African-American Representative Corrine Brown (FL) issued a half-hearted apology to a Bush representative for attacking him with a racial epitaph, calling the Bush team “a bunch of white men,” and then telling Mexican-American Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, “You all [whites and Hispanics] look alike to me.” Brown’s apology was anything but, quickly glossing over her own racism to again attack the Bush administration over Haiti.

Haitian politics aside this is a typical political press reaction and a double standard of racism: Were a Republican to say such a thing it would make the airwaves to the point that a resignation or firing would be all but ensured. But when a Democrat says it all they have to do is issue a less than sincere apology. There’s never a resignation or firing even demanded. Recall Senator Ted Kennedy a few months back called a group of Bush judicial nominations, which included a Hispanic and African American woman, “Neanderthals,” but the media and Liberal community made not even a gasp of outrage.

Brown made the statement during a Wednesday briefing on Haiti with Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, a Mexican-American, and the Florida congressional delegation. During the meeting, attended by about 30 people, Brown sat across the table from Noriega and launched an attack on President Bush's policy on Haiti.

She said Republican leaders were "racist" in their policies toward the Caribbean nation, which is almost entirely black, and called the president's representatives "a bunch of white men."

After the dressing down, which sent a hush over the hour-long meeting, Noriega responded that he would relay her comments to Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, both high-level African-American members of the Bush administration.

Participants in the meeting said Noriega later told Brown: "As a Mexican-American, I deeply resent being called a racist and branded a white man."

Noriega also pointed to Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican member of the delegation who was born in Cuba, and asked whether he appeared to be a white man. Diaz-Balart's brother, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, is also a congressional member from the state.

Brown's response, according to witnesses, was: "You all look alike to me."

"It simply mystifies me how President Bush, a president who was selected by the Supreme Court under more than questionable circumstances — in my district alone 27,000 votes were thrown out — is telling another country that their elections were not fair and that they are therefore undeserving of aid or international recognition," Brown said.

Well, lucky for Corin Brown that President Bush does not run the country like Aristide runs Haiti or else a bunch of thugs would have by now beaten Brown into submission. For the record the Bush administration features, for the first time ever, African-Americans in two of the most powerful positions on the planet, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. But Democrats don’t want facts; they just want to play the race card. The Bush administrations reluctance to help Aristide has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the fact that the Haitian leader is one-election dictator. But that’s been covered enough already.

Surgeons cut, soldiers fight, mechanics fix, accountants account and spies spy. In what has got to be the most pointless story of the day the UK spy agency, MI6 (of James Bond fame), stands accused of spying on the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, headquartered in NYC. Claire Short, a former minister, Iraq war opposer and frequent pain in the side of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, told the BBC radio network that she had personally seen transcripts of taped conversations in the months leading to war. Really? Imagine that? Claire naturally offered not one shred of evidence; it goes without saying that in doing so she is revealing classified information and as such probably breaking UK law.

Prime Minister Tony Blair branded Short's allegations deeply irresponsible but refused to confirm or deny them, saying that to do so would violate his government's policy of not discussing intelligence matters. He said at a news conference that Britain's intelligence services always act in accordance with domestic and international law, and those who disclose intelligence activities, whether intentionally or not, undermine the essential security of the country.

The United Nations reacted sharply to the allegations, asserting that any attempt to eavesdrop on the secretary general would constitute a violation of three international treaties that govern diplomatic relations.

"From our point of view it is indeed illegal" to spy on U.N. premises, said Annan's chief spokesman, Fred Eckhard. But he noted that there was little the United Nations could do about it. "The United Nations doesn't have a police force or any other means of enforcing these laws," he said.

Eckhard stopped short of accusing the British of spying. "We have seen today's media reports alleging that the secretary general's phone conversations were tapped by British intelligence. We would be disappointed if this were true," he said in a statement. "Such activities would undermine the integrity and confidential nature of diplomatic exchanges."

Stephen Dorril, author of a history of Britain's secret intelligence service, MI6, said it was not a surprise to learn the British had spied on U.N. officials. He said the CIA and MI6 had a long history of collaboration, including asking for help in spying operations that might be deemed illegal for the host nation.
There are several points to be made here:

First, big deal. Second, it would be the epitome of naivety to think that only the US and UK spy on the UN; but not France, Russia, Germany or Syria for that matter; or that the UN does not itself have either its own members act as spies or use spy material from a collaborator nation. Third, Kofi Annan is not an American citizen but is a guest in our country, so while CIA-MI6 collaboration may seem distasteful to UN-lovers, they’re not breaking any US law. Fourth, since the UN is so shocked that countries spy for information to create advantage, and happen to be breaking international treaties, where is their shock in learning that spy agencies in France and Russia, for starters, actively passed information onto Saddam Hussein (1, 2, 3, 4) about British and American intentions and thus endangered the lives of soldiers who fought in Iraq?

The Bush administration decided to continue the eventual banishment of “dumb” or “persistent” land mines, but appealing to Pentagon and military concerns will not place restrictions on “smart” land mines, which defuse within predetermined time period of their setting and placement. As the Washington Post words it, Former President Bill Clinton signed the executive order during his tenure to ban all anti-personnel land mines – but not anti-vehicular land mines – by 2006, “depending on the success of Pentagon efforts to develop alternatives.” In other words this was typical Clintonianism – he had no intention of actually banning land mines, and knew the Pentagon would not develop alternatives by 2006. It’s very similar to how Clinton signed the Kyoto treaty knowing it would never pass Congress (indeed, Kyoto failed 98-0). Clinton thus avoided making actual policy decisions while appearing squeaky clean; a politically smart but gutless strategy.

Bush’s new order, in fact, strikes a proper balance between military and humanitarian concerns. Bush is actually expanding the Clinton order to include all “dumb” land mines, even those used against armored vehicles. Nonetheless, the humanitarian groups, citing 10,000 killed annually by land mines, are not looking for compromise, and care not one bit about American military concerns or winning wars, and so are attacking Bush’s new policy as a step backwards. Of course, as far as the land mine issue applies to the US military it is a red herring – the US military is being punished and pressured to accept a world-wide land mine ban because a bunch of irresponsible third-world governments apply no restrictions during their placement of land mines. Furthermore, third world governments are the most likely to not comply with any land-mine ban while responsible Western governments will. The rule thus fails to punish those it was originally intended to apply towards.

A senior State Department official, who disclosed Bush's decision on the condition that he not be named, said the new policy aims at striking a balance between the Pentagon's desire to retain effective weapons and humanitarian concerns about civilian casualties caused by unexploded bombs, which can remain hidden long after combat ends and battlefields return to peaceful use.
The safety problem stems from dumb bombs, which kill as many as 10,000 civilians a year, the official said. Smart bombs, he added, "are not contributors to this humanitarian crisis."

Bush's decision drew expressions of outrage and surprise from representatives of humanitarian organizations that have pressed for a more comprehensive U.S. ban on land mines. They say the danger to civilians and allied soldiers during and after a war outweighs the benefits of such weapons. They also dispute the contention that unexploded smart mines are safe, saying there isn't enough evidence to know.

"We expected we wouldn't be pleased by the president's decision, but we hadn't expected a complete rejection of what has been U.S. policy for the past 10 years," said Steve Goose, who heads the arms division of Human Rights Watch.

"It looks like a victory for those in the Pentagon who want to cling to outmoded weapons, and a failure of political leadership on the part of the White House. And it is stunningly at odds with what's happening in the rest of the world, where governments and armies are giving up these weapons."

The policy has been under review since Bush took office in 2001. With two wars in the interim and the nation still engaged in a worldwide battle against terrorist networks, officials said Bush is particularly sensitive to Pentagon arguments for retaining some types of land mines.

By focusing on eliminating dumb -- or what the administration calls "persistent" -- land mines, Bush and his aides intend to make the case that they are addressing the root cause of the humanitarian problem.

"It's a different formula from the past," the senior official said, "but it comports with the reality of the humanitarian crisis, which is that persistent mines are the ones that are causing the casualties and polluting lands and preventing recovering from wars."

But critics noted that the United States tried with little success to draw a distinction between smart and dumb mines in international treaty negotiations in the mid-1990s.

"The rest of the world rejected this distinction for a number of reasons," Goose said. "Some were technical, based on concerns that smart mines would still have an unacceptable failure rate. Some were political, along the lines of 'How can you expect other nations to give up their antipersonnel mines but allow the United States to keep theirs, claiming they're more technologically advanced?' "

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), a leading opponent of land mines, noted "some positive aspects" to Bush's decision. But he said, "On the whole, it is a deeply disappointing step backward."
Everywhere you look there’s someone on the Left trying to make America as powerless as possible. Those “governments and armies” giving up land mines are generally the Western countries that spend only about 1 percent of their GDP on military defense, because they know that the US military will protect them. As with our pharmaceutical industry the US taxpayer subsidizes most of Western and world defense. The reaction by the “humanitarian” groups uncovers their socialistic principles. Aside from the fact that people aren’t losing legs from US land mines but rather from those placed by third-world governments, they consider it unfair that the US has the financial means to adopt “smart” land mines. So instead of asking the third-world to follow the US lead the “humanitarians” instead wish to drag everyone down and ban mines altogether. Next, they’ll go after guns, missiles, artillery, etc., because, you know, there was no death or war before the invention of gun powder... Their utopian vision is a complete waste of time, however, because just as with any arms control agreement dictators tend to break the rules.

WASHINGTON -- Barely half of all black, Hispanic and Native American students who entered U.S. high schools in 2000 will receive diplomas this year, according to a new report that challenges conventional methods of calculating graduation rates.

Of all students who entered ninth grade four years ago, 68 percent are expected to graduate this year. The rates for minorities are considerably lower -- 50 percent for blacks, 51 percent for Native Americans and 53 percent for Hispanics -- according to a measure devised by the nonprofit Urban Institute in Washington.

Methods of calculating graduation rates are a perpetual subject of debate, and there are many differences in the ways states and school systems report data. By any measure, though, blacks and Hispanics graduate at lower rates than whites.
Did you notice what’s purposely missing from this report? Asians.

Why is it that Asians - a minority - are able to take full advantage of this our education system, graduate high school (usually at a higher percentage than Whites) and get into college, whereas Blacks and Hispanics are not? It has nothing to do with race or a lack of opportunity, as the Asian students thrive in similar conditions where many more Blacks and Hispanics do not. I suppose the next argument by the defenders would be that’s not a fair comparison because you have to look at how poverty and other social conditions compare between Blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

But this begs another question: We’ve had affirmative action in place for several generations. Why is it that in the same environment of affirmative action the Asians have been more successful and passed this success down to their offspring but Blacks and Hispanics have not? We have tax funded programs to help minority students at the federal, state and county levels across the country. One cannot use the argument that we need more affermative action when the Asian minority students are doing so well. Does there not come a point where we begin to address any adverse effects of affirmative action? And at what point does it become the crutch for cultural problems which no tax-funded program can solve?

On NBC’s Today Show for Katie and Matt lobbed soft balls for Sarah and James Brady to knock out of the park, specifically regarding how wicked Republicans, like House Speaker Dennis Hasert, were considering blocking an expansion of the 1994 Assault weapons ban. Sarah Brady spread the oft repeated lie that a repeal or limitation on the bill would allow anybody to purchase “AK-47s and UZIs.” Sigh…. After cursing out Katie and Matt for, naturally, allowing such a statement to go unchallenged, my girlfriend wisely turned the television to the off position.

Anyway, I’ll let the master of the gun control argument, John Lott, Jr., inform my readers of why Mrs. Brady’s statement was so ridiculously false:

The most-charitable interpretation is that the ban's proponents know nothing about guns. "Assault-weapon ban" conjures up images of machine guns used by the military, which are surely not very useful in hunting deer. Yet, the 1994 federal ban had nothing to do with machine guns, only semiautomatics, which fire one bullet per pull of the trigger. The firing mechanisms in semiautomatic and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semiautomatic gun has to be gutted and replaced to turn it into a machine gun.

Functionally the banned semiautomatic guns are the same as other non-banned semiautomatic guns, firing the exact same bullets with the same rapidity and producing the exact same damage. The ban arbitrarily outlaws 19 different guns based upon either their name or cosmetic features, such as whether the gun could have a bayonet attached.

With the sniper trial now going in Virginia, the media understandably focuses on the so-called "sniper rifle." Yet, the .223- caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the sniper killings was neither a "sniper" rifle nor an "assault weapon." In fact, it is such a low-powered rifle that most states ban it even for deer hunting precisely because of its low power, too frequently wounding and not killing deer. Ironically, the much-maligned AK-47, only new semiautomatic versions of the gun were banned, uses a .30-caliber bullet that is actually well suited to hunting deer.

The law never had any effect on crime. Banning a few percent of semiautomatic guns when otherwise identical guns are available only changes the brand criminals use. But despite the apocalyptic claims, the law didn't even do that much. Even President Clinton, who signed an "assault-weapon ban" into law, complained in 1998 how easy it had been for gun manufacturers to continue selling the banned guns simply by changing the guns' names or by making the necessary cosmetic changes.

The banned guns were seldom used in the commission of crimes to begin with. A 1995 Clinton administration study found that fewer than one percent of state and federal inmates carried a "military-type" semiautomatic guns (a much broader set of guns than those banned by the law) for crimes they committed during early 1990s before the ban. A similar 1997 survey showed no reduction in this type of crime gun after the ban.

Only two studies have been conducted on the federal law's impact on crime, one of which also examined the state assault-weapons laws. One study was funded by the Clinton administration and examined just the first year the law was in effect. It concluded that the ban's "impact on gun violence has been uncertain."

The second study was done by me and is found in my book The Bias Against Guns. It examines the first four years of the federal law as well as the different state assault-weapon bans. Even after accounting for law enforcement, demographics, poverty, and other factors that affect crime, the laws did not reduce any type of violent crime. In fact, overall violent crime actually rose slightly, by 1.5 percent, but the impact was not statistically significant. The somewhat larger increase in murder rates was significant.

The bans have now been in effect for almost a decade, without any evidence of any benefits. Increased crime is not the biggest danger arising from not extending the law. Politicians who have claimed such dire consequence from these mislabeled "assault weapons" have put their reputations on the line. If the extension fails, a year after that voters will wonder what all the hysteria was about.

Fueled by false images of machine guns and sniper rifles, the debate next year is likely to be very emotional. Let's hope that the politicians at least learn what guns are being banned.
Not yet, John...

US officials say that nine Iraqi scientists formerly involved with Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs have been murdered in the past four months. The US believes that it is a concerted effort by Baath insurgents to conceal information about Iraqi WMD.

The last killing was that of Iraqi aeronautical scientist Muhyi Hussein.
Majid Hussein Ali, a professor at the College of Science at Baghdad University, was found dead in the Raghibah Khatun.

He had been shot twice in the back. The assassins are believed to be former members of Saddam Hussein's government.

The killing appears to be part of an effort to systematically eliminate Iraqi scientists and technicians involved in Saddam's nuclear program.

The scientist had been involved in nuclear physics research, notably nuclear centrifugal force.

Although the reason for the assassination campaign is unclear, U.S. officials believe the killings represent an effort to conceal the scope of Iraq's nuclear program.

Former CIA weapons inspector David Kay said in October that two Iraqi weapons scientists who had been cooperating with the U.S. military were shot, and one of them was killed.

The murdered scientist was shot in the head outside of his apartment.

"We think it was because, in fact, he was engaged in discussions with us," Kay said.

The Left has a problem with the Bush administration cracking down on illegal immigrants from Brazil. Apparently, so does the Arizona Republic newspaper, which headlines its article: “Terror ties? No, but US detaining Brazilians.” That’s quite the misleading headline, of course. It makes one think that our Special Forces are infiltrating Brazil and kidnapping its citizens. The article should read: “Terror ties? Possibly, but US detaining Brazilian ILLEGAL ALIENS ENTERING COUNTRY ILLEGALLY.”

Did I mention they’re illegals? Because the Arizona Republic and the porous, open-border liberal activist community sure don’t ever mention it.

FLORENCE - Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice are using an executive order signed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to override immigration judges' decisions and hold scores of undocumented immigrants from Brazil, despite acknowledging the detainees have no terrorism ties.

An order signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001 expanded the government's power to detain immigrants who "may pose a threat" to the nation, even if a judge orders they be released on bond. In recent months, the government has broadly used the power, designated for "national security" cases, to deter an influx of Brazilians crossing the U.S.-Mexican border illegally through Arizona.

"Essentially, the attorney general wrote himself a regulation that gives him the right to ignore and make a mockery of an immigration judge's decision," said Cesar Ternieden, a Florence-based immigration attorney. "It's a clear violation of due process."
So sayeth a person who has absolutely no problem with illegal aliens taking advantage of weak US law, created by people like Mr. Ternieden, and coming to the country illegally. Try to curb illegal aliens and you’re just a mean Republican.

Despite the highly inaccurate headline slant at least the remainder of the article highlights exactly why we need to crack down on Brazilian illegals over other groups. Indeed, you could say Brazilians need to be scrutinized as though they were from Syria or Saudi Arabia because there’s one more very important fact that the article avoids – the higher percentage that a Brazilian national could be a member of al Qaeda or similar terrorist organization.

What pro-illegal immigrant advocates don’t want you to remember is that Brazil makes up part of the infamous Tri-border – a lawless triangle on the borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay which terrorists from al Qaeda, Hezbollah and even the Irish Republican Army use to train and recruit more terrorists. As I wrote about it a year ago it’s an Islamic community of 30,000 strong, many expatriates of the Lebanese civil war. Attorney General John Ashcroft isn’t cracking down on Brazilians because he just doesn’t like Brazilians, he’s doing it first because it’s his damn job, and second because there’s a higher percentage that a Brazilian entering the country illegally could be a Tri-border terrorist than a Mexican or other Latin illegal.

But even without that fact Ashcroft and the border patrol have a duty to curb illegal immigration and ending people-smuggling operations:

"It's not a situation of targeting Brazilians; it's targeting a smuggling organization," said Victor Cerda, general counsel for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Cerda said a smuggling organization in southern Arizona catering to Brazilians was advertising the $10,000 to $30,000 bond posted in many cases as simply, "the admission price to enter" the country.

Cerda, the top attorney for ICE, said the influx of Brazilians poses a threat to national security because it consumes resources along the Southwest border.

While about 99 percent of all undocumented immigrants caught crossing the Southwest border are Mexicans, the number of Brazilians arrested in Arizona skyrocketed from 97 in 2000 to 1,397 in 2003.

Unlike Mexicans, who typically are returned across the border the same day, Brazilians and all "OTMs," or "other than Mexicans" as they are known within the Border Patrol, require additional paperwork and are housed in detention centers when space is available. When immigrant detention facilities reach capacity, many OTMs simply have been handed a slip of paper with instructions to return for a court date.

Last year, about 95 percent of Brazilians did not show for their hearings, compared with 86 percent of those issued such notices from all the countries combined, according to ICE officials.

"The word had basically gotten out on the streets of Brazil that . . . if you're caught, you'll be able to get out," said Russell Ahr, an ICE spokesman in Phoenix. "It was a joke. No one was showing up."

An analysis by ICE, the agency charged with immigrant detention and removal, showed that from August 2002 to September 2003, 346 Brazilians were released from the agency's custody in Arizona. Of those, 194 were ordered removed from the United States. As of October, ICE agents had physically removed one person.

David V. Aguilar, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, wrote in a sworn declaration filed in Arizona immigration courts that a change in Mexico's visa requirement with Brazil, coupled with a "well-established" people-smuggling network in Sonora, has contributed to the increase in the number of Brazilians.

"They are aware that despite the fact they have been apprehended, they most likely will be released on bond," he wrote, saying that the Brazilians are "coached" on how the system works by smugglers, who charge up to $12,000 for a trip from Mexico into the United States.

Border Patrol union members say many Brazilians are released before an initial appearance because there just isn't any place to hold them.

For years, the Border Patrol has employed a "catch and release" policy when detention centers, which have a capacity of about 1,940 in Arizona, overflow. Immigrants are fingerprinted, processed through a database to check for a criminal record and then told to return for a deportation hearing.

"They are turning them loose because of a lack of detention space," said Mike Albon, spokesman for Local 2544, which represents 2,000 agents in Southern Arizona. "Once someone is apprehended and not deported . . . they are on the ground and they can go wherever they want."

Immigration attorneys and civil rights activists argue that the government is targeting disenfranchised groups, like Brazilians, who are less established in the United States than migrants from other Central and South American countries.
It’s offensive to call these advocates “immigration attorneys” or “civil rights activists”. Let’s call them what they are – illegal immigration apologists. These advocates care not one iota about our national security. They don’t care if an al Qaeda terrorist has pretty good odds to use the Brazil-Mexico link to sneak into the country. Were it up to them anybody could illegally enter the country and then immediately apply for government welfare, and then car bomb the federal building from which they applied for it.

If you need a refresher on the situation in Haiti you should read yesterday’s commentary from the Wall Street Journal. In a nutshell President Bill Clinton restored “President” Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 in reaction to badgering from the Congressional Black Caucus. Indeed Aristide is an elected president only in the same technical manner that Saddam Hussein was – one man, one vote, one time while using security forces to, a-hem, “persuade” its citizens to vote for the incumbent. Aristide has been become the equivalent of a dictator while his American Democrat supporters find it increasingly difficult to make apologies for his abuses. Even though this action occurred under Clinton it is difficult for Bush to reverse American foreign policy in Haiti, no matter how much he hates Aristide. On top of that, chaos in Haiti equates directly to boats of Haitian refugees attempting to sneak into South Florida, and heaven knows the Coast Guard is busy enough as it is.

The problem in Haiti has brought about a myriad of interesting, ironic and hypocritical stances from various global leaders. For starters the French government is calling on Aristide to resign, and has already dispatched 4,000 French soldiers off island as a precautionary measure and to show the Aristide government that they mean business. This is the same French government, mind you, that refused to send one soldier to Iraq’s border to convince Saddam Hussein to resign. But I guess Aristide has no oil with which Haiti can bribe French companies and officials.

At least the Congressional Black Caucus is being consistent, although their hypocrisy shows in a different way.

As more voices called on the U.S. administration to ensure the rebels do not take control, 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus paid a quickly arranged visit to the White House, where they met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before spending a half-hour with Bush.

Caucus members wanted Bush to "take action toward stopping the killing in Haiti," said Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.). "We want to make sure we don't allow thugs to storm Port-au-Prince while the United States sits idly by, working on a diplomatic resolution."
Yes, but Rep. Meek had no problem with thugs controlling Iraq, a country of 26 million. Meek voted against the 2002 House resolution authorizing Bush to use force to remove Hussein from power, and voted no in 2003 to give US soldiers in Iraq the additional funds they need to fight. Fortunately, both times he was on the losing side of the vote. Meek and the Congressional Black Caucus had no problems with the US “working on a diplomatic resolution” indefinitely in Iraq – something that was impossible in Iraq. Why does the Congressional Black Caucus demand liberty and freedom for Haitians, but not for Iraqis?

(Washington Post, p1) Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently calls companies and chief executives "Benedict Arnolds" if they move jobs and operations overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes. But Kerry has accepted money and fundraising assistance from top executives at companies that fit the candidate's description of a notorious traitor of the American Revolution.

Executives and employees at such companies have contributed more than $140,000 to Kerry's presidential campaign, a review of his donor records shows. Additionally, two of Kerry's biggest fundraisers, who together have raised more than $400,000 for the candidate, are top executives at investment firms that helped set up companies in the world's best-known offshore tax havens, federal records show. Kerry has raised nearly $30 million overall for his White House run.
Bar none, the best way to take down Democratic John Kerry is to point out his outrageous levels of hypocrisy. If there ever were ever a candidate who espoused to the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ rule it is John Kerry. The “everybody does it” rule, or claiming that Bush may do the same, is irrelevant since it is John Kerry and no one else who has defined a company moving offshore to reduce its tax burden as the epitome of unpatriotic. Conservatives, capitalists and anyone whose economic principles aren’t in line with the socialist wing of the Democratic Party know it natural law to want to reduce one’s tax burden. If you are capitalist you understand that attacking a company for moving overseas or offshore is to attack the symptom, not the cause. The cause of the problem is an uncompetitive tax rate. It is the government’s job to make its climate business friendly, not the job of Xerox, Coke or IBM.

Kerry has taken aim at "Benedict Arnold" companies as part of a much broader political and policy debate over stemming the flow of well-paying U.S. jobs overseas, a chief cause of unemployment, especially in the hardest-hit manufacturing sector. Kerry's solution, detailed in a speech yesterday in Toledo, is to enforce trade agreements, track and slow the outsourcing of U.S. jobs, and stop government contracts and tax incentives from going to companies that move operations or jobs offshore.
So by Kerry’s ever-broadening definition, is any company that moves its jobs overseas, even though it may still pay full tax, also unpatriotic? Again, manufacturing or information technology jobs moved overseas is a symptom of today’s global economy. There are workers overseas willing to do labor that American citizens are simply not willing to do, and not for the rate of pay that those overseas will work at. It is an individual worker’s responsibility, not Wal-Mart’s, to ensure that their skill set is competitive. Nobody has the right to a job. The job belongs to the company, not the worker. Nobody has the right to learn a trade at 20 and expect to never ever update or expand their skills until retirement, or the government to “protect” – a socialist word for hold hostage – a worker’s job. Furthermore, those overseas jobs, by increasing the worker’s standard of living in that foreign country, helps the American economy when that worker purchases American products. Finally, if Kerry gets his way and limits corporations from sending their work overseas he will make them unprofitable and thus contribute to the bankruptcy of those companies, ensuring far, far more layoffs than occur by moving a percentage of them overseas. It’s basic economics, something John Kerry and many Democrats lack knowledge of.

Oh, and it's only fitting that Kerry voted for the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but is now conveniently attacking it for political gain.

Kerry has come under attack from President Bush, as well as some Democrats, for criticizing laws he voted for and lambasting special interests after accepting more money from paid lobbyists than any other senator over the past 15 years. Some Democrats worry that Kerry is leaving himself open to similar attacks on the latest issue. [See past posts on Kerry’s campaign finance bents and outright violations here and here. Oh, and here. Oh, yea, here and here too.]

Given the vast sums raised during the presidential campaign as well as the growing number of companies with offshore operations, it seems almost inevitable that candidates would receive contributions from some of them.
Bush has taken exponentially more from these companies than Kerry, though the president has not made a major campaign issue out of clamping down on them.

On Monday, Kerry was asked why two of his biggest fundraisers were involved with "Benedict Arnold" companies. "If they have done that, it's not to my knowledge and I would oppose it," Kerry told a New York television station. "I think it's wrong to do [it] solely to avoid taxes."

Then he sought to clarify his position: "What I've said is not that people don't have the right to go overseas and form a company if they want to avoid the tax. I don't believe the American taxpayer ought to be giving them a benefit. That's what I object to. I don't object to global commerce. I don't object to companies deciding they want to compete somewhere else.''
See how Kerry dances. Note that last paragraph, by the way. Kerry says the American taxpayer should not be giving benefits to those not paying taxes, yet the Democrats, for the most part, has no problem opening our borders and allowing millions of illegal aliens to receive federal and state benefits.

