Daily Kos ran a poll on the UK Airline Terrorism Plot, which produced these results:

The thwarted U.K. plot

1. was legit. 792 votes – 49 %
2. was more drama from BushCo to keep us all afraid. 811 votes – 50 %

1603 Total Votes

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The frightening thing is that they do really let all these impaired people vote.

The place to go for a summary and the best link collection, as always, is Michelle Malkin.

My wife is seriously annoyed. The terrorists are concentrating on the use of hand-carried liquid explosives, which is going to cost business travellers the ability to carry their own Diet Pepsi. Karen is also very worried that Homeland Security may start confiscating books.

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff is quoted as saying the plot was “quite close to the execution phase.” Considering the dates, one wonders: is it possible that Shiite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated references to an 8/22 reply to the United States may have been referring to the intended climax of an Al Qaeda operation?

Dr. Demarche, at Austin Bay, identifies the problems attendant upon responses by states to attacks by non-state entities.

Israel is not at war with the state of Lebanon; it is at war with a “non-state actor” in the parlance (Hezbollah), which happens to be in Lebanon. This is a fairly new concept in the era of the modern state. Barbarians, for example, may have besieged ancient Rome, but at the time the “state” was a minority. Today the state system is firmly entrenched, and the “barbarians” are largely within. My question is this, now what?

Groups such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and others cross borders at will, their memberships are ideologically homogeneous, but diverse in nationality. Efforts to destroy these organizations are bound to cross multiple borders, as we have already seen, something for which international law and the so-called international community (which supported Israel’s withdrawal from the very territories that are now the launch points for cross border attacks by terrorists) are woefully unprepared. Should you have any doubt of this I offer the talks in Rome this week as proof. Those engaged in finding a solution to the current state of affairs should keep one thought in the back of their minds: this will not be the last time the world will have to face such an event.

Traditional methods of sanction appear to be non-applicable to entities such as these- how do states sanction organizations that transcend borders and are privately funded? No mechanism exists to hold non-state actors accountable for their actions, even though they now have the potential to cause the same, or even greater, level of destruction than do many states.

Global policy maker must shift their thinking. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the like are not organizations that can be “contained”, they do not field armies that can be squared off against and defeated. In a way they are reminiscent of Mao’s idea that “the people are like water and the army is like fish”, but these fish swim in every sea. The current battle may rage in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, but the bottom line is that this is a battle between a state and a non-state actor, and the world is not prepared to deal with this new reality, even today. Let’s hope those working to settle the current battle keep their eyes on this bigger picture, too.

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

Baron Bodissey, this week, has a terrific essay identifying the crucial components of Islam’s attack on the West:

Covert funding based on successful long-tern extortion via the manipulation of petroleum prices.

The use of criminals, psychos, and malcontents as cannon fodder.

And so we have what might be called a Demonic Convergence, a confluence of destructive impulses that Islam gathers unto itself. In the terms of Chaos Theory, Islam is a “basin attractor”, an asymptotic solution to all the differential equations of nihilistic human behavior.

Any impulse that longs to destroy Western Civilization — which, for the modern world, means all civilization — will gravitate towards Islam. The criminal gets ideological justification for his behavior, the sadist gets to rape and murder to his heart’s content, and the hippie radical gets to stick it to the Man for all eternity.

This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become.

And, finally, the habitual treason of the journalistic clerisy of the West, providing the essential Fifth Column.

A must-read article.

Hat-tip to Richard Fernandez.

The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

AP reports that the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s cell phone has been examined and was found to contain some intriguing phone numbers.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone, according to an Iraqi legislator.

Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s party, said Monday that authorities found the numbers after al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7.

Abdul-Latif did not give names of the officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament.

He called for an investigation, saying Iraqis “cannot have one hand with the government and another with the terrorists.”

A terrorist fifth column inside the hastily assembled Iraqi government, I suppose, was always a strong possibility.

A recent commenter from the UK took issue with postings here arguing that George W. Bush ought to have done more to mobilize and involve the American public in the Iraq War. Insisting that the Invasion of Iraq should not be viewed as an appropriate action in the War on Terror begun in response to 9/11, she wrote, referrring to the text of the author I quoted and linked: “are you suggesting Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the Twin Towers thingie?”

