HBO is currently broadcasting a documentary movie, titled Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater. The film is a nostalgic tribute to the late Senator Barry Goldwater, produced by his granddaughter, CC Goldwater, who was five years old when he ran for president in 1964.

I recorded it a week ago, and finally managed to sit down and watch it last night. I was a high school sophomore and a passionate Goldwater supporter back then, and the memories of Barry’s triumphant nomination by the Republican Convention, and of our defeat in the election after a vile and scurrilous campaign are still vivid for me. Barry Goldwater was a standard-bearer to be proud of, and merely looking upon his features again and hearing his voice makes me smile.

One finds, viewing his granddaughter’s film, that even some of Barry’s old-time enemies, with the perspective of time, have come to respect and appreciate him better. There were a number of interesting observations, and I made a point of writing several of them down.

Al Franken:

There were people who said: if you vote for Goldwater, the Vietnam War will escalate, and we’ll have 450,000 American troops over there. And a friend of mine voted for Goldwater, and that’s exactly what happened.

Robert MacNeil:

I did not think, at the time, privately, that Goldwater would make a good president. But, in a year or two afterwards, as the Lyndon Johnson White House became paralysed by self-deception over Vietnam, I wondered whether we, and the country, had undervalued Goldwater’s integrity, and whether it might not have served the country better.

John McCain:

I’d love to be remembered as a Goldwater Republican. But I don’t pretend in any way to live up to the legacy of the man who literally changed the face of politics in America.

George Will aptly summed it all up.

People say Goldwater lost in 1964. Some of us think Goldwater won. It just took sixteen years to count the votes. In 1980, we finally got the results, and Conservatism had won.

Watch for it on your local schedule.

Ron Rosenbaum is lamenting that no one has ever succeeded in making “a movie from what may be one of the THE great American novels Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 Red Harvest.”

Mr. Rosenbaum is mistaken. Red Harvest has been adapted as a movie by Akira Kurosawa (1961), remade by Sergio Leone (1964), and again by Walter Hill (1996).

Hat tip to PJM.

A French Intelligence leak reveals that the Saudi Intelligence service believes it has good information that Osama bin Laden died on August 23 in a remote location in Pakistan of typhoid fever.

Washington Post story

AP provides an English version of the French story:

L’Est Republicain… the daily newspaper for the Lorraine region in eastern France printed what it described as a confidential document from the French foreign intelligence service DGSE citing an uncorroborated report from Saudi secret services that the leader of the al-Qaida terror network had died.

The contents of the document, dated Sept. 21, or Thursday, were not confirmed by French or other intelligence sources. However, the DGSE transmitted the note to President Jacques Chirac and other officials, the newspaper said.

Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie “has demanded an investigation be carried out of this leak,” a ministry statement said, adding that transmission of the confidential document could risk punishment.

Defense Ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau, clarifying the statement, said that the DGSE document exists but that its contents – that bin Laden is allegedly dead – cannot be confirmed.

The DGSE, or Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs, indicated that its information came from a single source.

“According to a reliable source, Saudi security services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead,” said the intelligence report.

There have been periodic reports of bin Laden’s illness or death in recent years but none has been proven accurate.

According to this document, Saudi security services were pursuing further details, notably the place of his burial.

“The chief of al-Qaida was a victim of a severe typhoid crisis while in Pakistan on August 23, 2006,” the document says. His geographic isolation meant that medical assistance was impossible, the French report said, adding that his lower limbs were allegedly paralyzed. On Sept. 4, Saudi security services had their first information on bin Laden’s alleged death, the unconfirmed document reported.

In Pakistan, a senior official of that country’s top spy agency, the ISI or Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence, said he had no information to confirm bin Laden’s whereabouts or that he might be dead. The official said he believed the report could be fabricated. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic and spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Embassy officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan also said they could not confirm the French report.

Gateway Pundit has a link collection.

Original L’Est Republicain story

This apparently originates from an unsavory porn site. YouTube requires adult confirmation, but there is no obscenity.

I can’t identify the country, and I’m not entirely convinced that the dancer is not computer-generated.

video 2:56 minutes.

video

Hat tip to Red Square.

How Neal Katyal expresses his gratitude to the US:
Defending Osama bin Ladin’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan

This month’s Yale Alumni Magazine interviews celebrity alumnus Georgetown Law Professor Neal K. Katyal, ’95JD Yale Law, preening over his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which challenged the authority of the President to consign illegal combatants to trial by military courts, and which elicited the absurd majority opinion, written by Justice Stevens, which erroneously applies the language of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, viz.,

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions (to):

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…

to illegal combatants and terrorists captured outside the territory of the United States.