According to federal election records, Kerry has received $119,285 from donors employed at what Citizen Works describes as the "25 Fortune 500 Corporations With the Most Offshore Tax-Haven Subsidiaries." The list does not include nearly all of the companies that shave their tax bill by moving jobs and operations overseas, so Kerry has actually raised substantially more from firms qualifying as "Benedict Arnolds."

Kerry has also received $20,100 in donations directly from individuals at companies with mailing addresses offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes, records show.

"Senator Kerry has made it crystal clear that he's going to close these loopholes, forever," said Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman. "Nothing will stop him. Period."
But he’ll take their money. The vast majority of Democrats in Congress backed the campaign finance reform act on the belief that when a politician takes money from a special interest or corporation they are indebted to them and thus will curb the country’s interests to protect the special interest. Yet Kerry wishes to convince you that he will take offshore money and then destroy those givers at a later date?

Kerry’s hypocrisy will continue, to be sure.

Claudia Rosett of the WSJ opines she'd like to see former Iraqi Survey Group head David Kay investigate the corruption behind the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which former dictator Saddam Hussein used for seven years to bribe influential world officials and keep himself in power. Rosett was the first of the mainstream investigative journalists to look into the corruption. As she writes today the latest sexy news of bribery, uncovered by Iraqi documents published by Al Nada, is just the icing on the cake. For 18 months Rosett says she has tried to get the UN accounting to add up, and it's far from doing so - perhaps off by $5 billion.

the U.N. Compensation Commission states on its Web site that oil sales under Oil-for-Food totaled not Mr. Annan's $65 billion, but "more than US$70 billion"--a $5 billion discrepancy in U.N. figures. A phone call to the UNCC, based in Geneva, doesn't clear up much. A spokesman there says the oil total comes from the U.N. in New York, and adds, helpfully, "Maybe it was an approximate figure, just rounded up."

OK, but in some quarters, if not at the U.N., $5 billion here or there is big money. Halliburton has been pilloried, and rightly so, over questions involving less than 1% of such amounts. One turns for explanation to the U.N. headquarters in New York, where a spokesman confirms that though the U.N. program ended last November, the former executive director of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, is still on contract, still drawing a salary, but Mr. Sevan's secretary explains he is "not giving interviews anymore." The spokesman, also still on salary, answers all requests for clarification with "I don't know," and "You have the Web site."

All right. The Web site brings us a U.N. update issued Nov. 21, 2003, when the U.N. turned over the program to the CPA, which tells us that $31 billion worth of supplies and equipment had been delivered to Iraq, with another $8.2 billion in the pipeline. That comes to $39.2 billion. Again, even if you add in, say, $2 billion for U.N. commissions, that's still about $5 billion short of the $46 billion Mr. Annan says was used for supplies--which might make sense if the program at the end had been swimming in loose cash, except that Mr. Sevan was lamenting toward the end that there was not enough money to fund all the supply contracts he'd already approved.

Returning to the U.N. Web site, nothing there discloses the amount of interest paid during the course of the program on the Oil-for-Food escrow accounts. That should have been substantial, because these U.N.-managed Iraq accounts in the final phases of the program held balances of about $12 billion. Or so we've been told. I first got that number by phoning the U.N. back in September 2002. That was well before Mr. Sevan stopped giving interviews, and I spoke with Mr. Sevan himself. He told me the Oil-for-Food accounts at that point contained balances of about $20 billion. The next day, someone in his office revised that down to about $15 billion. Later that afternoon, someone in the U.N. controller's office revised that down to $9 billion. When I protested that these discrepancies were getting large, we ended up haggling over the phone for a while, and finally settled on an official total of about $12 billion in the Oil-for-Food accounts.

I'm still not sure what to believe, however, given that the U.N. treasurer, Suzanne Bishopric, assured me at the same time, in September 2002, and again in early 2003, that the accounts had been diversified among "five or six" banks, and to date we have still heard mention of only one--a French bank, BNP Paribas. So, in some fit of arithmetic absent-mindedness, did Ms. Bishopric lose track of the number of banks, confusing one with five or six?

It's a little hard to know whether oil sales were actually $65 billion or $70 billion, whether there were five or six banks or just one, whether at least that one bank, BNP, ever paid significant interest on balances that toward the end of the program totaled $20 billion or $15 billion or $9 billion or $12 billion, and whether humanitarian import contracts were funded to the tune of $39.2 billion or $46 billion. Mr. Annan assures us the program has been audited many times, even if it was done in confidence, in-house, backed up by member nations that may have had their own interests to consider, such as one of Saddam's favorite trading partners, France.

You can find Rosett's previous articles here, here and here. Similarly, Therse Raphel had a scoop a few weeks ago.

A few days ago the NY Times headlined that German intelligence gave the CIA the first name and telephone number of an al Qaeda operative who would later become a pilot-hijacker on September 11. Today the German interior minister noted that the NY Times neglected to publish a few important facts:

During a U.S. visit to discuss the use of biometric technology in the war against terror, German Interior Minister Otto Schily denied that his country knowingly passed on information on a Sep.11 hijacker to the CIA.

Schily however was much more unequivocal that Germans had "no idea" that a man whose first name and telephone number they passed on to U.S. authorities long before the Sep.11 terrorist attacks would turn out to be a key player in the plot.

The New York Times reported earlier Tuesday that German intelligence officials gave the CIA the above information on Marwan al-Shehhi in March 1999 and asked the Americans to track him. The story, citing a senior German intelligence official, said that after the Germans passed on the information to the CIA, they did not hear form the Americans about the matter until after Sep. 11.

"Your article was a little bit misleading," Schily told a small group of reporters including one of the authors of the New York Times article, Reuters reported.

The information was the earliest known clue the U.S. received about any of the hijackers and has now become a crucial element of an independent U.S. commission's investigation into Sep. 11, 2001. U.S. officials say al-Shehhi was the pilot who flew the second plane into the World Trade Center.

A United Arab Emirates native, al-Shehhi moved to Germany in 1996 and became a key member of the al Qaeda Hamburg cell at the heart of the Sept. 11 plot. Mohammed Atta, one of the plot leaders, was his roommate.

Schily added that the indication that German intelligence officials had made a link between the name and an upcoming attack "is not true. At that time we had no idea that (it) could be a thing like this (the Sept. 11 attacks)." The minister said that Germany gave the information on al-Shehhi to the U.S. as part of "routine" data exchanges, adding that authorities were unable to connect the rather common Arabic name "Marwan" to a family name.

CIA director George Tennet (photo) also rejected suggestions that his agency had failed to act on the German tip. Speaking before an annual Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats on Tuesday, Tenet said, "In 1999 the Germans gave us a name -- Marwan, that's it, and a phone number. And we didn't sit on our hands."

Yeah, that makes a difference from what the Times originally reported.

The man who voted for the Patriot Act but who now opposses it; voted for No Child Left Behind but now opposes it; voted against Gulf War I, for Gulf War II and then back to against continuing support of Gulf War II; opposed Reagan's rescue mission in Granada but now supports it; blasts PAC money while taking it; attacked those who inserted Vietnam into presidential campaigning in 1992 but now practices it, (and this is the short list), has flip-flopped on yet another issue.

After the latest suicide bombing in Israel Kerry said that the Israeli security fence seperating the country from West Bank Palestinians is a "legitimate act of self defense." Naturally in October 2003 Kerry opposed this same fence.

It has been rare for Democratic candidates to issue statements on incidents like bombings in Israel over the past few months. Kerry's statement, highlighting the justification for the fence, came a week before the crucial March 2 "Super Tuesday" primaries, which include New York with its high concentration of Democratic Jewish voters, some political observers noted.

In his October speech to a conference held by the Arab American Institute in Michigan, Kerry stressed the fence's negative aspects.

"I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the Israeli government's decision to build the barrier off of the Green Line – cutting deep into Palestinian areas," Kerry said. "We don't need another barrier to peace. Provocative and counterproductive measures only harm Israelis' security over the long term, increase the hardships to the Palestinian people, and make the process of negotiating an eventual settlement that much harder."

His Democratic defenders insist that Kerry was speaking figuratively last October. Too bad for them Israel's security fence was in construction back then, so there's nothing figurative about it. Kerry is shameless. Nothing he says shocks me anymore. I never thought we'd see a guy who could top Bill Clinton on saying anything to get elected, depending upon his audience.

The Wall Street Journal reminds us how Haiti became a fiasco in the first place; labels Aristide what he is - a one man, one vote dictator-crat; notes that the international community, expressing a usual lack of leadership, is waiting on an American response; and that John Kerry opposed democracy in Iraq but supports the dictator Aristide in Haiti... oh, yeah, and he wants to be your next president.

Bill Clinton dispatched 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power against a military junta. He did so largely at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose Members hailed Mr. Aristide as a democrat who deserved American financial and moral support. Prominent Democrats were Mr. Aristide's benefactors in Congress, while others became his lobbyists in Washington and won lucrative Haitian phone contracts.

Most of them have stayed silent, or actively supported the former priest, even as he steadily became one of the nastier rulers in the Western hemisphere. His paramilitary squads have terrorized the political opposition. Such prominent opponents as radio host Brignol Lindor have turned up dead. Mr. Aristide controls the national police, as well as large chunks of the economy.

No wonder so many Haitians who once supported Mr. Aristide have joined the rebellion against him. The armed rebels now advancing toward Port-au-Prince may number only a few hundred. But they have met little resistance because most Haitians agree with their cause. The opposition includes the Group of 184, a civic group that wants elections as well as the right to congregate without being attacked by Aristide gangs.

Yet even now we hear that the U.S. must intervene to support Mr. Aristide because he is a "democrat" who was "freely and fairly elected." Four prominent Congressional Democrats, including John Conyers, recently sent a letter to President Bush opposing any "international military force" unless it props up Mr. Aristide.

But Mr. Aristide forfeited his right to claim democratic legitimacy when he sabotaged senatorial elections in 2000. Even the U.N.'s Kofi Annan frowned on the results. In protest, Haitians boycotted the presidential elections later that year and no more than 10% showed up to elect Mr. Aristide to his second term. Insisting on U.S. support for such a leader isn't "democracy" but a debasement of it. It's a signal to the Aristides and Mugabes (Zimbabwe) of the world that once they make it into office, they're free to tyrannize as they please.

The Iranian mullahs also won an election last week, though everyone seems willing to call that a fraud. Perhaps Tehran's clerics should retain the law firm of Patton Boggs, or former Congressmen Ron Dellums, Michael Barnes and Joe Kennedy, who have all put in a lucrative good word for Mr. Aristide in Washington.

It's hard to see how Haiti escapes further violence as long as Mr. Aristide stays in power. Yesterday he begged the international community to bolster his police, while also threatening the U.S. with another flood of "boat people" refugees.

Meanwhile, the Haitian rebels rejected a U.S.-brokered international peace plan because it didn't require Mr. Aristide to resign. They rightly fear that Mr. Aristide could manipulate any foreign military force to disarm them while strengthening the strongman's police to strike back once the foreigners leave. "There must be no more delays. Our answer remains the same. Aristide must resign," says Maurice Lafortune, president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and another member of the democratic opposition.

It's worth noting, by the way, how desultory the "international community" has been in meeting this crisis. The U.N. is waiting on Uncle Sam, as ever. The French have 4,000 troops on nearby islands, but they have no great desire to rescue Mr. Aristide. The Canadians are also fed up, and even the feckless Organization of American States has roused itself to denounce his depredations.

One man who still hasn't figured this out is Senator John Kerry. Despite (or perhaps because of) his long tenure on the Senate's Western Hemisphere subcommittee, Mr. Kerry criticized the Bush Administration yesterday for cutting off aid to Mr. Aristide and said the U.S. should force the rebels to back off. He told the New York Times that if he were President he'd threaten to deploy international peacekeepers to keep Mr. Aristide in power.

So while Mr. Kerry voted against $87 billion to build a free and stable Iraq, he's all in favor of deploying troops to prop up a Haitian leader whose tyranny has lost him the support of most of his own population.

My feelings on Bush’s formal adoption of a constitutional amendment to haven’t changed – as a conservative I think it’s unwise to give the federal government more power, in this case to “define” marriage. If they can define it some other yahoo can come along and change it, tax it, etc. Having said that there’s a few things to point out here, first and foremost this fallacy that Bush is pushing a divisive cultural war on Americans.

In today’s Washington Post, Bush-hater Dana Milbank writes in his “news analysis” – basically editorial creep disguised as front page objective news – that Bush “has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004.” Bush didn’t rekindle jack, he’s responding. He didn’t initiate this, the Left did. (More on Milbank journalism here)

You may recall in Massachusetts that liberal activist judges, aka the judicial branch of government, anointed themselves as a second legislative branch of government and re-wrote Massachusetts law and thus told the voting populace of Massachusetts, the majority of which is against gay marriage, to stick it. You might further recall that a mayor of San Francisco is right now breaking California law by issuing illegal marriage licenses. Would the Left be so high horse about this if a Georgia activist judge or Atlanta mayor re-wrote or broke law to give 16-year-olds AK-47s? You laugh but the Second Amendment doesn’t have age requirements and mentions no types of arms.

As for Bush, he couldn’t ignore the issue. Ignoring it would have caused him attacks from both sides – Right and Left – instead of just Left. On the positive side a constitutional amendment could at least settle the issue once and for all (could) – it will either pass, and individual states can decide to give state (but not federal) benefits and recognition, or it won’t pass and will be seen as a referendum in favor of gay marriage. Of course, the latter may just invite more activism and law-breaking from government officials. Personally I don’t really care one way or the other if gays marry. But we have to respect state and federal law. And for Bush to not respond to judges and mayors breaking law is to invite tyranny on a multitude of issues, not just politically correct notions of marriage.

Finally, as said above, I don’t like empowering the feds with cultural power, but I also find ridiculous this outrage on the Left that Bush is warping the constitution by proposing an amendment. There’s a reason why our founding fathers wrote the amendment process into the constitution without limits about what we could or could not amend. They say Bush is warping the process is silly. Amendments are the process. You have the right to propose amendments limiting Americans to driving only red cars but that doesn’t mean it will earn the majority votes in the House and Senate and then get two-thirds of the states to ratify it as required by the constitution.

I haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion,” but will make the effort to do so just to see what all the fuss is about. It’s just a day old but already people seemed polarized over it; mirroring our current political climate they either love it or hate it. What I find bizarre is the type of attacks Gibson and his movie are under – regarding the media and social elites they seem to run under two themes: that the movie and it’s maker Gibson are either anti-Semitic (an odd charge as Gibson seeks to do for a Jew, Jesus Christ, what Stephen Spielberg did for Normandy – display an event with realism) or that the movie and it’s maker are violence obsessed (a very odd charge as since when has the liberal media complained about violence in the movies?). I mean if the movie sucks, just say it sucks; why does Gibson have to become the scorge of the media to boot?

The NY Times calls the film “harrowingly violent; the final hour of "The Passion of the Christ" essentially consists of a man being beaten, tortured and killed in graphic and lingering detail.” Really? Jesus was beaten, tortured and killed? What would we do without NY Times columnists!? This just in from the Times – a movie about Jesus’ birth was “just some baby in a manger.”

Look, people tend accept the fallacy that modern times are more violent than the past. Perhaps it plays into liberal institutions like gun control – if we had more gun control there’d be less violence, they say. The truth is that the Romans, like so many other cultures, would imprison you, beat you, spear you, or execute you at the drop of a hat - you didn't have to claim to be the son of God. The past, whether in Palestine, Rome, Scotland, Spain, Constantinople, or ancient Japan, was far, far more violent than today – and there was no helicopter to fly you to the nearest hospital for life-saving treatment. Naturally, any movie about the past is going to tend to be violent.

Moving on, the Times conclusion is even more bizarre: “In most movies — certainly in most movies directed by or starring Mr. Gibson — violence against the innocent demands righteous vengeance in the third act, an expectation that Mr. Gibson in this case whips up and leaves unsatisfied.”

Again, don’t they get it? Gibson wanted to portray the Crucifixion with the same realism that Spielberg, no doubt critically acclaimed by this same Times among others, portrayed WWII. Saving Private Ryan didn’t feature a soldier saying, “OH, NO, sarge I’ve been shot!” as you’d find in some circa 1950s war flick, but instead shows a guy picking up his own arm; Just like “The Passion,” in “Ryan,” the lead character dies. Where were these compliants of violence in "Schlindler's List"?Sure it’s depressing, but it’s war and history.

One last note regarding elite critics’ hypocrisy – this World Net Daily article notes how past movie columnists and critics who praised realism and violence in such films as “Gladiator” bash Gibson’s movie for that same violent realism.

[Catholic League president William] Donohue points to New York Daily News reporter Jami Bernard, who voted the "super-violent" film "Gladiator" the best picture of 2000, but brands Gibson's film "a compendium of tortures that would horrify the regulars at an S&M club."

Yet, Donahue says, Bernard is a big fan of the Marquis de Sade – the pervert who wrote the book on S&M – and that is why she liked 'Quills.'"

Reviewer Peter Rainer, the Catholic leader noted, also condemns "Passion" for delving into "the realm of sadomasochism," yet commended director Steven Spielberg for the "gentleness" he brought to the bloody war hit "Saving Private Ryan."

Richard Corliss of Time, he noted, thinks the only people who will be drawn to Gibson's film are those "who can stand to be grossed out as they are edified."

Yet, said Donahue, Corliss called the "body halvings, decapitations, [and] unhandings" of "Gladiator" a "pleasure that we get to watch."

Newsweek's David Ansen says "The Passion" will "inspire nightmares," though he hails as "a must-see" movie a film about incest, "The Dreamers."

David Denby of the New Yorker cites "The Passion" as being so violent it "falls into the danger of altering Jesus' message of love into one of hate."

Says Donahue: "This is the same guy who said of 'Schindler's List' that 'the violence [is] neither exaggerated nor minimized."
Truth be known I’d say the critics’ complaints about violence were a mask for any film that forces them to uncomfortably view Christ’s death. Liberal columnists and elites are uncomfortable about religion to begin with, unless that is, they’re comparing the Taliban to John Ashcroft. And if in “The Passion” Jesus had been a pimp for Mary Magdalen, or something like that, no doubt the elites would be showering it with artistic praise.

Democrats have been milking comments that Education Secretary Rod Paige made about the National Education Association, calling the union a "terrorist organization," for all they are worth. For his part Paige’s comments are ill advised and just play into the hands of the liberal media, but you’ve got to love Paige’s insult-laden “apology” (if one can call it an apology):

"It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms. I also said, as I have repeatedly, that our nation's teachers, who have dedicated their lives to service in the classroom, are the real soldiers of democracy, whereas the NEA's high-priced Washington lobbyists have made no secret that they will fight against bringing real, rock-solid improvements in the way we educate all our children regardless of skin color, accent or where they live. But, as one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks, I should have chosen my words better."
Obstructionist scare tactics! That’s an apology? Too funny. Good for Paige to label the union for what it is and not, hat in hand, beg for forgiveness from almighty NEA and their cronies in the Democratic Party. The Democrat-NEA iron curtain has had control of our country’s education system for decades so they’ve only got themselves to blame if it’s totally screwed up. President Bush, attempting triangulation to earn moderate appeal, signed off with ultra-liberal Senator Ted Kennedy on the No Child Left Behind act, and what does the GOP get in return for feeding the inefficient education system even more taxpayer money? Grief and backstabbing.

Anyway, like Wile E. Coyote’s bomb exploding in his face, the Democrats have opened another door for their own to be attacked, as Drudge pointed out today. It seems Sen. and presidential hopeful John Kerry used the terrorist label just as loosely and with just as much contempt as Rod Paige:

In Jan. 1996, commenting on the federal government shutdown, Kerry called the House Republicans 'legislative terrorists,' who used federal workers as pawns and disrespected them. Asked about his terrorist comment, Kerry explained, 'Terrorists hold hostages, and the Republicans are holding the government hostage'...
Well, if Paige has issued an apology, shouldn’t Kerry be held to the same accountability? Don’t hold your breath. The only good thing is that it’s just another in a long series of examples where Kerry has said one thing but done another.

It matters not, and is barely worthy of the news cycle. In fact, had a Democrat said such things about a more conservative friendly group one must wonder if the media would have even bothered reporting it.

This election isn’t going to be won or lost on tasteless analogies. The Democrats want to paint Bush as an AWOL liar, and his staff as dangerous neo-cons, because they know that the electorate is going to be made fully aware of Kerry’s long career in making our country weaker by opposing the strengthening of the military and intelligence community. Kerry, as pointed out in today’s Washington Times, opposed the development of all those successful weapons systems we used to defeat al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in Iraq.

The Massachusetts senator voted against defense appropriations bills that included money for weapons such as the Patriot missile, the Tomahawk cruise missile and the B-2 stealth bomber — all of which military leaders say have become integral to the U.S. force and were crucial to winning the 1991 Gulf war and last year's war in Iraq.

According to voting records, Mr. Kerry also favored cutting or canceling spending on the Apache helicopter, the M-1 Abrams tank and a wide range of fighter jets.

"That's the game they play," Mr. Kerry told reporters yesterday while campaigning in New York. "They haven't come to you and said we need this [weapons] system and John Kerry voted against the system. They're saying he voted against defense ... and I'm not going to let them nickel-and-dime us on one system or another that was an individual vote."

[Mr. Bush's campaign chairman, Marc] Racicot also said Mr. Kerry is trying to "cloud the issue" by complaining that Republicans are attacking his patriotism rather than his votes on defense issues in the Senate.

"We have praised repeatedly Senator Kerry's service in Vietnam," Mr. Racicot said. "This is not a discussion about anything other than his record."

The Center for Security Policy has analyzed more than 75 votes over the past decade cast by Mr. Kerry and other senators. The Washington-based conservative think tank gave Mr. Kerry one of the lowest ratings of any senator.

Among the votes the group evaluated were nine Mr. Kerry cast against developing a missile-defense system envisioned to protect the United States from nuclear attack. Also noted are the six times in the past 10 years he voted to freeze or reduce defense spending. Mr. Kerry also cast two votes to loosen trade controls over "dual-use" technology such as U.S.-made high-speed computers that can also be used by enemies to build high-tech weaponry.

Republicans have also produced a proposed bill that Mr. Kerry authored in 1996 to cut the deficit. The proposal, which would have cut spending on defense and intelligence by $6.5 billion, never attracted a co-sponsor or came to a vote.

"This bill was so reckless that it had no co-sponsors," said Mr. Racicot.

Mr. Kerry yesterday said embracing every weapons system proposed doesn't make Republicans stronger on defense.

"That's not the measure of whether you're strong on defense," he said.
Well, what is a measure of strong defense for Kerry? Trying to eliminate successful military systems? How does that make us stronger, Sen. Kerry? This is the legislative record of John Kerry, and he can’t hide it. Kerry’s defense – that his votes should be viewed as line item rather than as whole – is very weak. The bottom line is that had Kerry gotten his way over the past two decades of his senatorial career the US might not have the capability to have been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foreign policy philosophy aside nobody short of an enemy of the US could argue that not having the M-1 tank, Apache helicopter or Tomahawk cruise missile – all which Kerry voted not to fund – would be a good thing. War hero or not, you have to hold John Kerry accountable for his lack of judgment on our national defense.

Today’s biggest story comes from the NY Times which claims that German intelligence gave the CIA the first name and phone number of one of the 9-11 hijackers in March of 1999, more than two years before the attack.

The Germans themselves have for a long time been under fire for their own failures in penetrating the Hamburg cell, from which three of the four hijack pilots originated including Mohammed Atta. The young men who would move on to their infamous marks were first recruited by a vocal and recurrent speaker of the radical al Quds mosque in Hamburg, Mohamed Heidar Zammar. After September 11, Zammar fled to Morocco where he was captured and then handed over to Syria. Had either the German intelligence or CIA infiltrated the Hamburg cell 9-11 might have been stopped or severely limited. Cracking the Hamburg cell would have eventually led to the 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Mohammed, long before he was finally captured in March of 2003.

In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him.
The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates had been obtained by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an Islamic militant in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks, German officials said.

After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior German intelligence official said.

"There was no response" at the time, the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that "Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down, American officials say.

The Germans considered the information on Mr. Shehhi particularly valuable, and the commission is keenly interested in why it apparently did not lead to greater scrutiny of him.

The information concerning Mr. Shehhi, the man who took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the south tower of the World Trade Center, came months earlier than well-documented tips about other hijackers, including two who were discovered to have attended a meeting of militants in Malaysia in January 2000.

The independent commission investigating the attacks has received information on the 1999 Shehhi tip, and is actively investigating the issue, said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission.

American intelligence officials and others involved with the matter say they are uncertain whether Mr. Shehhi's phone was ever monitored.

An American official said: "The Germans did give us the name `Marwan' and a phone number, but we were unable to come up with anything. It was an unlisted phone number in the U.A.E., which he was known to use."

Officials involved with the work of the joint Congressional investigation made it clear that the publication of a more complete version of the story was the subject of a declassification dispute with the C.I.A. A former official involved with the Congressional inquiry acknowledged that having a telephone number for one of the hijackers was far more significant than simply having a first name.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other government agencies have been heavily criticized for failing to put together fragmentary pieces of information they received from a wide array of sources in order to predict or prevent the terrorist plot. The joint Congressional panel that investigated the attacks concluded that American authorities "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

Until now, the most highly scrutinized failure has related to the C.I.A.'s handling of information about a meeting of extremists in Malaysia in January 2000 that involved two of the men who would become hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. Although the C.I.A. identified the two men as suspected extremists, the agency did not request that they be placed on the government's watch lists to keep them out of the United States until late August 2001. By that time, they were both already in the country. In addition, while the two men lived in San Diego, their landlord was an F.B.I. informant, but the bureau did not learn of their terrorist links from the informant.

But unlike the leads to Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in San Diego, the earlier information about Mr. Shehhi could have taken investigators to the core of the Qaeda cell at a time when the plot was probably in its formative stages. According to testimony in Germany in December in a criminal case related to the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Shehhi was one of only four members of the Hamburg cell who knew about the attacks beforehand.

This is somewhat of a parting shot by the German intelligence who are tired of taking the bull brunt of not infiltrating the al Quds mosque where so many of these al Qaeda radicals originated. Ironically, it was this same NY Times that in July of 2002 fingered the German intelligence, the BND, as the main bungler of intelligence failures. Whether the Germans handed the CIA the first name and telephone number or not (a big deal, sure) Hamburg is Germany’s back yard and German intelligence, not the CIA, is responsible for terrorists within German borders.

The Germans must have known something was up or else they wouldn’t have had an investigation on Zammar since 1997; the Germans learned Zammar’s full role as an al Qaeda recruiter after a 1998 investigation into Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, an al Qaeda founder. Salim also led them to Mahmoud Darkazanli. Most inexcusable is allowing Zammar to flee after 9-11. But in Germany, even after 9-11, the law does not consider one a terrorist until an attack is actually performed. Here’s a key paragraph from the 2002 article:

Germany accuses the CIA of not disclosing information, but what the NY article fails to mention today it mentioned in 2002 – Germany had the first names not one, but three 9-11 planners; Germany also complained when the US tried to take matters into their own hands:

After Mr. Salim's 1998 arrest, the German police tapped the telephones of both Mr. Darkazanli and Mr. Zammar. One of those taps led to three young Arab students.

