Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has got to be an idiot. AP reports that Graham said:

If it‘s seen that our country is trying to redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of the CIA, why can‘t every other country redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of their secret police?” Graham asked.

The entire point of the Geneva Conventions is reciprocity. A signatory only promises to take prisoners, treat them decently, not use germ warfare or poison gas, not because they are trying to prove who is more humanitarian than whom, but merely so that their own troops will enjoy the decent treatment and the enemy’s restraint.
But our enemies, in recent years, have rarely been civilized European states, like Germany, who are signatories. Our enemies lately have been terrorists and illegal combatants, who simply torture, murder, and mutilate the remains of any Americans so unfortunate as to fall alive into their hands.

It is the misapplication of the Geneva Convention, and the unwarranted extension of its privileges to latrunculi (pirates and brigands), which jeopardizes US troops, by preventing just punishment for violation of the customs and usages of war. Obviously, the way you protect your own troops is to deny Geneva Convention protections to those who do not live up to its prescriptions, not by giving away Geneva Convention status to to our adversaries, however they choose to behave.

“Oh, I say, old boy, go right ahead and kill every prisoner out of hand. Use poison gas and germ warfare, if you like. Butcher all the non-combatants you please. But we Americans are simply too good, and fine, and pure to stoop to mistreating you. Keep the secret of the location of the diabolical device which will blow up one of our major cities, and kill a hundred thousand Americans. We certainly won’t beat it out of you.”

Nathan Sharansky discusses the current covert form of warfare in the LA Times:

IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin told me a story that I have been unable to get out of my mind. We were meeting in the Kremlin, and I raised the grave danger facing the world from the transfer of missile technology and nuclear material to the Iranians. In Putin’s view, however, the real danger came not from an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile or, for that matter, from the lethal arsenal of any nation-state.

“Imagine a sunny and beautiful day in a suburb of Manhattan,” he said. “An elderly man is tending to the roses in his small garden with his nephew visiting from Europe. Life seems perfectly normal. The following day, the nephew, carrying a suitcase, takes a train to Manhattan. Inside the suitcase is a nuclear bomb.”

The threat, Putin explained to me a year before 9/11, was not from this or that country but from their terrorist proxies — aided and supported quietly by a sovereign state that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty — who will perpetrate their attacks without a return address. This scenario became real when Al Qaeda plotted its 9/11 attacks from within Afghanistan and received support from the Taliban government. Then it happened again this summer, when Iran was allowed to wage a proxy war through Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But this time, the international community’s weak response dealt the global war on terror a severe blow.

Five years ago, after 9/11, such a lack of culpability seemed inconceivable. That was when President Bush abandoned the conventional approach to fighting terror by vowing that the United States would henceforth make no distinction between terrorists and regimes that support them. You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.

The problem is that Bush has not fulfilled that promise.

In the case of Hezbollah, the Palestinians are surrogates for Iran, which is something of a surrogate for China. The US really does not want to confront on the basis of both military and economic consideration.

But, for whom is Al Qaeda a surrogate? It is just not possible for a band of guerillas to wage warfare, to recruit, train, transport, arm, and supply themselves. War is expensive. Al Qaeda’s operations, and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, must be being funded by Islamic sources. It would economically disruptive to go after those sources, but there is no realistic other option. Until all the Near Eastern sources of funding are forced to stop waging proxy way, the war will continue.

AP confirmed what bloggers learned via tips from military sources last April, AP photographer Bilal Hussein was detained, after being captured by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”…
In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.
The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

No?

Well, how about looking at these photos? or these? AP’s Tom Curley finds nothing inappropriate? Ridiculous. US forces should detain him.

LGF provides a bit more detail on Hussein’s capture.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

Christopher Hitchens dissects the facile dismissal of Iraq seeking Niger uranium in the Pouting Spooks’ Senate Intelligence Committee report.

And, on page 54 we read, under the heading “Conclusions”:

Iraq had two contacts with Niger after 1998, but neither involved the purchase of uranium. The purpose of a visit to Niger by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, was to invite the president of Niger to visit Iraq. The other visit involved discussions of a Nigerien oil purchase from Iraq.

