pressed in Medicare.

“It’s not just photos,” said John Lapp, who runs the Democratic campaign committee’s independent advertising program. “It’s statements and actions and votes that show a pattern of people being with Bush.”

Steve Murphy, a consultant whose firm made the Iraq advertisement for Ms. Madrid of New Mexico, said: “The war is a dominant issue. For all these Republican candidates who are going through gyrations to distance themselves from Bush — well, if they support Bush on the war, there is nothing more illustrative of the fact that they are in bed with Bush.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat leading his party’s campaign to take back the Senate, said: “In 2004, people were still happy with Bush’s course in Iraq. Now they are not.”

Peggy Noonan, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, explained why Bush-hatred just isn’t enough.

Pundits and historians call Mr. Bush polarizing — and he is, but in some unusual ways. For one thing, he’s not trying to polarize. He is not saying, “My team is for less government, your team is for more — my team, stand with me!”

Mr. Bush has muddied what his team stands for. He has made it all come down to him — not to philosophy but to him and his certitudes.

What is polarizing about him is the response he elicits from Americans just by being himself. They have deep questions about him, even as he is vivid to them.

Americans don’t really know, deep down in their heads, whether this president, in his post-9/11 decisions, is a great man or a catastrophe, a visionary or wholly out of his depth.

What they increasingly sense is that he’s one thing or the other. And this is not a pleasant thing to sense. The stakes are so high. If you woke most Americans up at 3:00 in the morning and said, “Tell me, looking back, what would you have liked in an American president after 9/11?” most of them would answer, “I was just hoping for a good man who did moderately good things.” Who caught Osama, cleaned out Afghanistan, made it proof of the possibility of change and of the price to be paid by those who choose terror as a tactic. Not this historical drama queen, this good witch or bad.

The one thing I think America agrees on is that George Bush and his presidency have been enormously consequential. He has made decisions that will shape the future we’ll inhabit. It’s never “We must do this” with Mr. Bush. It’s always “the concentrated work of generations.” He doesn’t declare, he commits; and when you back him, you’re never making a discrete and specific decision, you’re always making a long-term investment.

This can be exhausting…

With all this polarity, this drama, this added layer Mr. Bush brings to a nation already worn by the daily demands of modern individual life, the political alternative, the Democrats, should roar in six weeks from now, right? And return us to normalcy?

Well, that’s not what I sense.

I like Democrats. I feel sympathy for the hungry and hapless, identify with aspirations, am deeply frustrated with Mr. Bush. More seriously, I believe we are at the start of a struggle for the survival of the West, and I know it is better for our country if both of its two major parties have equal responsibility in that struggle. Beyond that, let’s be frank. Bad days are coming, and we’re all going to have to get through them together, with two parties, arm in arm. It’s a big country.

But I feel the Democrats this year are making a mistake. They think it will be a cakewalk. A war going badly, immigration, high spending, a combination of sentimentality and dimness in foreign affairs — everyone in the world wants to be free, and in exactly the way we define freedom at dinner parties in McLean and Chevy Chase — and conservative thinkers and writers hopping mad and hoping to lose the House.

The Democrats’ mistake — ironically, in a year all about Mr. Bush — is obsessing on Mr. Bush. They’ve been sucker-punched by their own animosity.

“The Democrats now are incapable of answering a question on policy without mentioning Bush six times,” says pollster Kellyanne Conway. “What is your vision on Iraq? ‘Bush lied us into war.’ Health care? ‘Bush hasn’t a clue.’ They’re so obsessed with Bush it impedes them from crafting and communicating a vision all their own.” They heighten Bush by hating him.

One of the oldest clichés in politics is, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” It’s a cliché because it’s true. You have to have belief, and a program. You have to look away from the big foe and focus instead on the world and philosophy and programs you imagine.

Mr. Bush’s White House loves what the Democrats are doing. They want the focus on him. That’s why he’s out there talking, saying Look at me.

Because familiarity doesn’t only breed contempt, it can breed content. Because if you’re going to turn away from him, you’d better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don’t appear to have one.

Which leaves them unlikely to win leadership. And unworthy of it, too.

Ace linked this Israeli Defense Force photo gallery featuring a huge collection of photos of female members of the IDF (goes on for pages). Best argument for a co-ed military I’ve seen so far.

I was obliged to restore the databases to a point a couple of days back. I will have to put two days’ postings back manually. Operations will thereafter, hopefully, return to normal.

Thank you for your patience.

1938 Talbot-Lago T150 C SS Teardrop Coupe

Automobile Magazine picks the 25 most beautiful cars of all time.

And AutoMotoPortal offers a list of 10.
The goute d’eau (drop of water) shaped Talbot Lago coupe, the E-type Jaguar, and (inevitably) the Gull-winged Mercedes-Benz 300SL made both lists.