On Feb. 17, 1999, Mr. Zammar visited the apartment on Marienstrasse in Hamburg where the students lived. There, he met with the residents — Mr. Atta and two other men implicated in planning the attacks, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Said Bahaji, according to the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

While there, Mr. Zammar received a telephone call in which the police overheard him referring to the three men by their first names. The police put the apartment on their watch list, but did not follow up and identify the three men mentioned by Mr. Zammar.

About this time, American investigators took matters into their own hands. An investigator familiar with the episode said the German police discovered that American agents had been questioning people in Hamburg about Mr. Darkazanli and Mr. Zammar without informing the German authorities.

The discovery drew sharp complaints from the Germans, the investigator said.

American investigators contend this was a critical period in the formation of the Hamburg cell, which provided three of the four suspected hijackers on Sept. 11. Mr. Shibh and Mr. Bahaji disappeared just before the attacks and have been charged with conspiracy by the Germans.

A senior German intelligence official said that the light surveillance of the Marienstrasse apartment suggested that Mr. Atta and the others were inconspicuous students. Early in 2000 a judge refused permission to extend the monitoring, ruling that the police did not have evidence of a crime.

But some Americans say the Germans may have had the opportunity to crack the plot.
"If you were on top of these guys you would have gotten quite a bit," an American official said.
The CIA might be right about Shehhi’s unlisted phone number being useless to them, but that sounds like an empty defense. Maybe it was a lack of Langley managerial support to pursue this lead, maybe it was arrogant dismissal because the lead came from a competing foreign agency, or maybe it was just another in a series of blunders by the CIA, which in hindsight mind you, seem obvious – for whatever reason the Western intelligence community failed as a whole. I believe it was culture. Politicians, judges and law enforcement managers not on the beat (basically the bureaucrats) were more worried, and some still are, about not making wake, not insulting or upsetting the culturally sensitive issues. Political correctness in law enforcement created a culture of timidity, and fear of career-ending retribution for mistakes. As a result they chose to take no chances, to never follow intuition or rock the boat.

“But it's [the war on terror] primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world…” – Senator John Kerry in a January debate.

Keep Kerry’s quote in mind as you read this Washington Post article about how Clinton administration officials, primarily Janet Reno, restricted the CIA and intelligence community from acting effectively against Osama bin Laden during the 1990s. The Democrats truly believe that the government should pursue the war on terror as a law enforcement issue, and not a war. But, as this article makes clear, we tried that for 8 years and the result was terror attack after terror attack, climaxing with 9-11.

[The ban on assassinations does not apply to military targets such as bin Laden] Yet the secret legal authorizations Clinton signed after this failed missile strike required the CIA to make a good faith effort to capture bin Laden for trial, not kill him outright.
Beginning in the summer of 1998, Clinton signed a series of top secret memos authorizing the CIA or its agents to use lethal force, if necessary, in an attempt to capture bin Laden and several top lieutenants and return them to the United States to face trial.

From Director George J. Tenet on down, the CIA's senior managers wanted the White House lawyers to be crystal clear about what was permissible in the field. They were conditioned by history -- the CIA assassination scandals of the 1970s, the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s -- to be cautious about legal permissions emanating from the White House. Earlier in his career, Tenet had served as staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and director of intelligence issues at the White House, roles steeped in the Washington culture of oversight and careful legality.
Some of the most sensitive language concerned the specific authorization to use deadly force.

Clinton's national security aides said they wanted to encourage the CIA to carry out an effective operation against bin Laden, not to burden the agency with constraints or doubts. Yet Clinton's aides did not want authorizations that could be interpreted by Afghan agents as an unrestricted license to kill. For one thing, the [Janet Reno] Justice Department signaled that it would oppose such language if it was proposed for Clinton's signature.

The compromise wording, in a succession of bin Laden-focused memos, always expressed some ambiguity about how and when deadly force could be used in an operation designed to take bin Laden into custody. Typical language, recalled one official involved, instructed the CIA to "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."

At the CIA, officers and supervisors agonized over these abstract phrases. They worried that if an operation in Afghanistan went badly, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope. Over time, recriminations grew between the CIA and the White House.

It was common in Clinton's cabinet and among his National Security Council aides to see the CIA as too cautious, paralyzed by fears of legal and political risks. At Langley, this criticism rankled. The CIA's senior managers believed officials at the White House wanted to have it both ways: They liked to blame the agency for its supposed lack of aggression, yet they sent over classified legal memos full of wiggle words.

Clinton's covert policy against bin Laden pursued two goals at the same time. He ordered submarines equipped with cruise missiles to patrol secretly in waters off Pakistan in the hope that CIA spotters would one day identify bin Laden's location confidently enough to warrant a deadly missile strike.

But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.

This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.

In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.

As the months passed, Clinton signed new memos in which the language, while still ambiguous, made the use of lethal force by the CIA's Afghan agents more likely, according to officials involved. At first the CIA was permitted to use lethal force only in the course of a legitimate attempt to make an arrest. Later the memos allowed for a pure lethal attack if an arrest was not possible. Still, the CIA was required to plan all its agent missions with an arrest in mind.

Some CIA managers chafed at the White House instructions. The CIA received "no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action" against bin Laden before Sept. 11, one official involved recalled. "The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement." In these operations, the CIA had to recruit agents "to grab [bin Laden] and bring him to a secure place where we can turn him over to the FBI. . . . If they had said 'lethal action' it would have been a whole different kettle of fish, and much easier."
After all I've read on 9-11, intelligence failures, etc., I'm throughly convinced that Janet Reno was the weakest attorney general we've ever had, and one of the biggest reason why the US was not able to get a handle on Islamic extremism during the 1990s, essentially allowing it to become a major problem from what could have been managable. Even the Clinton people, like Sandy Berger, hated Reno.

The current crop of Democratic presidential candidates assails the Bush administration for preemptive force and what they consider to be hasty use of military force. As John Kerry indicated in January, they see the war on terror as nothing more than a massive manhunt for a few bad individuals, hence their over-reliance on diplomacy and law enforcement and reluctance to use military force. Had the Clinton administration not hamstrung the CIA there might never have been a 9-11 to react to. But they didn’t and 9-11 did happen. So the question becomes: do you want to elect for president a guy who says he’ll return us to the more ineffective 1990s method of fighting terrorism? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, only in this case, it will be at our gravest expense.

I don’t recall Liberals and Democrats complaining in 1992 when Ross Perot took so many conservative and independent votes from George Bush Sr. that Bill Clinton captured the election with a plurality of just 43 percent. And I don’t think the Left would condemn any attempt by a conservative such as John McCain running for president as an independent. But to listen to the amount of complaining on the Left because independent Ralph Nader has decided to run for president you’d think they thought that they think John Kerry (or Edwards, but really John Kerry) is entitled to every liberal and center-left vote. But of course they do! The liberal media, as Howard Kurtz notes in his column, is particularly outraged:

"Some of Ralph Nader's best friends are desperately trying to persuade him not to run for president this year," the New York Times warned.

The Washington Post carried a similar message: "The backlash is already underway. On the Internet, in newspapers and magazines, erstwhile supporters have been urging the former Green Party presidential candidate to forgo this year's race -- all in the hope of aiding the Democratic presidential nominee."

The Nation, which first published Nader in 1959, issued its own plea: "For the good of the country, the many causes you've championed and for your own good name -- don't run for President this year."

[NBC Meet The Press interviewer Tim] Russert read the Nation editorial and played the RalphDontRun video, which said that if Nader had sat it out last time, President Gore would be running for reelection.

"That's the liberal intelligentsia," Nader said dismissively, which wants to "block the American people from having more choices and voices."
You gotta love Nader’s comeback at the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ – he hit the nail on the head. The far Left academia wants to the government to be the primary decision maker in you everyday life. The government, not the market, should persuade you into buying that eco-car over the SUV, the government should ensure that you don’t eat unhealthy fatty foods and tax those who do, the government should tell you what doctor you can see, the government will tell you what school you must send your kids too, etc. Ironically, I would consider Nader, for the most part, to be one of those very liberal intelligentsia he criticizes.

In any event, Nader has just as much right to run as anyone else. Still, the liberals whine.

I’m not sure how bad this will hurt the Democrats one way or the other. With Howard Dean out some on the far Left are looking for an alternative to John “Cash and” Kerry, whose hypocrisy reigns supreme as a guy who takes special interest money while attacking others for doing the same. Nader, more than anything else, made his mark as anti-special interests. He truly does have the potential to get liberal votes on this issue, considering all the trouble Kerry has had with campaign finance scandals. The thing is: are these voters who would have otherwise voted for Kerry, or are they the disillusioned who wouldn’t have bothered to vote for anyone to begin with? If the former, it hurts Kerry (or Edwards, whatever), if the latter it doesn’t matter.

We’ve seen how liberal billionaires like George Soros are spending millions on Democrats (who, again, attack Bush for special interests but have no problem taking money from the Soros/Buffett crowd). I’d like to see a wealthy conservative step up and offer Nader millions for TV ads so that Democrats have a taste of their own medicine.

Mix Johnny Cochran’s infamous “race card” with the Vietnam War and you get the current strategy of Senator John Kerry and Democratic Party – call it the Patriot card. Kerry never misses a moment to interject his Vietnam service while at the same time hiding behind a party that attacks Bush personally for his service in the air national guard. However, simultaneously should any opponent dare to criticize Kerry’s post-Vietnam War behavior or his decades-long record of slashing budgets for our military and intelligence agencies Kerry plays this Patriot card, claiming Republicans are attacking his patriotism. The Democrats, like Cochran during the OJ trial, know if they shout this untrue fabricated accusation long enough people might believe it.

Kerry had taken umbrage at statements that Sen. Saxby Chambliss made earlier, predicting trouble for the Massachusetts Democrat in Georgia's primary because of a "32-year history of voting to cut defense programs and cut defense systems."

In the letter to Bush Saturday, Kerry wrote: "As you well know, Vietnam was a very difficult and painful period in our nation's history, and the struggle for our veterans continues. So, it has been hard to believe that you would choose to reopen these wounds for your personal political gain. But, that is what you have chosen to do."

"Saxby Chambliss, on the part of the president and his henchmen, decided today to question my commitment to the defense of our nation," Kerry said while campaigning in Georgia, one of 10 states choosing electoral delegates on March 2.

Kerry told a news conference he voted for the largest defense and intelligence budgets in American history, although sometimes he "voted for common sense to make changes."

In his reply letter Sunday, Racicot said, "Our campaign does not condone any effort to impugn your patriotism. Your letter claims that supporters of our campaign questioned your service and patriotism. In fact, that simply wasn't the case."

"Our campaign is not questioning your patriotism or military service, but your votes and statements on issues now facing our country," said Racicot, former governor of Montana. "Senator Chambliss addressed your Senate record of voting against the weapons systems that are winning the war on terror."

Countered Kerry spokesman David Wade: "The Republicans need to answer to the American people for their craven tactics that degrade our democracy and question the patriotism of those who stand up and ask questions about the direction of our country. ... John Kerry takes a back seat to no one when it comes to maintaining the strongest military on the face of the earth and keeping our promises to America's veterans."
It takes a lot of gall for Kerry to accuse Republicans of “reopening” Vietnam-era wounds when it is Kerry above all others who mention Vietnam at every moment of opportunity. Truly disgusting. Kerry’s defense is weak – Republicans, or John Edwards for that matter, have every right to attack, for example, Kerry’s 1995 attempt to cut $1.5 billion from our US intelligence budget. Even as late as the 1990s, even after Islamic extremists tried to knock down the WTC in 1993 Kerry nonetheless saw the intelligence community, not the Islamic nuts trying to kill us, as the biggest threat to democracy. Kerry’s a war hero and patriotic, but the Democratic Party is exemplified by people like Kerry, who view everything through Watergate/Vietnam lenses and whose liberal, politically correct, weak defense strategy helped foster an environment that made 9-11 possible.

A year ago I would have wagered that bin Laden is already dead, considering that he failed to show his goat-beard mug via video for two years after being a camera hound throughout the 1990s. Audiotapes just don't fit his narcissist style. In any event until we know we just don't know, you know? So, while I'm optimistic about this news article claiming the US military has surrounded him, take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, if he is alive it really is just a matter of time, as it was for Saddam Hussein, Khalid Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, et. al.

A BRITISH Sunday newspaper is claiming Osama bin Laden has been found and is surrounded by US special forces in an area of land bordering north-west Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Sunday Express, known for its sometimes colourful scoops, claims the al-Qaeda leader has been "sighted" for the first time since 2001 and is being monitored by satellite.

The paper claims he is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta. The region is said to be peopled with bin Laden supporters and the terrorist leader is estimated to also have 50 of his fanatical bodyguards with him.

The claim is attributed to "a well-placed intelligence source" in Washington, who is quoted as saying: "He (bin Laden) is boxed in."

The paper says the hostile terrain makes an all-out conventional military assault impossible. The plan to capture him would depend on a "grab-him-and-go" style operation.

"US helicopters already sited on the Afghanistan border will swoop in to extricate him," the newspaper says. It claims bin Laden and his men "sleep in caves or out in the open. The area is swept by fierce snow storms howling down from the 10,000ft-high mountain peaks. Donkeys are the only transport."

The special forces are "absolutely confident" there is no escape for bin Laden, and are awaiting the order to go in and get him.

"The timing of that order will ultimately depend on President Bush," the paper says. "Capturing bin Laden will certainly be a huge help for him as he gets ready for the election."

The article says bin Laden's movements are monitored by a National Security Agency satellite.

A couple of weeks ago Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty predicted that the military would capture bin Laden by the end of 2004. This report also comes on the heels of reports of a US offensive within Pakistan, and of Pakistani military maneuvers against pro-Taliban forces in Northwest Pakistan, near the Afghan border, a suspected hiding place for al Qaeda/Taliban leaders since the end of the war in Afghanistan - so, this report isn't far fetched. We'll see what happens.

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for pointing out this Boston Globe story in which a CBS producer not only exhibits bias in favor of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but actually coached Kerry in order to produce a better soundbite.

DAYTON, Ohio -- John F. Kerry, wrangling with rival John Edwards over jobs and trade in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, arrived in this city with 26 percent unemployment yesterday and scored some political points off the Bush administration -- though not quite in slam-dunk fashion.

"Just a couple of days ago, the administration promised America several million jobs over the course of the next months, and I immediately said that those predictions would fall short based on the promises they made with respect to the tax cut, which was supposed to give a million jobs -- it lost a million -- and the next tax cut was supposed to produce a million jobs, and it lost a million," Kerry told reporters, going on to cite more statistics and insist that his plan is better than Bush's.
Kerry's remarks lasted three minutes, yet it left TV reporters without a soundbite until one CBS News producer asked the Massachusetts senator to try again.

"They don't know what they're talking about in their own economic policy," Kerry said of the Bush team. "Today it's one thing, tomorrow it's the next."

Take two was the sort of succinct, wry comment for which Edwards, not Kerry, became known among many Wisconsin voters in the run-up to their primary Tuesday, which Kerry won despite a surprising surge from the North Carolina senator.
That’s absolutely pathetic. The media doesn’t even try to hide their wishful thinking for a Kerry presidency, and are now actively trying to help him secure the nomination. What’s worse, the Boston Globe reporter finds no shame in this and other than matter of fact reporting doesn’t even bother addressing the less than professional behavior by the CBS producer.

Here's an idea for Bush campaign ad:

Scene: Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their cronies are in their cave, eating popcorn. The cave is dimly illuminated by the light of a television set. They're watching a clip from the Wisconsin Democratic debate.

Questioner: Senator Kerry, President Bush described himself as a war president. He said he's got war on his mind as he considers these policies and decisions he has to make. If you were elected, would you see yourself as a war president?

Kerry: "I'd see myself first of all as a jobs president, as a health care president, as an education president and also an environmental president.... So I would see myself as a very different kind of global leader than George Bush."

Cut to Osama and Mullah Omar high-fiving each other, throwing the popcorn up in the air. One henchman in the background is grinning while waving a "Kerry for President" banner.
Fade to black.
Yes, Kerry really replied with that answer to the moderator's question at the Wisconsin debate. Amazing. I guess to some Democrats 9-11 was just another day, and we're not really in a war.

Read the whole commentary by Jonah Goldberg. It's priceless. As Goldberg says, for the first time since 1988 foreign policy is back on the table, big time, and it is Kerry and the Democratic Party refusing to acknowledge the dangers that threaten the country.

MEMRI has translated a list of individuals and company spokespersons implicated by discovered Iraqi documents that show they received oil bribes from Saddam Hussein. The list is authentic enough that the Iraqi government has already started an investigation, and the US and UK governments are expected to follow suit. One Iraqi Governing Council member, Muwwafaq Al-Rabi'I, said there are "tons of documents" still not released. The translation includes each individual and a response from them. Read it when you have some time to see how they squirm.

Posted below is an excerpt of how the operation - oil skimming for profit - occurred:

In a subsequent article, Al-Mada provides details on the allocation and sale of oil vouchers. In general, the vouchers were given either as gifts or as payment for goods imported into Iraq in violation of the U.N. sanctions. The voucher holder would normally tender the voucher to any one of the specialized companies operating in the United Arab Emirates for a commission which initially ranged from $0.25 to $0.30 per barrel, though it may have declined in later years to as little as $0.10 or even $0.05 per barrel because of oil surplus on the market. [7] In other words, a voucher for 1 million barrels would have translated into a quick profit of $250,000-300,000 on the high side and $50,000-100,000 on the low side - all paid in cash. According to Al-Mada, Jordan will seek to tax the illicit profits of citizens who benefited from the sale of the vouchers.

One of the common arguments by recipients of vouchers was that the vouchers paid for goods provided in the framework of the U.N.-administered Oil for Food program. However, under the Memorandum of Understanding governing the program, oil allocations were intended for "end users," meaning those with refineries. Most of the voucher recipients would be considered "non-end users." Moreover, if vouchers were used to pay for goods, it would suggest that these were not authorized by the program and should be considered illicit since all contracts approved by the U.N. were reimbursed from the trust account where the oil revenues were kept, at a French bank, at Iraq's insistence. According to the United Nations: "The oil buyer had to pay the price approved by the Security Council Sanctions Committee into a U.N. escrow account, and the U.N. had to verify that the goods purchased by Iraq were indeed those allowed under the program. But the U.N. had no way of knowing what other transactions might be going on directly between the Iraqi government and the buyers and sellers."
By the way, one of the individuals implicated was Bernard Merimee, alleged recipient of 11 million barrels of Saddam Hussein's oil. Merimee is the former permanent French representative to the United Nations. How convenient. And now you know why the UN was powerless to enforce its own sanctions against Iraq.

Past Iraq oil bribe link here.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has developed ballistic missile technology that can outwit any defensive system, a top Russian general said on Thursday, in a clear challenge to the United States' planned $50 billion anti-missile shield.

The declaration came a day after President Vladimir Putin, eyeing nationalist votes for elections next month, promised to equip his armed forces with a new generation of long-range weapons matching those of the United States.

First Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel-General Yury Baluyevsky said that during large-scale military exercises on Wednesday, Russia had test-launched a missile system that could maneuver in mid-flight, allowing it to dodge defenses.

"The test carried out yesterday confirmed that we can build weapons which will render any anti-missile system defenseless against an attack by Russia's strategic forces," he told a news conference.

"It's part of our unilateral response to the creation or future creation of a missile defense system by any state or bloc of states," he said.
Curious, isn’t it, how the US is developing a missile shield to counteract rogue states, like North Korea, who might not care if they have everything to lose by launching a missile strike against the West, whereas Russia is developing an anti-missile shield missile to challenge the US? I could have sworn that the West won the Cold War and the Russians were said to be our “allies.” Are the Russians still fighting it?

In any event, fear not the Russian military technology. They don’t have the ability to stop Chechens with AK-47s let alone missile shields. This is typical Russian bravado; many of their leaders are still bitter over the Cold War loss and they’re trying to save face after a week of embarrassing missile failures that fly in the face of any claim of a successful missile test.

From the above article:

Moscow and Washington agreed not to develop large-scale missile defenses in the Cold War, but President Bush pulled out of the treaty in 2002, saying the United States had to ward off threats from terrorists and "rogue states."
If the label says “Reuters” you can count on shoddy journalism. Citing it as a Cold War relic, Russia also pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002. Reuters implies it was not a mutual decision. Naturally they do so to spread the myth that Bush makes rash unilateral decisions.

It’s only fitting that on the same day that international inspectors discovered highly technical uranium centrifuges in Iran the Israeli government received its first shipment of new F-16I fighter planes, capable of fly without refueling as far as, surprise, Iran.

The aircraft, called "Sufah," was part of a $4.5 billion deal that will increase Israel's F-16 fleet to 362 F-16s, the largest F-16 fleet after the United States. Air Force pilots said the new conformal fuel tanks will provide the F-16I with a capability to fly 1,640 kilometers without refueling. This would allow Israeli missions in such countries as Iraq and Iran.

The most controversial component of the F-16I is the Northrop Grumman AN/APG-68[V]9 multimode synthetic aperture radar. Northrop Grumman's radar was chosen over the SAR by the state-owned Elta Electronic Industries.

The air force said the AN/APG-68[V]9 increases the distance of airborne engagement by 30 percent over the older radar in the F-16I. Air force pilots said the radar system will provide high-resolution synthetic-aperture ground mapping capability.
Hmmm. Fighter-bombers capable of hugging the ground to avoid radar and reaching Iran without refueling? Well, it appears that Israel has a backup plan should the international community fail to disarm Iran.

Meanwhile, back in Iran the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency might be finally accepting the reality that Iran is trying to deceive them. Both US and Pakistani officials believe that Pakistan’s top scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, sold nuclear technology to Iran during the 1990s (more in the post below) – gee, right about the same time that the Clinton administration was saying that Iran had changed. Just one week ago the IAEA discovered previously undisclosed Iranian blueprints for uranium enriching equipment. Today, they found the real thing:

The lengthy IAEA report, due to be released in coming days, will provide "evidence that the Iranians' dossier was neither complete nor correct," said a Vienna-based diplomat familiar with the U.N. watchdog's work. He said the list of IAEA descriptions will reveal "serious discrepancies."

The study will cite Iran's failure to account for traces of highly enriched uranium found on centrifuge equipment, according to U.S. and European weapons experts familiar with the IAEA's findings. That failure has fueled suspicions that Iran, which has often divulged details only when confronted with undeniable evidence, continues to conceal its nuclear efforts.

New test results show the presence in Iran of at least two distinct types of highly enriched uranium. One is believed to have originated in Pakistan. The existence of the other, whose origin remains unknown, suggests that Iran secretly imported material from a still-unidentified country -- or ran a concealed enrichment program that has not come to light.

News of the more sophisticated components, first reported by USA Today, show that Iran had begun testing a faster and more efficient enrichment machine known as a P2, used in producing the fuel used in nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. Iran said its only goal has been energy production.

A small number of complete, fully assembled P2 machines were found at one location in Iran, according to U.S. and European officials. In addition, U.N. officials found machine tools used in manufacturing centrifuge components at a different site, described by one official as a "military-related" facility.
Now here’s where it gets really frustrating. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: An oppressive oil-rich regime gets caught red handed breaking nonproliferation agreements and lying to international inspectors, yet there’s still plenty of people willing to give them a pass.

Although Iran's failure to declare the equipment was viewed as a serious omission, the machines themselves do not represent a significant leap in Iran's ability to enrich uranium, said officials familiar with the discovery. Iran appears to have assembled a handful of centrifuges for testing nearly a decade ago.

"It is very serious but it is not the end of the game, and it is not a smoking gun," said David Albright, a former IAEA inspector. "It is significant that these things are being dug up from the past, as opposed to current programs. It is important to keep the pressure on Iranians, but don't get out the sticks just yet."

Several analysts said policymakers could go to the Security Council in search of a credible threat of sanctions.
Sanctions? From the United Nations? Ha, that’s a laugh. And now we see how the UN’s refusal to enforce its own resolutions in Iraq has created a world of nuclear-ambitious dictators who will always be willing to call the UN’s bluff. What does Iran have to fear from the UN? Perpetual gridlock? Iran, like Hussein’s Iraq, can simply throw some oil money around to bribe government officials and influential entrepreneurs from the Security Council nations. Do you think Security Council member Russia, currently supplying Iran with several billion dollars worth of nuclear reactors (the Bushehr plant is $800 million alone), is going to allow sanctions to hit Iran? Please! That veto is easy to spot. Even more scrupulous countries like Japan are seduced by the Ayatollah’s oil money – rebuffing American concerns Japan today signed a $2 billion deal to develop Iran’s coveted Azadegan oilfield. Meanwhile, Iran could detonate a nuke in David Albright’s living room before he and other pacifist WMD experts ever declared evidence of a “smoking gun.” Pathetic.

No wonder Israel is getting their air fleet ready.

Malaysian authorities claim that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan sold Iran nuclear centrifuges for a $3 million profit during the mid-1990s through a Malaysian middleman. The middleman, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, also told Malaysian police how Libya acquired nuclear technology from Khan. The information also indirectly implicates the son of the Malaysian prime minister.

"The [Iranian] cash was brought in two briefcases and kept in an apartment that was used as a guesthouse by the Pakistani nuclear arms expert each time he visited Dubai," says the report, which identifies Khan as the arms expert.

"Around 2001, the nuclear arms expert informed B.S.A. Tahir that a certain amount of UF6 (enriched uranium) was sent by air from Pakistan to Libya," the report said.

Malaysian police have said Tahir obtained the centrifuge components from SCOPE, part of a publicly listed company controlled by the Malaysian prime minister's son, Kamaluddin Abdullah, and two other investors.

In Kuala Lumpur, a diplomat who requested anonymity said the more important issue for Washington might be to get Malaysia to sign up to an export controls regime on dual-use weapons technology, including machine parts and chemicals.

But state-run Bernama news agency quoted Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar on Friday as saying Malaysia had no intention of doing so.

"There is no reason for us to tighten because we are not involved and we do not have the capability," it quoted Syed Hamid as saying in the administrative capital of Putrajaya.
No reason to tighten controls? How about Malaysian middlemen using the company of the prime minister’s son to peddle nuclear technology to dictators? Is that reason enough, Mr. Albar?

The Malaysians are a problem, and not just in the nuclear department. The country is a hotbed of Islamic extremism and convenient meeting place for them. You might recall the al Qaeda terror summit in January of 2000, where the terrorists put the finishing touches on 9-11 and planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Their government is a problem and flirting with the definition of harboring terror.

John Kerry, who makes a living off bashing Republicans for their ties to special interests, sent almost 30 letters pressuring Congress and the Pentagon to pay for a missile system being sold by an Indian businessman who recently pled guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. While federal prosecutors say that neither Kerry nor other politicians knew that the contributor was breaking the law, the fact that Kerry actively lobbied for the man while he was accepting his money completely contradicts Kerry’s statements against special interests.

From 1996 to 1999, Kerry sent 28 letters urging the freeing of money for an upgraded guided-missile system Parthasarathi Majumder was trying to build for U.S. warplanes, the Times said on its Web site last night.

The letters were sent at a time when Majumder and employees at his Science and Applied Technology Inc. were donating money to the Massachusetts Democrat, the article said, citing court records.

Kerry received about $25,000 during the period, according to Dwight L. Morris and Associates, which tracks campaign donations.

Last week, Majumder pleaded guilty to two counts of illegal campaign contributions and defrauding the government. He could face up to six years in prison and more than $250,000 in fines.

