The London Times quotes an MI5 report.

Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq are planning the first “large-scale” terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets with the help of supporters in Iran, according to a leaked intelligence report.

Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in an attempt to “shake the Roman throne”, a reference to the West.

Another plot could be timed to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as prime minister, an event described by Al-Qaeda planners as a “change in the head of the company”.

The report, produced earlier this month and seen by The Sunday Times, appears to provide evidence that Al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq.

There is no evidence of a formal relationship between Al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, but experts suggest that Iran’s leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organisation’s activities.

The intelligence report also makes it clear that senior Al-Qaeda figures in the region have been in recent contact with operatives in Britain.

It follows revelations last year that up to 150 Britons had travelled to Iraq to fight as part of Al-Qaeda’s “foreign legion”. A number are thought to have returned to the UK, after receiving terrorist training, to form sleeper cells.

The report was compiled by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) – based at MI5’s London headquarters – and provides a quarterly review of the international terror threat to Britain. It draws a distinction between Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s core leadership, who are thought to be hiding on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and affiliated organisations elsewhere.

Read the whole thing.

Reuters reports that a small Iowa town has identified itself as the future birthplace of Star Trek Captain James T. Kirk.

A small Iowa town is trying to lure tourists by going where no town has gone before — forward 200 years in time to be the birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk from cult science fiction show “Star Trek.”

Welcome to Riverside, a once prosperous little farming town with a population of 928 that has fallen on hard times, wants to attract tourists and much needed money with a “Star Trek” museum to revive its largely lifeless, boarded-up main drag.

The town has no famous offspring like West Branch, 25 miles away, where former U.S. President Herbert Hoover was born in 1874, and can’t boast the “World’s Largest Strawberry,” a 15 feet high fiberglass fruit, like Strawberry Point, 100 miles to the north.

So former town councilor and self-declared “Trekkie” Steve Miller in 1985 persuaded the council to declare Riverside the future birthplace as Kirk, a main character of the “Star Trek” television series that began in 1966 and following films.

“Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote a book saying Kirk will be born in Iowa, but didn’t say where,” said Miller. ”So I thought ’why not here?”’

Kirk’s birthday was never officially established but the town lists it on a plaque as March 22, 2228. The show’s official Web site, however, says he was born on March 22, 2233. Canadian actor William Shatner who played the captain of the starship Enterprise was born in real-life on March 22.

Read the whole thing.

The James Lewis column I just linked has provoked some vehemently negative dissent from Hilzoy on the left, who was so enraged that she accidentally deleted her first draft, but managed finally to conclude:

it’s just another hit piece against an academic department that makes precisely no attempt to characterize that department accurately, that Lewis chooses instead to treat the members of that department as mere instantiations of some “trend” that exists only in his head, and that he does this at a time when the people he uses as political props must be suffering enormously, makes it lower than dirt.

Dan Riehl, speaking from a rightwing perspective, is even more indignant:

For God’s sakes, are there no limits to which some won’t go to, quite frankly, pathetically attempt to score a political point? Seung-Hui Cho was insane. He could have studied nothing but The Wealth of Nations, the Constitution, the Boyscout Manual and Mary Had a Little Lamb and still he would likely have emerged as the psychotic killer he eventually became.

Attempting to construct a false logic for perceived political gain to explain away sheer madness is as contorted and dangerous as lunacy itself. There are plenty of good reasons to find fault with the Liberal philosophy that holds sway within all levels of our contemporary system of education. Seung-Hui Cho is not one of them.

Anyone attempting to invoke his name for the benefit of conservative thinking isn’t thinking much at all, let alone conservatively. Such tactics leave conservatism looking foolish and those attempting them as if they are in need of a good couch after a hefty shot of Thorazine. In fact, stopping at calling such efforts crazy may be too kind. Ultimately, they are more dangerous than even that.

Sorry, Dan, Hil, I don’t think it’s in the least difficult to draw a connection between the 23-year-old shooter’s pathological rage and accusatory rhetoric, featuring wildly-exaggerated and not particularly accurately-directed grievances, and the entire leftwing “culture of complaint” dominating the perspective of the majority of faculty at most American universities today, including Virginia Tech.