As of today, blogs which we know of carrying pictures of Adnan Al-Shukri Juma aka El Shukrijumah and other known associates wanted by US authorities, and reporting on the rumored mass terror attack on US cities during the coming month of Ramadan (starts September 24) include:

Pajamas Media

Little Green Footballs

The Jawa Report

Clarity & Resolve

Riehl World View

Ace of Spades HQ

Allahpundit

My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Cop the Truth

Noblesse Oblige

Drop me a line if I overlooked anyone.

Gateway Pundit has located a video of Al Qaeda Second Wave Attack leader Adnan El Shukrijumah teaching an English-as-a-Second-Language class.

Hat tip to Ace.

Islamic editorialist in London threatens war.

Somali cleric calls for Pope’s murder.

Palestinian gunmen fire bomb Christian churches on the West Bank and in Gaza.

They have a interesting way of trying to prove Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologos wrong, don’t they?

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

Christopher Hitchens dissects the facile dismissal of Iraq seeking Niger uranium in the Pouting Spooks’ Senate Intelligence Committee report.

And, on page 54 we read, under the heading “Conclusions”:

Iraq had two contacts with Niger after 1998, but neither involved the purchase of uranium. The purpose of a visit to Niger by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, was to invite the president of Niger to visit Iraq. The other visit involved discussions of a Nigerien oil purchase from Iraq.

Since the report does not trouble to supply any reasoning from the evidence to its conclusions, we are left to infer that there is nothing odd about Saddam Hussein’s envoy (to the Vatican) paying a visit to Niger, and nothing unusual about Niger’s desire to buy (“for cash”) crude oil from a country under international sanctions that is much less close and convenient a source of oil than, say, its neighbors Nigeria and Algeria.

That ambassador to the Vatican, it turns out, was none other than Wissam al-Zahawi. Ambassador Rolf Ekéus, head of the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first Gulf War, tells Hitchens:

When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger, I thought well, then, that’s it. Conclusive.

One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq’s delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions). . . . He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq’s top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues.

Hitchens sums it up.

The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie’s name without ever once mentioning his significant background. It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip. It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger… It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekéus. It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions. It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless.

Journalist and author Oriana Fallaci died yesterday at age 77 of cancer in Florence.

Washington Post

In the aftermath of 9/11, Fallaci wrote two best-selling books, The Rage and the Pride (2001) and The Force of Reason (2004), criticizing Islam in scathing terms.

Attempts were made in 2002 in Switzerland, and more recently in Italy (her pending trial had been postponed to December 18th), to prosecute her on the basis of her writings for such supposed crimes as “inciting racial hatred or discrimination” (Switzerland) and “making defamatory statements about a religion” (Italy).

I think the least we can do is to commemorate her passing by sharing some of her observations and opinions.

Tunku Varadarajan, in today’s Wall Street Journal, recalling just how eloquent she could be on the subject of Islam, quotes from a letter she wrote to him in March.

In the speech I gave at the Italian consulate in New York to accept one of the four golden medals I have received in the last two months, I told that I had drawn a cartoon on the Prophet and his nine wives including the 9 year old one and his sixteen concubines including the she-camel. But I had not published it because I had not been able to draw well the she-camel. (True). The author of the booklet which asks the Moslems to eliminate me in accord with four Suras of the Koran even sued me . . . Meaning now in Italy they even appeal to the Italian law to incriminate an Italian citizen for a ‘vilifying’ cartoon that nobody has seen.

Tunku finds Fallaci a little too high-proof, and remarks:

This is acid, bitter, marvelously funny. Oriana Fallaci was very brave. Perhaps a little too brave. But now is not the time to judge her by proportions.

Mark Steyn, on the other hand, is much more keen.

Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the western world where she is not in legal jeopardy – New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them herself into what she calls “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable. It’s full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both. This section is a lively read in an age when most westerners, consciously or otherwise, adopt the blithe incuriosity of Jimmy Kennedy’s marvelous couplet in his 1950s pop hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”:

Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam — for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.

Moliter ossa cubent. (“May the earth lay lightly on her bones.”)

Ace reports:

Ok, I have a dilemma.
I am pretty sure this guy came [to rent a house].

I was just checking my records and it had to have been [earlier] this year. I remember the home I showed him, a couple leased the home within days of me showing it to this guy.

He had a Mexican Consular ID, no valid TX info. He would not allow me to make a copy of the ID card. I wrote notes on the visitor card when he came in because he refused to fill it out.

I will be looking at my records from earlier this year to see if I can find the info. He measured the distance between the homes – had a “friend” go into the home and yell, to see if it could be heard from outside.