Kerry's campaign told the Times that the senator's letters of support for the project involved a concern that the delay in the project would affect jobs in his home state, where a subcontractor, Millitech, was based.

"Kerry has made a career of going to bat for Massachusetts companies and bottlenecks they might have with the federal government. It's part of his job," said Michael Meehan, campaign senior adviser.
Got that everybody? When Republicans like Bush take special interest money it’s dirty and corrupting. But when John Kerry and Democrats do likewise they’re just trying to help the local economy – hey, it’s just part of their job. Glad that’s all straightened up.

Head administrator in Iraq L. Paul Bremer reiterated that the US would not allow any Iraqi government or constitution based upon Islamic law, or Sharia. The US, said Bremer, won’t attempt to refuse any acknowledgement of Islamic principles or the Muslim religion, but will ensure that Iraq has secular rule.

"We have an obligation as the sovereign power that an appropriate democratic structure is put in place here while we are here so that we can deliver to the Iraqis what they want, which is a democratic, unified, stable country at peace with itself," Bremer said.
I have no doubt that Bremer and the Bush team will insist that Iraq adopt secular rule in order to ensure liberty to every Iraqi, whether Shiite, Sunni, Kurd or another minority faction. This is the single most important notion we can establish in Iraq, even more than democracy. After all Taiwan under a British but liberal and secular monarchy was one heck of a lot more free than Russia or Iran, countries which are technically democratic but which lack freedom to the extreme.

Separately the Bush team scored a diplomatic victory when United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan backed the US position that elections cannot be held in Iraq until the political power is handed over on June 30. Still unknown is if Annan will back the Bush team’s preferred method of choosing a provisional government. Annan, out of the loop for months due to his own misjudgments, was recently empowered when the defacto ruler of the Shiite community in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani, said that he would be more willing to back the US method if the UN also endorsed it. All involved parties are now debating how to create an interim government, with some advocating a system used in Afghanistan, and others wishing to simply expand Iraq’s current provisional government to 25 members until direct elections were held. The current conventional wisdom believes the latter will prevail but it really doesn’t matter so long as the most Iraqis possible back it and that it ensures secular rule based on individual liberty.

Having said that, despite the diplomatic victory there is reason to be cautious of the UN’s new role in Iraq.

Despite the Bush administration's increased reliance on the United Nations, senior administration officials are wary of involving the Security Council in Iraq policy.

One State Department official voiced concern about the possibility that member nations might call for a Security Council resolution to formally approve a new plan for Iraq's transition, which could complicate and delay the process with just over four months remaining.

"There's ample opportunity to hijack this in the Security Council and take it down a road we don't want to see it go," said the official, speaking on the condition that he not be named.

"It may be that some want to use it . . . for their own gains in Iraq."

France and Germany, the council's two toughest critics of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, said today that the Security Council should adopt a new resolution.
Oh, boy. You can see this coming a mile away – more French opposition for the sake of opposition. Like 17 Security Council resolutions on Iraq weren’t enough. Now the French want another. That’s just the first problem with involving the UN: it indirectly empowers the French, Germans, Russians, Chinese and Syrians, among others. Each of them has their own agenda for Iraq, and much of the time it runs contrary to what our government desires. These ulterior motives often lead to corruption. The UN oil-for-food program comes to mind, as do Syrian, French and Russian illegal financial dealings with the former Hussein regime.

The second problem is that the more “partners” and “allies” you include in the process the more of a bureaucratic mess you make. Try getting 15 people together and get them to agree on lunch. Now have fifteen representatives of fifteen countries get together to determine how to reconstruct the political apparatus of a country. They don’t call the UN the world’s biggest debating society for nothing.

The third problem, the biggest, is that the United Nations has a habit of promoting stability over freedom. They call it peace, but it’s a false peace: is there such a thing as peace without liberty? Koreans are “at peace,” but one group of them is just fine and the other group, to the north, is friggin miserable. Everywhere the UN is involved one can find false peace. The UN (and Clinton) backed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but he’s just a different degree of despot. Call him despot-lite; just “humane” enough for the world powers to back him because they promote peace over liberty, but corrupt enough that Haiti is, ho-hum once again, in chaos.

Then look at the Balkans. The UN still has full control over that nightmare but most people don’t know that Kosovo has “deteriorated into a hotbed of organized crime, anti-Serb violence and al-Qaeda sympathizers, say security officials and Balkan experts.” Despite 18,000 NATO forces in the region paramilitary groups in Kosovo have murdered 1,192 Serbs, kidnapped 1,303 and wounded 1,305 in 2003 alone. Those numbers are up sharply from the prior year. But is the UN doing anything about it? Are they activating those 18,000 peacekeepers to use force against the paramilitaries? No, because to do so would call attention to the fact that there’s a problem; to do so would promote liberty over peace or stability. World War II could have been peaceful too, had we just let Hitler quietly take over Europe.

Related to the above point is problem number four with the UN: they refuse to differentiate between liberal and illiberal regimes. Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, and other despotic regimes are given the same voice, rights and privilege as liberty-ensuring regimes in the US, Canada, or the UK, for example. The UN bestows membership to regimes who do not even enjoy lawful representation of their own populations. From these seeds the UN becomes a farce. It’s why we find Libya or Syria on the Human Rights Commission. Or why under Saddam Hussein Iraq was part of the UN commission on disarmament.

So, the Bushies should be wary of the UN in Iraq, at least if it doesn’t want to Iraq to become Balkanized.

I’m not a usual Ann Coulter reader, but for the second week straight she’s really made the Democrats look like idiots, and weasels, and idiot weasels, by telling the truth about Senator Max Cleland. I can’t really set it up, so I’ll post her latest piece here, and you can go back to the week before via the link in her commentary if you like to see how it started. It’s particularly relevant considering all the “Vietnaming” that’s going on in this election campaign. Funny how the liberals suddenly love Vietnam (Or should I say how shamelessly opportunistic of them). Too bad for the Democrats we’re now fighting Islamic radicals and not Charlie. Always a few decades too late, eh, Dems?

Liberals are hopping mad about last week's column. Amid angry insinuations that I "lied" about Sen. Max Cleland, I was attacked on the Senate floor by Sen. Jack Reed, Molly Ivins called my column "error-ridden," and Al Hunt called it a "lie." Joe Klein said I was the reason liberals were being hysterical about George Bush's National Guard service.

I would have left it at one column, but apparently Democrats want to go another round. With their Clintonesque formulations, my detractors make it a little difficult to know what "lie" I'm supposed to be contesting, but they are clearly implying – without stating – that Cleland lost his limbs in combat.

It is simply a fact that Max Cleland was not injured by enemy fire in Vietnam. He was not in combat, he was not – as Al Hunt claimed – on a reconnaissance mission, and he was not in the battle of Khe Sanh, as many others have implied. He picked up an American grenade on a routine noncombat mission and the grenade exploded.

In Cleland's own words: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is given to those wounded in combat. Liberals are not angry because I "lied"; they're angry because I told the truth.

I wouldn't press the point except that Democrats have deliberately "sexed up" the circumstances of Cleland's accident in the service of slandering the people of Georgia, the National Guard and George Bush. Cleland has questioned Bush's fitness for office because he served in the National Guard but did not go to Vietnam.

And yet the poignant truth of Cleland's own accident demonstrates the commitment and bravery of all members of the military who come into contact with ordnance. Cleland's injury was of the routine variety that occurs whenever young men and weapons are put in close proximity – including in the National Guard.

But it is a vastly more glorious story to claim that Cleland was injured by enemy fire rather than in a freak accident. So after Saxby Chambliss beat Cleland in the 2002 Georgia Senate race, liberals set to work developing a carefully crafted myth about Cleland's accident. Among many other examples, last November, Eric Boehlert wrote in Salon: "[D]uring the siege of Khe Sanh, Cleland lost both his legs and his right hand to a Viet Cong grenade."

Sadly for them, dozens and dozens of newspapers have already printed the truth. Liberals simply can't grasp the problem Lexis-Nexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty – hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte.

One of the most detailed accounts of Cleland's life was written by Jill Zuckman in a lengthy piece for the Boston Globe Sunday magazine on Aug. 3, 1997:

Finally, the battle at Khe Sanh was over. Cleland, 25 years old, and two members of his team were now ordered to set up a radio relay station at the division assembly area, 15 miles away. The three gathered antennas, radios and a generator and made the 15-minute helicopter trip east. After unloading the equipment, Cleland climbed back into the helicopter for the ride back. But at the last minute, he decided to stay and have a beer with some friends. As the helicopter was lifting off, he shouted to the pilot that he was staying behind and jumped several feet to the ground.

Cleland hunched over to avoid the whirring blades and ran. Turning to face the helicopter, he caught sight of a grenade on the ground where the chopper had perched. It must be mine, he thought, moving toward it. He reached for it with his right arm just as it exploded, slamming him back and irreparably altering his plans for a bright, shining future.

Interestingly, all news accounts told the exact same story for 30 years – including that Cleland had stopped to have beer with friends when the accident occurred (a fact that particularly irked Al Hunt).

"He told the pilot he was going to stay awhile. Maybe have a few beers with friends. ... Then Cleland looked down and saw a grenade. Where'd that come from? He walked toward it, bent down, and crossed the line between before and after." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec. 5, 1999)
"[Cleland] didn't step on a land mine. He wasn't wounded in a firefight. He couldn't blame the Viet Cong or friendly fire. The Silver Star and Bronze Star medals he received only embarrassed him. He was no hero. He blew himself up." (Baltimore Sun, Oct. 24, 1999)

"Cleland was no war hero, but his sacrifice was great. ... Democratic Senate candidate Max Cleland is a victim of war, not a casualty of combat. He lost three limbs on a long-forgotten hill near Khe Sanh because of some American's mistake ..." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 29, 1996)

The story started to change only last year when the Democrats began citing Cleland's lost Senate seat as proof that Republicans hate war heroes. Indeed, until the myth of Republicans attacking Cleland for his lack of "patriotism" became central to the Democrats' narrative against George Bush, Cleland spoke only honorably and humbly about his accident. "How did I become a war hero?" he said to the Boston Globe reporter in 1997. "Simple. The grenade went off."

Cleland even admitted that, but for his accident, he would have "probably been some frustrated history teacher, teaching American government at some junior college." (OK, I got that wrong: I said he'd probably be a pharmacist.)

Cleland's true heroism came after the war, when he went on to build a productive life for himself. That is a story of inspiration and courage. He shouldn't let the Democrats tarnish an admirable life by "sexing up" his record in order to better attack George Bush.

Some would say that it’s a shame that America is again spending so much time fighting over the Vietnam War, especially since we’re in the midst of a far more relevant one against Islamic militants. For all of its ghosts and demons it is what our crop of leaders do now and in the future, not 30 years ago, that will determine our fate. The Kerry campaign has determined that the best way to overcome the Democrats’ perceived natural disadvantage in foreign policy is to constantly champion himself as a Vietnam War hero. Part of John Kerry’s strategy is to cause Americans to forget not only about his association with peaceniks but also his decades long record trying to gut US intelligence and defense budgets. Thus, Kerry shamelessly touts his Vietnam experience, personally interjecting it for political gain, as displayed again during this past Sunday’s debate:

[CRAIG] GILBERT: Let me turn to you, Senator Kerry, because you said your vote [to use force in Iraq] wasn't a vote for what the president ultimately did. But you did vote to give him the authority, so do you feel any degree, any degree of responsibility for the war and its costs and casualties?

[JOHN] KERRY: This is one of the reasons why I am so intent on beating George Bush and why I believe I will beat George Bush, because one of the lessons that I learned -- when I was an instrument of American foreign policy, I was that cutting-edge instrument. I carried that M- 16. I know what it's like to try to choose between friend and foe in a foreign country when you're carrying out the policy of your nation.
In a world where media don’t make favored Democratic candidates their darlings, Mr. Gilbert’s next question might have been, “Senator, what in my previous question led you to believe it was about Vietnam instead of why you continue to flip-flop on the War in Iraq?” No matter. Kerry implies that because he served in Vietnam he can make better foreign policy decisions than a candidate who did not serve in Vietnam (or another war). This is similar to the ‘chickenhawk’ argument that seeks to belittle persons who make war decisions, or encourage the use of force to protect America, without themselves ever having fought in wars. The argument is despicable because it is the exact opposite of a principle that America was founded upon – the civilians tell the military what to do, not vice versa. Hoping to avoid America becoming a military junta, our founding fathers purposely designed our government so that a civilian was commander in chief of the military. The John Kerrys of the world imply that only those in the military or who are military veterans may make military decisions. Sorry, but that’s not America, that’s Pakistan or Egypt.

Regardless of all this, if Kerry wants to continue interjecting Vietnam, he will eventually have to deal with his dishonorable behavior once he returned home.

In 1971, in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry flat out accused US military soldiers, as an entity, of being nothing more than your average fascist war criminal. It wasn’t fact, but innuendo. Of course Kerry didn’t admit this until much later.

Dressed in his combat fatigues and ribbons, he [Kerry] told Congress that U.S. soldiers had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads … randomly shot at civilians … in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." He later acknowledged that he did not witness the crimes himself but had heard about them from others.
Even though he later admitted it hearsay, Kerry makes no apologies for his 1971 testimony. But he should. Former North Vietnamese General Nguyen Giap wrote in his memoirs that antiwar groups like Kerry’s, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was instrumental in keeping morale up amongst the North Vietnamese. Likewise, former veterans have stated that Kerry’s testimony was used by the North as a method of torture against American POWs.

Paul Galanti learned of Kerry's speech while held captive inside North Vietnam's infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison. The Navy pilot had been shot down in June 1966 and spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war.

During torture sessions, he said, his captors cited the antiwar speeches as "an example of why we should cross over to [their] side."

"The Viet Cong didn't think they had to win the war on the battlefield," Galanti said, "because thanks to these protesters they were going to win it on the streets of San Francisco and Washington."

He says Kerry broke a covenant among servicemen never to make public criticisms that might jeopardize those still in battle or in the hands of the enemy.

Because he did, Galanti said, "John Kerry was a traitor to the men he served with."

Now retired and living in Richmond, Va., Galanti, 64, refuses to cool his ire toward Kerry.

"I don't plan to set it aside. I don't know anyone who does," he said. "The Vietnam memorial has thousands of additional names due to John Kerry and others like him."

Galanti isn’t alone in his feelings about Kerry. But of all the earned criticisms perhaps the most influential comes from current Arizona Senator John McCain; not from today, but through an interview he gave US News & World Report published on May 14, 1973. Some might dismiss this because recently McCain came to the defense of Kerry. McCain no doubt has his reasons, probably in large part due to his personal dislike of Ted Sampley, head of the group Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, who in 1992 attacked McCain because he felt the senator had given up on any still missing Vietnam POWs. Also, McCain might consider it diplomatically poor or rude to attack Kerry now. But McCain’s words from 1973 cannot be ignored; first because they were spoken long before politics, Sampley or a Kerry presidential bid entered the fray, and second because McCain spoke a fundamental truth which Kerry ignored – pacifism kills.

Like veteran Galanti, McCain cites in his 1973 interview that the North Vietnamese government thrived off the anti-war movement. The North Vietnamese expected the American POWs to denounce the war, the military and the US government in front of their “guests.” If they did not do so, conditions could become very uncomfortable.

David Dellinger [of the Chicago 8] came over. Tom Hayden [now ex-husband of Jane Fonda] came over. Three groups of released prisoners, in fact, were let out in custody of the "peace groups." The first ones released home with one of the Berrigan brothers [of the Catonsville Nine]. The next group was a whole crew. One of them was James Johnson, one of the Fort Hood Three. The wife of the "Ramparts" magazine editor and Rennie Davis [of the Chicago 8] were along. Altogether, I think about eight or nine of them were in that outfit. Then a third group followed.

The North Vietnamese wanted me to meet with all of them, but I was able to avoid it. A lot of times you couldn't face them down, so you had to try to get around them. "Face" is a big thing with these people, you know, and if you get around them so that they could save face, then it was a lot easier.

For example, they would beat the hell out of me and say I was going to see a delegation. I'd respond that, O.K. I'd see a delegation, but I would not say anything against my country and I would not say anything about my treatment and if asked, I'd tell them the truth about the conditions I was kept under. They went back and conferred on that and then would say, "You have agreed to see a delegation so we will take you." But they never took me, you see.

[…]

The pressure continued on us to see antiwar delegations. By early in June I was moved away from Colonel Finley to a room that they called "Calcutta," about 50 yards away from the nearest prisoners. It was 6 feet by 2 feet with no ventilation in it, and it was very, very hot. During the summer I suffered from heat prostration a couple or three times, and dysentery. I was very ill. Washing facilities were non-existent. My food was cut down to about half rations. Sometimes I'd go for a day or so without eating.

All during this time I was taken out to interrogation and pressured to see the antiwar people. I refused.

All through this period, the "gooks" were bombarding us with antiwar quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us-speeches and statements by men who were generally respected in the United States.

They used Senator [J. William] Fulbright a great deal, and Senator Brooke. Ted Kennedy was quoted again and again, as was Averell Harriman. Clark Clifford was another favorite, right after he had been Secretary of Defense under President Johnson.

When Ramsey Clark came over they thought that was a great coup for their cause. The big furor over release of the Pentagon papers was a tremendous boost for Hanoi. It was advanced as proof of the "black imperialist schemes" that they had been talking about all those years.
There could not be a more clear condemnation of the antiwar movement then that of John McCain’s personal comments from 1973. Whether willing or unwittingly, whether intentions were benevolent or harmful, the antiwar movement became the useful idiots and pawns of the North Vietnamese, and of communist governments from Moscow to Havana. The North Vietnamese, to quote McCain, “used Senator Fulbright a great deal” as propaganda against the POWs. As the North Vietnamese were beating the tar out of American POWs, and as McCain was spending his fourth of five and a half years in a tiger cage, John Kerry was standing before Chairman J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee and describing the American soldier, not the North Vietnamese, as “Genghis Khan.” I’m sure the North Vietnamese thank Mr. Kerry for his help.

The peaceniks didn’t get it (and still don’t), but McCain understood precisely and personally the damage that the antiwar movement caused not just the war effort but the POWs as well. McCain explained that in armed conflict signs of weakness are only met with more force, not less.

As you may know, back in 1954, the North Vietnamese had a big hand in toppling the French Government in Paris because the French voters had no more stomach for the Vietnam War their Government was waging at the time. That was the way the North Vietnamese won in 1954-they didn't win in Vietnam.

The French agreed to pull out of Indo-China with no questions asked when they signed the agreement. As a result, they got back just one third of their POW's.

I'm convinced that Hanoi hoped to win in our case by undermining morale among the people at home in America. They had to marshal world opinion on their side. I remember in 1968 or '69 (North Vietnam Premier] Pham Van Dong's speech to the National Assembly, because we were blasted with these things on the loud-speakers. The title of his address was, "The Whole World Supports Us," not, "We Have Defeated the U. S. Aggressors, or anything like that.

In 1969, after the three guys who were released went back to the U. S. and told about the brutality in the POW camps, President Nixon gave the green light to publicizing this fact. It brought a drastic change in our treatment. And I thank God for it, because if it hadn't been for that a lot of us would never have returned.
McCain concludes by defending then President Nixon’s decision to escalate bombing of high-value North Vietnamese targets in late 1972. He contrasts the better treatment he received when the US was acting stronger via Nixon than when LBJ was limiting military strikes and refusing to go public with the POW issue:

“We knew at that time that unless something very forceful was done that we were never going to get out of there. We had sat there for 31/2 years with no bombing going on-November of '68 to May of '72. We were fully aware that the only way that we were ever going to get out was for our Government to turn the screws on Hanoi.

I know it was very, very difficult for him [Nixon] to do that, but that was the thing that ended the war. I think the reason he understood this is that he has a long background in dealing with these people. He knows how to use the carrot and the stick. Obviously, his trip to China and the strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia were based on the fact that we're stronger than the Communists, so they were willing to negotiate. Force is what they understand. And that's why it is difficult for me to understand now, when everybody knows bombing finally got a cease-fire agreement, why people are still criticizing his foreign policy-for example, the bombing in Cambodia.

Right after the Communist Tet offensive in 1968, the North Vietnamese were riding high. They knew Johnson was going to stop the bombing before the elections. "The Soft-Soap Fairy" told me a month before those elections that Johnson was going to stop the bombings.”
Nixon and McCain understood that one cannot negotiate a peace unless the enemy is made to understand that to continue war will cause as much or more pain to its side. They also understood that the only way to ensure that your army is not shot in the back and slaughtered as they withdraw is to first escalate. John Kerry was guilty of failing to understand this fundamental truth when he came home, and the North Vietnamese thrived off of statements like Kerry’s labeling of US soldiers as war criminals (again, of which he later confessed was hearsay) in front of Fulbright’s committee. So, Kerry can continue to tout his Vietnam experience all he likes, but he cannot conveniently divorce his inadvertent post-war support of Hanoi’s regime from his heroic wartime behavior.

What is relevant of Kerry’s past could be transferred to Kerry’s presidency. Kerry, like many liberal Democrats, has made it clear that of all the Bush policies he despises Bush’s willingness to use force is for him the worst. Recently Kerry said that Bush is "enthralled by the idea of pre-emption and American military might." But, once again we are engaged by an enemy who wishes to use a domino theory to spread their own hateful, illiberal and extreme ideology. Only, unlike the Cold War communist, this enemy knows no rules of war, is not easily deterred, if at all, and believes that killing unlimited numbers of “unbelieving” civilians will earn them heavenly reward. Due to the spread of military technology and WMD time is not on our side and we do not have the luxury of ensuring every Security Council ally is pleased with our course before we act upon it. So this begs the question: given our enemy, do we want a president who loathes the idea of pre-emption and American military might? Kerry’s past philosophical stance is troubling. Americans may have to get used to recurrent September 11s should Kerry become president.

Former Vermont Gov Howard Dean’s candidacy is done. Some would trace the beginning of Dean’s demise to his angry Iowa concession speech. As ridiculous as it was it is small potatoes in the political spectrum. There are really two things that stick out in my mind as the marks of his downfall, and they were recognizable back then. First, Howard Dean alienated every businessperson, liberal, conservative or otherwise, when he suggested that his first economic action, after raising everybody’s taxes, would be to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Really, really stupid. But even more than that one can trace Dean’s demise to Al Gore’s decision to endorse Dean. Al Gore possesses the opposite of the Midas touch – everything Gore touches turns to crap. (Caveat: I’ll admit until the Greenspan comment I though this primary was Dean’s to lose).

Dean and, importantly, his angry misguided followers are now considering their political futures. Early reports indicate that Dean will endorse Senator John Edwards over John Kerry. Well, Kerry must be happy about that. Howard Dean is this year’s Al Gore, so an endorsement by Dean for Edwards is the kiss of death.

The former Vermont governor sought out rival John Edwards for a private meeting Sunday night in Milwaukee. After what Democratic sources described as a friendly but inconclusive conversation, Dean said the two men should talk again today. The implication was that there could be ways for Dean to help a candidate he has said he prefers over Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

A few days earlier, meanwhile, two top officials for the Democratic National Committee traveled to Burlington, Vt., to meet with Roy Neel, the Dean campaign's chief executive. Their agenda, diplomatically stated but unmistakable, was to find out whether and how Dean would harness his network of highly motivated grass-roots activists and small contributors on behalf of the national party and the eventual nominee, according to people familiar with the session.
Hey, here’s an idea. Dean could grow a beard and teach at a Vermont college a la Gore.

Edward’s strong showing in Wisconsin could mark the beginning of a strong second half of primary season, especially as races begin in the South. Edward’s only victory was in South Carolina, his birthplace. But, even so, a bridesmaid is still just a bridesmaid. He’s got to start winning, so I don’t see how Edwards could be excited about a Dean endorsement. It would counteract Edward’s natural asset – the ability to pull in the male center or center-right Southern voters. The Southern Democrat is no fan of Dean’s, and they view John Kerry for exactly what he is – a pampered, Northeastern lib trying to act like the “common man.” Sure, because every Joe Six-pack marries into the Heinz Ketchup (pronounced – cat-chup) family. Moreover, the Deaniacs aren’t going to go for either Edwards or Kerry with the vigor that could boost a campaign. If Edwards were smart he’d diplomatically shun Howard Dean, and say, ‘Well, I thank him for his endorsement but he’s much different from the Democratic Party I represent’ or something along those lines. Edwards could lose more from a Dean endorsement than he gains.

Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, commander of 11,000 US troops in Afghanistan, says that the Pakistani military has begun to engage and threaten Northwestern province tribal leaders in order to persuade them to assist in locating Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders. Pakistan had previously refused or hesitated to use its military to sweep its country for al Qaeda presence, although its intelligence service, the ISI, has conducted joint operations with the US to capture September 11 mastermind Khalid Mohammed and other important al Qaeda leaders. Regardless, if the Pakistani military has truly entered the fight it marks a concerted effort by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. While the motivations are not yet clear it’s reasonable to assume that Musharraf has wagered that since Islamic militants have already tried on numerous occasions to assassinate him, he has nothing to lose at this point by submitting to US will in eradicating al Qaeda from his country. Perhaps too, facing pressure in an election year and complaints that Iraq drained resources from finding bin Laden (it didn’t), President Bush added some incentive for Musharraf to get serious about finishing off al Qaeda. Also, Musharraf might be fed up with the lawless Northwestern Pakistan regions and decided those tribal areas need to learn that they are not rulers of their own country, but report to Musharraf.

Although he provided few details, Barno called some of the new Pakistani measures "quite innovative." He said he had seen reports of Pakistani forces trying, in some instances, to compel the cooperation of local leaders by threatening to destroy homes and by taking other steps "of that nature."

He said regular Pakistani troops are now "operating periodically" in the territories after having no significant presence in the region previously. "So the fact that they are now there, that they have got a presence, that they're confronting the tribal elders and they're holding them accountable for activities in their areas of influence is a major step forward," Barno said. "And it's something that we're watching with great interest and with some cautious optimism that it will have a positive effect."

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon via a video connection from Afghanistan, Barno did not mention any U.S. military participation in the activities on the Pakistani side of the border. U.S. Special Operations forces have reportedly ventured into the rugged territories from time to time, but their presence in an area where many villagers are sympathetic to al Qaeda is a highly sensitive issue for Pakistani authorities and is rarely acknowledged.

Barno said the United States and Pakistan are continuing to coordinate operations in a kind of "hammer-and-anvil approach" to prevent al Qaeda fighters from escaping back-and-forth across the border. Barno said he confers monthly with Pakistani military authorities and hosts a meeting every four to six weeks of U.S., Pakistani and Afghan security officials to address border and intelligence issues.

He declined to repeat a prediction he made to reporters last month that bin Laden would be captured by the end of the year. But he said U.S. forces are "re-energizing" efforts to find not just bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda members but also leaders of other enemy groups -- most notably, Mohammad Omar, who headed the Taliban government ousted by U.S. forces in 2001, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a renegade Afghan warlord.

The intensified targeting of enemy leaders comes amid a broader adjustment in U.S. tactics that Barno described. Instead of venturing out for raids and then returning to base, Barno said, U.S. forces are staying in areas for sustained periods and operating continuously, in effect "owning" chunks of territory.

This allows troops to develop and maintain relations with local leaders and to gather better intelligence, Barno said. As a sign the approach is yielding results, Barno pointed to discoveries in the past month of caches of weapons and ammunition that set a six-month record.