Just look at these references by Virginia Tech’s own Nikki Giovanni in a widely-hailed poem, titled “We Are Virginia Tech,” read aloud at a Memorial Convocation last Wednesday.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

1:44 video

Are Cho’s irrational accusations really a completely different species of rhetoric from Giovanni’s accusatory baby elephant and Appalachian infant?

You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. ‘But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.

You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.

Are his economic grievances really at odds with the class warfare routinely treated as a background assumption of the conventional contemporary academic perspective?

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”

Envy, narcissism, and paranoia were key factors motivating Cho’s attacks and they are also the vital ingredients in the witches’ brew of leftist ideology presiding over American Academia today.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, wonders if his university’s faculty and curriculum might not have some connection to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn’t excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder—- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes—- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently—- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites.

Read the whole thing.

William Lind (who teaches at Quantico) has a column at Military.com discussing why the Kesselschlacht is not part of the US Army’s modern battle repertoire.

It occasionally happens that a reader’s e-mail is translated into dots and dashes and sent to me over Mr. Morse’s wonderful electric telegraph. The sounder on my desk, opposite the inkwell and under the flypaper scroll, recently tapped out the following, from Jim McDonnell of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“Could you please explain what’s meant by the remark about U.S. forces being unable to fight battles of encirclement? Is it that there are too few of them in Afghanistan or are you saying that our forces are constitutionally incapable of that kind of operation? If the latter is the case, that would make a column all by itself.”

It would, and it does. The problem is not numbers but tactical repertoire, or lack thereof. That deficiency, in turn, is a product—like so much else—of the American armed forces’ failure to transition from the Second Generation to the Third.

Second Generation tactics, like those of the First Generation, are linear. In the attack, the object is to push a line forward, and in the defense it is to hold a line. As we saw in so many battles in and after World War I, the result is usually indecisive. One side or the other ends up holding the ground, but the loser retires in reasonably good order to fight again another day.

Usually, achieving a decision, which means taking the enemy unit permanently out of play, requires one of two things, or both in combination: ambush or encirclement. Modern, Third Generation tactics reflect an “ambush mentality,” and also usually aim for encirclement. To that end, Third Generation tactics are sodomy tactics: the objective is to get in the other guy’s rear.

On the defense, that is accomplished by inviting the enemy to attack, letting him penetrate, and then launching a counterattack designed to encircle him, not push him back out. This was the basis of the new, Third Generation German defensive tactics of 1917, and also the German Army’s standard defense in World War II.

On the offense, the rule is not “close with and destroy” but “bypass and collapse.” The goal is to penetrate deep into the enemy’s rear, by stealth or by force (the Germans used a three, not two, element assault, and the largest element was the exploitation element), then roll up the enemy’s forward units from the flank and rear while overrunning his artillery, headquarters and supply dumps. The same approach was used by the Panzer divisions on the operational level, leading to vast encirclements of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops on the Eastern Front in 1941.

The U.S. military today knows little or nothing of this. It did attempt an operational encirclement of the Iraqi Republican Guard by 7th Corps in the First Gulf War, but that attempt failed because 7th Corps was too slow. On the tactical level, most American units have only one tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire. The assumption is that America’s vast firepower will then annihilate the opponent, but that seldom happens. Instead, he lives to fight again another day, like Osama and his al Qaeda at Tora Bora.

While the central problem here is conceptual – sheer ignorance of Third Generation tactics—there is a physical aspect to it as well. On foot, American soldiers are loaded down with everything except the kitchen sink, and they will probably be required to carry that too as soon as it is digitized. To use tactics of encirclement, you need to be at least as mobile as your enemy and preferably more so. The kind of light infantry fighters we find ourselves up against in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are just that, light. They can move much faster on their feet than can our overburdened infantry. The result is that they ambush us, then escape to do it again, over and over. Flip-flops in the alley beat boots on the ground.