I remember this incident so well, due to the fact that it was one of the strangest things I have ever seen. He did not have a hispanic accent, and certainly did not appear hispanic. [Redacted.] I showed the photo of this guy to [someone else present] a few minutes ago and her reaction was “Holy Shit[]! That is the guy”. The photo that took me so by surprise is the one with the goatee & mustache, which I saw on a different site. Looked just like that guy!

Will let y’all know if anything comes of this!

Hat tip to LGF.

The Telegraph reports that the consequences of the Waziristan surrender by the Musharraf regime is far worse than previously known. Pakistan is releasing thousands of terrorists, including most likely the murderers of Daniel Pearl.

Pakistan’s credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf’s government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries.

Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa’eda or the Taliban over the past four years.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. “We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects,” said a US diplomat in Islamabad. “We are monitoring their response with great concern.”

Bill Roggio counts the cost:

A sample of those released included the following individuals, including the killers of journalist Daniel Pearl:

Ghulam Mustafa: “He was once close to Osama bin Laden, has intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda’s logistics and financing and its nexus with the military in Pakistan.”

Maulana Sufi Mohammad: “Maulana Sufi Mohammad was Faqir Mohammed’s first jihadi mentor who introduced him to militancy in Afghanistan in 1993. Sufi Mohammad was one of the active leaders of Jamat-e-Islami (JI) in the 1980s. He was the principal of the JI madrassa in Tamaergra, a town in the northwestern part of NWFP. He was an instinctive hardliner and in due course developed differences with JI and left them in 1992 to form Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed [TNSM].” Sufi Mohammad organized Pakistanis to fight jihad in Afghanistan and along with the TNSM fought in Kunduz November of 2001.

Mohammad Khaled: A brigade leader who led the Taliban in against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “”It is a difficult time for Islam and Muslims. We are in a test. Everybody should be ready to pass the test – and to sacrifice our lives,” said Mohammad Khaled.

Fazl-e-Raziq: A senior aide to Osama bin Laden, and “an ethnic Pakhtoon resident of Swabi district of the North West Frontier Province.”

Khairullah Kherkhawa: The former Taliban governor of Herat.

Khalid Khawaja: “Khalid Khawaja is a retired squadron leader of the Pakistan Air Force who was an official in Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, in the mid 1980s. After he wrote a critical letter to General Zia ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 till 1988, in which he labeled Zia as hypocrite, he was removed from the ISI and forced to retire from the airforce. He then went straight to Afghanistan in 1987 and fought against the Soviets along side with Osama Bin Laden, developing a relationship of firm friendship and trust. Khalid Khawaja’s name resurfaced when US reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and subsequently killed. Pearl had come to Pakistan and met Khalid Khawaja in order to investigate the jihadi network of revered sufi, Syed Mubarak Ali Gailani.”

Mansour Hasnain: A member of the group that kidnapped and murdered Danny Pearl. He also was “a militant of the Harkat-al-Mujahedin group, is one of those who hijacked an Indian Airlines jet in December 1999 and forced New Delhi to release three militants—including Omar and Azhar.”

Mohammad Hashim Qadeer: “Suspected of being one of [Daniel] Pearl’s actual killers, was arrested in August 2005 and has notable al-Qaida links” and “ties with the banned extremist groups Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen and Jaish-e-Muhammad.”

Mohammad Bashir: Another Pakistani complicit in the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu: Facilitators/couriers, and wives of al-Qaeda members. “Pakistani authorities arrested 23 Arabs, including two children, suspected of links to Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday. All of them sneaked into the country from Afghanistan in recent weeks. The suspects include three women, identified as Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu, who are believed to be relatives of bin Laden. An interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the arrests were made in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan.”

Gul Ahmed Shami & Hamid Noor: Al-Qaeda foot soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. “I want to be the next Osama bin Laden,” said Shami in 2001. “Allah is with us. The Americans have technology but they don’t have the courage to face death, which we do. I will be there until my death if need be. I know I probably won’t come back,” said Hamid.

But how can anyone realistically expect the administration to act decisively, at the cost of facing even more of the wrath of our domestic treasonous clerisy?

A lot of blogs have their origin in other blogs. My understanding is that Gates of Vienna is the progeny of Belmont Club. YARGB is the offspring of Roger L. Simon. This blog is really the offspring of political arguments on my college class listserv (which you can’t get, unless you were in my original college class). I still waste my time arguing over there, and I thought I might import some of my arguments.

A college professor classmate of mine opined today:

Osama is winning. I don’t know how to make it plainer. He’s winning not because there are Democrats in Congress but because the policy executed by the Bush administration has produced adverse results.