In another new development, Barno also disclosed plans to set up "regional development zones" that are intended to better coordinate Afghan army and police forces with the assistance efforts of the United Nations, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other organizations. The first such zone is slated for the city of Kandahar.

Enemy fighters have shifted tactics, as well, Barno said, no longer trying to form large groups for combat as they did last summer. Instead, they have resorted increasingly to bombing attacks on aid workers and Afghan civilians.

Interesting. This is a quiet war that the media cannot see, and so doesn’t report. Likewise, the Pakistani government loathes admitting to its population that the US military is operating within its borders. Last month it was leaked that the US military was planning a Spring offensive inside Pakistan. Sounds like its starting.

And people wonder why there’s no peace in the Middle East? Well, the very question presupposes that all parties want peace to begin with! They don’t, as further exemplified from an interviewer’s anti-Semitic softballs loaded up on Palestinian television for the secretary of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Ahmad Nasser, to pound upon.

Nasser: "Israel is not deterred from anything. Israel was established on the basis of theft. Israel, the State of Israel, is the Satan's offspring, a Satanic offspring. Israel was founded on theft from the first moment. It was founded on the basis of robbery, terror, killing, torture, assassination, death, stealing land and killing people. On this basis, Israel was founded and will continue this way, never able to exist because its [Israel's] birth was unnatural, a Satanic offspring, and cannot exist among human beings. . . . Only in this way can Israel exist. It is not capable of existing naturally as other nations in the world."

Woman Interviewer: "The very existence [of Israel] is unnatural, is not logical. The root, the root itself is rotten."

Nasser: "This state is based on racism, biblical concepts, death, killing and destruction ...."

Nasser (on the exchange of 400 Arab prisoners for one Israeli and three bodies of Israeli soldiers): ". . . We see that Israel is trying to delude the world, and delude the Arabs and the Palestinians psychologically - that one Israeli will be exchanged for a thousand Palestinians. Meaning - Israel is interested in planting among the Palestinian, the Arab or the world the concept of value - the value of a Jew and the value of an Arab. But it is not true..." [Interrupted]

Interviewer: "This concept appears in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that they [the Jews] are at a high level [of existence] and the rest are at a low level."

Nasser: ". . . It [Israel] does all it can to take as many prisoners of war as it can, for example, 10,000 Arab prisoners in exchange for the release of a hundred [Israeli] prisoners of war. By this, Israel is trying to put a value on an Arab and a value on an Israeli or Jew . . . Israel is an aggressive country, a racist country, an ideologically hostile country, which hates all the goyim, all the foreigners. Israel is a Satanic offspring."
How the hell do you reason with such blinding hate… I mean besides bombing the Palestinian television stations.

Even more stomach churning than the amount of leftward-tiled media bias in the world today is when it becomes hypocritical as well. Whether John Kerry had an affair or not is no longer an issue. He’s denied it, and the woman has too. Fine. What isn’t fine is that the media has a double standard for reporting such things – one for Democrats and one for Republicans. Guess which group gets the microscope treatment and which gets the free pass?

Matt Drudge points this out the best by reminding that 12 years ago the mainstream media had no problem muckracking and spreading rumors that George H.W. Bush, Sr. was guilty of having an affair. It had no basis, but unlike Kerry today, the media continued to keep the 'have you stopped beating your wife' story on the front pages:

CNN rushed to get the rumor into the media stream as White House correspondent Mary Tillotson confronted President Bush as he hosted Israel Prime Minister Rabin in the Oval Office.

"There is an extensive series of reports in today's New York Post alleging that a former U.S. ambassador, a man now deceased, had told several persons that he arranged for a sexual tryst involving you and one of your female staffers in Geneva in 1984."

Asked NBC's Stone Phillips to the president's face at the height of the "rumor mongering":

"Have you ever had an affair?"

CBS' Harry Smith then confronted Bush spokesperson Mary Matalin over on-air morning coffee:

"Let me ask you about something else. There's a book out, or a book that's just about out that in a footnote names that then-Vice President Bush had an affair with an assistant when he was on a mission in Geneva. Well, that footnote has turned into frontpage news (holding up N.Y.POST), at least in New York, in the N.Y. POST. Albeit a tabloid, it is usually a conservative newspaper. Are you ready to say that accusation is a flat out lie?"

NEWSWEEK's Jonathan Alter defended the aggressive adultery rumor line-of-questioning of the first President Bush on ABC's NIGHTLINE on August 12, 1992, on a broadcast titled: "The Media Charges George Bush With Adultery."

"In this situation, the Oval Office isn't a temple," Alter explained. "The President is a candidate and he has to be asked tough, often distasteful, but nonetheless important kinds of questions." [Unless it's about John Kerry...]

UPI's Helen Thomas also defended the Bush affair reportage:

"Some people might have felt that it wasn't appropriate. But when you have the President there, I think it's very legitimate to ask him any question." [Unless its about a Democrat challenging Bush, apparently]

NEWSWEEK'S Alter blasted any and all coverage of the Kerry infidelity probe last week on a New York City talkradio outlet -- calling the investigation "sleazy."

The media outrage over an erupting story of possible infidelity of a presidential candidate -- 2004 -- peaked with Joe Conason's cover story in SALON late last week ["There he goes again! Matt Drudge and the GOP smear machine are back in the Democrats' pants"]

Conason lamented:

"But the kind of proof usually required by national news organizations isn't what Drudge needs in order to put innuendo into circulation."

But is this really the same Joe Conason who in the Summer of 1992 wrote a magazine cover story entitled "1,000 REASONS NOT TO VOTE FOR GEORGE BUSH?"

Consaon's reason #1:

"He cheats on his wife."

The rumor of President Bush having an affair was never proved by the media.
It gets worse. Many in the media have responded to Drudge’s retort, but in doing so prove even more – as if it wasn’t already obvious – how biased they are. NY Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove blasts Joe Conason for his weak excuses for a blatant media double standard.

But unlike cybergossip Matt Drudge - who, Conason charged in Salon, had "hyped to the maximum" the "vague and unsourced" Kerry rumors - Conason sometimes dropped the word "alleged" and published dirt as fact.

In a tone of supreme authority, he wrote about "Bush's adultery" and "the President's extramarital dalliances."

Yesterday, Conason explained: "That's the Spy style - it's a very assertive style.

They just don't use a lot of 'alleged' ... But I stand by every word."

Conason also explained why, in his scorching of Drudge, he failed to mention his Spy piece: "I wasn't even thinking about it. It was 12 years ago."
Pathetic. It’s their fault, not mine. I’m just the person who wrote the smear piece, I'm not the editor. But it was soooo long ago. Friggin pathetic.

In an E-mail, Conason argued that the subject of his Spy story was less Bush's supposed affairs than the media's reluctance to investigate them - in contrast to "nonstop press coverage of Clinton's alleged, rumored and gossiped infidelities ... Was the the President protected by a political double standard?"
Boy does that defense take gall! First, notice how Conason tries to put the wagon before the horse. Bush was before Clinton. The media pursued the Bush story on its own, even though there was nothing substantial to report; conversely, recall, that the media initially took a pass on the Lewinski scandal, and that the story only went mainstream because Matt Drudge leaked that Newsweek decided to bury the story to protect the president. Second, Conason’s attempt to compare unsubstantiated rumors about Bush to very substantiated rumors about Clinton are the epitome of media bias. There weren’t half a dozen women who came forward to assert Bush Sr. had sexually assaulted them over a 20-year period, but did with Clinton (Juanita Broddrick even claimed rape). Conason isn’t just comparing apples to oranges; he’s comparing apples to orangutans.

Of course, it’s not just the sex issues where we find media bias protecting the Democrats.

John Kerry, like so many other Democrats, has a long history of making comment after comment declaring Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq a threat and urging action against it. But the same media which gives Kerry a pass calls Bush a “lair.” Either they were both right, or they are both liars - well, media, which is it?

I wrote last week that Bush is playing into his political enemies’ hands on the gay marriage issue because theirs is a position more conservative than Bush’s. Yes, more conservative – because conservatives should be wary of any constitutional amendment to define marriage. Why in heaven’s name would a conservative want to give the federal government even more control over their daily life? Once the Feds define marriage they can then control it, complicate it, tax it, whatever. John Kerry and John Edwards on the other hand have taken advantage of Bush’s overreaction by embracing a federalist argument – that is, the legislators of every state, elected by the state’s populace, should decide what is best for their individual state.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a national TV audience Feb. 13 that states such as Massachusetts should be allowed to legalize same-sex "marriage" without federal government interference.

"I think we ought to let states do what they think is right," Edwards said on NBC's "Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

"... If California chooses to recognize same-sex marriage, that's fine. If Massachusetts chooses to recognize it, then the federal government ought to honor that."

Edwards reiterated his opposition to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment that would protect the traditional definition of marriage. It has been introduced in Congress and has eight supporters in the Senate, 113 in the House.

Democratic frontrunner John Kerry's position is similar to Edwards'. Conservatives, though, fear that Kerry's and Edwards' hands-off approach will result in courts legalizing same-sex "marriage" nationwide.
And here’s the A-ha! moment: Note how neither Kerry nor Edwards condemn the judicial activism that brought this issue about. There isn’t a candidate out there who could honestly debate that it’s a good thing that the judicial branch of government has taken it upon themselves to write law, and thus act as a second legislative branch of government. This country is founded on separation of powers, and if judges can with impunity write laws about gay marriage they can write laws about anything. Well, we judges decided that you should pay higher taxes; we judges decided that your kid is going to that school and that’s final; don’t question us, we’re judges, we’ll tell you what’s best for you.

I think our founding fathers would have found today’s judicial activism as nothing more than creeping tyranny, and a despicable violation of separation of powers. Bush needs to take advantage of the gay marriage issue and turn it into a national referendum on judicial activism. That’s his way to again appear to the right of Kerry and Edwards instead of trying to push a constitutional amendment with the potential to creep dangerously even more into our daily affairs.

The war in Iraq was all about oil, but now we know that Saddam Hussein illegally skimmed money from the UN oil-for-food program fund anti-war, anti-sanction groups and politicians, further detailed in the UK Guardian. (Past Iraqi oil corruption links here.) Once again the document severely implicates former British politician George Galloway. One implicated UK businessman has already agreed to profiting from the deal.

Undercover cash from oil deals went to three businessmen who in turn supported pressure groups involving the ex-Labour MP George Galloway, Labour MP Tam Dalyell, and the former Irish premier Albert Reynolds, it is alleged in documents compiled by the oil ministry, which is now under the control of the US occupation regime.

Separately, a dossier from the oil ministry in Baghdad has been handed by the British Foreign Office to Customs and Excise, which has been asked to investigate. They were also referred to the Cabinet Office because of their political sensitivity.

"The government has been given copies of certain documents [from Iraq]," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said yesterday. "They are being passed to the appropriate authorities for consideration."

Two of the three businessmen involved in UK campaigns, Burhan al-Chalabi and Riad al-Tajir, were based in Surrey; the other, Fawwaz Zureikat, a Jordanian entrepreneur, had offices in London.

Mr Chalabi and Mr Zureikat gave money to the Mariam Appeal, run by Mr Galloway, the MP confirmed. Mr Tahir said he ran another anti-sanctions campaign called Friendship Across Borders, which had Mr Dalyell as its official patron and organised visits to Baghdad by supportive politicians.

The three businessmen are alleged to have received money from Saddam via oil allocations. They sold the oil rights on at a profit of more than $1m (about £530,000), in an exploitation by Saddam of loopholes in the UN's then oil-for-food programme.

Mr Tahir agrees he profited from the oil deals. Mr Chalabi refuses to comment. Mr Zureikat confirmed to Agence France Presse in Jordan last week that he had made the oil deals.

The oil-for-food programme was set up in 1995 amid fears of a humanitarian disaster after the first Gulf war. Under the scheme, Saddam was allowed to sell limited quantities of oil to pay for food and medicine for the Iraqi people.

The contents of the new documents shed light on Mr Galloway's libel battle with the Daily Telegraph. Last year newspaper reports based on purported Iraqi intelligence files led to him being accused of receiving an annual £375,000 in secret personal payments from Saddam.

Our investigations in Iraq, New York, Paris, Moscow and London indicate the new British-related documents are authentic, although their meaning is not always clear.
These files do not implicate Mr Galloway in personal corruption. Nor do they suggest that Mr Dalyell and Mr Reynolds, who always paid their own way, had any knowledge of what was going on.

Mr Galloway said he was unaware that his financial sponsors were getting oil cash from the UN programme. But he accepts that he knew his supporters had links with Saddam's regime, and regarded that as an inevitable price to pay.
Oh, please, will the UK Guardian spare us its liberal apologies? How many of us would ever receive such allotments of money without knowing its source? That’s insulting. Galloway is a traitor to his country, and we’ve just found the tip of the iceberg regarding Saddam’s willing conspirators.

But most revolting in all of this how the mainstream media has for the most part ignored this story because it destroys a central argument for those who wished to avoid war – to wit: one cannot argue that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained when he was in reality punching holes in that containment with oil money. He bought whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted and it was just a matter of time before he wore out the international community’s containment policy.

This should be the top story in every newspaper and broadcast. Both President Bush and Tony Blair need to push it forward from the bully pulpit.

The Bush AWOL allegation began from a single source, now with a huge credibility problem.

For at least six years, a retired Texas National Guard officer has maintained that President Bush's record as a member of the Guard was purged of potentially embarrassing material at the behest of high-ranking Bush aides laying the groundwork for Bush's 2000 run for the presidency.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, who has been pressing his charges in the national news media this week, says he even heard one high-ranking officer issue a 1997 order to sanitize the Bush file, and later saw another officer poring over the records and discovered that some had been discarded.

But a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett has told the Globe that the central elements of his story are false.

George O. Conn, a former chief warrant officer with the Guard and a friend of Burkett's, is the person whom Burkett says led him to the room where the Bush records were being vetted. But Conn says he never saw anyone combing through the Bush file or discarding records.

Conn's recollection also undercuts another of Burkett's central allegations: that he overheard Bush's onetime chief of staff, Joe M. Allbaugh, telling a Texas Guard general to make sure there were no embarrassments in the Bush record.

Burkett says he told Conn, over dinner that same night, what he had overheard. But Conn says that, although Burkett told him he worried that the Bush record would be sanitized, he never mentioned overhearing the conversation between Allbaugh and General Daniel James III.
Much more about this liar in the link.

The Iranians were caught with their pants down yesterday when an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN atomic watchdog, discovered previously undisclosed blueprints to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran promised three months ago to fully disclose. They have not.

The documents -- designs for a highly sophisticated machine used in uranium enrichment -- were not declared by Iran in October when it suspended enrichment and promised full transparency for its nuclear program in the face of threatened international sanctions, the sources said. Iran acknowledged the documents only when confronted with what one official described as "unassailable" evidence by investigators of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

The blueprints contain instructions for building a type of gas centrifuge known as the P2, a super-efficient machine used in producing enriched uranium, the fuel used in nuclear power plants and a key ingredient in atomic bombs. Iran has acknowledged possessing hundreds of less efficient P1 machines at a formerly secret nuclear facility near the central town of Natanz.

Although some U.S. officials suspect Iran of operating secret enrichment facilities elsewhere in the country, IAEA investigators have found no evidence that Iran currently is using the advanced machines to enrich uranium.
Oh, no, my, no, never! It amazes me how the international diplofools catch the Iranians red handed time and again, but then are so willing to give them a pass on intentions. Well, we discovered this 20 megaton nuclear bomb... but we have no evidence that the Iranians planned on wiping Tel Aviv off the map. They probably made it by accident.

And were the the UN gives its pass the Europeans are sure to follow:

"This is not an indication of a significant new capability, but it is something that will cause people to question Iran's good faith," said one Europe-based diplomat, who, like the others, spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name. "Iran, on the other hand, will contend that their failure to declare was just an oversight."
Sheesh!

Remember how the Bushies argued that the Iraq War would scare the begeezes into every other nuclear-pursuing third world dictator, and how after Saddam Hussein was caught then Libya up and confessed that they had a nuclear development program, and how they then implicated Pakistan, and how Pakistanis chief scientist admitted helping North Korea, Libya and Iran. Well, thanks to the Iraq War and subsequent CIA scoops about that Pakistani scientist, Qadeer Khan, we were able to alert the IAEA, which tied it back to Iran:

The discovery of the blueprints was an unexpected result of the larger investigation into a nuclear trading network led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist credited with creating Pakistan's nuclear weapon. IAEA officials since November have been investigating a web of businesses and middlemen who worked with Khan in supplying nuclear technology and parts to others. Khan's known clients included both Libya and Iran. The United States carried out a parallel investigation of the network and last year presented the details to Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

After determining that Libya had received designs for the P2 machine, the investigators learned that the same suppliers had also provided the designs to Iran, according to diplomats familiar with the investigation. IAEA officials at the agency's Vienna headquarters would not comment on the finding.

The IAEA's year-long investigation of Iran's nuclear program had already documented numerous violations of Tehran's nuclear safeguards agreements, including the import of uranium from China in the early 1990s and the undeclared production of enriched uranium and plutonium. Those discoveries helped pressure Iran into signing the Oct. 21 agreement -- brokered by France, Britain and Germany -- to suspend uranium enrichment and open its nuclear facilities to more intrusive international inspections.

Since then, Iran has appeared to waffle on its pledges, and last month the Tehran government acknowledged that it was continuing to assemble additional centrifuges.

Before yesterday's disclosure, Bush administration officials had begun to signal a tougher line against Iran, hinting of new intelligence findings that strongly suggested that Iran was harboring nuclear secrets. "Some of these things the IAEA does not yet know," said one administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Former U.S. government officials and nonproliferation experts viewed the discovery of the centrifuge designs as a serious development that could result in diplomatic action against Iran. Some said they expect that nuclear weapons designs may also be found in Iran, citing recent discoveries of bomb blueprints in Libya.

"It seems the Iranians have not been telling the whole story," said Rose Gottemoeller, a top nonproliferation official during the Clinton administration. "We've seen all along that they dribbled out information only when confronted, and that they reluctantly acquiesced to certain steps. It is clear at this point that the Iranians must be told to step up to the bar, because this situation is extremely dangerous."
Is that the same Clinton administration that embraced Iran because they thought the Mullahs had changed into a bunch of liberty-loving "reformists"? Well, that's another commentary altogether.

What we want is a genuine reconciliation with Iran based on mutuality and reciprocity, and a sense that the Iranians are prepared to move away from support of terrorism and distribution of dangerous weapons, opposition to the peace process. We appreciate the comments that were made by the [Iranian] President several months ago, and we are exploring what the future might hold. We have not changed our principles, our ideas, or our objectives. We believe Iran is changing in a positive way and we want to support that. - Bill Clinton, June 18, 1998.
Clinton's comment followed former Secretary of State Madeline Albright's decision to lift embargoes on importation of carpets, caviar, and pistachio nuts, even as Pakistan's Q.A. Khan was supplying nuclear knowhow to the Iranians. The CIA was warning Clinton, but no matter. Iran is still, and has been for 20 years, the top state sponsor of terrorism on the planet. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh told then President Clinton that the Iranian government had a hand in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US servicemen. Still Clinton, worried about pistachio nuts, was pursuing a policy of reconciliation with Iran, instead of confronting them on terrorist support or nuclear development. What's more, the Clinton team never even allowed Iran's lack of human rights to enter the equation. Had the Clintons pursued a tougher course, as Bush has done, Iran might have been stopped a lot sooner, or altogether - now it could be too late; we might have been closer to shutting down groups like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad; we might have cracked the Khan-Iran-Libya-North Korea enigma sooner; and the Iranian people might have been closer to freedom that they currently lack. The Clinton team was pursuing reconciliation. Iran was pursuing terror and nukes.

The naivete of the left will never cease to amaze me.

[Washington Times] "The answer, I think, probably is because we didn't have enough dots on the table for the analysts to draw a clear enough picture for our policy-makers," Mr. [Florida Republican Rep. Porter J.] Goss said. During the mid-1990s, he said, the United States was focused on domestic issues and the link between the intelligence community and the White House was considerably less than it has been since September 11. "No only did we not invest in intelligence, we willfully disinvested in intelligence," Mr. Goss said. "We cut back the number of capabilities that we had on a global basis very dramatically." Mr. Goss, a former CIA case officer, said intelligence agents "have to do business with some very distasteful people." "You have to get next to them to get information," he said, adding that without people who have close access to the plans and intentions of the troublemakers "the chances of stopping something like a 9/11 are very difficult."
Rep. Goss is cryptically referring to the Clinton administration's backing of a rule restricting the CIA from recruiting foreign nationals as spies if they have criminal records - otherwise known as the "Torricelli principle," named after the infamous senator, or the "Deutch rule." The rule was put in place in the mid 1990s and removed after it came under public scrutiny in the days after 9-11. As former CIA Director James Woolsey noted of the rule, it is akin to "telling the FBI to please penetrate the Mafia, but don’t put any actual crooks on your payroll as informants." Goss' comments come on the same day that the House Intelligence Committee’s initial probe of intelligence used in Iraq found no evidence that any Bush administration official abused or distorted intelligence to make a case for war.

But don’t expect it to be repeated much on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the NY Times, Washinton Post, etc. And don't expect the Democrats to do so either.

Why is it that every Muslim convert American turncoat comes from the Pacific Northwest? Or does the link have to do with Fort Lewis in Washington. Yesterday the Feds arrested a 26 year-old Fort Lewis National Guardsman and Muslim convert, Spec. Ryan G. Anderson, trying to pass information about US weapons systems to what he thought were al Qaeda operatives, but who were actually federal agents in a sting operation. You might remember the James Ujaama crew, who tried to create an al Qaeda training camp outside Bly, Oregon; similarly, the group of terrorist wannabes headed by Patrice Lumumba Ford and Jeffery Leon Battle came from Portland, Oregon; and the Muslim-convert DC sniper, John Muhammed - is also a product of the Washington mosque system, and was also trained at Fort Lewis, Washington; Army Capt. James. J. Yee, held for trying to travel outside of his Guantanamo base with classified information, converted to Islam when based in Washington, at, you guessed it, Fort Lewis.

Anderson, 26, is a tank crew member from the National Guard's 81st Armor Brigade, a 4,000-member unit preparing to depart for Iraq for a one-year deployment. The brigade has been training at Fort Lewis, an Army base near Tacoma, since November.

A brief Army statement said Anderson was taken into custody without incident. Justice Department and FBI agents participated in the investigation that led to his arrest, the statement said. But Anderson has been turned over to the Army for prosecution.

He is jailed at Fort Lewis "pending criminal charges of aiding the enemy by wrongfully attempting to communicate and give intelligence" to al Qaeda, according to the statement.

Anderson's hometown newspaper, the Herald in Everett, Wash., carried an item about Anderson last week, noting his participation in a Tacoma Dome ceremony honoring his Guard unit.

The paper said Anderson had graduated from Everett's Cascade High School in 1995 and from Washington State University in 2002 with a degree in military history and "an emphasis on the Middle East." The paper also reported that Anderson converted to Islam five years ago.
Of course, not all of the American turncoats come from the Pacific Northwest. Sgt. Asan Akbar, who murdered or wounded 15 fellow soldiers in Kuwait with a hand grenade during the early days of the Iraq war, came from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. But it seems like we have an unusual amount of Islamic radicals in the P-NW.

[UK Telegraph] But Democratic sources blamed the allegation [of John Kerry's affair with a mystery woman] on Republican "dirty tricks". They said it marked the long-expected start of a campaign from the Right to smear the frontrunner and damage his chances of fighting a strong campaign against President George W Bush.
Wesley Clark, who allegedly leaked the information to three reporters, is Democrat, not Republican. And how does it help Bush to leak this info nine months before the election? Were this a Republican "dirty trick" they would have leaked it days before the November election, just like the Gore people leaks Bush's DUI arrest record days before the 2000 election. (Democrats have no problem with "dirty tricks" it would seem, as that DUI occurred 20 years prior to the election.)

Notice what is missing from Kerry's initial statements - any comment denying the charge.

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if this helped Kerry. Now he's cool like Clinton. Yeah, it's cool to cheat! He'll woo the MTV crowd. Dozens of Hollywood elites will come to his defense. I wouldn't be surprised if the Kerry camp leaked the story just so they could then blame the Bush team. Not to mention Americans are just tired of sex scandals in politics. I know I am.

The alternative might be worse. If it hurts Kerry, it only helps John "tobacco lawyer" Edwards, who in many ways would be even more difficult to beat than Kerry.

The following is the epitome of media bias: In December NBC refused to renew the contract of Bob Arnot, the best foreign coorespondant they had and the most entertaining to watch. He's a hero to boot. How many other medically trained doctors who also happen to speak Arabic work as NBC reporters and then risk to save Iraqi civilians? Just Arnot. This is a guy who ran from behind cover during a gun battle between the US military unit he was covering and Iraqi soldiers to help an Iraqi family seek shelter. NBC officially cited budget concerns, but nobody within ear shot can repeat that with a straight face. For NBC the decision was an easy one because Arnot committed the worst crime possible for any network reporter, sans FOX - Arnot dared report any good news from Iraq:

In a 1,300-word e-mail to NBC News president Neal Shapiro, written in December 2003 and obtained by NYTV, Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased. He argued that keeping him in Iraq and on NBC could go far in rectifying that. Dr. Arnot told Mr. Shapiro that NBC had alienated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since it shot and then aired footage of correspondent Jim Miklaszewski at the scene of the November bombing of the Al Rashid Hotel, in which a C.P.A. staffer was shown injured. That incident, he wrote, "earned the undying enmity of the C.P.A."

"I’m uniquely positioned to report the story," he wrote. "NBC Nightly News routinely takes the stories that I shoot and uses the footage, even to lead the broadcast," but "refuses to allow the story to be told by the reporter on the scene."
In other words, he suggested, NBC News did not like putting him on the air.

In his letter to Mr. Shapiro, he wondered why the network wasn’t reporting stories of progress in Iraq, a frequently heard complaint of the Bush administration. "As you know, I have regularly pitched most of these stories contained in the note to Nightly, Today and directly to you," he wrote. "Every single story has been rejected."

Dr. Arnot said he knew for "a fact" that Mr. Shapiro’s problem with his reporting was that "it was just very positive."

Maj. Clark Taylor e-mailed NYTV from Baghdad to state that Dr. Arnot "highlighted what is really happening over here …. He generally reported positive things because, generally, that is what is happening. Of course there are occasional bad things … and he reported those as well. The fact was, he reported what he saw—which generally was positive."

In his e-mail to Mr. Shapiro, Dr. Arnot argued that his relationships with the authorities earned him access to stories that other reporters couldn’t get.

"I was the only reporter to be shown the actual list of terrorists found in Saddam’s briefcase," he wrote. "The military even let me witness the capture of one of the leaders of the insurgency … a major general in the Baathist military wing."
In his e-mail, Dr. Arnot revealed the kind of thing he would offer NBC if he was allowed to stay: "At the end of the war I scrubbed in on an operation to save a young girl hit by a grenade. As a female surgeon closed her abdomen at the end of the operation, I asked if the child would survive. She said, ‘Yes she will, she is the future of Iraq.’ She also survived because a US Army sergeant took the ticking grenade from her hand and turned away from her. The girl survived because of his heroism. At my request, the Army sent a Blackhawk helicopter to evacuate a four and a half year old girl with 55 percent burns … under fire … and protected by two Apache gunships. These stories never made air on NBC.