As the students in my seminar at Quantico discovered early in the year, the decisive break, both in tactics and in organizational culture, is not between the Third and Fourth Generations but between the Second and Third. It is little short of criminal that the American military remains stuck in the Second Generation. The Third Generation was fully developed in the German Army by 1918, almost a century ago. It costs little or nothing to make the transition. To those who understand how the Pentagon works, that may be the crux of the problem.

Peggy Noonan had a good day in the Wall Street Journal today:

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don’t notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won’t help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean “not obviously and vividly offensive.” The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was “troubled”; he clearly had “issues”; it would have been good if someone had “reached out”; it’s too bad America doesn’t have better “support services.” They don’t use direct, clear words, because if they’re blunt, they’re implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be “mentally ill” was due to the lack of a government “safety net.” In a news conference, he decried inadequate “funding for mental health services in the United States.” Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost—almost—comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush’s fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the “global warming challenge” and “today’s Supreme Court decision” upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.

One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?

And to the production of computer viruses.

In the Netherlands, private enterprise has found it.

The ever-astute New York Times has discovered that, in theory, existing federal law should have prevented the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings from purchasing a gun.

When you buy a gun, you are required to fill out and sign a form which asks if you have ever been adjudicated legally incompetent, mentally incapacitated, or been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

Firearms Purchase Eligibility

This sort of thing is exactly like the Post Office asking you to sign a form promising that the package you are mailing does not contain prohibited items or a bomb.

Asking ordinary people to fill out these kinds of forms is a complete waste of time, and the persons the form is intended to block will always simply lie.

And there is no point in singling out Virginia. Local adaptations of the same federal form 4473 are used in every state.

Example: Minnesota version

WASHINGTON, April 20 — Under federal law, the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from purchasing a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a government official and several legal experts said Friday.

Federal law prohibits anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” as well as those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, from purchasing a gun.

A special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Mr. Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him, said Richard J. Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also said if that if found mentally defective by a court, Mr. Cho should have been denied a gun.

The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include “determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority” that as a result of mental illness, the person is a “danger to himself or others.”

Mr. Cho’s ability to purchase two guns despite his history of mental illness has cast new attention on Virginia’s relatively lax gun laws. And since states are supposed to enforce federal gun laws, the sales raise questions about whether Virgina — and other states — fully comply with the federal restrictions.

Mark Levin argues.

Harry Reid… by word and action is actively undermining our fighting men and women in Iraq. His legislative efforts to starve our armed forces in the middle of a war are as contemptible as anything I’ve witnessed in my 25 years in Washington. And yesterday he made a statement that was so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War. The difference, of course, is that Reid is the highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate.

For those who are so pre-occupied with Gonzales that they may not have heard it, this is what Reid said yesterday: “I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.”

So, Reid announces to our brave volunteers that their country is sending them to a lost war. And he announces to our enemy that victory is within their reach — just keep up the killing a little longer. During my radio show last night, I received a call from a Gold Star father. He was outraged by Reid’s comment. He has called before and has become a good friend. But I’ve never heard him as angry and frustrated as he was last night.

Rather than join the chorus demanding Gonzales’s resignation, let me be the first to demand Reid’s resignation. And let’s see how many pundits, conservative and otherwise, will join me.

He’s dead right.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

The leftwing Canadian reporter on American legal affairs for Stale magazine Dahlia Lithwick, in contributing her own little bit to the MSM-fabricated “8 Fired US Attorneys” scandal, recorded what she considered a grand bon mot for that embarassment-to-the-Republic Richard Durbin.

Right before we break for lunch in Alberto Gonzales’ star turn before the Senate judiciary committee, he repeats, for about the fifth time, some crazy hokum about how anyone who criticizes the actions of the Justice Department folks involved in the recent unpleasantness is in fact “attacking the career professionals.” At which point Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., about loses it. “That’s like saying anyone who disagrees with the president’s policy on the war is attacking the soldiers,” he bellows.

No, Dick, it’s more like saying politicians on the homefront (like you) trying to negate the goal of the efforts and sacrifices of US soldiers fighting a war are stabbing them in the back.

We’ve known that since early in our own Freshman year, of course. But Dean of Undergraduate Affairs Betty Trachtenburg (PC-enforcer for the University) really outdid herself in the liberal stupidity department with this response to the Virginia Tech Shootings.

