Mohammad Fadhil of Iraq the Model responds on PJM to the recent London Times poll finding most Iraqis optimistic about their country’s future.

When Arabs or westerners ask me about the situation and I answer that hope remains and that we’re looking forward to a better future most would say ‘Are you living in this world?’ I answer, ‘Yes, it’s you who live in the parallel world the media built for you with images of only death and destruction’.

If it surprised some of them that a poll found Iraqis optimistic, then I’m surprised that someone finally bothered to ask Iraqis how they feel…

Just as free birds would never return to the cage, we don’t want to return to the days of the tyrant. Birds do not care that beasts roam outside and would not feel nostalgic for a home or meal mixed with humiliation.

All that a free bird cares about is to spread wings and fly as it pleases.

Read the whole thing.

Investors Business Daily points out that Valerie Plame Wilson’s recent Congressional testimony is contradicted by the facts, and adds another anecdote demonstrating that Joe Wilson had identified his wife’s job widely months before the appearance of the Novak column.

“I did not recommend him,” Plame claimed before the House panel last Friday. She was referring to her husband, Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger in early 2002 by the CIA to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein sought uranium there. “I did not suggest him,” she added.

But the Senate bipartisan report of July 2004 indicates otherwise:

The reports officer of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division (CPD), where Plame worked, told committee staff that Plame “offered up his (Wilson’s) name.”

In a memo to the CPD deputy chief dated Feb. 12, 2002, Plame wrote, “My husband has good relations with both the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” That’s not a recommendation?

The day after that memo, Plame’s CPD division sent a cable “requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador (Joseph Wilson) to Niger …”

Plame “told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him ‘there’s this crazy report’ on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.”

A CIA analyst intent on discrediting what she calls a “crazy report” is indicative of a spy agency at war — or at least at odds — with the White House it is supposed to be serving. The actions of both Mr. and Mrs. Wilson suggest that is exactly what is at the heart of the Plame Affair.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the first person we know of to reveal Plame’s identity to the press — first to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, then to columnist Robert Novak. He was never indicted. Still, he had some very interesting things to say about Plame and Wilson.

On the tape of his conversation with Woodward, played at the Libby trial and apparently recorded a month before he spoke to Novak, Armitage said of Plame’s job at the CIA, “Everyone knows it,” immediately adding that “Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody.”

Read the whole thing.

On March 14 I reported finding it impossible for several days, since around March 10 or 11, to access the Volokh Conspiracy Blog at its conventional address: www.volokh.com.

Clearly, my experience with this problem is not unique, since Glenn Reynolds blogged about this yesterday (March 18).

Professor Reynolds kindly supplies a solution which saves all of us affected the necessity of logging into our computers in Safe Mode and searching the Registry for a corrupted Host file.

All one needs to do is use Volokh.Powerblogs.Com instead.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The Department of Defense’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal today released the transcript of the hearing of detainee Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, mastermind of the October 12, 2000 bomb attack on the American Destroyer USS Cole, which took the lives of seventeen US sailors and wounded 39.

ABC News

New York Times

DOD Transcript

RECORDER: …the following facts support the determination that the detainee is an enemy combatant:

a. On 7 August 1998, near simultaneous truck bombs were detonated at the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The explosion at the United States embassy in Nairobi resulted in the death of 213 people, including 12 Americans. More than 4,500 people were wounded,

b. Mohammad Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali Al-Owhali stated that in approximately June or July 1998, the detainee told him that his mission was a martyrdom mission, where he would be driving a vehicle filled with explosives into a target which would result in his death. The detainee told Al-Owhali the target was a United States embassy in East Africa, but he was not told the exact country,

c. In 1998, Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali was indicted in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, for his involvement in the 7 August 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Charges included conspiracy to kill United States nationals, conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim at places outside the United States, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against nationals of the United States, conspiracy to destroy buildings and property of the United States, and conspiracy to attack defense utilities,

d During the latter part of 1999, the detainee facilitated and participated in close-combat training which was held in the Lowgar training camp in Afghanistan. The graduates of the class then met with Usama bin Laden who lectured about the operational details of the East Africa bombings,

e. On 12 October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked during refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden by operatives of the al Qaida network. Al Qaida claimed responsibility for the attack. Seventeen United States sailors were killed and 39 other sailors were wounded,

f. Stamps utilized on a forged Yemeni merchant’s registration card, which was utilized by the detainee, were forged by a suspect of the USS Cole bombing,

g. A participant in the USS Cole bombing identified the detainee as someone he knew from an al Qaida training camp. The participant in the USS Cole bombing that identified the detainee stated an individual approached him with a letter from the detainee requesting assistance in facilitation of the USS Cole bombing. The participant in the USS Cole bombing claimed the only reason he agreed to visit the individual was due to the letter from the detainee,

h. The detainee went to an al Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in December 2000.

