The answer is: not well. The Embassy Bomber who killed 224 people in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 was acquitted in a Manhattan Federal District Court of all but one count of a 285 count indictment.

Jennifer Rubin, in Commentary, explains what went wrong.

The acquittal of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on all but one of 285 counts in connection with the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania has once again demonstrated that the leftist lawyers’ experiment in applying civilian trial rules to terrorists is gravely misguided and downright dangerous. The soon-to-be House chairman on homeland security, Peter King, issued a statement blasting the trial outcome and the nonchalant response from the Justice Department:

“I am disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice today in Manhattan’s federal civilian court. In a case where Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was facing 285 criminal counts, including hundreds of murder charges, and where Attorney General Eric Holder assured us that ‘failure is not an option,’ the jury found him guilty on only one count and acquitted him of all other counts including every murder charge. This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama Administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts”

Congress can start by ending federal-court jurisdiction over detainees. Then they should demand Eric Holder’s resignation — preferably before his serially wrong advice causes any more damage to our national security.

As the New York Times explains:

[P]rosecutors built a circumstantial case to try to establish that Mr. Ghailani had played a key logistical role in the preparations for the Tanzania attack.

They said the evidence showed that he helped to buy the Nissan Atlas truck that was used to carry the bomb, and gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to intensify the blast. He also stored an explosive detonator in an armoire he used, and his cellphone became the “operational phone” for the plotters in the weeks leading up to the attacks, prosecutors contended.

The attacks, orchestrated by Al Qaeda, killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands of others.

But the case was ill-suited to civilian courts, and a key witness was excluded from testifying:

But because of the unusual circumstances of Mr. Ghailani’s case — after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004, he was held for nearly five years in a so-called black site run by the Central Intelligence Agency and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the prosecution faced significant legal hurdles getting his case to trial. And last month, the government lost a key ruling on the eve of trial that may have seriously damaged their chances of winning convictions.

In the ruling, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, barred them from using an important witness against Mr. Ghailani because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

The witness, Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he had sold Mr. Ghailani the large quantities of TNT used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam, prosecutors told the judge, calling him “a giant witness for the government.”

The judge called it correctly, and explicitly warned the government of “the potential damage of excluding the witness when he said in his ruling that Mr. Ghailani’s status of ‘enemy combatant’ probably would permit his detention as something akin ‘to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end, even if he were found not guilty.’”

In other words, what in the world was the bomber doing in an Article III courtroom? He was, quite bluntly, part of a stunt by the Obama administration, which had vilified Bush administration lawyers for failing to accord terrorists the full panoply of constitutional rights available to American citizens who are arrested by police officers and held pursuant to constitutional requirements.

Once again, the Obama team has revealed itself to be entirely incompetent and has proved, maybe even to themselves, the obvious: the Bush administration had it right.

Taiwan’s animated news service pokes fun at America’s resort to electronic strip searches and crotch fondling.

The Washington Times is right that the recent move to humiliating invasions of personal privacy represents a deliberate policy choosing universal indignity over profiling, but I think they are wrong to identify the TSA’s practices and politically correct ideology as the invention of the Obama Administration. That infernal organization was created by the Bush Administration, and it was the Bush Administration that appointed the original officials who established its keynote policies of security theater and political correctness.

Hat tip to Theo.

Taggart Tunnel through Continental Divide: Obama voters, Beware!

On December 7, 6:30 to 9:30 PM, at The Millennium Broadway Hotel, Hudson Theatre, 145 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036, purchasers of $100 to $500 tickets will get to drink cocktails, hobnob with the producers and cast of the Atlas Shrugged movie, receive an update on the film’s progress and watch a ten-minute preview film clip, including the film’s first scene.

How high exactly can a Polar Bear jump? How fast can he move?

The Daily Mail published this image of wildlife filmmaker Tristin Bayer engaged in a staring match with one of the natives of Cape Churchill, Manitoba.

Jack Russell Terriers are small dogs who don’t know their own size, as this case from Eastern South Dakota demonstrates. The valor of this particular terrier attracted international attention, and one of the best accounts is the one from the British Daily Mail.

It was a David and Goliath style battle that few would have thought possible.

But with the odds stacked against him, Jack the plucky Jack Russel chased a deadly mountain lion high into a tree.

The cornered lion remained trapped above the ground before the Jack Russel was able to pounce a few minutes later.

Jack’s owner, Chad Strenge, witnessed the astonishing scenes while he was walking Jack on farmland in South Dakota.

The pair had been hunting when Mr Strenge heard Jack barking frantically several hundred yards away.