"What happens if NBC is wrong[?]" he wrote. "What happens if this is a historical mission that does succeed … that transforms the Middle East … that brings peace and security to America. What if NBC’s role was like that of much of the media in general … allowing the terrorists to fight their war on the American television screen, where their stories of death and destruction dominate rather than that of American heroes?"

Dr. Arnot became popular with military leaders in Iraq and with the C.P.A. in Baghdad. A high-ranking C.P.A. official said Dr. Arnot "was visible, he was active, he told a compete story," adding that NBC News had effectively stopped reporting on Iraq, leaving a single Pentagon reporter, Mr. Miklaszewski, in Baghdad. "NBC doesn’t really cover the Iraq story," the official said. "They don’t have serious resources on the ground. If they did, they would cover the release of the Zarqawi memo with a reporter on the ground," referring to a document that the U.S. military said demonstrates an Iraqi insurrection orchestrated by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a terrorist that the White House has linked to Al Qaeda. [And, according to Zarqawi's letter, demonstrated that al Qaeda fears the US is winning.]

NBC sources said that when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw declined to put Dr. Arnot on the air, even though he was the sole NBC reporter on the scene. Instead, Mr. Brokaw aired a British reporter from a news agency called ITN. "They used ITN, their British affiliate … rather than someone on the NBC payroll," said the NBC staffer. "They don’t use his reporting because they don’t trust his reporting."
Yeah, they don't trust Arnot's reporting because he reports the positive with the tragedy, and not just the tragedy.

Since we're on the topic of media bias maybe you missed this exceptional admission by the ABC News team in which they admit that the mainstream media views all relevant events through liberal lenses:

Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are "conservative positions."

They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation's problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don't have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.

More systematically, the press believes that fluid narratives in coverage are better than static storylines; that new things are more interesting than old things; that close races are preferable to loose ones; and that incumbents are destined for dethroning, somehow.

The press, by and large, does not accept President Bush's justifications for the Iraq war -- in any of its WMD, imminent threat, or evil-doer formulations. It does not understand how educated, sensible people could possibly be wary of multilateral institutions or friendly, sophisticated European allies.

It does not accept the proposition that the Bush tax cuts helped the economy by stimulating summer spending.

It remains fixated on the unemployment rate.

It believes President Bush is "walking a fine line" with regards to the gay marriage issue, choosing between "tolerance" and his "right-wing base."

It still has a hard time understanding how, despite the drumbeat of conservative grass-top complaints about overspending and deficits, President Bush's base remains extremely and loyally devoted to him -- and it looks for every opportunity to find cracks in that base.

Of course, the swirling Joe Wilson and National Guard stories play right to the press's scandal bias -- not to mention the bias towards process stories (grand juries produce ENDLESS process!).

The worldview of the dominant media can be seen in every frame of video and every print word choice that is currently being produced about the presidential race.

Sheesh! It's nice that ABC News took the first of their 12-step recovery, but there's something downright dispicable that they don't seem to feel any shame in admitting that they slant their news liberal. Objectivity? Two sides? Who needs that when you portray liberal values as normal and those conservative as, well, "conservative."

Here's another example of what I'm (and what ABC's) talking about - "The Drudge Report, the right-wing news website which broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, claimed a woman close to Kerry recently left America at his behest...He also claimed that Time magazine, ABC News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press – where the woman in question was said to have once worked – had been investigating her relationship with Kerry for several days." What? No "left-wing" qualifier before Time magazine, ABC News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press? The implication is that the Kerry-woman scandal, leaked by a fellow Democrat mind you, was part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. You see, Drudge is "right wing" and those others are just normal media, that's all...

And again at the UK Telegraph: "The campaign of Senator John Kerry, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, faced its first media storm last night after a Right-wing website alleged that he had asked a woman to leave the country for personal reasons."

Actually, the "right wing" website didn't allege crap. Other reporters did. When will people get it through their heads that Drudge is just a news portal, not a news paper?

Jerusalem - Israeli police have come up with plans to place bags of pig lard on buses in a bid to deter Palestinian militants from carrying out suicide attacks, the Maariv daily reported on Thursday.

Authorities believe that the move could discourage Palestinians from carrying out attacks as pieces of their exploded body could come into contact with the pig fat, prejudicing their chances of entering into paradise.

The paper said that the rabbinical dispensation could mean that security forces also hang bags of lard in shopping malls and schools.
So crazy it’s not a bad idea a’tall. We need to start making our 767s out of pig fat aluminum.

Through a lack of assertiveness Secretary of State Colin Powell seems to earn the brunt of criticism of all the Bush officials, but today he should be credited for, lack of a better phrase, not taking crap from House Democrats. Powell was speaking with the House International Relations Committee to affirm that there was no deception, no premeditation and that Bush team honestly expected, as did all parties, to quickly find significant quantities of WMD (which may be found, mind you). Powell was then suddenly forced to lay the smack down on opportunist Democrats who decided to turn an intelligence inquiry into a forum for personal attacks against Bush. Here’s how it went down:

Powell testified that President Saddam Hussein's apparent intent to develop and use weapons, his record of gassing his own people and his defiance of the United Nations all were - and remain - valid reasons for going to war to overthrow him.
He said President Bush and he had relied on intelligence provided by CIA Director George Tenet, and the only serious question raised about the analysis since the war was whether Iraq had storehouses of weapons of mass destruction.

"I don't think anyone in America should think that President Bush cooked the books," Powell said.

"The reason we told you there were stockpiles there was because we believed it to be true," Powell said. "We were surprised when they did not turn up."

But Reps. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., Robert Melendez, D-N.J., Rep. Robert I Wexler, D-Fla., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, challenged Powell about the administration's case, suggesting it may have been misleading from the outset.

"Truth is the first casualty of war," Ackerman said. "I would contend truth was murdered before a shot was fired."

"We went into this war under false premises," Melendez said.

Wexler told Powell he considered him to be "the credible voice in the administration."

"When you reached the conclusion that Iraq represented a clear and present danger to the United States, that meant a lot to me," Wexler said. "But the facts suggest there was a part of the story that was not true."

Powell fielded the assertions calmly, defending the president's judgment and his own.

But when Brown contrasted Powell's military experience to Bush's record with the National Guard, saying the president "may have been AWOL" from duty, Powell exploded.

"First of all, Mr. Brown, I won't dignify your comments about the president because you don't know what you are talking about," Powell snapped.

"I'm sorry I don't know what you mean, Mr. Secretary," Brown replied.

"You made reference to the president," Powell shot back.

Brown then repeated his understanding that Bush may have been AWOL from guard duty.

"Mr. Brown, let's not go there," Powell retorted. "Let's not go there in this hearing. If you want to have a political fight on this matter, that is very controversial, and I think it is being dealt with by the White House, fine, but let's not go there."

Powell then went on to defend the Bush administration's assertions on Iraq's prewar weaponry. "We didn't make it up," Powell said. "It was information that reflected the views of analysts in all the various agencies."
But the dispute with Brown did not end.

"Are you shaking your head for something, young man?," Powell asked when he noticed an aide to Brown apparently disagreeing.

"I seldom come to a meeting when I'm talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you giving editorial comment by headshakes," Powell said.
Brown, defending his assistant, said "I think people have opinions."

Eager to move on, the committee chairman, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., observed that "we're on a very emotional subject," but "we've been doing swimmingly until now."
Well, if people have opinions they can write a letter to their local editor, or show up on O’Rielly, but shame on those Democrats for turning a Q&A session into an episode of Jerry Springer, and good for Colin Powell to let them know how unprofessional it was.

Most Americans don’t know of Sibel Edmonds. In 2002 Edmonds became the other FBI whistleblower, yet more people remember the other – Coleen Rowley. But what Ms. Edmonds had to say was in many ways more frightening than Rowley’s criticisms of FBI hesitancy and bureaucratic wrist-slashing. The FBI hired Edmonds as a Middle Eastern translator just days after September 11. When she met her coworkers she found many of them foreign nationals who were celebrating the 9-11 attack. Paul Sperry of Front Page Mag has the re-scoop (original story here).

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.

She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:

"It's about time they got a taste of what they've been giving the Middle East."

She found out later that it was her supervisor's wife who helped organize the office party there at the bureau's Washington field office, just four blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

"This guy's wife brought the date-filled cookies for the celebration," Edmonds, 33, recalled.

At the time, the supervisor, Mike Feghali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut, was in charge of the FBI's Turkish and Farsi desks.

But he's been promoted since then, and now also runs the all-important Arabic desk, which is key to intercepting the next al-Qaida plot.

It gets worse.
Indeed it does, including delaying translations for political gain. Read the rest.

A lot of the punditry want CIA Director George Tenet to resign, or Bush to fire him, for the intelligence lapses in Iraq. Bill O’Rielly, for example, almost on a daily basis is calling for this. By the way, I thought it pathetic how O’Rielly genuflected on Good Morning America and “apologized” for being wrong about WMD in Iraq. Is he likewise apologizing for Bill Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox, also based on WMD? Anyway, guys like O’Rielly defeat their own argument because in the very next breath they state the fact that everyone, including German, French and UK intelligence agencies, believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. That’s fact, beyond dispute. So, should the head of every Western intelligence agency resign?

The “failures” in Iraq, if you want to call them that, are just the nature of the intelligence business. It’s literally hit or miss. Analysts have to make conclusions based on fragments of information – an informant here, an intercept there, a satellite photo here, etc. Sometimes we hit a home run, such as cracking WWII-era German and Japanese codes or uncovering Libya’s recent nuclear transactions, and sometimes we whiff air like in the 60s Cuban fiascoes or in Iraq today. The difference is that today the public has a much greater access to information, reporters are more aggressive and leaks are more prevalent.

Now, having said all that there is certainly room for much improvement, beginning with what David Kay talked about – a lack of human intelligence. It’s also near impossible to dispute that the Democrats have had a big hand in weakening our intelligence agencies, starting with the Senator Church commissions in the 1970s and continued with the Clinton administrations unfriendly view of the CIA and the “Torricelli principle.” In an attempt to soothe their own insecurities and fears about omnipotent intelligence agencies their reflexive reaction to abuses, as they saw them, caused an overcorrection, hurting our own security. Throw in guys like John Kerry who continually tried to cut intelligence budgets and even as late as 1997 was fretting over the size of our intelligence apparatus and it was inevitable that we’d begin to miss more than hit. The unfortunate reality is that it’s going to take time to recruit more and retool our intelligence resources.

But there are some things we can do right away, including correcting any processes that led to wrong conclusions. According to a Washington Post story George Tenet has decided to overturn a long-standing policy and give analysts access to information about sources and methods, instead of keeping those analysts in the dark:

The changes were ordered after an internal CIA review revealed several occasions when CIA analysts mistakenly believed that Iraq weapons data had been confirmed by multiple sources, when in fact it had come from a single source, Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, said in a speech yesterday to the agency's analysts. The misunderstanding arose because CIA operatives had given analysts ambiguous information.

In other cases, Miscik said, analysts believed they were looking at information that came from a reliable source who had direct knowledge, but subsequent review showed the agent with the good reputation was actually supplying information from other parties "about whom we know little."

Tenet is "adamant this must change," Miscik told the analysts. "We are not brushing aside the agency's duty to protect sources and methods, but barriers to sharing information must be removed.

"Analysts can no longer be put in a position of making a judgment on a critical issue without a full and comprehensive understanding of the source's access to the information on which they are reporting," Miscik said, according to a text of her speech given to The Post.

Under the CIA's current system, analysts are told about the reliability of the source but get no other information, such as an explanation of the person's access to the information that he or she is providing. That is designed to protect agents' identities, but also has roots in a bureaucratic divide between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytical side of the agency.

Analysts have long felt they needed to know more about sources of information -- not their names but rather whether they have first-hand, or less-direct, access to the information they are presenting, officials said.

"This is something the analysts have sought for years and have never been able to get," said one former senior agency analyst.

Miscik said analysts working on Iraq were sometimes misled into thinking more than one agent was involved because reports would describe a single source more than once and would use different descriptions each time.

In cases where analysts didn't realize they were looking at information from unproven sources, Miscik said, the spare information in the reports gave them no way of knowing.

Miscik also described another problem that has been revealed in the CIA's internal review: the reliance on "inherited assumptions," or failing to retest past intelligence conclusions as time goes on.

She called that issue "the single most important aspect of our tradecraft that needs to be examined."

When experienced analysts pass information on to newcomers, Miscik asked, "How do we ensure that we are not passing along assumptions that haven't been sufficiently questioned or reexamined?"

Miscik also said there would be a review of the President's Daily Briefing, the bound book presented each morning to Bush with the most sensitive, latest overnight intelligence. Saying the PDB had been "dramatically revamped" in a way that "significantly improved the quality of the product" when Bush entered the White House, she said there would be a comparison with the material presented to President Bill Clinton "to see if some of the strong points of our earlier approach have been lost."

According to a senior intelligence official, the Bush version added "more sensitive operational information" and dropped some of the accompanying graphics that helped in understanding the substance of the material. In addition, the Bush PDB gets a more limited distribution within the agency, leaving some senior analysts unaware of what has been sent to the White House.
It sounds as though the CIA analyst’s inability to examine sources and methods had become a major gap in the intelligence system. I’m sure, however, there’s bound to be thus far undisclosed complaints and concerns over keeping these sources secret. Leaks kill agents, and when that happens you lose overall credibility and will have difficulty recruiting in the future because word gets around and nobody wants to work for an agency that will get you killed. Hopefully, Tenet and company will ensure that sources and methods are protected with this new strategy.

One last note: Bush has taken a lot of heat over the Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB) he gets from the CIA. Opportunist politicians, i.e. Democrats, are charging Bush with exaggerating the CIA intell he got. But from this and previous articles it’s the CIA that “revamped” intelligence to get Bush a better and more conclusive product. Naturally, he repeated some of this to the public as he made his case for war. Why wouldn’t he? This article makes it clear that this was a CIA policy change made right as Bush took office. We’ll see if it goes back to the old method, but with every passing day the Democrats’ “Bush lied!!!” charge becomes empty political rhetoric.

[UPDATE: Just so people don't get the wrong idea, I am by no means excusing judicial activism. The fact of the matter is that neither the people nor the legislators of Massachusetts passed a low acknowledging civil unions. Our division of government into three branches - legislative, executive and judicial - is for a reason, and activist judges who take it upon themselves to write law (thus becoming another legislative branch) create a world of problems and mistrust of the system.]

I don’t care what your feelings are on gay marriage it’s just stupid for President Bush to back a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a male-female union only.

Frankly the issue is just one I couldn’t care one iota about. Maybe it’s because I’m not married, I don’t know. But I’m patently offended that any person who calls themself a “conservative” would want to rewrite the US Constitution and empower the government to actually define marriage. What’s next? A constitutional amendment to define bigamy? Being conservative means limiting government power, not thrusting governmental views or definitions into our daily lives even more than it already is.

What’s really stupid is that Bush is opening the door to John Kerry, who like Bush, opposes gay marriage but does not support a constitutional amendment to define marriage. That means that the individual states, and not the federal government, will decide on their own if their state does or does not support a gay civil union. This is what the conservative notion of federalism, where states bestow power to the federal government, not vice versa, is all about. So, from an ideological standpoint of governmental power, not marriage or gay rights, etc. – Bush is to the left of Kerry on this.

Having said all that it’s by design that our founding fathers created a system whereby, as long as majorities in the House and Senate and then 2/3 of the states voting populace approve, the constitution may be altered for any reason. With enough support we could have a constitutional amendment to repeal free speech. It just wouldn’t be a very good idea.

“I’m an internationalist. I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.” – John Kerry in 1970.
How does Kerry feel now? We don’t know because he’s continually flip flopping on his positions. Would Kerry still like to see our military take its marching orders from the United Nations and the illegitimate governments, in Syria for example, that make up that body?

The Harvard president is right: Were I on the Bush team I’d bring this comment front and center to the public and demand a response from Kerry.

Surprises aside Senator John F. Kerry is the likely Democratic presidential nominee. Kerry’s weaknesses, like most Democrats, are regarding foreign policy: Kerry’s attempted legislative budget cuts for numerous military systems that we used to topple the Taliban and Saddam Hussein (Apache helicopter, M-1 tank, Tomahawk cruise missile); his flip flops on Iraq or on Grenada; his proposals to cut intelligence budgets.

So to counter this weakness Kerry has been overplaying the Vietnam card. Kerry’s actions in Vietnam are very admirable, but he cannot ignore his actions once he came home, including becoming a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a group with the blood of US soldiers on its hands. North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap after the war said that groups like the VVAW encouraged the North Vietnamese to continue the fight. But Kerry’s most despicable post-duty action was his association with radical Jane Fonda. Many think of Jane Fonda as an exercise video queen, but during Vietnam Fonda crossed the line, traveled to North Vietnam and became their willing pawn, even as US soldiers were murdered and lost forever as POWs at the hands of that government.

As the Washington Times points out, Vietnam vets are sure to become vocal as the Kerry becomes the official nominee.

A photograph of John Kerry together with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1970 in Pennsylvania has surfaced on the Internet, angering veterans who say his association with her 34 years ago is a slap in the faces of Vietnam War veterans.

The photograph, taken at a Labor Day rally at Valley Forge, has been circulating across the Internet, particularly among veterans. It was posted Monday on the NewsMax.com Web site.

Mr. Kerry spoke at the 1970 rally, the culmination of a three-day protest hike from Moorestown, N.J., to Valley Forge, which featured a speech by Miss Fonda and a reading by Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.

"When he stands up with Jane Fonda, someone that is so notorious and hated by veterans, and Tom Hayden, and a couple of others as well and supports their agenda," Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Republican, said yesterday, "it diminishes the service some of us almost gave our lives for, and the over 56,000 people that lost their lives —it slaps their families in the face."

Mr. Cunningham was the first pilot to qualify as an ace in the Vietnam War, by shooting down at least five enemy airplanes.

Kerry campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said yesterday Mr. Kerry should not be associated in the public mind with Miss Fonda and her later trip to Hanoi, where she was photographed sitting astride a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun.

"John Kerry and Jane Fonda were just acquaintances," Ms. Cutter said. "What's important to understand here is two things: He met her before she went to Vietnam, and he did not approve of her very controversial trip."

She said Mr. Kerry took part in the antiwar movement in order to bring U.S. troops home quickly.

"John Kerry served his country bravely," she said. "He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for his service, and he praised the noble service of his fellow servicemen and women. After coming home, John Kerry worked to end the war so his fellow soldiers could come home, too."

Mr. Kerry testified in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, citing accusations that American soldiers in Vietnam routinely committed atrocities such as beheadings, killing children and razing villages. He did not present evidence of these claims.

Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican, who spent nearly seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam, said yesterday the photograph of Mr. Kerry with Miss Fonda will hurt him nevertheless.

"I think it symbolizes how two-faced he is, talking about his war reputation, which is questionable on the one hand, and then coming out against our veterans who were fighting over there on the other," Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson recalled that his North Vietnamese captors played recordings of Miss Fonda telling U.S. troops to give up the war. "Seeing this picture of Kerry with her at antiwar demonstrations in the United States just makes me want to throw up."
Vietnam was a loss because of the political decisions made, but loss was not inevitable as it is now portrayed. liberals often twist the Vietnam War as a moral failure, when it anything but. Regardless of the wars failings one cannot discount the alternative, prompted in part by the Fonda and groups like the VVAW: the number of South Vietnamese whom the North Vietnamese slaughtered once the US military cut and ran; likewise in neighboring Cambodia the infamous communist dictator Pol Pot likewise murdered 1 million in his own genocide campaign.

Kerry has out of his own free will brought Vietnam once again to the front and center of American politics. He may end up falling on his sword.

See also: Vietnam Vets Against John Kerry

WSJ oped - Conduct Unbecoming, Kerry doesn't deserve Vietnam vets' support.

Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester?

Found: A Smoking Gun
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

In the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga.

That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a "clear link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.

The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to Al Qaeda the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements. The Kurds turned him over to Americans for further interrogation, which is proving fruitful.

The Times reporter Dexter Filkins in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages' authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, "We couldn't make this up if we tried."

The author of the lengthy Ansar-to-Qaeda electronic message is suspected of being the most wanted terror operative in the world today: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, long familiar to readers of this space as "the man with the limp," who personifies the link of Ansar and Al Qaeda.

On Sept. 24, 2001 — not two weeks after 9/11 — Kurdish sources led me to report: "The clear link between the terrorist in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in Kurdistan. . . . The Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of Al Qaeda mullahs and terrorists. . . . Some 400 `Arab Afghan' mercenaries . . . have already murdered a high Kurdish official as well as a Muslim scholar who dared to interpret the Koran humanely."

The C.I.A. blew off that report. Our National Security Council did not learn of subsequent warfare against the Kurds by the Qaeda affiliate doing Saddam's bidding until its members read it in The Times. After Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker and C. J. Chivers of The Times developed the story from inside northern Iraq, it dawned on some intelligence analysts that a "clear link" was probable.

On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year."

The leader whose leg was treated, perhaps amputated, in Baghdad was identified here in January 2003, as Zarqawi (twice, after one misspelling). The presence of this international terrorist for two months in a Baghdad hospital required the approval of Saddam's ubiquitous secret police.

In his U.N. speech the following month, Colin Powell publicly identified the Palestinian, born in Jordan, as one who oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan three years before: "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden."

Now we have documentary evidence of Ansar's current operation: employing suicide bombers to foment a civil war in Iraq that would reinstate safe haven for terrorists. The notion that these serial killers are not central players in the global network that attacked us — that the Ansar boss in Iraq must be found carrying an official Qaeda membership card signed by bin Laden — is simply silly.

Of the liberation's three casus belli, one was to stop mass murder, bloodier than in Kosovo; we are finding horrific mass graves in Iraq. Another was informed suspicion that a clear link existed between world terror and Saddam; this terrorist plea for Qaeda reinforcements to kill Iraqi democracy is the smoking gun proving that.

The third was a reasoned judgment that Saddam had a bioweapon that could wipe out a city; in time, we are likely to find a buried suitcase containing that, too.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone former Senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), who was forced out of Congress for his many, many illegal campaign finance actions, is helping the Kerry campaign. Kerry, who chastises the Bush team for their ties to special interests, himself has a record of illicit campaign finance activity.

In November of last year, Torricelli transferred $50,000 from his Senate campaign to Americans for Jobs & Healthcare, a little-known group that this winter ran more than $500,000 in ads against Dean, then the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The ads sharply criticized Dean's support of gun rights, free trade and slowing Medicare's growth when he was governor of Vermont. The most controversial ad raised the image of Osama bin Laden and questioned Dean's foreign policy experience.

Kerry went on to win the Iowa caucuses. Torricelli's role in financing the ads was first reported by the Web site PoliticsNJ.com. David Jones, executive director of the group, last night released the entire list of contributors, which showed that the "stop Dean" effort had support from donors to rivals of the former Vermont governor, especially Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) and Kerry.

At the time the ads were running, the group refused to reveal its donors, though a few labor unions acknowledged helping to fund the effort. The group's spokesman was Robert Gibbs, who had left the Kerry campaign shortly before. Gibbs no longer works for the organization.

Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman, said the senator from Massachusetts and his staff have had no contact with the group and were unaware of Torricelli's involvement. "I am told no one knew anything about it," Clanton said.

Kerry's affiliation with Torricelli -- and now his indirect link to Americans for Jobs & Healthcare -- could cause political problems for the front-runner, Democrats said. Kerry has made his fight against special interests a centerpiece of his campaign, and Republicans and Democrats are highlighting Torricelli's involvement in the Kerry campaign to undercut that message.

Dean communications director Tricia Enright circulated news of the Torricelli contribution with the attached message: "This is unbelievable. The torch, the king of the special interests." Torricelli's nickname is "Torch." The Republican National Committee last night sent around its own e-mail titled "Sen. John Kerry hypocrisy." In it, the RNC states: "Disgraced Ex-Senator Bob Torricelli Raising Money For Cash And Kerry."

The Senate Ethics Committee sent a letter to Torricelli in July 2002 that "severely admonished" him for accepting improper gifts from donor David Chang. A federal grand jury investigated the matter; Torricelli was never charged.

Groups such as Americans for Jobs, known in Washington parlance as 527s, are the subject of the latest campaign finance controversy because Republicans are accusing Democrats of using them to circumvent the federal ban on unlimited "soft money" donations from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

Now corporations, unions and individuals can contribute as much as they want to such groups, which are prohibited from coordinating with candidates and from running ads in the days leading up a primary and general elections. In truth, both parties are planning 527s to hammer each other with ads and mailings funded by the same soft money reformers had hoped to purge from the system.
This could hurt Kerry; if he’s smart he’ll cut ties to Torricelli as soon as possible. Torricelli is a real snake. Aside from making the CIA weaker by placing restrictions in the 1990s on how they can recruit foreign spies, Torricelli was a crook as well. Infamous campaign donor David Chang admitted bribing Torricelli with more than $150,000 in cash and gifts in return for business dealings with the North and South Korean governments.

And now he’s helping John “Cash and” Kerry become president.

It’s not a travesty that the independent commission investigating 9-11 accepted a White House deal to acquire access to a 17-page summary of Bush’s Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB) instead of actual documents it sought; the travesty is that the Democrats on the commission have now blatantly let it be known that they intended to use the PDBs to pin 9-11 on Bush during the election season.

The problem is you just cannot trust these commissions not to leak classified information to the public. Recall that just days after September 11 you had loud-mouth senators running around Capital Hill telling the media about the “zero hour” intercept. In doing so they alerted al Qaeda not only that we had intercepted them, but which operative’s communications we intercepted. And there dries up that line of information. As mentioned 100 times previously were Bush, or any future president, to open PDBs to Congress the info would inevitably leak, causing second guessing of the information. Then any CIA analyst would naturally, for fear of scrutiny or being wrong, pull their punches on making assessments. The president would then be given wishy-washy junk with no solid conclusions.

This deal not only covers the Bush administration but also the Clinton administration. Indeed, the al Qaeda operatives began planning the attack as far back as 1998, possibly 1995, long before Bush took office. But Democrats, by their statements, seem only concerned with PDBs starting on January 20, 2001, when Bush took office.

"You either say you didn't have warning prior to 9/11 and you let us see the documents, or you shouldn't claim that," said Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former House member from Indiana. "To say there's nothing in the PDBs that gave the president warning and then put together an agreement that only allows one or two commissioners to see the PDBs is not defensible."
Note Roemer’s language – “the president.” It’s pretty obvious Roemer cares only about PDBs from the Bush administration and not Clinton. He’s hoping to find something to leak to the NY Times on the eve of the election.

Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska who recently joined the commission, said "the White House broke its word" on that earlier agreement, and he contended that the latest deal will hurt the commission's effort to issue a complete report.

"We couldn't even get our own notes," Kerrey said. "If all 10 of us had read the documents, it would be much more likely that we would have a report the American people can trust."
The problem is, Mr. Kerrey, that nobody can trust these commissions to keep their traps shut about classified information.