i. An al Qaida cell associated with a senior al Qaida operative used the code name, father of the leg, which was a reference to the detainee and the fact that he was missing a leg.

j. A notebook that was seized during the capture of a senior al Qaida operative contained a phone number that was also found in the stored memory of a phone belonging to the detainee,

k. The detainee’s University of Islamic Studies identification card was found at an alleged al Qaida residence in Karachi, Pakistan.

l. The detainee was implicated in a notebook containing account ledgers for payments made to various al Qaida operatives which was found during a raid of anal Qaida safe house,

m. A source that met the detainee in Afghanistan stated he also saw the detainee at al Farouq training camp. The source stated the detainee worked for an important person in al Qaida and the detainee was a body guard for Usama bin Laden.

Sir, this concludes the summary of unclassified evidence…

PRESIDENT: Tribunal members, do you have any questions for the detainee?

TRIBUNAL: I do.

PRESIDENT: Proceed.

TRIBUNAL: What exactly was his role as the – both the USS Cole and the -ah- embassy thing?

DETAINEE: Many roles, I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives. I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation. Buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation. Buying the explosives.
…

PRESIDENT: Where were you, physically, at the time of the Cole attacks?

DETAINEE: He was with Sheik Usama bin Laden in Kandahar.

PRESIDENT: And at the time of the embassy attacks?

DETAINEE: I was in Karachi meeting the operator, the guy that basically did the operation a few hours before the operation took place. These are statements that are not in the evidence that you have. These are additions to the questions that you have asked.

PRESIDENT: What can you tell us about the -ah- item contained in paragraph, in item 3a? (US Embassy Bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, 7 August 1998 -JDZ)…

DETAINEE: I was the link between Usama bin Laden and his deputy Sheikh Abu Hafs Al Masri and the cell chief in Nairobi. I was the link that was available in Pakistan. I used to supply the cell with what ever documents they need from fake stamps to visas, whatever. Sending them from Afghanistan to Pakistan and individuals, cell members.

Why, I wonder, has it taken close to four years to undertake this simple process? And, now that it is perfectly clear that various persons in US custody are illegal combatants guilty of grave and horrible crimes, are we going to proceed promptly and without further ado to the delivery of justice, i.e., to the executions of these villains? Or are we going to dither, and shilly shally, and debate, and litigate some more?

Why you don’t tick off an engineer….

Michael Barone discusses the negative impact of higher education today. The better-educated, wealthier, and more privileged the American, the more likely he is to have a fundamentally negative view of his own country.

“They always blame America first.” That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America — or the parts of America they don’t like — first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls “tenured radicals,” people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.

Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals’ description of the world is wildly at odds with reality. But this battering away at ideas of truth and goodness does have some effect. Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives…

“There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are.

Bill Roggio reports that Pakistan has made another agreement conceding Bajaur, another portion of the Northwest Frontier territories, to Islamic extremists.

map
Red agencies are currently Taliban-controlled. Yellow are threatened.

The much anticipated Bajaur Accord – a peace agreement purportedly with the local tribal leaders of the Mamoond tribe and the government – has been signed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal agency. The details of the agreement are not yet available, however the Daily Times has described it as “a step towards a North Waziristan-like peace accord. Bajaur Agency.” Pakistan conveniently finished negotiations as international attention is on the crisis over the removal of Pakistan’s chief justice.

It appears, like in the North and South Waziristan deals, that the government has openly negotiated with the Taliban and al Qaeda. “We hope that a North Waziristan-like deal is also reached between the government and tribal militants, led by Faqir Mohammad,” sources told Dawnon condition of anonymity. Faqir Muhammad is a senior leader within the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM, or Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Sharia Law), the “Pakistani Taliban” who has sent over 10,000 foot soldiers to fight alongside the Taliban during the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Jack Cashill has two possible suggestions.

In the recent military tribunal hearing on his combatant status, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad owned up to 29 separate acts of terror in which he served, at the very least, as “responsible participant.” Some such acts, September 11 for instance, he claimed to have successfully masterminded and executed.

Others he helped plan but, happily, did not manage to pull off. These include schemes to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange and the Panama Canal as well as plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and presidents Clinton and Carter.

It is likely that KSM has inflated his role in many of these events, but just as likely that he was at least involved.

The Department of Defense does not edit a word out of 28 of the 29 acts that KSM listed. But one act, number 3 in KSM’s line-up, the DOD originally redacted entirely.

The numerical placement seems critical here. In number 1, KSM assumes responsibility for the “1993 World Trade Center Operation,” and there is no reason to doubt him.

In number 2, he takes credit for “the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.” Although KSM overstates his control of the operation, there is little reason to question his involvement.