I replied indignantly (more or less – some editing is being done for more formal publication):

If one applied the principles of the liberals historically, the USA must have lost every war in history, since any action on our part always angered the enemy and provoked him to resist. Our acting at all always proved a blunder which merely confirmed his worst opinion of us, and inspired new enemies to rally to his side. Every wild Indian, every British redcoat, every Southern rebel, every Philippine Insurrectionary, and every Prussian grenadier we killed always inspired revenge, and caused two more volunteers to join the ranks of our opponents. We repeatedly made the mistake of invading the territories of our enemies, thus inevitably recruiting even more allies to their side. American excesses, like Sullivan’s Raid on the Iroquois homeland, Sherman’s March to Sea, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, always hardened the enemy’s resolve and ensured our inevitable defeat. And that’s why we’re all weaving Iroquois baskets, being ruled by the British Parliament, and lamenting the loss of the Southern Confederacy, while we struggle to learn better Japanese in order to converse with our conquerors.

State Street, Chicago 1949

The great director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) actually started his career as a freelance photographer.

The Chicago Tribune serves up 8 Kubrick photos taken in Chicago in the summer of 1949, which demonstrate that Kubrick could handle lighting and compose a shot. Interesting stuff for the cinéaste.
——————————————————————-
Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Sink those pirates with your cannon.

game

The Telegraph reports:

A British tourist has shocked Australians by twice getting lost in the Outback in the same place, in the same circumstances, in a bungle which nearly cost him his life.

Martin Lake, 50, “the bumbling Brit”, first went missing last week when he strayed from a well-worn path at a historical telegraph station on the outskirts of Alice Springs.

Wearing only shorts and a T-shirt and carrying three litres of water, he spent three days lost in the wilderness, despite being only a few miles from the edge of town.

He made a desperate call to police on his mobile phone, starting a huge search involving officers on foot, three helicopters, Aboriginal trackers and rangers.

When Mr Lake was found in the desert on Sept 5 he was badly dehydrated and so burnt from the 86F (30C) heat that he looked like “a freshly-cooked lobster”.

Police said he was less than three miles from the town and almost within shouting distance of outlying houses.

He was flown to hospital, but not content with having survived one near-death experience, he returned to the area on Friday, apparently to recover belongings. Again he struck out into the desert and became disorientated in a landscape of baking red rock and parched scrub that looks very much the same in every direction.

He made another panicked call to police but was unable to tell them where he was. After a while his phone went dead.

He had, for a second time, broken the cardinal rules of Outback survival — he had no hat or sunscreen, not enough water and had failed to tell anyone where he was going.

“He told me he was somewhere north of Alice Springs and that’s about it,” said Sgt Graeme Farquharson, the search co-ordinator. “He didn’t have a clue where he was.”

Mr Lake, a divorcee and former trainee policeman, from Birkenhead, Merseyside, was found by a helicopter crew on Tuesday after spending another four nights in the bush. Again, he was only three miles from Alice Springs.

Visiting the University of Regensburg, where he used to teach from 1969 to 1977, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in which he reflected on the Christian tradition of rational theology, and the incompatibility of religious coercion with Reason.

The Pope’s quoting of a comment on Islam made by a 14th century Byzantine Emperor has, again, produced the (at-this-point only too familiar) world-wide temper tantrums on the part of the community of turban-wearers.

The BBC reports:

Pakistan summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to express regret over the remarks, as parliament passed a resolution condemning the comments

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood said the remarks “aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world”

In Iraq, the comments were condemned at Friday prayers by followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr

The “hostile” remarks drew a demand for an apology from a top religious official in Turkey

The 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference also said it regretted the Pope’s remarks.

What the Pope actually said was:

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium…

..even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read… of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

In the seventh conversation…the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.”

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

Full Text
—————————————————
Apologize, my eye. What the Pope ought to do is what Pope Urban II did, and call upon the people of the West to defend Civilization against the insolent aggression of Islamic barbarism, instructing them that God wills its defense. Deus vult.

Amer El-Maati

Aliases: Amro Badr Eldin Abou El-Maati, Amro Badr Abouelmaati

DESCRIPTION

Date of Birth Used: May 25, 1963 Hair: Brown
Place of Birth: Kuwait Eyes: Brown
Height: 6’0” Sex: Male
Weight: 209 pounds Complexion: Olive
Remarks: El-Maati may be wearing a full beard and mustache. He requires corrective lenses and may be wearing eyeglasses.

DETAILS

Amer El-Maati is being sought in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States.

SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS

This individual is reportedly associated with Adnan Al-Shukri Juma, El Shukrijumah in the Second Wave Attacks.

article

Graham Allison, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, discusses what is needed to stop a nuclear version of 9/11. Read the whole thing.

On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of New York City’s Times Square. If terrorists detonated a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the blast would kill them all instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire, and fallout in the hours and days thereafter.