Thinking that his heel-biting Jack Russel – a breed known for their high energy levels- might have caught a squirrel, Mr Strenge raced to a patch of dense woodland.

Incredibly, the 150lb mountain lion was trapped high in the branches while 17lb Jack bayed for his blood below.

‘He trees cats all the time. I suppose he figured it was just a cat,’ said Mr Strenge. …

Mr Strenge shot at the lion which knocked it from the tree. Jack then chased the lion over a short distance before Mr Strenge killed it with his gun.

Professor Jonathan Jenks, an expert on cougar migration, said hunters usually needed two or three hounds to chase a lion up a tree.

He said: ‘The cougar was probably not hungry enough to attack Jack.

‘It very well could have lost a territory and decided to take off from the Black Hills and head this way.’

Arden Petersen, of the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks department, said that no charges would be filed for shooting the animal.

People in South Dakota have the right to kill mountain lions which they feel are a threat to themselves, their livestock or their pets.

The lion was taken to South Dakota State University, where it will be studied.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Walter Kirn, in his autobiographical Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, describes the post-modern English major experience and explains the nature of the conversion process to full membership in the contemporary elite educated community of fashion.

[A] suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays by leading theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force HerÄ™ is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name: “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking “heteronomous” and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across— stuck in a footnote—”unreadability.”

That word I understood, of course.

But real understanding was rare with theory. It couldn’t be depended on at all. Boldness of execution was what scored points. With one of my professors, a snappy “heuristic” usually did the trick. With another, the charm was a casual “praxis.” Even when a poem or story fundamentally escaped me, I found that I could save face with terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as “semiotically unstable.” By this I meant “hard.” All the theory words meant “hard” to me, from “hermeneutical” to “gestural.” Once in a while I’d look one up and see that it had a more specific meaning, but later—some-times only minutes later—the definition would catch a sort of breeze, float away like a dandelion seed, and the word would go back to meaning “hard.”

The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery-” honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps—left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. We toted around books by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Walter Benjamin. We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors—the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts—we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.
For true believers, the goal of theory seemed to be the lifting of a great weight from the shoulders of civilization. This weight was the illusion that it was civilized. The weight had been set there by a rangÄ™ of perpetrators—members of certain favored races, males, property owners, the church, the literate, natives of the northern hemisphere—who, when taken together, it seemed to me, represented a considerable portion of everyone who had ever lived. Then again, of course I’d think that way. Of course I’d be cynical. I was one of them.

So why didn’t I feel like one of them, particularly just then? why did I, a member of the classes that had supposedly placed e weight on others and was now attempting to redress this crime, feel so crushingly weighed down myself?

I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers. I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized —the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion—were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then. We could say “incommensurable.” Both words meant “hard.”

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were fakes. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I—a born con man who knew little about great literature—had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king.

This lucky convergence of academic fashion and my illiteracy emboldened me socially. It convinced me I had a place at Princeton after all. I hadn’t chosen it, exactly, but I’d be foolish not to occupy it. Otherwise I’d be alone.

Finally, without reservations or regrets, I settled into the ranks of Princeton’s Joy Division—my name for the crowd of moody avant-gardists who hung around the smaller campus theaters discussing, enjoying, and dramatizing confusion. One of their productions, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage decorated with nothing but potted plants. Plants and Waiters, it was called. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings making bets on how long it would take people to leave. They, the “waiters,” proved true to form. They fidgeted but they didn’t flee. Hilarious.

And, for me, profoundly enlightening. Who knew that serious art could be like this? Who would have guessed that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor saps that still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now. It bothered me that I’d ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the great coast (people like me— the new, emerging me) had been laughing at us all along. But what troubled me more was the dawning realization that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this; I might have stayed a rube forever. This idea transformed my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave behind the sort of folks whom I’d been raised around and stand—for better or for worse—with the characters who’d clued me in.

Whit Stillman

If Whit Stillman were a blogger, I believe he’d be a contributor at Maggie’s Farm.

Ivy League conservatives rejoiced twenty years ago when Metropolitan opened in the art houses. Here, at last, was a directorial voice speaking for us, someone sharing our appreciation for the surviving remnants of the belle monde, a sophisticated storyteller focused on the lifestyles of urban haute bourgeoisie of old family and private school background, recounting the minor scale epics and tragedies of the younger part of Upper East Side society with rueful and self-deprecating wit.

He moved location, in his second film Barcelona, exposing his American Innocents Abroad to deeply-entrenched-in-European-culture Anti-American prejudices, and seemed to be proceeding from strength to strength artistically.