Since the report does not trouble to supply any reasoning from the evidence to its conclusions, we are left to infer that there is nothing odd about Saddam Hussein’s envoy (to the Vatican) paying a visit to Niger, and nothing unusual about Niger’s desire to buy (“for cash”) crude oil from a country under international sanctions that is much less close and convenient a source of oil than, say, its neighbors Nigeria and Algeria.

That ambassador to the Vatican, it turns out, was none other than Wissam al-Zahawi. Ambassador Rolf Ekéus, head of the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first Gulf War, tells Hitchens:

When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger, I thought well, then, that’s it. Conclusive.

One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq’s delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions). . . . He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq’s top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues.

Hitchens sums it up.

The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie’s name without ever once mentioning his significant background. It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip. It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger… It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekéus. It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions. It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless.

The Telegraph reports that the consequences of the Waziristan surrender by the Musharraf regime is far worse than previously known. Pakistan is releasing thousands of terrorists, including most likely the murderers of Daniel Pearl.

Pakistan’s credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf’s government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries.

Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa’eda or the Taliban over the past four years.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. “We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects,” said a US diplomat in Islamabad. “We are monitoring their response with great concern.”

Bill Roggio counts the cost:

A sample of those released included the following individuals, including the killers of journalist Daniel Pearl:

Ghulam Mustafa: “He was once close to Osama bin Laden, has intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda’s logistics and financing and its nexus with the military in Pakistan.”

Maulana Sufi Mohammad: “Maulana Sufi Mohammad was Faqir Mohammed’s first jihadi mentor who introduced him to militancy in Afghanistan in 1993. Sufi Mohammad was one of the active leaders of Jamat-e-Islami (JI) in the 1980s. He was the principal of the JI madrassa in Tamaergra, a town in the northwestern part of NWFP. He was an instinctive hardliner and in due course developed differences with JI and left them in 1992 to form Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed [TNSM].” Sufi Mohammad organized Pakistanis to fight jihad in Afghanistan and along with the TNSM fought in Kunduz November of 2001.

Mohammad Khaled: A brigade leader who led the Taliban in against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “”It is a difficult time for Islam and Muslims. We are in a test. Everybody should be ready to pass the test – and to sacrifice our lives,” said Mohammad Khaled.

Fazl-e-Raziq: A senior aide to Osama bin Laden, and “an ethnic Pakhtoon resident of Swabi district of the North West Frontier Province.”

Khairullah Kherkhawa: The former Taliban governor of Herat.

Khalid Khawaja: “Khalid Khawaja is a retired squadron leader of the Pakistan Air Force who was an official in Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, in the mid 1980s. After he wrote a critical letter to General Zia ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 till 1988, in which he labeled Zia as hypocrite, he was removed from the ISI and forced to retire from the airforce. He then went straight to Afghanistan in 1987 and fought against the Soviets along side with Osama Bin Laden, developing a relationship of firm friendship and trust. Khalid Khawaja’s name resurfaced when US reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and subsequently killed. Pearl had come to Pakistan and met Khalid Khawaja in order to investigate the jihadi network of revered sufi, Syed Mubarak Ali Gailani.”

Mansour Hasnain: A member of the group that kidnapped and murdered Danny Pearl. He also was “a militant of the Harkat-al-Mujahedin group, is one of those who hijacked an Indian Airlines jet in December 1999 and forced New Delhi to release three militants — including Omar and Azhar.”

Mohammad Hashim Qadeer: “Suspected of being one of [Daniel] Pearl’s actual killers, was arrested in August 2005 and has notable al-Qaida links” and “ties with the banned extremist groups Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen and Jaish-e-Muhammad.”

Mohammad Bashir: Another Pakistani complicit in the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu: Facilitators/couriers, and wives of al-Qaeda members. “Pakistani authorities arrested 23 Arabs, including two children, suspected of links to Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday. All of them sneaked into the country from Afghanistan in recent weeks. The suspects include three women, identified as Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu, who are believed to be relatives of bin Laden. An interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the arrests were made in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan.”