In number 4, KSM admits his participation in the “Shoe Bomber operation to down two American airplanes.” Again, this seems like a credible claim.

Number 3, however, was originally posted as “REDACTED.” This was before the Internet started humming about its likely contents.

Given the placement of number 3 high among the provable acts of terror committed against Americans on American soil, I and others speculated that KSM may very well have been staking claim to one of two events.

One is the Oklahoma City bombing. As has been well enough documented, convicted conspirator Terry Nichols made multiple trips to the Philippines when KSM’s “nephew,” Ramzi Yousef, was living there. Yousef was constructing the bombs for the impending aviation attack that KSM refers to as “the Bojinka operation.”

According to a recent House report, Nichols traveled with the book, ”The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives,” and just happened to show up in Cebu City at the exact same time as master bomber Yousef.

This was November 1994, six months before the Oklahoma City bombing. Nichols changed his itinerary immediately after Yousef’s lab was busted by the Manila police in January 1995 and left the county in haste.

In “Against All Enemies,” Clinton anti-terror czar Richard Clarke has this to say about the visits of these two terrorists to the same city in the same country at the same time: “We do know that Nichols’ bombs did not work before his Philippine stay,” writes Clarke, “and were deadly when he returned.”

The second likely suspect for the redacted terror act was TWA Flight 800, the 747 blown out of the sky off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, Saddam’s national liberation day.

According to two separate sources within the NSA, on the night the plane went down Yousef phoned KSM from his New York City prison and said—in their native Baluchi– “What had to be done has been done, TWA 800” (last two words unintelligible).”

The next day Yousef asked for a mistrial, arguing in high chutzpah that the environment had turned prejudicial in regard to accused airplane bombers like himself.

Cashill does seem right that the order of the redacted item makes it look like a very important terrorist act. I had wondered if it might have been referring to TWA Flight 800 myself, having read lots of speculation on the Net that Sandy Berger’s efforts at removing Clinton Administration documents from the National Archives may have been occasioned by the necessity to remove Flight 800 references. It’s certainly a good conspiracy theory.

I am obliged to admit it: I never covered it at all.

Clinton had Janet Reno fire all 93 US attorneys, so why should there be a problem with the Bush Administration replacing 8 of them? I thought personally.

But it’s clear that those of us blogging on the Right screwed up on this one, and allowed the left blogosphere to gin up a fabricated scandal as the result of inadequate defense. (Though, Lord knows, I’m tired of defending George W. Bush, who doesn’t do much that’s effective by way of defending himself.)

Terry McDermott, in the LA Times, explains how the big-time leftie blogs did it.

over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

Read the whole thing.

And the moral is that we on the Right need to put on our waders and gas masks, and go trudging through the left blogosphere’s sewers more regularly than we do, keeping an eye on their mischief, so that we can demolish these kinds of attack memes before they successfully root themselves in the public dialogue.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Daniel Clark observes. The whole business is just a part of the feminization of modern society.

He’s right, too.

If a guy is shown a picture of a sad-looking polar bear adrift on an ice floe, his first thought will be something like, “I’ve heard that bear steaks are tough, but maybe if you marinated them in beer, they’d turn out all right.” At that point, the alarmists’ emotional ploy is foiled. In a world without guy stuff, however, his vacant mind may be invaded by irrationalities like, “Who will take care of the polar bears’ children?”

In this chicken-and-the-egg scenario, the success of the global warming movement is both the cause and effect of our society’s emasculation. It would have never gotten this far if the “Nineties Man” hadn’t paved the way. When “I feel your pain” became a successful presidential campaign slogan, we should have known that charcoal-grilled steaks would soon be on the endangered list.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

All the really cool blogs run ads. Capitalism is a good thing, and I don’t see any reason why a blog shouldn’t pay some of its own expenses via advertising. And, besides, I have an addiction to blog gadgets and counters and the like, and I’ve been hankering for some time to play with advertising tools and run amusing ads.

So I’ve established a relationship with Blogads, and created a space over in the right column for future advertising. Watch for further exciting developments.

He has some reservations about the film, of course, but Stephenson thinks it’s an acceptable assimilation of history to contemporary entertainment genre.

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it…

When science fiction tackles classical themes, the results may look a bit odd to some, but the audience — which is increasingly the mainstream audience — is sufficiently hungry for this kind of material (and, perhaps, suspicious of anything that’s overly polished) that it is willing to overlook the occasional mistake, or make up for it by shouting hilarious things from the balcony. These people don’t need irony or campiness self-consciously pointed out to them, any more than they need a laugh track to enjoy “The Simpsons.”

The Spartan phalanx presents itself to foes as a wall of shields, bristling with spears, its members squatting behind their defenses, anonymous and unknowable, until they break formation and stand out alone, practically naked, soft, exposed and recognizable as individuals.

The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen — until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.

Read the whole thing.