Oldest College Daily:

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Students involved in this weekend’s production of “Red Noses” said they first learned of the new rules on Thursday morning, the same day the show was slated to open. They were subsequently forced to alter many of the scenes by swapping more realistic-looking stage swords for wooden ones, a change that many students said was neither a necessary nor a useful response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

According to students involved in the production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all of the University’s theatrical productions. While shows will be permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to make changes to their props.

Trachtenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

I think this picture is a hoax, but all this is worth a look anyway.

Snopes calls the photo “undetermined,” but agrees with me that it is quite evidently a created artwork.”

John McCain has been making serious movements in a rightward direction recently, speaking out against gun control, urging America to stay the course in Iraq. (You might almost think he was running for president, or something.)

This little vignette at the Murrells Inlet, South Carolina VFW Hall was downright endearing. The moonbats were wetting their beds over at Daily Kos over it: Splash1, Splash2, Splash3.

0:42 video

That Kos-linked video is being flooded with attention, and isn’t loading in a timely fashion. Here’s the same thing at an alternative link.

Here’s the complete version (on a leftwing site, but I enjoyed it anyway).

AFP:

The war in Iraq “is lost” and a US troop surge is failing to bring peace to the country, the leader of the Democratic majority in the US Congress, Harry Reid, said Thursday.

“I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week,” Reid said, on the same day US President George W. Bush was giving a speech at an Ohio town hall meeting defending the war on terror.

At the First Battle of Manassas, it is reported that General Barnard Bee, whose troops were beginning to break under the attack of superior Union forces, informed General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, “General, sir, the day is going against us,” to which Jackson replied: “If you think so, sir, you had better not say anything about it.”

Jackson kept his brigade standing there steady (like a stone wall), then attacked with the bayonet and won the day.

If Harry Reid had been commanding the First Virginia Brigade at the First Battle of Manassas, the American Civil War would have been very short.

The London Times thinks that the box office failure of Quentin Tarantino’s latest homage to cinematic genre trash demonstrates that high budget parodies filled with obscure references to the director’s own personal cinematic obsessions are just too esoteric and too demanding to bring in the popcorn-eating mass audience needed to recoup their cost.

When a high-profile $100 million movie flops at the box office Hollywood groans. When that movie has been directed by two of the hottest hitters in town, produced by the best in the business, filled with sex, violence and stars, and yet it still flops, then the entire industry panics.

Such is the case for Grindhouse, the new double-feature homage to 1970s exploitation movies, directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The movie, a three-hour self-aware smorgasbord of genre action, zombies and killer cars, represents the creative apogee of the relationship between its directors and their long-time producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein. (The movie takes its title from the down-at-heel venues that once specialised in sceening B-movies).

Tarantino and Rodriguez are the Weinsteins’ golden boys, responsible for such commercial and critical Weinstein smashes as Pulp Fiction , Desperado , Kill Bill and Sin City . These two — more than any within the Weinstein stable (which includes the likes of Kevin Smith and Anthony Minghella) — have given the producing brothers their brand identity as the masters of populist yet edgy “indie-wood” entertainment.

The shock was thus all the more profound when Grindhouse managed to turn in only a paltry $12 million (£5.9 million) from its opening Easter holiday weekend. Things got even worse last weekend, when figures revealed that audience members were walking out halfway through the movie, unaware that it was a double bill. Others were complaining about the degraded nature of the film footage (itself a nod to Seventies production values), while the movie was often playing to near-empty theatres (14 people per screening was the average).

Read the whole thing.

I must admit: I haven’t made it out to this one yet myself, and I’m a strong Tarantino aficionado.

Easter weekend doesn’t really inspire in most of us a major yearning for a 1970s exploitation flic. I really like Tarantino’s work, but I see Robert Rodriquez films grudgingly. It’s one thing for Quentin to show up in a bit part in a Rodriquez film, or even to write one as a lark, but combining the work of Rodriquez with his own, and marketing them together on an equal basis does not strike me as a really great idea.