The Bush administration, which initially opposed the establishment of the independent commission, has frequently clashed with the panel over access to information and witnesses. The commission has issued two subpoenas to federal agencies and is still in the process of negotiating for testimony from Bush, Vice President Cheney, former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore.

Under the original November agreement with the White House, four commission representatives -- Zelikow, Kean, Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D) and member Jamie S. Gorelick (D) -- had access to two dozen PDBs that the White House had preapproved as being relevant to the commission's mandate. In addition, Zelikow and Gorelick were able to comb through several hundred other PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations in search of information they deemed relevant.

From notes taken during these reviews, Gorelick compiled the 17-page summary provided to the commission yesterday, which was approved by the White House, officials said. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said the summary provides the commission with "the most important and salient facts" from the documents.
Again, the Clinton people wanted this deal as well. Why, because they know that the Republicans on the commission would have done the same thing to Clinton that the Democrats wish to do to Bush. The notion of an “independent” commission is a farce. Like all others, the 9-11 panel is a political commission of attackers and defenders.

By the way, nothing ever happened to those loud-mouth senators who leaked the classified “zero hour” NSA intercepts. Remember that as Democrats and their pals in the media try to pin fabricated election-year scandals after scandal on Bush.

We can agree we need a better intelligence system in this country. But we need this because intelligence has been downgraded over the years by the John Kerrys of the world — and their predecessors. We forget, too easily, there was near-universal certainty we would be hit again after 9/11, and soon. Just how much safer would Senator Kerry make us? How much safer could he make us? It's worth remembering: When we treated terrorism merely as a law-enforcement problem — and not law enforcement as one of several tools to fight terrorism — al Qaeda was building, training, and planning. Since we've treated terrorism as a war problem, we have not been hit again.
Read the entire commentary by Seth Leibsohn and Shaun Small. September 11 didn’t just happen. It was nurtured, in part, by America’s failure to respond to terror in the proper manner. The Democrats truly believe that this is a massive law enforcement operation, and nothing more. But we tried that approach throughout the Clinton years even as we suffered many terror attacks including the first WTC bombing in 1993. John Kerry doesn’t propose a solution; he offers a failed strategy.

[Associated Press] WASHINGTON -- A fund-raising committee run by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was fined $21,000 for improperly accepting donations over federal limits, according to records and interviews.

Federal law dictates that if multiple PACs are under the control of the same person, they're considered affiliated and must adhere to limits as if they were one. Federal law limits PAC contributions to candidates to $5,000 per election. Donors to PACs can give $5,000 annually.

In the 2002 election cycle, Pelosi gave more than two dozen candidates the $5,000 maximum contribution from Team Majority as well as PAC to the Future, which is her main leadership PAC -- thereby exceeding contribution limits.
Naturally, Nancy Pelosi voted for the Campaign Finance Reform bill. She just doesn’t bother adhering to the laws she supports.

The head of the Norwegian Conservative Party, Ingvald Godal, advanced in public the theory that Russian President Vladmir Putin is assassinating all of his political challengers. The latest rival, Ivan Rybkin, disappeared a few days ago and is feared dead. He is the fourth Putin challenger to die in the past two years.

"There can't be any doubt about who is behind this systematic liquidation of the political opposition in Russia," Godal claimed in a written statement. "It can only be Vladimir Putin, who also is responsible for the liquidation of Russia's free press."

Godal now leads a local support group for Chechnya, and made his statement in the form of a press release from the group. He listed himself as the contact person.

"A bloody despot goes loose in Europe," claimed Godal in the statement. "It's high time that everyone, including the Norwegian government, open their eyes to this... extremely dangerous reality, accept the facts and take necessary action before it's too late."

Godal ties Putin himself to terrorist actions that Putin and other Russian authorities have blamed on rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Godal’s support for Chechnya, an extremist Islamic nightmare of Russian creation, makes him a somewhat slanted accuser. Having said that, Putin is the former head of Soviet KGB and has, over the last few years, appointed mostly former KGB officers loyal to him to powerful governmental posts. Half his security council is former KGB; five of Russia’s seven political districts are headed by ex-KGB, and perhaps as many as 70 percent of senior regional officials are ex-KGB. The Cold War is technically over, but you wonder sometimes if the losing side is really moving on or plotting their return. Rybkin’s disappearance prompted a murder probe but the Moscow authorities quickly reversed course and closed the case, probably because there is no body... yet.

The report of the April 2003 assassination of the former co-chairman of the Liberal Russia Party, Sergei Yushenkov, is here. Yushenkov was a vocal opponent of Putin’s war in Chechnya. The latest incident – the disappearance of Ivan Rybkin – occurs just one month before the Russian election, in which Putin is expected to sweep. And no wonder, all the competition is gone. On top of that Putin has severely curbed the media since he took power. More than 130 journalists have been killed since 1994, including 19 in 2002 and 10 by April of 2003. Much of the murders are considered to be crime syndicate targetings against investigative reporters. But then that leads to the question if Putin is so friendly to the criminal syndicates that they protect him, with or without his knowledge, by killing his competition. No wonder Putin has a 70 percent approval rating.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show.

Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech in 1987, Miami-based Metalbanc, was later indicted, along with two executives, on charges it helped the Cali drug cartel in Colombia launder money in the United States. The charges eventually were dropped because the firm was defunct.

At the time of the 1987 speech to Metalbanc, Kerry was chairman of the Senate subcommittee that investigated drug trafficking and money laundering.
I would doubt that there’s any illegal impropriety occurring, but that’s not the point, but there are a few. First, Kerry is a hypocrite considering he’s running in large part by painting George W. Bush as a friend of special interests. But Mr. Kerry, wedded to the heir of the Heinz Ketchup family, is just as friendly. Second, had George Bush ever been paid money by a company aligned with the Cali cartel while on the Senate subcommittee investigating such groups it would be in the media every single day and there would be Democrats calling for independent committees every day.

This hit the Associated Press but will not have legs because the producers and editors from nightly news and liberally-slanted newspapers won’t dig. But had it been Bush all they would do is dig, even if they knew nothing is there. Look at Bush Vietnam record garbage – that’s been covered in Bush’s two runs as governor and it was common topic in the 2000 election. What’s good for Bush should be good for Kerry, right? Nope.

Speaking of liberal media slant it’s the quite telling that they, in this case the Washington Post, are pursing a story that a Republican staffer got a hold of several Democratic memos without ever mentioning what was in those memos. The media quotes three Democrats for this piece but no Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans, weak as usual, offered the staffer as a sacrifice hoping the story will go away. The saddest part about that is that the staffer, Manual Miranda, may have discovered that Democrats broke “advice and consent rule by the promise of campaign funding and election support in the last mid-term election." (more on that in a moment)

[Senate Democrats] Their comments followed a 90-minute closed-door briefing by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle on progress of his probe into how GOP staffers gained access to Democratic memorandums on strategy for blocking some of President Bush's most conservative appeals court nominees.

"The extent and duration of this theft far exceeds anything that I imagined," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), one of at least two senators whose staff memos were obtained by GOP aides and given to conservative publications.

Durbin did not elaborate. But Manuel Miranda, who resigned last week as a top aide to Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), said in a "departure statement" yesterday that a young Judiciary Committee staff member "preserved perhaps thousands of documents" from Democratic files on his own computer hard drive. Fourteen memos previously were made public on a conservative group's Web site.

Miranda worked for the judiciary panel while the Democratic files were being downloaded -- roughly from 2002 through 2003, according to some sources -- and joined Frist's staff last February.

Democrats contend the GOP staffers stole their strategy memos. Republicans say a glitch on their shared computer server, which they blame on Democrats, effectively left files open to all staffers.

In his statement, Miranda suggested that other "counsels and staff" for Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) "came to know about the glitch and that some had concluded that the access was not unlawful."
"I would characterize it as highly improper, highly unethical and probably criminal," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), whose files were also tapped by GOP staffers.

"We've had things stolen from us, our computers have been broken into. . . . That leads you to assume this has to be investigated as a criminal matter," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
This is so typical. The story isn’t how the memos were gotten but rather what’s in them: Democratic plotting to pervert the US Constitution and block Bush’s judicial nominations. What’s more, Manual Miranda may have discovered evidence of illegal activities. This is news, right? This should be a big subject for the media, right? Nope.
You have to find a conservative columnist to hear about it:

In a letter delivered to the committee Friday morning, Manuel Miranda says he has read "documents evidencing public corruption by elected officials and staff of the United States Senate."

Miranda says the evidence of wrongdoing is contained in previously undisclosed Democratic memos obtained by Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fourteen of those memos were leaked to the press last November. Two sources familiar with the memos tell NRO there were dozens of additional memos — perhaps as many as 100 — that were downloaded by Republicans but never made public.

Those memos are now in the possession of the Senate's sergeant-at-arms, who is investigating how Republicans obtained the documents. He is expected to reveal his findings to Senate leaders next week.

Miranda's letter, addressed to Ethics Committee chief counsel Robert Walker, says the still-unpublished memos contain evidence of "a violation of the public trust in the judicial confirmation process on the part of Democrat senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee. This includes evidence of the direct influencing of the Senate's advice and consent rule by the promise of campaign funding and election support in the last mid-term election."

The memos that were leaked last year showed Senate Democrats working in close consultation with groups like People for the American Way, the Alliance for Justice, NARAL, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in an effort to defeat President Bush's judicial nominees.

One memo, from a staffer to Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, dated April 17, 2002, detailed how the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Democrats to delay the confirmation of Julia Scott Gibbons to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Legal Defense Fund officials did not want her on the court when the University of Michigan affirmative action case was decided. Members of Kennedy's staff conceded they were "a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case." But they nevertheless worked to delay the confirmation.

Another memo, from a staffer to Illinois Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, dated November 7, 2001, described a meeting with the liberal interest groups in which the groups "identified [Bush nominee] Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment." The staffer continued: "They [the groups] want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."
Gee, isn’t it interesting that the two biggest criers of foul on the Democrat’s side, Senators Kennedy and Durban, may have been the ones violating ethics rules.

Keep sleeping, America.

If you know the subject, or if you’re a regular here, it’s old news that the UN oil-for-food program was corrupt to its core. You further know that it’s the biggest but least talked about story when it comes to the United Nations and Iraq. ABC News broke the story based off of an Iraqi investigation that has just begun. But since then there has been very little on it. This is particularly troubling because the story should be big news again considering the recently uncovered document showing that the government of Iraq, under Hussein, was bribing powerful businessmen and officials in more than 50 countries, especially France and Russia. Therse Raphael has expanded this by pointing out that one of the names on the bribe list might be the UN official who oversaw the program, Benon V. Sevan.

The list reads like an official registry of Friends of Saddam across some 50 countries. It's clear where his best, best friends were. There are 11 entries under France (totaling 150.8 million barrels of crude), 14 names under Syria (totaling 116.9 million barrels) and four pages detailing Russian recipients, with voucher allocations of over one billion barrels. Many of the names, transliterated phonetically from Arabic, are not well-known or are difficult to identify from the information given. Others stand out. There's George Galloway, the Saddam-supporting British MP recently expelled from the Labour Party, who has always denied receiving any form of payment from Saddam. Other notables include Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri (also listed separately as the "daughter of President Sukarno"), the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Russian Orthodox Church, the "director of the Russian President's office" and former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. Some--including Mr. Pasqua, the Russian Church and Ms. Megawati--have denied receiving anything from Saddam. Patrick Maugein, a close friend of Jacques Chirac and head of Soco International oil company, says his dealings were all within "the framework of the oil-for-food program and there was nothing illegal about it."

One of the most eye-catching names on the list is easy to miss as it's the sole entry under a country one would not normally associate with Iraq--Panama. The entry says: "Mr. Sevan." That's the same name as that of the U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Benon V. Sevan, a Cyprus-born, New York-educated career U.N. officer who was tapped by Kofi Annan in October 1997 to run the oil-for-food program.

In the seven years that Oil-for-Food was operational, (it was shut down in November and its obligations are being wound up) Saddam was able to skim off funds for his personal use, while at the same time doing favors for those who supported the lifting of sanctions, supplied him with his vast arsenal of weapons, and opposed military action in Iraq. Indeed, it was clear from the outset that Saddam would be able to use the program to benefit his friends. The 1995 U.N. resolution setting out the program--Resolution 986--bends over backwards to reassure Iraq that Oil-for-Food would not "infringe the sovereignty or territorial integrity" of Iraq. And to that end it gave Saddam power to decide on trading partners. "A contract for the purchase of petroleum and petroleum products will only be considered for approval if it has been endorsed by the Government of Iraq," states the program's procedures. Predictably, Saddam exploited the program for influence-buying and kickbacks, and filled his coffers by smuggling oil through Syria and elsewhere. With Oil-for-Food and smuggling, he was able to sustain his domestic power base and maintain a lavish lifestyle for his inner circle.

The system was ripe for abuse, in part because a divided Security Council gave Saddam far too much flexibility within the program. Oil-for-Food not only gave Iraq the power to decide with whom to deal, but also freedom to determine the official price of Iraqi oil, revenues from which went legally into the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food account. U.N. rules did not allow it to order Iraq to deal directly with end-users and bypass all those lucky middlemen who got deals from Saddam. Nor was the U.N. allowed to view contracts other than those between the oil ministry and the first purchaser, so it had no way of verifying that surcharges were being imposed by the middlemen on end-users. That enabled him to add surcharges to finance his own schemes while still making the final price competitive.

U.N. rules were ostensibly devised to prevent pricing abuses, but in one of the many indications of administrative failure, those safeguards appear not to have been enforced. In response, the U.S. and Britain tried often from 2001 to impose stricter financial standards, but Russia blocked changes. Then the U.S. and Britain instituted a system of retroactive pricing--delaying approval of the Iraqi selling price so that they could take account of the market price when giving their approval. This too met with grumbling from Friends of Saddam and while it reduced oil exports, it didn't end the corruption.

Throughout most of the program's life, Mr. Sevan's office seemed to see no evil. When overwhelming evidence finally surfaced that Oil-for-Food had become a gravy-train for the Iraqi regime, U.N. officials acknowledged some of the abuses but refused any of the blame. Criticism is routinely portrayed as politically motivated. "The [program] has existed in a highly politicized environment from day one," explains the U.N. Web site. "The scale of these operations has also made it a rather large target." Its last line of defense was to punt to the Security Council, whose sanctions committee (authorized by the 1990 sanctions resolution and composed of Council members) was meant to oversee the program, receive reports and review audits.

The record of systemic abuse of the program lends credence to claims that the oil-ministry list is genuine and should be investigated. The Iraqi Governing Council says it's considering legal action against anyone found to have profited illegally from Oil-for-Food. The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is investigating possible violations of U.S. law. But the U.N. has resisted calls for an independent investigation into abuses. Says Mr. Hankes-Drielsma: "I would urge the U.N. to take the high moral ground and instigate a truly independent investigation."
The UN oil-for-food abuses is the Achilles heel in the argument of those who advocated that “containment,” and not war, was the best policy for Iraq. It is impossible to contain any country that so easily bribes those supposedly charged with containing it. Perhaps this is why the story hasn’t earned its proper legs – to acknowledge that the oil-for-food program was corrupt, and that the antiwar community was a willing part of it, is to admit that war in Iraq wasn’t the first option, but the last option and the only option at that.
Previous UN oil-for-food corruption articles:

Bribe story getting hot

Saddam’s Willing Conspirators(scroll down)

Just a few days after discovering a seven pound block of cyanide in a suspected safehouse of al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zarqawi, US military commanders say they have captured a document written by Zarqawi that frets how the insurgents are losing in Iraq and urges sparking a civil war in Iraq by June to counter this inevitable loss to the Americans. The letter makes June the deadline to begin this “sectarian” war because it is the time when the US will hand authority over to the Iraqis, and thus any action taken after it will appear a war against Muslims.

The memo says extremists are failing to enlist support inside the country, and have been unable to scare the Americans into leaving. It even laments Iraq's lack of mountains in which to take refuge.

Yet mounting an attack on Iraq's Shiite majority could rescue the movement, according to the document. The aim, the document contends, is to prompt a counterattack against the Arab Sunni minority.

Such a "sectarian war" will rally the Sunni Arabs to the religious extremists, the document argues. It says a war against the Shiites must start soon — at "zero hour" — before the Americans hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis. That is scheduled for the end of June.

The American officials in Baghdad said they were confident the account was credible and said they had independently corroborated Mr. Zarqawi's authorship. If it is authentic, it offers an inside account of the insurgency and its frustrations, and bears out a number of American assumptions about the strength and nature of religious extremists — but it also charts out a battle to come.

The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda. But it does not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists.

Without providing further specifics, the senior intelligence officer said there was additional information pointing to the idea that Al Qaeda was considering mounting or had already mounted attacks on Shiite targets in Iraq.

"This is not the only indication of that," the official said. The intercepted letter also appears to be the strongest indication since the American invasion last March that Mr. Zarqawi remains active in plotting attacks, the official said.

According to the American officials here, the Arabic-language document was discovered in mid-January when a Qaeda suspect was arrested in Iraq. Under interrogation, the Americans said, the suspect identified Mr. Zarqawi as the author of the document. The man arrested was carrying it on a CD to Afghanistan, the Americans said, and intended to deliver it to people they described as the "inner circle" of Al Qaeda's leadership. That presumably refers to Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Americans declined to identify the suspect. But the discovery of the disc coincides with the arrest of Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani described by American officials at the time as a courier for the Qaeda network. Mr. Ghul is believed to be the first significant member of that network to have been captured inside Iraq.

The document is written with a rhetorical flourish. It calls the Americans "the biggest cowards that God has created," but at the same time sees little chance that they will be forced from Iraq.

"So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle," the writer of the document said. "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of Shiites.
The author offers his services and those of his followers to the recipients of the letter, who American officials contend are Al Qaeda's leaders.

In the document, the writer indicated that he had directed about 25 suicide bombings inside Iraq. That conforms with an American view that suicide bombings were more likely to be carried out by Iraqi religious extremists and foreigners than by Hussein allies.

"We were involved in all the martyrdom operations — in terms of overseeing, preparing and planning — that took place in this country," the writer of the document says. "Praise be to Allah, I have completed 25 of these operations, some of them against the Shia and their leaders, the Americans and their military, and the police, the military and the coalition forces."

But the writer details the difficulties that he and his comrades have been experiencing, both in combating American forces and in enlisting supporters. The Americans are an easy target, according to the author, who nonetheless claims to be impressed by the Americans' resolve. After significant losses, he writes, "America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

The Iraqis themselves, the writer says, have not been receptive to taking holy warriors into their homes.

"Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," according to the document. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house."

The writer contends that the American efforts to set up Iraqi security services have succeeded in depriving the insurgents of allies, particularly in a country where kinship networks are extensive.

"The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance," the document says. "When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region."

With some exasperation, the author writes: "We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases.

"By God, this is suffocation!" the writer says.

But there is still time to mount a war against the Shiites, thereby to set off a wider war, he writes, if attacks are well under way before the turnover of sovereignty in June. After that, the writer suggests, any attacks on Shiites will be viewed as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that will find little support among the people.

"We have to get to the zero hour in order to openly begin controlling the land by night, and after that by day, God willing," the writer says. "The zero hour needs to be at least four months before the new government gets in place."

That is the timetable, the author concludes, because, after that, "How can we kill their cousins and sons?"

"The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority," the letter states. "This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts."
It’s nice to know that our enemy in Iraq believes he is losing. This is, of course, reality no matter the number of smaller setbacks the US has come up against. Don’t tell this to the media, however, who are loathe to call Iraq anything but a quagmire.

To me the most amazing political event in this modern era is how Bush has transformed the Republican party into the progressive party, while Democrats have become the isolationist party of 1930s Republicans. What will the Democrats do should they take office? Return us to the failed cosmetically feel-good foreign policy of the 1990s – the one that kept Iraq in diplomatic quagmire, and failed to seriously address terrorism and even promoted it with impotence. More than that, however, Bush has adopted old Democratic values and thus caused Democrats to reflexively abandon them. It is the Democrats now arguing for stability and the Republicans arguing to spread liberty.

Which brings us to our future foreign policy as Bush sees it, and what makes him and not the Democrats the progressive. Bush’s vision was first truly stated publicly last October when he said, “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

Which Democrat is offering any vision other than doing just that – promoting stability over liberty in the Middle East? None, and no Democrat has, at least not since John F. Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Progressive Bush again reiterated this vision to Tim Russert on Meet The Press:

And the best way to secure America for the long term is to promote freedom and a free society and to encourage democracy. And we are doing so in a part of the world where people say it can't happen, but the long term vision and the long term hope is -- and I believe it's going to happen -- is that a free Iraq will help change the Middle East.

How can one argue against that? Democrats keep saying that the war in Iraq has made us less safe. That’s absurd! How do you argue that promoting liberty in Middle East is a bad thing unless you happen to be an Islamic extremist yourself? Appeasing extremists by refusing to act against them gains us nothing.

The Democrats are forced to spin excuses about why we shouldn’t attempt transforming the Middle East – we’ll, you can’t promote democracy at gunpoint! Really? We did in this country. The French did too. Millions of people in East and West Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the Pacific Rim are all free today because of American gunpoint diplomacy.

Next excuse: The Democrats adopt an approach used by Tim Russert; that is, it’s too big to accomplish:

Russert: But there are lots of madmen in the world, Fidel Castro … Iran, in North Korea, in Burma, and yet we don't go in and take down those governments.
What a cowardly defense! How about one at a time, Tim? Imagine if every eight years a president concentrated on just one oppressive regime. The difficultly of the task is not an excuse for inaction.

Finally, the Democrats retort that Bush is not being sincere; that Bush’s vision for the Middle East will end with Iraq, and that he has no intention of spreading it to other countries. It’s just about oil! Politics! Elections!

They couldn’t be further from the truth. According to the Washington Post, not only is Bush planning on expanding this approach, he plans on bringing Europe into the fray.

Senior White House and State Department officials have begun talks with key European allies about a master plan to be put forward this summer at summits of the Group of Eight nations, NATO allies and the European Union, U.S. officials say. With international backing, the United States then hopes to win commitments of action from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries.

Details are still being crafted. But the initiative, scheduled to be announced at the G-8 summit hosted by President Bush at Sea Island, Ga., in June, would call for Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major political reforms, be held accountable on human rights -- particularly women's empowerment -- and introduce economic reforms, U.S. and European officials said.

As incentives for the targeted countries to cooperate, Western nations would offer to expand political engagement, increase aid, facilitate membership in the World Trade Organization and foster security arrangements, possibly some equivalent of the Partnership for Peace with former Eastern Bloc countries.
Again, progressive. I can’t wait to see how the Democrats argue against calling on Arab and Asian governments to liberally reform, empower women, and free their people and their markets.

The only way to make America safer is to bring down the extremist Islamic culture that offers an alternative to the Middle Eastern populace suffering under oppressive rule. Take away that political focal point and the extremists lose their biggest recruiting tool. The masses will then be empowered, and will help confront and destroy the extremists instead of either joining them or turning a blind eye to them.

In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences. People look at us and say, they don't mean what they say, they are not willing to follow through.
Bush is referring to the “serious consequences” clause of UN Security Council resolution 1441, which offered Iraq a “final chance” to comply with all UN resolutions against it or face “serious consequences.” Bush enforced, for America’s sake, resolutions that the United Nations Security Council was not willing to enforce. Since 1991 there were 17 resolutions against Iraq, and if you remember Bush’s argument in September 2002 was that if the UN Security Council is not willing to enforce them than the Security Council will become irrelevant as a law enforcing body in the future. He’s right. Now every tinpot dictator knows that the UN will never take effective action even when they make the most blatant of breaches. But they know the US will, which is why North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Libya are all suddenly cooperating. It wouldn’t have been thus without the US invasion of Iraq.

President Bush's Meet The Press interview was by all accounts pretty uneventful. Curiously, some of the biggest critics of the president's responses to interviewer Tim Russert are conservatives - former Reagan speechwriter and WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan wasn't impressed and said Bush looked at best tired. I'll have to take the punditry's word this perception as I did not watch the broadcast but only read the transcript later on Sunday. Bush was weakest on denying conservative charges that he's the biggest spender since LBJ ("They're wrong"). Such responses won't earn one many points. But, despite the criticisms I think there are a few important things to point out, notably that he showed conviction in his defense of Iraq that his secretary of state, Colin Powell, was lacking a few days prior.

Bush is under fire from Democrats on the independent commission investigating 9-11 for not relinquishing his "Presidential Daily Briefs," a CIA daily analysis customized for the president(s). Here's Bush's reply:

And see, the danger of allowing for information that I get briefed on out in the public arena is that it could mean that the product I receive or future presidents receive is somewhat guarded for fear of for fear of it being revealed, and for fear of people saying, Well, you know, we’re going to second guess that which you told the President. I need good, honest information, but we have shared this information with both those gentlemen, gentlemen I trust, so they could get a better picture of what took place prior to September the 11th.
Bush's point is underscored. CIA analysts need to be able to draw conclusions in a vacuum. Were CIA daily briefings made public they would be scrutinized to the point where in the future an analyst might feel it necessary to pull punches, to not draw solid conclusions, delivering a wishy-washy intelligence product that would be of little use to any president. Aside from that, Democrats want these briefings for political ammunition to blame 9-11 on Bush. But I've covered that enough already.

On Iraq:

President Bush: The … first of all, I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our analysts thought was valid but analysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be reanalyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror. And I made the decision, obviously, to take our case to the international community in the hopes that we could do this achieve a disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully. In other words, we looked at the intelligence. And we remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had weapons. We knew the fact that he was paying for suicide bombers. We knew the fact he was funding terrorist groups. In other words, he was a dangerous man. And that was the intelligence I was using prior to the run up to this war. And so we – I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we’ll find out. That's what the Iraqi survey group let me let me finish here. But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world. And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their [the UN's] data in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made.

[...]

President Bush: I went to Congress with the same intelligence Congress saw the same intelligence I had, and they looked at exactly what I looked at, and they made an informed judgment based upon the information that I had. The same information, by the way, that my predecessor had. And all of us, you know, made this judgment that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed.
A bit meandering but it gets the point across: namely, everyone - from Democrats to UN officials to the French - thought Iraq had significant quantities of WMD, and are on record asserting this; moreover, the Iraqi Survey Group might find something yet, or discover what happened to the WMD or if they were transferred; but at very least Saddam Hussein secretly and illegally kept in place the apparatus to continue making them, even though he knew he was violating 17 UN resolutions including the truce that ended the 1991 Gulf War.

In any event, the assessment of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post was probably the most correct - this will neither help or hurt Bush, it's just another appearance on TV.

Under pressure from civil libertarians the military says that its tribunal format will now alert in advance defense attorneys when conversations with their clients are taped instead of just secretly recording them. It needs to be noted that the ability to record attorney-client conversations was not simply randomly applied, but seriously addressed only for national security purposes in specific cases and only after convincing a judge of such.

Under the new rules, attorneys for the defendants who will be tried before the special military courts at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be notified when their conversations with clients are electronically monitored by military officials, a Pentagon source said. The old rules had not clarified whether the defense lawyers would be informed about such eavesdropping.

The government's ability to listen in on attorney-client talks was one of many provisions of the tribunal rules denounced by human rights groups, some foreign officials and legal organizations such as the American Bar Association.

With rare exceptions, conversations between defense attorneys and their clients are confidential under military and civilian law. Last year, when military officials drew up the rules allowing the electronic monitoring of attorney-client sessions, some defense lawyer groups said they would refuse to participate.