The blast would instantly vaporize Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within half a mile of the point of detonation. Buildings three-quarters of a mile from ground zero would be fractured husks.

Lest this seem too hypothetical, recall an actual incident that occurred in New York City one month to the day after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A CIA agent, code-named Dragonfire, reported that Al Qaeda had acquired a live nuclear weapon produced by the former Soviet Union and had successfully smuggled it into New York City. A top-secret Nuclear Emergency Support Team was dispatched to the city. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these nuclear ninjas searched for the 10-kiloton bomb whose blast could have obliterated a significant portion of Manhattan. Fortunately, Dragonfire’s report turned out to be a false alarm. But the central takeaway from the Dragonfire case is this: The U.S. government had no grounds in science or in logic to dismiss the warning.

A nuclear terrorist attack on the United States would have catastrophic consequences even for other countries. After the nuclear detonation, the immediate reaction would be to block all entry points to prevent another bomb from reaching its target, resulting in the disruption of the global “just-in-time” flow of goods and raw materials. Vital markets for international products would disappear, and closely linked financial markets would crash. Researchers at RAND, a U.S.-government-funded think tank, estimated that a nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach in California would cause immediate indirect costs worldwide of more than $3 trillion and that shutting down U.S. ports would cut world trade by 10 percent.

The negative economic repercussions would reverberate well beyond the developed world. As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned, “Were a nuclear terrorist attack to occur, it would cause not only widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty.”

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

John Bolton is nowhere nearly as conservative as I am, poor guy!

But, he’s done the best job of any UN ambassador I can remember, the liberals don’t like him, and he is a classmate of mine, so the least the Blogosphere can do, it seems to me, is to help secure his confirmation.

Blogging for Bolton web-site. Sign up today. If I can support a guy that moderate and good-natured, you can too.

Niall Ferguson, in Foreign Policy, playing with the ever-popular Intelligentsia meme of the United States as Empire, does put his finger on the very key factor in modern wars of advanced and civilized Western nations against more primitive Third World opponents: the comparative value of lives risked in combat. Ferguson quotes aptly from Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditty Arithmetic on the Frontier. (I’m posting the whole poem. His selection appears in bold.):

A GREAT and glorious thing it is

To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this, Ere reckoned fit to face the foe—

The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: “All flesh is grass.”
Three hundred pounds per annum spent

On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent Comprised in “villanous saltpetre!”
And after—ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ’ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station—

A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,

No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp

Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,

The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam, To slay Afridis where they run.
The “captives of our bow and spear”
Are cheap—alas! as we are dear.

It is a serious point. Today, Western military forces can inflict fifty times their own losses, and the much smaller Western casualty rate may still be seen by the public at home as so costly as to necessitate withdrawal.

—————————
Hat tip to Karen Myers and Charles Bork.

The Anchoress is moved to justified indignation by the discreditable behavior of certain people at the Toronto Film Festival, celebrating and applauding a film made entirely for the purpose of dramatizing the assassination of President Bush.

(Ths kind of fantasy) makes me realize that this Bush hate on the left is not about Bush. It’s not about Iraq, it’s not about the war on terror, it’s not about tax cuts…it’s not about Bush. It’s about the foot-stomping tantrums of the perpetually adolescent who – even before the 2000 elections – could not bear even the idea of their side being out of power in congress and out of the White House. It has never been about Bush. They’d hate any Republican in that White House just as roundly and completely, on any pretext.

All this time, we thought it might be about something. Now, we realize, all this hate is about nothing but them, and what they want and their childish angst. It is about the delay to the coup they had in place and their frustrations at having to wait and in some cases, rebuild.

I’m beginning to think they deserve the world they want. But I surely don’t, and neither do my kids. Neither does the rest of the world.

David Warren, of the Ottawa Citizen, notes that the hatred which fuels militant Islamic acts of terrorism often has little to do with Islam really, and less with real grievances. Its real animating engine is the ideology of resentment created within the West itself, and promulgated unceasingly by the Western intelligentsia.

Mr Blair’s answer to a question about British home-grown terrorists donged the bell:

“It’s not necessarily what have we done wrong, because part of the problem of what you have in Western opinion is that Western opinion always wants to believe that it’s our fault and these people want to have a sort of, you know, grievance culture that they visit upon us and say it’s our fault. And so we have a young British-born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally.”..

We have a huge fifth column in the West, and it is not the Muslim immigrants. They become radicalized only because our “victim culture” encourages them to nurture their grievances. Yet most, despite temptation, remain good, decent people, doing their share of the West’s work.

Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year—that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist “victim culture” itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends.

