The Washington Times is reporting:

The Lebanese killer of a U.S. Navy diver was in custody in Beirut yesterday, according to U.S. officials who decried his release from a German prison last week and pledged to bring him to the United States for trial….

U.S. and German officials said Berlin notified Washington a couple of days before Hamadi was released. The United States, whose extradition request was turned down in 1987, did not ask that he be held longer because it saw no chance that Germany would turn him over now.

Instead, Washington approached the authorities in Beirut, where Petty Officer Stethem’s murder occurred and where Hamadi arrived on Friday.

A senior State Department official said Hamadi was in “temporary custody” in Lebanon, although it was not clear where or when he was arrested.

It certainly looks like Germany’s foreign intelligence service got their hostage out and also doublecrossed the kidnappers by tipping off US authorities.

Hat tip to Captain Ed.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Joel Engle on What’s the Rumpus excoriates the California-King-sized sense of entitlement of the planning-to-have-it-all “professional couple” who placed the following ad:

“IF THERE’S ever a Museum of Chutzpah, this recent classified ad in a community newspaper will be the featured exhibit:

‘NANNY — FULL-TIME — MONDAY-FRIDAY: Professional couple seeks responsible, happy, engaging nanny for 3-month-old infant. 7:30 AM-6 PM M-F; $300-350/week; breakfast, lunch provided. Would consider splitting into 2 positions (morning, afternoon). Interact/play with baby, daily stroller rides, no TV; housekeeping as time allows (during baby’s naps). Web cams present. No evenings/weekends/major holidays, no travel required. Qualification: infant childcare experience with references; college coursework in ECE or child development; current infant CPR/First Aid certification; fluent English; no smoking; reliable transportation to/from our … home; willingness for annual background/credit check, drug screening.’

It concludes with a phone number and, no kidding, an e-mail address. So let’s recap: A professional suburban couple needs someone to raise their child from scratch. Someone with a car who’ll brave two rush hours daily and work without rest 10 1/2 hours daily, 52 1/2 hours weekly, cleaning house when baby’s asleep instead of checking e-mail on her PowerBook. Someone fluent in not only English but also the advanced dialect of early childhood education and development. Someone who doesn’t mind Big Brother capturing her every moment for the comfort of her employers watching on the Web at their desks. Someone who’ll do all that for whatever’s in the fridge and $6.67 an hour — at the top end.

Hat tip to (wait for it…) Pajamas Media.

The Scotsman, and numerous other news outlets, are reporting on Germany’s release of Mohammad Ali Hammadi, a Hezbollah terrorist previously sentenced to life in prison for the murder of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in the course of a hijacking in 1985.

GERMANY has quietly released a Hezbollah member jailed for life for the murder of a US Navy diver, disregarding Washington’s desire that he be extradited or remain behind bars, officials said yesterday.

The government said there was no link between Mohammad Ali Hammadi’s release and that of a German hostage in Iraq just days later.

“He served his term,” Eva Schmierer, a spokeswoman for Germany’s justice ministry, told a news conference.

Sources in Berlin and Beirut said that Mohammad Ali Hammadi, who was convicted of killing Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight and sentenced to life in prison, was flown to Lebanon last week.

The US did submit an extradition request to the West German government in 1987, but it was turned down since Hammadi could have faced the death penalty in America.

Still, several diplomats said that if he could not be extradited, the Americans had wanted Hammadi to remain behind bars for the murder of Mr Stethem, whose battered corpse was thrown out of the TWA plane by the hijackers after they had shot him.

The diplomats said that the release could complicate relations between Germany and the US, which have pledged to co-operate against terrorism.

The US embassy in Berlin made no comment on Hammadi’s release, which came shortly before Susanne Osthoff was freed in Iraq.

The 43-year-old archaeologist had disappeared last month. Germany said on Sunday she was in safe custody.

The foreign ministry denied any Hammadi-Osthoff link, saying: “There is no connection between these two cases.”

Depkafile, the Jerusalem-based news and rumor source, whose reports are not always found to be reliable, and which is believed by many to function as a mouthpiece for Mossad, is affirming the German prisoner release was indeed a hostage trade arranged by the newly-appointed head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, and that the German betrayal of the United States constitutes the beginning of a campaign to promote German influence in the Middle East:

Ernst Uhrlau, Angela Merkel’s new head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, is revealed by DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources as the man behind Berlin’s secret decision to trade German archeologist Susanne Osthoff kidnapped in Iraq on Nov. 25 for the jailed Hizballah terrorist wanted in America, Mohammad Ali Hammadi.

Frankly, I believe Depkafile this time, and I sincerely hope the Bush Administration takes appropriately serious diplomatic and trade-related steps to punish Germany. We really should also have had some non-pouting US spooks waiting for this guy’s arrival in Lebanon to provide him with a free one way trip to a destination of our choice.