Of course, the specific causus belli of the US Invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s persistent violation of the Gulf War Cease Fire Agreement and his continuing breach of UN Resolutions, requiring him to submit to weapons inspections and surrender materials known to be in his possession. But grounds for suspicion of possible Iraqi involvement in 9/11 certainly do exist.

Czech Intelligence has never backed away from its report that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi Intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague 08 April 2001.

There is also the Telegraph news story, published back on 14 Dec 2003, that 9/11 hijack leader Mohammed Atta underwent some form of training for the 9/11 attacks at the hands of the infamous Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad during the summer of 2001.

Abu Nidal had been a guest of Saddam Hussein since 1999, occupying a villa supplied by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service, in the wealthy al-Masbah neighborhood of
al-Jadriyah, Baghdad. Abu Nidal was killed 14 August 2002 by an Iraqi Mukhabarat assassination unit.

Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day “work programme” Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal’s base in Baghdad.

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.

The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq’s ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.

“We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda,” he said. “But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks.”

All this is unproven at the present time, but it would certainly be premature of dismiss these reports out of hand, as the Left has done out of partisan motivation.

Cicero in response to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld:

IV. atqui, si tempus est ullum iure hominis necandi, quae multa sunt, certe illud est non modo iustum verum etiam necessarium, cum vi vis inlata defenditur… insidiatori vero et latroni quae potest inferri iniusta nex?

quid comitatus nostri, quid gladii volunt? quos habere certe non liceret, si uti illis nullo pacto liceret. est igitur haec, iudices, non scripta, sed nata lex, quam non didicimus, accepimus, legimus, verum ex natura ipsa adripuimus, hausimus, expressimus, ad quam non docti sed facti, non instituti sed imbuti sumus, ut, si vita nostra in aliquas insidias, si in vim et in tela aut latronum aut inimicorum incidisset, omnis honesta ratio esset expediendae salutis. silent enim leges inter arma nec se exspectari iubent, cum ei qui exspectare velit ante iniusta poena luenda sit quam iusta repetenda.

etsi persapienter et quodam modo tacite dat ipsa lex potestatem defendendi, quae non hominem occidi, sed esse cum telo hominis occidendi causa vetat, ut, cum causa, non telum quaereretur, qui sui defendendi causa telo esset usus, non hominis occidendi causa habuisse telum iudicaretur. quapropter hoc maneat in causa, iudices; non enim dubito quin probaturus sim vobis defensionem meam, si id memineritis quod oblivisci non potestis insidiatorem interfici iure posse.

(Translation, JDZ:)

IV. But if there is any occasion on which it is proper to slay a man, and there are many, surely that occasion is not only just, but even necessary, when violence is offered, and must be repelled by violence… And what death can be unjust when inflicted on a secret plotter and outlaw?

Why do we have an army, why do we own swords? Surely it would not be justifiable for us to have them at all, if it were never justifiable to use them. There is, therefore, a law, O judges, not written, but born with us, which we have not learnt, nor received by tradition, nor read, but which we have taken in and imbibed from Nature herself; a law which we were never taught, but for which we were made, which we were never trained in, but which is ingrained in ourselves: namely, that if our life is in danger from plots, or from open violence, or from the weapons of brigands or enemies, every means of securing our safety is honorable. For the laws are silent in the midst of the clash of arms, and do not expect themselves to be waited upon, when he who waited would be obliged to bear an unjust injury rather than exact a just punishment.

The law very wisely, and tacitly, gives a man the right to defend himself, and it does not merely prohibit homicide, but forbids anyone carrying a weapon for the purpose of murder. It is the intended purpose, not the carrying of the weapon, which constitutes the offense. The man who used a weapon to defend himself would not be deemed to have armed himself with the intention of committing murder. Let this principle then be remembered by you in this trial, O judges; for I do not doubt that I shall make good my defense before you, if you only remember, that which it is impossible to forget: that a plotter against oneself may be lawfully slain.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, PRO T. ANNIO MILONE ORATIO, [In Defense of Titus Annius Milo], X:IV.