WANTED
Adnan G. El Shukrijumah

Up to $5 Million Reward

Date of birth: August 4, 1975
Place of birth: Saudi Arabia
Height: 5’3” to 5’7”
Weight: Unknown
Build: Medium to Heavy
Hair: Black
Eyes: Black
Complexion: Olive
Sex: Male

Characteristics: El Shukrijumah occasionally wears a beard. El Shukrijumah carries a Guyanese passport, but may attempt to enter the U.S. with a Saudi, Canadian, or Trinidadian passport.
Aliases: Adnan G. El Shukri Jumah; Abu Arif; Ja’far Al-Tayar; Jaffar Al-Tayyar; Jafar Tayar; Jaafar Al-Tayyar

The validity of the Pakistani journalist’s warning of an imminent attack is highly uncertain, but the existence of an Al Qaeda dirty bomb plot with this man as its leader is true.

The FBI has been hunting for him since November of 2003, perhaps it would help if bloggers published these photos, and suggested that their readers keep an eye out for this man.

Now that Richard Armitage has been exposed by the Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Bob Novak finally tells his version of how he learned about Valerie Plame, and contradicts Richard Armitage.

I want to set the record straight based on firsthand knowledge.

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he ‘‘thought’’ might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

And Joe Wilson and Valerie have changed their minds, and are adding Richard Armitage as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Socialism is the philosophy of sissies, and now that everyone (including Socialists) recognizes that Socialism applied economically is a disaster, the energies of ameliorists tend to find outlet, not in the levelling of wealth, but in the elimination of any imaginable form of risk.

The New York Times reports that even Bill Callaghan, head of Britain’s Health and Safety Commission

believes that many of the decisions made in the name of health and safety in Britain are indeed asinine. These include schools requiring children to wear protective goggles when playing with nuts that have fallen from trees; schools banning bandages because of fears of latex allergies; and village fairs forbidding people to sell homemade cakes in case they contain contaminated eggs.

But the commission is blamed for them anyway. It set up a myth-busting page on its Web site explaining, for instance, that it was not involved in the decision last April to cancel a St. George’s Day breakfast in Wiltshire, after local officials ruled that the volunteer cooks were not formally trained in egg preparation…

Children who leave their coats and bags in special containers on field trips to the Science Museum in London, for example, are instructed by posted signs not to put anything on the lids, on account of Health and Safety rules. People buying cups of tea on British trains are ordered to carry them in paper bags for safety reasons — whether they want to or not.

Sailing down the placid Thames a year ago as part of the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the actor playing Lord Nelson was required to accessorize his vintage admiral’s outfit with a contemporary life preserver, which tended to spoil the effect.

Nor are the Health and Safety Commission offices, at the end of Southwark Bridge in East London, immune to dispensing their own cautionary advice. Along with security passes, visitors are issued photocopied pamphlets offering instructions on how to identify the sound of the fire alarm (a “continuous ringing of bells”); where to go if a fire does break out (convene at the location marked on the map on the back); and what to do if they feel sick or fall down (there is a first-aid room on the first floor; all injuries, “no matter how minor,” must be reported).

Do you suppose Etonians are still allowed to play the Wall Game?

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

According to Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir (Bin Laden’s biographer, and the only journalist to obtain a Bin Laden interview post 9/11), Al Qaeda has successfully smuggled and deployed in the United States nuclear weapons, along with “many kilos” of enriched uranium to be used to produce “dirty bombs.”

An attack on a major US target is rumored to scheduled for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, beginning this year on September 24. Previous rumors suggest that Los Angeles (or, at any rate, a location in California) may be the intended target.

In an interview with Al.Arabiya.net, reported by Aki today, Hamid Mir said that on a recent trip to Afghanistan he heard Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters speaking of an imminent attack on the United States “larger than 11 September 2001 attacks.”

Al Qaeda is reported to have enough material for six dirty bombs already in the United States.

Three suitcase nuclear bombs are said to have been smuggled from Russia into Europe. The bombs were said by an Afghan official to have been supplied to Al Qaeda in revenge for US support of the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in 1980s. The bombs were last believed to have been in Italy in 2000. Al Qaeda’s original intention was to use Chechen terrorists to smuggle them into London, Paris, and Los Angeles.

The leader of the impending US attack will be a Saudi national named Adnan Al-Shukri Juma, student of nuclear engineering formerly employed at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor for research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. A so-far-unsuccessful manhunt has been underway for Shukri Jumah since 2003.

In a Canada Free Press interview last May, Hamid Mir said that Bin Laden placed 42 sleeper agents in the United States prior to September 11, 2001. 19 were used in the 9/11 attacks, and 23 are still waiting to be activated.

Also reported by

Clarity & Resolve

Jawa Report

The theory that Al Qaeda would undertake a major attack at the end of 2006 does fit perfectly the timetable of the famous Seven Phase Plan.

UPDATE

The LA Times story gives more information on the suspected plot leader, and a different way of spelling his name: Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah.