But then, in 1998, came Last Days of Disco. Whit Stillman’s cynical, frivolous, and preppified personal world view somehow successfully crossed political and social barriers to appeal to a broad-based audience in his first two films, but Last Days of Disco seemed overly subjective and repelled audiences. No one in the late 1990s, other than Stillman it seems, lamented the passing of the Disco music era (most people were happy to participate in Disco record bonfires) or the demise of Studio 54.

The negative reception received by Last Days caused its director to vanish for twelve years, but as Mara Altman learns in an interview with Stillman appearing in First Things, rejoicing is in order. Whit Stillman is currently shooting another film due to be released next year.

[W]hen Disco didn’t earn the accolades Stillman had come to expect, he decided to retreat from New York, his wife, two daughters, and wounded feelings in tow.

Mostly, though, Stillman just wanted to live somewhere cheaper. But he also had another problem: His trunk was empty. To him, a trunk means a body of material or manuscripts that a writer keeps around and, over time, can come back to rewrite and reconceive. He took his first stab at Barcelona in 1983. It took more than ten years and multiple rewrites before it hit the screen. “After I finished Disco, I had no trunk,” he says. “Since then, I have been recreating my trunk.” …

[T]he wait is almost over. Under the cloak of secrecy, Stillman has at last returned to the role of director. He has just finished shooting his first movie in twelve years, on the streets of New York, his home again after several years of self-imposed European exile. Its working title is Damsels in Distress, and it’s about a group of perfume-obsessed college girls—some suffer from nasal-shock syndrome at the faintest sniff of B.O.—who run a suicide-prevention center. Stillman has raised the money and written the script, which has a honed Whitonian perspective and Whit-icisms galore. And although the film offers the possibility of a cameo appearance by Stillman staple Chris Eigeman, who has appeared in all three of his movies, it will not make a quadrilogy of his trilogy. “This film is different,” Stillman says. “Completely different. Okay, not completely different, but it’s different.”

I didn’t think much of Last Days when I saw it the first few times, but recently one of the cable networks was playing it and replaying it for several weeks. I not only grew fonder of the film. I found myself watching it over and over without tiring of it. Several individual performances, particularly Kate Beckinsale’s, inspired admiration, and the cad’s wronging of the sweet and intelligent Alice (Chloë Sevigny) increasingly moved this viewer.

Let’s hope that the years in exile have refilled the Stillman steamer trunk to overflowing, and that Damsels in Distress marks the beginning of a long and productive second career stage. Whit Stillman working in Dunkin’ Doughnuts. Whit Stillman frequenting diners. That just isn’t right. Hopefully Damsels will be a hit, and his Cobb Salads will be henceforward ordered in the Harvard Club.

Hat tip to Susan Vigilante via Walter Olson.

Location and date: Café Iruña, Pamplona, Spain — May 7, 2010. Ensemble: Asociación Gayarre Amigos de la Ópera de Navarra. Music: Libiamo ne’ lieti calici, from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata.

I had a few drinks last night, so I don’t actually remember how it was that I stumbled upon this amusing 2005 article in the New Journal by Adriane Quinlan providing a tour d’horizon of the best t shirt slogan expressions of the traditional Yale-Harvard football rivalry.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s pledges sell shirts “to raise money for their pledge project—usually an improvement to the infrastructure of the house. “For example,” said Fraternity president Billy Deitch, “rebuilding the basement bar.” Two years ago the frat put out one of the most successful shirts in recent memory, the front of which argued, “You’d have to be crazy to go to Harvard…” and the back of which provided evidence: a picture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Harvard Class of 1962. A later shirt was more minimal in design, “VE-RI-DUM,” which Branford Senior Jonathan Breit claimed as his favorite game shirt: “Everything is perfect: the number of syllables, the latin-esque ending of ‘dum,’ the fact that ‘dumb’ is misspelled. It just works.”

An amateur photographer with a habit of driving around inside Yellowstone National Park in his spare time taking shots of wildlife last month encountered a grizzly bear pursuing with intent an injured bison.

The photographs were taken around 7 AM at the Fountain Flats area, located between the Madison Junction and Old Faithful inside the Park.

The unfortunate bison had blundered into one of Yellowstone Park’s hot springs and was badly injured. As events unfolded, the bison managed to outrun the bear, but it was subsequently concluded to be too badly burned to recover and was put down by Park rangers. It seems a pity that the bear lost the race.

KTVQ reports.

The photographs have gone viral, and have been published in many places, including Field & Stream.

Hat tip to Karen l. Myers.