Members of the Trans-Atlantic intelligentsia today live unprecedently comfortable and domesticated lives, and enjoy such affluence and personal security that instead of worrying about the basics of survival (like people in the past) they are apt to seek the perfection of their selves. They take care to obtain the finest educations, they select and pursue the most prestigious and gratifying careers, they exercise and jog, and they contemplate with great care all questions of ethics. Even ordinary and banal matters, like cooking lobsters, to them commonly rise to levels of grave and serious concern.

So exquisite and precieux have become the souls of our contemporary elites that they simply cannot bear to contemplate the idea of themselves (or anyone else) inflicting suffering on human or animal, crustacean or terrorist.

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When I was a little boy, I once had a dog I loved very much, but who was unfortunately a very bad dog. You couldn’t walk him on a leash: he was strong, willful, and could pull even an adult off his feet.

My dog would obey no one. He terrorized the neighborhood, and frequently treed one neighbor’s cat. One day, he escaped from our backyard, and proceeded to the unimaginable atrocity of attacking a neighbor’s freshly washed sheets drying outdoors on a clothes-line. He tore most of them to shreds, and soiled the rest. My father had to face a female neighbor’s righteous wrath, and he had to make expensive restitution.

I woke up one morning shortly afterward to find my beloved dog missing.

I was heartbroken, but my parents explained that, though he was a wonderful dog, he had not really been happy living in a town (where he would get into trouble playing with people’s bed sheets). So they decided it would be best for him to go and live on a farm in the country, a place where dogs could run free.

The farm was a wonderful place, and a dog could have fun all day doing all the things he liked to do. The farmer was delighted to own such a wonderful dog, and this was the best possible arrangement for everyone. I missed my dog, of course, but I was happy to think of him happy, safe, and enjoying himself.

Many years later, when I was an adult, my father admitted to me that he took that dog up on the mountain, fired both barrels of his 12 gauge shotgun into him, and walked away.

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In a lot of ways, our intelligentsia today are like children. They have no first hand experience commonly of the harsh and difficult choices adults have to make. And, like children, they are naive and sentimental, and do not understand evil.

What the rest of us need to do for Justice Stevens, Andrew Sullivan, and the Trans-Atlantic chattering classes generally is just explain that those Islamic terrorists weren’t happy in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanamo Bay. They were only getting into trouble. So we had to let them all go off and live on the farm, where they could run free, set off all the bombs they like, and do all those other fun Islamic things they like to do. The farmer had never seen such wonderful terrorists, he said. He used to raise terrorists, he said. He loved terrorists, and he was delighted to adopt these.

Some National Defense University scholars believe we ought to be using Islamic terms more carefully in order to avoid inadvertently assisting the enemy by endorsing his own viewpoint and assumptions.

In dealing with Islamic extremists, the West may be giving them the advantage due to cultural ignorance, maintain Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV. The men work at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

The two believe the right words can help fight the global war on terror. “American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting,” the men wrote in an article titled “Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism.”

A case in point is the term “jihadist.” Many leaders use the term jihadist or jihadi as a synonym for Islamic extremist. Jihad has been commonly adapted in English as meaning “holy war.” But to Muslims it means much more. In their article, Steusand and Tunnell said in Arabic – the language of the Koran – jihad “literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression ‘jihad fi sabil illah,’ striving in the path of God.”

This is a good thing for all Muslims. “Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad thus indicates that we recognize their doctrines and actions as being in the path of God and, for Muslims, legitimate,” they wrote. By countering jihadis, the West and moderate Muslims are enemies of true Islam.

The men asked Muslim scholars what the correct term for Islamic extremists would be and they came up with “hirabah.” This word specifically refers to those engaged in sinful warfare, warfare contrary to Islamic law. “We should describe the Islamic totalitarian movement as the global hirabah, not the global jihad,” they wrote.

Another word constantly misused in the West is mujahdeen. Again, in American dictionaries this word refers to a holy warrior – again a good thing. So calling an al Qaeda terrorist a mujahid legitimizes him.