Katyal shares with the Yale Alumni Magazine the heart-warming story of his moving reply to Hamdan, when the imprisoned jihadi asked: “Why do you want to help me?”

So I paused for a long time, and then I said that I was doing this because my parents came to America to give their children better opportunities, and I couldn’t imagine another country on earth in which I would be able to do what I have been able to do. My parents came here from India, literally with eight dollars in their pockets, each of them. And what bothered me the most about the president’s order is that it said only foreigners would get this military justice system. If you were an American citizen, then you got a civilian trial. But if you were a green-card holder or a foreigner, then you got something really inferior. That was the first time that I felt our country was so fundamentally on the wrong path — and I had to do something.

I can relate to Mr. Katyal’s strong feelings of gratitude and appreciation toward the United States, as I come from immigrant background myself. My grandparents arrived here from Lithuania in the 1890s.

Professor Katyal and my father have a lot in common. Both were of the first generation brought up and educated in the United States. Both were grateful for the opportunities offered by the United States, though my father was not so quite so fortunate as Professor Katyal, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School.

Because his own father was dying of miner’s asthma, my father had to quit school after 8th grade and go to work in the coal mines to help support the family. But he was still grateful to grow up in the United States, rather than in Russian-occupied Lithuania, grateful for both America’s political freedom and for her economic opportunities, even though he had much less access to the latter than some others.

Despite the things they have in common, still, I cannot help reflecting that my father’s gratitude toward this country expressed itself in forms distinctly different than Professor Katyal’s, forms more recognizable as gratitude. I feel sure that my father left America better off by his relatively obscure contributions, a lifetime of hard labor and wartime military service, when he died in 1997. If Professor Katyal passed away tomorrow, I’m afraid I would find it very difficult to say the same of his more celebrated ones.

I do agree with Professor Katyal on one thing, though. I too cannot “imagine another country on earth in which (he) would be able to do what (he) ha(s) been able to do.”

How my father expressed his gratitude to the US:
Serving in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific

Winchester Model 1897 trench gun

The Bush Administration has been widely criticized for the allegedly unprecedented policy of interpreting the definitions of portions of the Geneva Conventions. And Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner recently waged a very public battle in the Senate specifically to ensure “that there be no attempt to redefine U.S. obligations.”

Bush Administration opponents are mistaken. There is a very prominent case of the United States refusing to accept the definition of treaty terms used by the enemy, and openly defying world opinion.

In WWI, the US military issued Winchester Model 1897 slide-action shotguns to US troops, along with buckshot-loaded cartridges. Each 12 gauge round contained nine size 00 buckshot. The shotguns featured a bayonet lug, and a perforated metal cover to protect the hand from the barrel becoming over-heated by rapid fire.

The shotguns were found to be desirable weapons, very useful for clearing trenches and in close combat. They were particularly popular with the Marines, who put them to conspicuously good use in Belleau Wood.

Germany, in 1918, protested US use of shotguns firing multiple projectile buckshot ammunition as a violation of Section II of the 1907 Hague Convention (the Geneva Convention’s predecessor treaty), which forbade belligerents to employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.

But, as W. Hays Parks, Special Assistant for Law of War Matters, Office of The Judge Advocate General, U.S. Army, notes in a 1997 paper, DA-PAM 27-50-299, the United States interpreted the Hague Treaty differently, rejecting the German protest.

The highly-effective use of the shotgun by United States forces had a telling effect on the morale of front-line German troops. On 19 September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest against the American use of shotguns, alleging that the shotgun was prohibited by the law of war.

After careful consideration and review of the applicable law by The Judge Advocate General of the Army, Secretary of State Robert Lansing rejected the German protest in a formal note.

Threats to punish captured American soldiers found armed with shotguns met the stern US warning that any unjustified measures taken against US prisoners of war would be retaliated in equal measure upon captured Germans.

The reality is that international agreements of this kind invariably include substantial quantities of broad and unspecific statement, inevitably requiring interpretation. Someone has to decide whether 00 buckshot constitutes the kind of projectile “calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.” Someone has to decide today whether keeping someone in a cold room, or subjecting someone to “water-boarding,” constitutes torture.

What is remarkable is that, in the old days, Germany would argue for definitions which were in Germany’s interest, and United States officials would argue for interpretations which were in the interest of the United States. Today, our leading media outlets, a substantial portion of the body of active participants in policy debate, the former Secretary of State, and even three prominent Republican senators are found shouting their heads off in the public square, demanding that the United States adopt interpretations as inconvenient to US interests as possible.