Here

Rex Hammock writes:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Web 2.0: I got this email from a young rexblog reader this morning, and I thought I should share it, knowing there are lots of children out there who this year are wondering the same thing:

Dear Rexblog:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Web 2.0.
Papa says, ‘If you see it on the rexblog, it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Web 2.0?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
vohanlon@nospam.com.
Here is my response:

Dear Virginia,

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see….

Not believe in Web 2.0! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire Tim O’Reilly to come over to your house and explain Web 2.0 to you, but even if Tim O’Reilly showed up and you didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about, what would that prove? So what if nobody can actually explain Web 2.0 without using techno babble and business buzzwords? That is no sign that there is no Web 2.0. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see — and that’s why they develop buzzwords. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

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Web 2.0 defined for the non-courant.

The Harvard Crimson yesterday reports that Bob Woodward disclosed an interesting bit of gossip, over roast beef and asparagas, during an invitation-only dinner he attended at Harvard on December 5th:

in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame, which touched off the scandal in the first place.

“His source was not in the White House, I don’t believe,” Woodward said of Novak over a private dinner at the Institute of Politics on Dec. 5. He did not indicate what information, if any, he had to corroborate the claim.

Woodward also denied conventional wisdom about the leak:

At the Harvard dinner, Woodward sparred with his friend and former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, over the motives behind the leak. The pair had just come from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics, where they spoke for more than an hour before television cameras and a large audience. The invite-only dinner afterward, which was attended by Harvard students as well as a handful of journalists and politicians, was declared on-the-record from the outset by Alex C. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who moderated the dinner conversation.

Responding to Bernstein’s claim that the release of Plame’s identity was a “calculated leak” by the Bush administration, Woodward said flatly, “I know a lot about this, and you’re wrong.”

On the one hand, the front runner in Bolivian presidential race is leftist Evo Morales, who campaigned promising to legalize cocaine production. On the other hand, Morales is a socialist who is planning to introduce new government planning and production controls. Just watch coca production plummet under Socialism. Shortages may soon be expected.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet)– An international research team reported on Monday that it has mapped part of the genome of the woolly mammoth, a huge relative of today’s elephant extinct for about 10,000 years.

Using a combination of novel techniques, the researchers have sequenced a chunk of ancient DNA belonging to remains of a woolly mammoth and “fellow travelers,” including a sample of the bacteria, fungi, viruses and plants that lived at the same time as the mammoth.

The remains of the mammoth, which lived in Siberia about 28,000 years ago, were well preserved in the permafrost, the researchers from Canada and the United States said in the Dec. 22 online edition of the journal Science.

Today’s must-read posting on Mudville Gazette of Robert Stokely’s observations on the meaning of his son’s Michael’s death last August in Iraq, the eloquent response of a decent and honorable man to the Cindy Sheehans of this world.

Linked by both Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson. There are some posts we think it obligatory to link, even if everyone else has already linked them.

A non-film review

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I don’t intend to see this PC film, but I’ve read the Annie Proulx story, and have seen Frank Rich’s column in the Sunday NY Times, which opines:

Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective “agenda” concocted by conspiratorial “elites” in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a “lifestyle.”

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Perhaps Ang Lee made the film more heavy-handed and conventional than was the original story. Or perhaps Rich sees what suits his own political agenda. I can’t say. I haven’t seen the film.

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The short story Brokeback Mountain is one of a series of “the hard reality of life among the simple and poor” stories set in rural Wyoming of which Proulx has recently written enough examples to make up two published collections.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist aren’t homosexual “by inherent and immutable identity.” They are

high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

After the accidental sexual encounter, the conversation goes:

Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.”

When four years later, they get together again, Ennis says:

“We both have wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain’t nothin like this. I never had no thoughts about doin it with another guy… You do it with other guys? Jack?

Jack replies:

“Shit no. You know that, Old Brokeback got us good.”

They are not homosexual. The entire point of the story is the tragic fate of two ordinary uneducated men, who accidentally develop an unaccountable and powerful emotional relationship
(including sex), which does not fit their ideas, circumstances, or possibilities.

The moral of the whole story is not: “Queers can be cowboys too!” Or: “A certain percentage of cowboys were secretly gay.” The moral of the story may be found in the closing sentence:

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

It seems interesting to note that the Left is treating the film as triumph in the culture wars, entirely on the basis of a 180 degree distortion of the central meaning of the original short story.

Rather than a vindication of “inherent & immutable gay identity,” Brokeback Mountain tells the story of the unhappy fate of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in the very same vein in which The Half-Skinned Steer tells the story of an octogenerian returning to the family ranch from Massachusetts for his brother’s funeral, who winds up driving off the road in a snowstorm a few miles from his boyhood home and freezing to death.

Annie Proulx isn’t purveying political correctness; she’s chronicling representative examples of strange and cruel accidents in a hard country. In the original story, homosexual love isn’t so much “an inherent and immutable identity,” as it is another example of the weird and miserable things that can sometimes happpen to people under an indifferent Western sky.

“More Iraqis think things are going well in Iraq than Americans do. I guess they don’t get the New York Times over there.”—Jay Leno