The New York Sun reports today:

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam’s voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.

Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization’s Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings “will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important – and controversial – weapons of mass destruction questions.”

Jack Kelly notes that the account of the transfer of WMDs to Syria by former Iraq Air Force Deputy Commander General Sada in his recent book is only one of number of similar statements by knowlegeable persons ignored by the MSM:

Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel’s top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

“While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives,” Mr. Shaw told NewsMax reporter Charles Smith.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that “I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran.”

In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam’s WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war.

“We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD program,” Mr. Kay told the Sunday Telegraph.

Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq’s WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria; the Syrian air force base near the village of Tal Snan, and the city of Sjinsar on the border with Lebanon.

In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn’t rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria.

“There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation,” Mr. Duelfer said.

In a briefing for reporters in October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper Jr., who was head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency when the Iraq war began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.

“I think the people below Saddam Hussein and his sons’ level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse,” Lt. Gen. Clapper said.

And promises new evidence from recently-translated, captured Iraqi Intelligence files:

John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, said a civilian contractor who has been among those examining the Mukhabarat files has found audiotapes of meetings in Saddam’s office where WMD was discussed. The contractor, a former military intelligence analyst, will make the tapes public Feb. 17 at a conference sponsored by Intelligence Summit, a private group that Mr. Loftus heads.

Mr. Loftus wouldn’t disclose the identity of the contractor in advance of the conference, but said his tapes have been verified by the National Security Agency. “This isn’t a smoking gun. It’s a smoking cannon,” he said.

Those who have bet their political futures that Saddam had no WMD may be starting to sweat.

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Jeff Goldstein notes that Islamic sources are successfully applying the language and tactics of the Western left to brand Danish protesters proposing to retaliate for the widespread Islamic burning of Danish flags, and the burning of two Danish embassies, by publicly burning the Koran as “racists” and “extremists,” while simultaneously depicting violent Muslim demonstrators as “offended victims.” Western political correctness is being successfully assimilated to the Islamic claim to privileged immunity to mockery or criticism.

This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.

Roger Kimball views the supine reaction of Western elites to Islamofascist tantrums over the Danish cartoons, and quotes Hillaire Belloc:

Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight
But roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

Hat tip to Austin Bay.

An Arab News columnist rejoices in the power of the Islamic and Arab worlds to bring a Western nation virtually to its knees.

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Mark Steyn wonders where all those Danish flags came from:

I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ”Death to the Great Satan!” Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ”Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!” But I never thought I’d switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.

Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that’s easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven’t a clue how I’d get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they’d have.

and cautions on the limits of sensitivity to one’s adversary’s point of view:

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

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Charles Moore at the Telegraph also remarks upon those flags:

It’s some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don’t remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)

Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of “spontaneous” Muslim rage, the odder it seems.

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking.

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And Matthew Paris in the London Times opines: So they have thin skins. That shouldn’t stop us poking fun at them.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has among its supplies significant quantities of plutonium, potentially useful to terrorists. Consequently, the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration are installing a defensive battery of Dillon Aero M134D Gatling guns, six barreled, electrically driven machine guns chambered in 7.62mm NATO (.308 Winchester) able to fire at a fixed rate of 3000 shots per minute.

The SF Chronicle, in characteristic MSM fashion, feigns neutrality, but gives prominence in its coverage to the clueless and the cowardly.

Word that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will install a battery of machine guns capable of spitting out 66 rounds a second with a range of nearly a mile was met by relief by some who think the weapons will deter terrorists but fear by others who worry they’ll be caught in the line of fire…

“I don’t think that’s cool at all — it’s going to be hitting my roof while I’m sleeping,” 23-year-old Daniel Cross said Friday after learning that his home on Shelley Street is within range of the weapon’s 7.62mm bullets.

His friend, Justin Blake, 21, let out some expletives as he tinkered with a Jeep Cherokee outside his friend’s home, where an American flag flies prominently.

“I ain’t seen nothing like that at the lab,” he said, marveling at the weapon’s firepower with a laugh and a shake of his head. “That’s pretty sick. I don’t think anyone’s gonna come into Livermore. I don’t think they need those Gatling guns.”

The leftwing paper throws in enough hints for the discerning reader to get the point:

The thought that Livermore, population 80,000, has an arsenal capable of shooting down a helicopter seems at odds with its motto of being “a friendly, dynamic community.”..

As for those concerned about bullets raining down on their homes, (Livermore Vice Mayor) Leider laughed.

“If they were firing something, I’m sure they would aim correctly and not just spray the rounds all over the place,” Leider said. “I have pretty good faith in that.”

CNN reports similarly, “balancing” the rational explanation:

“What we want to do is equip our protective force with the capability that will leave no doubt about the outcome,” said Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

with the local moon bat activist perspective:

Lab critics questioned the wisdom of putting such powerful guns at the lab, which is across the street from suburban homes. They say the real problem is that the lab site, which is relatively small at 1 square mile, is not a good place for nuclear materials.

“If you don’t have the firepower, that’s one kind of security weakness, but if you do have the firepower, you potentially endanger nearby workers and community members because it’s such a compact site,” said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CARES, a Livermore-based activist group.

The FR correspondent’s daughter is in the middle.

A Free Republic correspondent celebrates a daughter’s homecoming after a one year tour of duty in Iraq with the First Armored Division by posting some very heartwarming photographs.

Mohammed in Hell, Giovanni da Modena, Church of St. Petronio, Bologna, c. 1420

Zombietime, the useful site which collects images of domestic moonbat demonstrations, has added (in response to recent events) a collection of images of the historic moonbat Mohammed, including the three forged cartoons added to the far-too-bland original Danish twelve by the Islamic agitators who engineered the recent rioting.

Hat tip to Mark in Mexico.

The Islamic position:

Syrian demonstrators invaded the Danish Embassy in Damascus and set fire to the building. In Gaza, protesters burned Danish flags chanting “Death to Denmark,” and gunmen stormed the European Union office. Radical Islamists pronounced a fatwa against the 500-strong Danish garrison in southern Iraq. In Kashmir, shops closed in protest. Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami party offered a bounty of 50,000 Danish kroner for the murder of the Danish cartoonists. Jihadi websites are calling for suicide bombings in Denmark. Hezbollah’s head, Hassan Nasrallah, declared if Muslims had carried “out the fatwa of Imam Khomeini against the renegade Salman Rushdie, the scum who are insulting our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway, and France would not dare do so.” In a mosque in Ramallah inside the Palestinian territories, protesters shouted, “Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up.” In Nablus, Hassan Sharaf, an imam at a local mosque told worshippers at his sermon “If they want a war of religions, we are ready.'”

The Western elites’ response:

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour, announced: “I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others,” and launched investigations into “racism” and “disrespect for belief,” and asked for “an official explanation” from the Danish government.

In its first official comments on the caricatures, the Vatican, while deploring violent protests, said certain forms of criticism represent an “unacceptable provocation.” “The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, refused to publish the cartoons.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw criticized newspapers that published the drawings. And State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper declared: “These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims… We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

They may be ready for a war between religions and civilizations, but we are going to need different leadership before we are.

Charles Martel defeats a considerably larger Saracen Army at the Battle of Tours, October 10, 732 .

The West used to have better leadership.

Michelle Malkin sat up late last night putting together this video commentary:

First, They Came