Riehl World View 1

Riehl World View 2

Brett Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, describes the intellectual acrobatics of the contemporary liberal Western intelligentsia.

An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left’s curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism—a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism—is another.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: “Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit—that confronting evil is counterproductive,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. “They think that by appeasing them—allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools—they will win their friendship.”

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. “Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them.”

But the really “lethal mistake,” she says, “is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity.” Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, “are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, ‘if that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.’”

A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In the former case, the result too often is terror. In the latter, the ultimate risk is suicide, as the endless indulgence of “the other” obstructs the deeper need to preserve itself. Liberal beliefs… deserve to be protected and fought for. A liberalism that abandons its own defense to others does not, something liberals everywhere might usefully dwell on during this season of sad remembrance.

Max Blumenthal, in the Nation, identifies the secret conspiracy behind ABC’s recent docudrama.

On Friday, September 8, just forty-eight hours before ABC planned to air its so-called “docudrama,” The Path to 9/11, Robert Iger, CEO of ABC’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, was presented with incontrovertible evidence outlining the involvement of that film’s screenwriter and director in a concerted right-wing effort to blame former President Bill Clinton for allowing the 9/11 attacks to take place. Iger told a source close to ABC that he was “deeply troubled” by the information and claimed he had no previous knowledge of the institutional right-wing ties of The Path to 9/11’s creators. He reportedly said that he has commenced an internal investigation to verify the role of the film’s creators in deliberately advancing disinformation through ABC.

Heavens to Betsy! The director of Path to 9/11, David L. Cunningham, comes from an Evangelical family. And its writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, has an alarming past, involving (writing episodes of Falcon Crest and) some sort of friendship with Mr. Apuzzo and Ms. Murty of the conservative Libertas film blog. And aha! Mr. Apuzzo has an alliance of some kind with David Horowitz.

Mr. Blumenthal, and the editors of the Nation, seem to be operating on the basis of some peculiar cultural and political double-standard which regards the friendships, professional associations, and artistic productions of leftists active in the Entertainment Industry as entirely wholesome, natural, and normal forms of personal association and creative expression; and which, at the same time, considers even a single television production incorporating some conservative perspectives as a major outrage, and any indentifiable ties between conservatives as ipso facto evidence of deep dark conspiracy.

Let’s see here: Hollywood, accusations of secret covert ideological associations & intentional designs to influence public opinion in unsavory directions, efforts to silence members of the industry on the basis of unpopular opinions… Haven’t we all heard of that sort of thing before? Isn’t that… McCarthyism?

is eat your brains, sings the living dead narrator of this quite delightful zombie music video.

Democrat control of either house of Congress will almost certainly result in grandstanding Congressional committees investigating alleged violations of international law and human rights in the detention and interrogation of terrorists. It has been generally recognized that restraints on US Intelligence operations imposed as a result of the 1970s Frank Church-led CIA hearings had a great deal to do with the government’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The consequences of another Congressional Intelligence witch hunt are likely to be just as devastating.

The Washington Post reports that CIA officers are buying Congressional politics insurance.

It takes our own unique combination of vicious partisanship, habitual domestic treason, and opportunistic litigation to produce the need for such insurance for those who protect America from foreign enemies. We could translate Juvenal’s Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? differently today: Who will defend our defenders

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program…

Justice Department political appointees have strongly backed the CIA interrogations. But “there are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be coming” from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, said a retired senior intelligence officer who remains in contact with former colleagues in the agency’s Directorate of Operations, which ran the secret prisons.

“People are worried about a pendulum swing” that could lead to accusations of wrongdoing, said another former CIA officer.

The insurance policies were bought from Arlington-based Wright and Co., a subsidiary of the private Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association created by former FBI officials. The CIA has encouraged many of its officers to take out the insurance, current and former intelligence officials said, but no one interviewed would reveal precisely how many have bought policies…

The insurance, costing about $300 a year, would pay as much as $200,000 toward legal expenses and $1 million in civil judgments. Since the late 1990s, the CIA’s senior managers have been eligible for reimbursement of half the insurance premium.

In December 2001, with congressional authorization, the CIA expanded the reimbursements to 100 percent for CIA counterterrorism officers. That was about the time J. Cofer Black, then the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, told Bush that “the gloves come off” and promised “heads on spikes” in the counterterrorism effort.

“Why would [CIA officers] take any risks in their professional duties if the government was unwilling to cover the cost of their liability?” asked Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), a former CIA officer, during congressional debate that year.

Although suing federal officials for their actions is not easy, it is possible; the Supreme Court left the door ajar in two rulings. It ruled in 1971 that six narcotics agents could be sued for monetary damages arising from a warrantless search. Eleven years later, it held that government officials should be immune from civil liability only if their conduct does not violate clear statutory or constitutional rights that should be known by “a reasonable person.”