Some of us find all this more than a little grotesque.

The US and Japan compete on Japanese television.

video

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The White House has struck a deal with grandstanding GOP Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner intended to allow the Executive Branch to continue to defend the country against terrorist attacks on civilian population centers. Nice of them to agree, don’t you think?

New York Times

Isn’t it wonderful, that, as the calendar ticks forward to the month of Ramadan in which one or more nuclear terrorist attacks on US cities are rumored to be scheduled, three Republican senators and the former Secretary of State Mr. Powell have stepped forward to take control of the fate of the American public, demanding that due regard be paid to our country’s image and to extravagant projections of domestic American legal practice into the unlikely context of the International Underworld of homicidal conspiracy.

OK, Jack Bauer, just make sure that you Mirandize that terrorist, before you remove his finger from the nuclear bomb’s triggering device.

It would be nice to know where the second WMD has been placed, but, remember: you must give Achmed access to his pro bono attorney from Wachtell, Lipton, or Georgetown Law, before you are allowed to ask him if he’d (pretty please, with sugar on it!) like to reveal the other bomb’s location.

ShrinkWrapped puts Slick Willie and the AP on the couch.

One particular, and very clever, defensive maneuver is the veiled negation of the minor error. Often enough, a correct interpretation is undone by a minor factual error, which the patient then can us to negate the entire interpretation, even while appearing to give it careful consideration…

We see this tendency to change the subject to avoid unacceptable thoughts and feelings in much of our public discourse.

For example, the current dispute over the treatment of detainees is a classic example of such misdirection. Bill Clinton was interviewed by NPR this morning. He said that we should not codify the use of torture and that we need to agree that it isn’t right to smack around and torture detainees, some of whom are innocent. In fact, Bill Clinton, often recognized as one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House in recent years, knows quite well that no one in the current Administration is suggesting we routinely torture detainees. The question is how we define torture, not whether we should torture. Is loud music torture? Cold temperatures? A Belly slap? Our interrogators have the right to know what behavior puts them at risk for being sued by the ACLU.

Another example, perhaps more problematic, is currently playing itself out in the blogosphere. Michelle Malkin, among many others, has been following the story of an AP photographer who has been held by coalition forces in Iraq since May, when he was picked up at breakfast with an “al Qaeda in Iraq” leader and another “Insurgent” leader (as per the report by Judy Swallow at the BBC this morning.) Michelle received a note from the AP today disputing her characterization of Bilal Hussein…

..the use of a minor factual error to deny and avoid the implications of Michelle’s column suggests a need for the AP to remain unaware of the effects of their inadvertent complicity.

Three things that can be brought from Psychoanalysis to the situation:

1) When there is a denied, unconscious motivation for behavior, the hidden impulse will continue to press for expression. If the AP (or any MSM outlet) has a need to facilitate enemy propaganda, this will be more and more apparent as time goes on and as attention is paid to those occasions when the impulse breaks through in unmistakable ways. Rathergate and Pallywood are the rules, not the exceptions.

2) When patients use such transparent maneuvers, it is because more effective defenses are no longer working… Once brought into the open, it becomes available for therapeutic work and is a precondition for him changing his behavior. The AP’s transparent and ineffective defense suggests they are having difficulty maintaining their denial and minimization.

3) If Michelle, et al, can avoid polemics, and avoid engaging in arguments over the minor error, it will allow the facts to speak for themselves. This will deny the AP the opportunity to use an argument over minutia to deflect attention away from the most important questions. In this specific case, maintaining the focus on Bilal Hussein and the AP’s overt behavior is the best approach to getting at the facts.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

RaceBannon, on Free Republic, posts, with the permission of the family, a letter from a staff member at the office of Senator Ted Kennedy refusing assistance to a constituent, Mrs. Kathleen T. Hutchins, the mother of Sergeant Lawrence G. Hutchins III of Plymouth, Massachusetts, one of the Pendleton 8 being prosecuted for allegedly killing Iraqis in Haditha.

Kennedy letter

Reuters reports:

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America’s campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes” that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given to Musharraf’s intelligence director.

“The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,”‘ Musharraf said. “I think it was a very rude remark…”

The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were distributed to the media by CBS, said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” Musharraf said.

Before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world to maintain relations with the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and many Pakistanis were sympathetic with the neighboring Islamic state.

But within days of the attacks Musharraf cut his government’s ties to the Taliban regime and cooperated with U.S. efforts to track and capture Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that sought refuge in Pakistan.

They need to have the same conversation with more than one country right now.

———————–
Hat tip to LGF.