The correct term for these killers is “mufsidun,” Streusand and Tunnell say. This refers to an evil or corrupt person. “There is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world,” they wrote.

People can apply other words instead. “Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive,” they wrote. “Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.”

The men also want officials to stop using the term “caliphate” as the goal of al Qaeda and associated groups. The Caliphate came to refer to the successors of the Prophet Mohammed as the political leaders of the Muslim community. “Sunni Muslims traditionally regard the era of the first four caliphs (A.D. 632-661) as an era of just rule,” the men wrote. “Accepting our enemies’ description of their goal as the restoration of a historical caliphate again validates an aspect of their ideology.”

The men point out that an al Qaeda caliphate would not mean the establishment of just rule, but rather a global totalitarian state where women would be treated as chattel, music banned and any kind of difference severely punished. “Anyone who needs a preview of how such a state would act merely has to review the conduct of the Taliban in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001,” they wrote.

The correct term for the al Qaeda goal is global totalitarian state – something no one in the world wants.

Finally, the men urge Westerners to translate Allah into God. Using Allah to refer to God would be like using Jehovah to refer to a Hebrew God. In fact, Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham. Using different names exaggerates the divisions among the religions, the authors say.

Complete article

Terrorists in Iraq, wearing no uniforms, recently violated the laws of war by the barbarous murder of two US soldiers.

AP:

The U.S. military recovered the booby-trapped bodies of two missing soldiers Tuesday, and Iraqi officials said the Americans were tortured and killed in a “barbaric” way. An insurgent group claimed the new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq executed the men personally…

“Coalition forces had to carefully maneuver their way through numerous improvised explosive devices leading up to and around the site,” the military said in a statement. “Insurgents attempting to inflict additional casualties had placed IEDs around the bodies.”

A number of the usual offenders from the Blogosphere have taken this occasion, when we should all be voicing our indignation at the conduct of the enemy, and wishing our troops success in hunting the malefactors down and exacting vengeance, instead to strike moralizing poses and quote grave legal opinions, informing us of imaginary obligations to avoid excessive injury to the enemy.

Stephen Bainbridge turns to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England:

Islamofascist terrorists will use torture regardless of whether the US responds in kind or not…

The Anglo-American tradition, according to the great English jurist William Blackstone, includes a “prohibition not only of killing and maiming, but also of torturing (to which our laws are strangers).” We thus ought to abstain from torture simply because a prohibition of torture is part of the moral and legal heritage we are fighting to defend.

Andrew Sullivan gets carried away with himself to the point of spouting treason, attributing to us moral equivalence with this particularly vicious and cowardly enemy.

One can only wish that Andrew Sullivan would go out to a workingman’s bar, and repeat exactly the same sentiments, in order to give some right-thinking American the opportunity to rebuke them in the most appropriate fashion.

My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves. What was once a difference in kind between us and our enemy is now a difference in degree. That fact profoundly weakens our moral standing in the world, the power of our cause, and impedes the long-run success in the war of ideas that the war on terror involves.

Gregory Djerejian contributes additional sanctimony.

Clearly, when American soldiers are tortured, murdered, and multilated by illegal combatants, the decision of just how the perpetrators should be punished, were the perpetrators of that outrage so unfortunate as to fall alive into the hands of US forces, ought to be the perogative of the local American commander. Politicians should not interfere, and the opinions of domestically-based law professors, corporate attorneys, and old ladies are completely beside the point.

The Laws of England and the Laws of the United States have not a thing to do with any of this. War takes place outside the jurisdiction of civilian law, and the murderers of Privates Menchaca and Tucker have no claim whatsoever to the privileges and immunities of the US legal system nor the least pretence to a right to be treated as prisoners of war.

They are unlawful combatants, and are eggregiously guilty of violating the customs and usages of war. Their lives ought to be regarded as forfeit, and the only questions a US commander on the scene ought to be asking himself in the event of their capture are: what form of execution would be regarded as most disagreeable by primitives infatuated with Islamic superstition? and, what would make the most dramatic impression, and provide the greatest deterrence to future outrages?

The British avenged the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 by tying the mutineers to the muzzles of cannons, which were then fired. Surely, we can do better today.