William L. Bransford, a senior partner at the law firm that defends people who take out the insurance, said he is unaware of any recent increase in claims. But agency officials said that interest has been stoked over the years by the $2 million legal bill incurred by CIA officer Clair George before his 1992 conviction for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra arms sales; by the Justice Department’s lengthy investigation of CIA officers for allegedly lying to Congress about the agency’s role in shooting down a civilian aircraft in 2001 in Peru; and by other events.

CIA employees outside the counterterrorism field who are eligible for reimbursement include the agency’s supervisors, attorneys, equal-opportunity- employment counselors, auditors, polygraph examiners, security adjudicators, grievance officers, inspectors general and internal investigators, he said. One in 10 eligible employees sought reimbursement last year, Mansfield said, adding that the fraction from previous years and a breakdown on those in the counterterrorism field were not immediately available.

ABC’s redacted Path to 9/11 concluded tonight. All sophisticated viewers, I think, agree with John Fund, that, however slightly fictionalized, docudramas based on events within living memory are a fundamentally bad idea. There is simply no legitimate way to combine the needs of theatre with factuality.

Although I’m no admirer of the genre, I thought Path to 9/11 was not entirely a bad thing. It seemed to me that the television mini-series represented our culture’s collective unconsciousness, whispering in our ear a (basically valid) warning about the sclerotic tendencies of large institutions faced with unprecedented challenges. I don’t think any of the purported facts were terribly far off the mark, and the spectacular reaction of William Jefferson Clinton, a number of officials from his administration, and the Democrat Congressional leadership was every bit as entertaining as the program.

James Lileks serves up a little 9/11 satire, imagining this year’s 9/11 anniversary as our liberal friends think it should have been celebrated, sans George W. Bush.

Click on above picture.

Hat tip to Michele Malkin.

Day by Day

Cox & Forkum have been adding one panel per year since 9/11/01.

And the London Times is offering one chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report produced as a graphic novel by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón.

Allahpundit has a side-by-side comparison of both the censored and uncensored versions of controversial scenes from ABC’s Path to 9/11.

Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cypress. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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2,996 is a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs are committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute is to Rick Rescorla.

In her own inimitably acidic fashion, Ann Althouse dead centers the Clinton camp: It’s too late to decide to attack Bin Laden, so let’s attack this TV show.

The Washington Post is running an article on Sunday titled Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’ which sheds light on why Pakistan is withdrawing from Waziristan, and why it is not possible to track terrorist targets in the region.

At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005. “Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere,” Interior Minister Sherpao said in a recent interview. “They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen.”

Send in the Marines would be my advice. Waziristan is good hunting country.

Krempasky at RedState has clips of the scene from ABC’s Path to 9/11 that Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, and the democrat Congressional leadership rreeally don’t want you to see.

link

Alternative link

“Are there any men left in Washington, or are they all cowards?” snarls the disappointed Afghani guide, when the attack on Bin Laden is aborted.

There’s a lot of traffic today, but I recommend that you keep trying or come back later.

Hat tip to LGF.

The merry gang of former John Kerry supporters in control of the US Intelligence Community under the Bush Administration have produced two extremely partisan reports, establishing that they were right all along: Saddam Hussein was perfectly harmless, had no WMDs, and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism generally, and Bush lied.

These conclusions are reached by the artful selection of data, and by systematically dismissing the sources of all evidence to the contrary of a preferred reality as unreliable on a variety of questionable bases. This source spoke to the Press, that proves he’s lying. And that source took a job with the Iraqi opposition, obviously he was always peddling propaganda on their behalf. If you throw out every piece of evidence you don’t like, using any convenient rationalization, it isn’t difficult to arrive at the conclusions you desired all along.

The reports were adopted, and amended, in a series of partisan votes, in which so-called Republican Senators Olympias Snowe (Maine) and Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) voted with the democrats.

New York Times story
——————————————————The Reports:

Postwar Findings on WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism

Report on Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress
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AJStrata notes that media establishment journalists can’t read.

Now I know why journalists get their stories so wrong so often – they lack basic reading comprehension skills. With all the hoopla about the Senate Intelligence report supposedly saying there were no ties between Saddam and Terrorists (despite Iraq documents which log the training of thousands of terrorists, and notes regarding meetings with Al Qaeda) it might behoove people to read them for themselves.

Like the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

“Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq…

I’m still weeding through this “report”. First impressions I got is that it seems to read as if it were trying to convince me that Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda as if by repeating over and over again I would descend in to a state of BDS and start a new liberal blog…

Our Senate Intelligence Committee could care less about getting to the truth, for the Democrats on the committee it was just another way to get Bush, nothing more, and nothing less.