Gul Ahmed Shami & Hamid Noor: Al-Qaeda foot soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. “I want to be the next Osama bin Laden,” said Shami in 2001. “Allah is with us. The Americans have technology but they don’t have the courage to face death, which we do. I will be there until my death if need be. I know I probably won’t come back,” said Hamid.

But how can anyone realistically expect the administration to act decisively, at the cost of facing even more of the wrath of our domestic treasonous clerisy?

A lot of blogs have their origin in other blogs. My understanding is that Gates of Vienna is the progeny of Belmont Club. YARGB is the offspring of Roger L. Simon. This blog is really the offspring of political arguments on my college class listserv (which you can’t get, unless you were in my original college class). I still waste my time arguing over there, and I thought I might import some of my arguments.

A college professor classmate of mine opined today:

Osama is winning. I don’t know how to make it plainer. He’s winning not because there are Democrats in Congress but because the policy executed by the Bush administration has produced adverse results.

I replied indignantly (more or less – some editing is being done for more formal publication):

If one applied the principles of the liberals historically, the USA must have lost every war in history, since any action on our part always angered the enemy and provoked him to resist. Our acting at all always proved a blunder which merely confirmed his worst opinion of us, and inspired new enemies to rally to his side. Every wild Indian, every British redcoat, every Southern rebel, every Philippine Insurrectionary, and every Prussian grenadier we killed always inspired revenge, and caused two more volunteers to join the ranks of our opponents. We repeatedly made the mistake of invading the territories of our enemies, thus inevitably recruiting even more allies to their side. American excesses, like Sullivan’s Raid on the Iroquois homeland, Sherman’s March to Sea, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, always hardened the enemy’s resolve and ensured our inevitable defeat. And that’s why we’re all weaving Iroquois baskets, being ruled by the British Parliament, and lamenting the loss of the Southern Confederacy, while we struggle to learn better Japanese in order to converse with our conquerors.

Amer El-Maati

Aliases: Amro Badr Eldin Abou El-Maati, Amro Badr Abouelmaati

DESCRIPTION

Date of Birth Used: May 25, 1963 Hair: Brown
Place of Birth: Kuwait Eyes: Brown
Height: 6’0″ Sex: Male
Weight: 209 pounds Complexion: Olive
Remarks: El-Maati may be wearing a full beard and mustache. He requires corrective lenses and may be wearing eyeglasses.

DETAILS

Amer El-Maati is being sought in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States.

SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS

This individual is reportedly associated with Adnan Al-Shukri Juma, El Shukrijumah in the Second Wave Attacks.

article

Graham Allison, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, discusses what is needed to stop a nuclear version of 9/11. Read the whole thing.

On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of New York City’s Times Square. If terrorists detonated a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the blast would kill them all instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire, and fallout in the hours and days thereafter.

The blast would instantly vaporize Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within half a mile of the point of detonation. Buildings three-quarters of a mile from ground zero would be fractured husks.

Lest this seem too hypothetical, recall an actual incident that occurred in New York City one month to the day after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A CIA agent, code-named Dragonfire, reported that Al Qaeda had acquired a live nuclear weapon produced by the former Soviet Union and had successfully smuggled it into New York City. A top-secret Nuclear Emergency Support Team was dispatched to the city. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these nuclear ninjas searched for the 10-kiloton bomb whose blast could have obliterated a significant portion of Manhattan. Fortunately, Dragonfire’s report turned out to be a false alarm. But the central takeaway from the Dragonfire case is this: The U.S. government had no grounds in science or in logic to dismiss the warning.

A nuclear terrorist attack on the United States would have catastrophic consequences even for other countries. After the nuclear detonation, the immediate reaction would be to block all entry points to prevent another bomb from reaching its target, resulting in the disruption of the global “just-in-time” flow of goods and raw materials. Vital markets for international products would disappear, and closely linked financial markets would crash. Researchers at RAND, a U.S.-government-funded think tank, estimated that a nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach in California would cause immediate indirect costs worldwide of more than $3 trillion and that shutting down U.S. ports would cut world trade by 10 percent.

The negative economic repercussions would reverberate well beyond the developed world. As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned, “Were a nuclear terrorist attack to occur, it would cause not only widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty.”

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Niall Ferguson, in Foreign Policy, playing with the ever-popular Intelligentsia meme of the United States as Empire, does put his finger on the very key factor in modern wars of advanced and civilized Western nations against more primitive Third World opponents: the comparative value of lives risked in combat. Ferguson quotes aptly from Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditty Arithmetic on the Frontier. (I’m posting the whole poem. His selection appears in bold.):

A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe—

The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: “All flesh is grass.”
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in “villanous saltpetre!”
And after—ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ’ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The “captives of our bow and spear”
Are cheap—alas! as we are dear.

It is a serious point. Today, Western military forces can inflict fifty times their own losses, and the much smaller Western casualty rate may still be seen by the public at home as so costly as to necessitate withdrawal.

——————

Hat tip to Karen Myers and Charles Bork.

David Warren, of the Ottawa Citizen, notes that the hatred which fuels militant Islamic acts of terrorism often has little to do with Islam really, and less with real grievances. Its real animating engine is the ideology of resentment created within the West itself, and promulgated unceasingly by the Western intelligentsia.

Mr Blair’s answer to a question about British home-grown terrorists donged the bell:

“It’s not necessarily what have we done wrong, because part of the problem of what you have in Western opinion is that Western opinion always wants to believe that it’s our fault and these people want to have a sort of, you know, grievance culture that they visit upon us and say it’s our fault. And so we have a young British-born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally.”..

We have a huge fifth column in the West, and it is not the Muslim immigrants. They become radicalized only because our “victim culture” encourages them to nurture their grievances. Yet most, despite temptation, remain good, decent people, doing their share of the West’s work.

Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year — that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist “victim culture” itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends.

According to Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir (Bin Laden’s biographer, and the only journalist to obtain a Bin Laden interview post 9/11), Al Qaeda has successfully smuggled and deployed in the United States nuclear weapons, along with “many kilos” of enriched uranium to be used to produce “dirty bombs.”

An attack on a major US target is rumored to scheduled for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, beginning this year on September 24. Previous rumors suggest that Los Angeles (or, at any rate, a location in California) may be the intended target.

In an interview with Al.Arabiya.net, reported by Aki today, Hamid Mir said that on a recent trip to Afghanistan he heard Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters speaking of an imminent attack on the United States “larger than 11 September 2001 attacks.”

Al Qaeda is reported to have enough material for six dirty bombs already in the United States.

Three suitcase nuclear bombs are said to have been smuggled from Russia into Europe. The bombs were said by an Afghan official to have been supplied to Al Qaeda in revenge for US support of the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in 1980s. The bombs were last believed to have been in Italy in 2000. Al Qaeda’s original intention was to use Chechen terrorists to smuggle them into London, Paris, and Los Angeles.

The leader of the impending US attack will be a Saudi national named Adnan Al-Shukri Juma, student of nuclear engineering formerly employed at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor for research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. A so-far-unsuccessful manhunt has been underway for Shukri Jumah since 2003.

In a Canada Free Press interview last May, Hamid Mir said that Bin Laden placed 42 sleeper agents in the United States prior to September 11, 2001. 19 were used in the 9/11 attacks, and 23 are still waiting to be activated.

Also reported by

Clarity & Resolve

Jawa Report

The theory that Al Qaeda would undertake a major attack at the end of 2006 does fit perfectly the timetable of the famous Seven Phase Plan.

UPDATE

The LA Times story gives more information on the suspected plot leader, and a different way of spelling his name: Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah.

Riehl World View 1

Riehl World View 2

Brett Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, describes the intellectual acrobatics of the contemporary liberal Western intelligentsia.

An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left’s curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism — a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism — is another.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: “Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit — that confronting evil is counterproductive,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. “They think that by appeasing them — allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools — they will win their friendship.”

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. “Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them.”

But the really “lethal mistake,” she says, “is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity.” Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, “are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, ‘if that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.'”

A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In the former case, the result too often is terror. In the latter, the ultimate risk is suicide, as the endless indulgence of “the other” obstructs the deeper need to preserve itself. Liberal beliefs… deserve to be protected and fought for. A liberalism that abandons its own defense to others does not, something liberals everywhere might usefully dwell on during this season of sad remembrance.