Yesterday, some legal experts welcomed the rule changes but said they do not go far enough.

"These are certainly positive changes, and not simply cosmetic changes, but they're unlikely to have much impact" in persuading defense attorneys to take part in the tribunals, said Eugene R. Fidell, a military law expert who represents a U.S. Army Muslim chaplain who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay and is accused of security breaches. A much larger inequity in the rules, he said, is that convictions can only be appealed up the Pentagon's chain of command to the president, instead of to civil courts.

"These changes don't alter the fundamentals of that equation in the rules," Fidell said.

One previous rule will remain: It requires that the monitoring of attorney-client conversations be undertaken only for security or intelligence reasons, and any information derived will not be given to the prosecution. But the new regulations include a provision that only military officials responsible for security, and not prosecutors, can order such eavesdropping, sources said. A bureaucratic wall will be erected to prevent migration of that information to the prosecution, one official said.

The old rules suggested defense lawyers could not ask for trial delays for personal or professional reasons, but the new rules allow that. The previous procedures suggested private defense lawyers would be constrained in working on the cases with their home offices, but the new rules make clear that they may do so.

Military officials say the rules allowing listening in on attorney-client sessions are comparable to procedures governing the U.S. Bureau of Prisons when it confronts security problems or assists in intelligence investigations.
This sounds like a legitimate compromise to both protect the US from its enemies and address libertarian concerns; no doubt, however, that the civil libertarians will still cry murder and try to remove the recording of conversations altogether.

But they do so at our own insecurity.

The thing is there is precedent of not-so-scrupulous attorneys acting as go-fers or couriers between imprisoned criminals (terrorists and mobsters) and their underlings still on the outside. For instance, infamous radical Lefty lawyer Lynne Stewart is facing federal charges for basically aiding and abetting Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the religious cleric and leader of the terrorist faction called Islamic Group, who gave his approval for the attempted 1994 plot to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations building, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in NYC. This cell was an offshoot of the original terrorist group that successfully bombed the WTC in 1993. According to the original indictment Stewart covered for Rahman's Islamic Group terrorists, Mohammed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar.

Left wing activists have celebrated a recent legal battle which Stewart won when the judge declared certain federal provisions as unconstitutional. The Feds have since restructured their argument, because any way you cut it they've got Stewart on tape aiding terrorists. The lengths to which the Left wing community will embrace religious extremists is downright scary. More moderate civil libertarians, likewise, seem to have had their concerns addressed in this tribunal ruling. But while they will continue to demonize Bush, John Ashcroft, etc., in the end we all need to remember that there are many people still trying to kill 3,000 people at a time. It would be suicidal, literally, to give terrorists and their idiot friends on the far left large loopholes to help them kill us.

[Associated Press] At least three times in his Senate career, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry has recommended individuals for positions at federal home loan banks just before or after receiving political contributions from the nominees, records show.

In one case, Kerry wrote to the Federal Housing Finance Board to urge the reappointment of a candidate just one day before a Kerry campaign committee received $1,000 from the nominee, the records show.

"One has nothing to do with the other," said Marvin Siflinger, who contributed around the time of Kerry's Oct. 1, 1996, recommendation that he be reappointed for another term to the board.

Kerry's office, like the nominees, insists the timing of the donations and the nominations was a coincidence.

But a longtime government watchdog says it is common for Washington appointees to donate just before or after they are nominated.

"This is just business as usual in Washington," said Larry Noble, the former chief lawyer for the Federal Election Commission who now heads the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. "Kerry is out there saying he is not being part of that game, yet he is the product of the same money system."

With Kerry more vocally portraying himself on the presidential campaign trail as an opponent of special interest money in Washington, scrutiny of his dealings with donors and special interests has increased among his rivals and the news media.

Noble said while Kerry long has advocated campaign finance reform, he also has benefited from the big money system he now distances himself from on the campaign trail. "It's like a game where you say the people who support me just want good government, but the people who support my opponent are special interests," he said.

All three of the people Kerry recommended got the positions they sought on various boards of Federal Home Loan Banks in Boston and New York that provide money for home mortgages.
Gee, imagine that - a top Democratic candidate engrossed in major campaign finance scandals. This is nothing new, and hardly surprising when one recalls the $50,000 a head Clinton coffees or renting out the Lincoln bedroom, Al Gore's illegal soliciting from the Oval Office (remember his "no controlling legal authority" defense?) and his illegal Buddhist temple fundraiser, etc.

As for Kerry, this is nothing more than a long line of campaign finance-related scandals. Newsweek caught Kerry in a lie last week about his relationship with infamous contributor Johnny Chung and the Chinese military back in 1996 (which was related to the Clinton violations). In that case, by the way, first Kerry said that he never met with Chung, but later told the Boston Globe that it was "coincidental"... just like the above AP story.

(past three Kerry posts 1,2,3)

John Kerry voted against the 1991 Gulf War, but for the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act and Bill Clinton's subsequent bombing of Iraq, and then for the war in Iraq, but is now against the war in Iraq and voted against giving US troops the additional money they needed to complete the job; Kerry was against Reagan's rescue mission in Granada but now cites it as a reason for force; Kerry voted for the Patriot Act, but is now against the Patriot Act; Kerry was against taking PAC money but is now taking PAC money; Kerry said he never met with convicted campaign finance law breaker Johnny Chung but now says it was coincedental; Kerry blasts Bush for corporate interests but himself takes plenty money from corporate interests.

Add to the list that Kerry preached not to insert Vietnam into campaigns, but now does exactly that. On Tuesday Kerry told a crowd that Bush should "answer questions" about Bush's service in the Alabama National Guard, something drug up from the 2000 election. This is the same Kerry who in 1992 defended Bill Clinton's Vietnam record, which Clinton spent in Moscow, Russia. The WSJ has reproduced a 1992 speech Kerry gave on this issue:

I am saddened by the fact that Vietnam has yet again been inserted into the campaign, and that it has been inserted in what I feel to be the worst possible way. By that I mean that yesterday, during this presidential campaign, and even throughout recent times, Vietnam has been discussed and written about without an adequate statement of its full meaning.

What saddens me most is that Democrats, above all those who shared the agonies of that generation, should now be refighting the many conflicts of Vietnam in order to win the current political conflict of a presidential primary.

The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them; that one help identify the positive things that we learned about ourselves and about our nation, not play to the divisions and differences of that crucible of our generation.

But while those who served are owed special recognition, that recognition should not come at the expense of others; nor does it require that others be victimized or criticized or said to have settled for a lesser standard. To divide our party or our country over this issue today, in 1992, simply does not do justice to what all of us went through during that tragic and turbulent time.

I would like to make a simple and straightforward appeal, an appeal from my heart, as well as from my head. To all those currently pursuing the presidency in both parties, I would plead that they simply look at America. We are a nation crying out for leadership, for someone who will bring us together and raise our sights. We are a nation looking for someone who will lift our spirits and give us confidence that together we can grow out of this recession and conquer the myriad of social ills we have at home.

We do not need more division. We certainly do not need something as complex and emotional as Vietnam reduced to simple campaign rhetoric. What has been said has been said, Mr. President, but I hope and pray we will put it behind us and go forward in a constructive spirit for the good of our party and the good of our country.
Unless, apparently, it is John Kerry looking to reduce Vietnam to simple campaign rhetoric...

You can find the text of CIA Director George Tenet's speech here, and a text of Q&A here. There are several notable paragraphs, including the first, a clear shot at critics who accuse the Bush administration, particularly Dick Cheney, of pressuring intelligence analysts:

They [the intelligence community] never said there was an “imminent” threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it.
That's a pretty clear last sentence. This should be the end of the "Bush lied!!!" story, right? Nonetheless, you'll continue to hear Liberals charge it, false or not. How unsurprising, then, that some unattentive Georgetown snot, quoting the Left-wing rag Mother Jones, asks a question to which Tenet already answered in his speech.

QUESTION: Recent investigative reports, including a long piece in the journal Mother Jones, which came out this past January, detailed the creation of a Pentagon group a few weeks after September 11th which, as of January of 2002, became known as the Office of Special Programs. And it contained prominent neoconservatives with direct ties to Dick Cheney and members of the administration. This group was shown to have a clear political agenda, to have influenced people in the intelligence community, and definitely used gross intelligence to promote their case. So my question is, can you confirm or deny the existence of such a Pentagon group? And if so, how can we prevent small ideological groups from influencing intelligence estimates?

TENET: Well, I haven't read Mother Jones in a while, but let me say this. Let me say this. I'm the director of central intelligence. The president of the United States sees me six days a week, every day. I tell him what the American intelligence community believes. There are always people all around town - you know, "There's gambling in this casino." Everybody has different views of what the intelligence means or doesn't mean. I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community: me. And he has told me firmly and directly that he's wanted it straight and he's wanted it honest and he's never wanted the facts shaded. And that's what we do every day.
So take your Mother Jones magazine and use it for toilet paper, kid... Mother Jones? Scheesh! What's next? Quoting Oliver Stone?

I'll outline more of Tenet's speech below.

Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002.
That's just pure honest truth. Former head of the Iraqi Survey Group, David Kay, said the same thing (1,2,3). Even the antiwar French and Germans concluded that Iraq had WMD. (and it should go without saying that if Saddam can successfully hide in a hole for 10 months so can any WMD.)

Tenet reiterates that one cannot talk about Iraq in an educated fashion without first recounting the 12 years of history behind the current issue. To summarize Tenet - One would have had to have ignored history to conclude that Iraq had no WMD. Tenet explains the rationale behind how the CIA and intelligence community reached their National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 estimate, the document most responsible for backing regime change from an intelligence perspective:

First: Iraq’s history. Everyone knew that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s and 1990s. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people on at least 10 different occasions. He launched missiles against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. And we couldn’t forget that in the early 1990s, we saw that Iraq was just a few years way from a nuclear weapon—this was no theoretical program. It turned out that we and the other intelligence services of the world had significantly underestimated his progress. And, finally, we could not forget that Iraq lied repeatedly about its unconventional weapons.

So, to conclude before the war that Saddam had no interest in rebuilding his WMD programs, we would have had to ignore his long and brutal history of using them. Our second stream of information was that the United Nations could not—and Saddam would not—account for all the weapons the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents. We did not take this data at face value. We did take it seriously. We worked with the inspectors, giving them leads, helping them fight Saddam’s deception strategy of “cheat and retreat.” Over eight years of inspections, Saddam’s deceptions—and the increasingly restrictive rules of engagement UN inspectors were forced to negotiate with the regime—undermined efforts to disarm him.

To conclude before the war that Saddam had destroyed his existing weapons, we would have had to ignore what the United Nations and allied intelligence said they could not verify.

The third stream of information came after the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998. We gathered intelligence through human agents, satellite photos, and communications intercepts. Other foreign intelligence services were clearly focused on Iraq and assisted in the effort. In intercepts of conversations and other transactions, we heard Iraqis seeking to hide prohibited items, worrying about their cover stories, and trying to procure items Iraq was not permitted to have.

Satellite photos showed a pattern of activity designed to conceal movement of material from places where chemical weapons had been stored in the past. We also saw reconstruction of dual purpose facilities previously used to make biological agents or chemical precursors. And human sources told us of efforts to acquire and hide materials used in the production of such weapons. And to come to conclusions before the war other than those we reached, we would have had to ignore all the intelligence gathered from multiple sources after 1998.

Tenet on Iraq's Bio-weaponry threat:

Last fall, the Iraq Survey Group uncovered ( “significant information—including research and development of biological weapons -applicable organisms, the involvement of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in possible biological weapons activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of Biological Weapon agents.” The Iraq Survey Group found a network of laboratories and safehouses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services that contained equipment for chemical and biological research and a prison laboratory complex possibly used in human testing for Biological Weapon agents, that were not declared to the UN.

It also appears that Iraq had the infrastructure and talent to resume production—but we have yet to find that it actually did so, nor have we found weapons. Until we get to the bottom of the role played by the Iraqi security services—which were operating covert labs—we will not know the full extent of the program. Let me also talk about the trailers discovered in Iraq last summer. We initially concluded that they resembled trailers described by a human source for mobile biological warfare agent production today. There is no consensus within our community over whether the trailers were for that use or if they were used for the production of hydrogen. Everyone agrees they are not ideally configured for either process, but could be made to work in either mode.

My provisional bottom line today: Iraq intended to develop Biological Weapons. Clearly, research and development work was underway that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were available. But we do not know if production took place – and just as clearly—we have not yet found biological weapons. Before I leave the biological weapons story, an important fact you must remember. For years the UN searched unsuccessfully for Saddam’s biological weapons program. His son-in-law, Husayn Kamil, who controlled the hidden program defected, and only then was the world able to confirm that Iraq indeed had an active and dangerous biological weapons program. Indeed, history matters in dealing with these complicated problems.
In other words, as is often repeated, Saddam Hussein was waiting out the UN - covertly keeping programs alive so that once sanctions disappeared he could begin mass production again. The "imminent threat" which Democrats demand be the litmus test would have been detected too late.

Tenet on Iraq's chemical warfare capability:

We said in the estimate with high confidence that Iraq had them. We also believed, though with less certainty, that Saddam had stocked at least 100 metric tons of agent. That may sound like a lot, but it would fit in a few dorm rooms on this campus.

Initially, the community was skeptical about whether Iraq had restarted chemical weapons agent production. Sources had reported that Iraq had begun renewed production, and imagery and intercepts gave us additional concerns. But only when analysts saw what they believed to be satellite photos of shipments of materials from ammunition sites did they believe that Iraq was again producing Chemical Weapon agents. What do we know now? The work done so far shows a story similar to that of his biological weapons program. Saddam had rebuilt a dual-use industry. David Kay reported that Saddam and his son Uday wanted to know how long it would take for Iraq to produce chemical weapons.

However, while sources indicate Iraq may have conducted some experiments related to developing chemical weapons, no physical evidence has yet been uncovered. We need more time. My provisional bottom line today: Saddam had the intent and the capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production.
Comment from biological weapons apply for chemical as well. He was waiting his time. Beyond that Tenet's point is well taken, if Saddam can hide in a hole for 10 months then so can chemical weapon components.

The next two paragraphs focus on a slight contradiction with Tenet's argument. First, Tenet flat out says there was a lack of human intelligence (HUMINT) inside Iraq. But, in the second Tenet says pundits who conclude that the CIA lacks HUMINT don't know what they're talking about.

There was, by necessity, a strong reliance on technical data, which to be sure was very valuable, particularly in the imagery of military and key dual use facilities, on missile and unmanned aerial vehicle developments--and in particular on the efforts of Iraqi front companies to falsify and deny us the ultimate destination and use of dual use equipment. We did not have enough of our own human intelligence. We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum - our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities, providing some useful information. We had access to émigrés and defectors with more direct access to WMD programs and we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner. Other partners provided important information. What we did not collect ourselves, we evaluated as carefully as we could. Still, the lack of direct access to some of these sources created some risk – such is the nature of our business. To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources, but a blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is simply wrong. We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service.

As Director of Central Intelligence, this has been my highest priority. When I came to the CIA in the mid-90s our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in CIA’s history. It will take an additional five years to finish the job of rebuilding our clandestine service, but the results so far have been obvious: A CIA spy led us to Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the mastermind of Al Qa'ida’s September 11th attacks. Al Qa'ida’s operational chief in the Persian Gulf, Nashiri the man who planned an executed the bombing of the USS COLE – was located and arrested based on our human reporting. Human sources were critical to the capture of Hambali, the chief terrorist in South Asia. His organization killed hundreds of people when they bombed a nightclub in Bali. So when you hear pundits say that we have no human intelligence capability … they don’t know what they are talking about.
Read the rest of this part of the speech for yourself, but Tenet sums up all the HUMINT (spy) success we're having in Libya, North Korea and Iran. If so, the question to Tenet becomes, "why, then, were we lacking in HUMINT in Iraq when it was not a problem in Pakistan or Libya, for example?"

I guess that's a question that the conspiracy-theory chasing, Mother Jones reading snot (above) didn't think to ask. Frankly, I expected more from a Georgetown grad. My UF educated self is laughing at his superior intellect.

I have argued for patience as we continue to learn the truth. We are no where near the end of our work in Iraq, we need more time. I have told you where we are and where our performance can be improved. Our analysts at the end of the day have a duty to inform and warn. They did so honestly and with integrity when making judgments about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. Simply assessing stacks of reports does not speak to the wisdom experienced analysts brought to bear on a difficult and deceptive subject.

But as all these reviews are underway, we must take care. We cannot afford an environment to develop where analysts are afraid to make a call. Where judgments are held back because analysts fear they will be wrong. Their work and these judgments make vital contributions to our nation’s security. I came here today also to tell the American people that they must know that they are served by dedicated, courageous professionals.
No doubt. This warning is especially relevant with the redundant amount of independent inquiries and commissions we have investigating Iraq or September 11, requesting classified memos from Tenet or Bush, which are then irresponsibly leaked to the press. If we create a climate in which intelligence analysts think they are going to be publicly humiliated or punished for being wrong they will cease making any estimates worth a damn. This is exactly the culture of hesitant fear that former agent Coleen Rowley said the FBI had been going through the 1990s, and why we failed to act on more obvious clues about the hijackers.

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a 300-page classified which will, according to the Washington Post, "criticize[s] the CIA and [CIA Director George J.] Tenet for relying on outdated and circumstantial information and unreliable informants in concluding that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and had an advanced nuclear program." There's likely a lot of truth to this. But one would think that if the Intelligence Committee really wanted to judge this objectively they would have at least called Tenet before the panel to give his side of the story. They never did. As a result Tenet will deliver his own unusual defense today in a speech at Georgetown University.

Before we get into the meat and bones of this article it's necessary to mention that intelligence is an art, not a science, and certainly not exact at that. It's silly to say that the CIA relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence or informants (usually you don't know an informant is "unreliable" until after the fact) because that's a lot of what intelligence work is - making educated guesses based on a bunch of bits and pieces.

Shoddy journalism alert: The Post opens the article by spinning that Kay criticized "the CIA for for misjudging Iraq's weapons threat..." That's true in a sense, but Kay was equally critical of himself; of all intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's intell branch; and foreign intelligence agencies from France, Germany and the UK, all who believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding large quantities of WMD. Furthermore, Kay points out that our intelligence failures - specifically a lack of human intelligence (spies) - span over decades. The Post implies that it's Tenet's fault. It's disingenuous for the Post to rephrase Kay's comments this way.

Associates of Tenet have said that the director, who has served for nearly seven years, will not criticize the White House's decision to go to war, as Democrats and other critics would like, but also will not let himself or his agency become what a friend called "a scapegoat" for that decision.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld staunchly defended the intelligence community and said it is far too early to conclude that biological or chemical weapons will not be found in the country.

"It took us 10 months to find Saddam Hussein," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The reality is that the hole he was found in was large enough to hold enough biological weapons to kill thousands of human beings. . . . And unlike Saddam Hussein, such objects can stay buried."

Tenet is expected to make the same point in the speech, to be delivered this morning at Georgetown University, his alma mater. Tenet will say that anyone who asserts the weapons-hunting Iraq Survey Group has accomplished "85 percent" of its mission, as Kay has said, "is 100 percent wrong," said a senior administration official familiar with the prepared text.

Tenet also plans a response to Kay and others who have said the agency was not only wrong in Iraq but also was caught unaware by recent revelations about weapons programs in other countries.

Kay singled out such intelligence "surprises" in Iran, Libya and Pakistan in an interview with National Public Radio on Jan. 25.

In response, officials said, Tenet will say for the first time in public today that the intelligence community had long-standing knowledge of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's weapons-program dealings with North Korea, and that it had prior knowledge of Libya's nuclear program.

Although the material on Khan was highly classified, a discreet public reference was included in the unclassified 2002 worldwide threat assessment. A more detailed version was given to policymakers and members of the intelligence committees.

With Libya, the agency had tracked the purchase of nuclear-related materials over the years, officials said.

In December, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi agreed to give up his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the result of secret consultations between the Libyans and officials from the CIA and British intelligence. Senior U.S. intelligence officials say the CIA's knowledge of Libya's programs helped convince Gaddafi that he should end them.
I think it's particularly unprofessional for the Senate to have never bothered to talk to Tenet and then release a report to make him the scapegoat. I've lost all faith in our the Senate Intelligence Committee's ability to objectively address and correct intelligence issues. After decades of having a reputation of being the most non-partisan committee, the Intell Committee is now as political as any other committee - one side attacks those in power, the other defends. In the end it's mostly a waste of time. This is especially true in an election year.

In some good surprising news it's nice to hear that the CIA did know about Abdul Khan (see below) and Libyan WMD activities. This knowledge only strengthens the decision to go to war in Iraq (as noted yesterday), because even with that knowledge the CIA was not able to persuade Libya to come clean (and sell out Abdul Khan) until the Libyans looked East and realized that their regime could be undone as quickly as the regime of Saddam Hussein.

As part of a plea bargain Pakistan's premier nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan admitted on television yesterday to providing Iran, North Korea and Libya with nuclear knowledge and technology but did not implicate the Pakistani government as many had speculated he would.

"My dear brothers and sisters, I have chosen to appear before you to offer my deepest regrets and unqualified apologies to a traumatized nation," Khan said in a taped four-minute address that aired on state-run Pakistan Television after a meeting between Khan and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

"There was never ever any kind of authorization for these activities by the government," he added, speaking softly in English. "I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon."

The deal appeared to eliminate the prospect of a public confrontation between the government and Khan that could prove uncomfortable for Musharraf if it led to disclosures that Pakistan's military played a role in Khan's activities.

It also appears to mean that Khan will essentially go unpunished for presiding over what Pakistani officials now acknowledge, after years of denials, was a far-reaching scheme to peddle hardware, blueprints and design assistance by means of a thriving nuclear black market stretching from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia.

Musharraf has been under heavy public pressure to go easy on Khan, 67, a European-trained metallurgist who is considered a national hero for his pivotal role in developing nuclear weapons that helped redress a strategic imbalance with arch rival India. India tested its first nuclear device in 1974; Pakistan's first test was in 1998.

Over the past two months, Pakistani investigators uncovered evidence that Khan had conducted transactions with all three countries and made millions of dollars in the process. They found he had spread his wealth among foreign bank accounts, palatial homes in Pakistan and properties abroad, including a hotel named for his wife, Hendrina, in the West African state of Mali.

According to investigators, Khan said he provided the assistance to Iran, North Korea and Libya to deflect international attention from Pakistan's nuclear program.

He also has maintained, according to a friend of Khan's and a senior investigator, that three army chiefs of staff, including Musharraf, were aware of the assistance he provided to North Korea in exchange for help with Pakistan's ballistic missile program. Khan's statement Wednesday contradicted that claim, however, and government officials, including Musharraf, have denied that military commanders knew Khan had sold nuclear secrets abroad.

Many Pakistanis have questioned how Khan could have conducted such an ambitious series of illicit sales without some level of official support. Though he enjoyed great autonomy as lab director, security at the facility was the responsibility of the military and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

As a kind of insurance policy, Khan several weeks ago provided his daughter, Dina, who lives in England, with evidence that the military knew of his nuclear dealings abroad, instructing her to make the evidence public if the government were to prosecute or take other punitive action against him, according to a friend of Khan's who has spoken with him twice during the investigation.

But the government also exerted leverage on Khan. Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, the head of the ISI, and Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, the head of the Strategic Planning and Development Cell, last week confronted Khan with "reams of evidence" that he had not only made large sums from his foreign clients but also from improper deals with suppliers of technology for Pakistan's program, a senior official said.

They threatened to make the evidence public if he did not sign a confession, which he did on Friday after discussing his options with S.M. Zafar, an attorney and former law minister, the official said.
Under the circumstances it's the best case scenario for this situation. The media will no doubt express skepticism that Khan did not implicate President Musharraf directly and argue that the government basically bribed Khan with the plea deal. But, had Khan done so, one could just as easily made the argument that the accusation was entirely founded on revenge. In the end this is the best thing. The nuclear trading ends and it will force heightened public scrutiny of Iran and North Korea, who unlike Libya seem still determined to go nuclear. It also leaves Musharraf undamaged, and that fact is the single most important event you'll read because Musharraf is critical to the war on terror. Musharraf is a dictator, yes, but he keeps power from the Islamic fundamentalists who ally themselves with the Taliban and al Qaeda. He's not in full control of the country as it is, but is enough that we've made several important scores - such as the capture of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Mohammed - because of him. He's our most important ally in this war.

In related news Khan's confession sparked a renewed interest into allegations that he intended to provide Iraq with designs for nuclear weapons. Official Iraqi documents indicate thus, but the process is assumed to have been interrupted by the 1991 Gulf War. It is unknown if future contacts were attempted.

President Bush relented yesterday and agreed to give the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks an additional two months to draw their final conclusions, pushing the deadline from May 27 to July 27. Democrats on the commission had been pushing hard for this because it means that the report will hit the media highlights all through August, at the very peak of the 2004 election. In the end it was simply too difficult politically for Bush to be perceived as refusing more time for the commission, even if it means handing Democrats some red meat.

Contrary to my personal feelings, the Washington Post indicates that Bush agreed in part because the report is not expected to blame him personally, but will spread blame through two administrations - Bush's and that of Bill Clinton. The report will probably likewise address the FBI, CIA, FAA and other governmental agencies. One group the report will not blame is Congress, because (surprise!), many former Congresspersons make up the panel. That's too bad because Congress, whether diluting the effectiveness of our intelligence or ignoring warnings of terror, refused to address terrorism issues throughout the 1990s.

Had the Bush team been really clever they could have turned the tables on the opportunistic Democrats by giving the commission a six-month extension, not two, to November 27, days after the 2004 election. Then had the Democrats said "well, we don't need that much time," Bush would have them right where he wanted them and replied, "why, don't you want to be thorough?" Then it would be Democrats perceived as playing politics with 9-11.

The White House previously insisted that the bipartisan commission stick to its original plan and issue its report by May 27, saying the work should be completed as soon as possible. Privately, Republican officials said they wanted time for any politically damaging findings to blow over before the heat of the presidential campaign.

But the panel, citing numerous delays in obtaining information, said it needs more time. Victims' families supported the postponement in order to produce a more thorough report, and the two main architects of the Sept. 11 panel, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), introduced legislation three days ago to give the commission until January 2005. McCain and others said a longer delay would avoid putting the commission's report in the middle of the election cycle.

That proposal was supported by many victims' family members, but commission staff aides opposed the idea in part for logistical reasons. Many key employees have other jobs and obligations that would not allow them to serve through the end of the year.

Adoption of the new deadline could depend on how hard the White House pushes for it. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) continues to believe the commission should stick to its original timetable, a spokesman said.

A senior Republican official said the White House acceded to the postponement after learning from commission sources that the report is likely to "have some criticism of the White House, but will not conclude that there was a failure by Bush himself.

"A lot of it will be pre-Bush and about the Clinton era, and there is very little direct ammunition aimed at the president himself," the official said.

Commission officials said that assessment may be premature because final deliberations have not occurred. The most outspoken members of the commission are Democrats.

The panel was formed in late 2002 after months of opposition from the White House. Commission members said they have been hampered by fights with the Bush administration and the city of New York over access to documents and other material.

In the latest dispute, the White House has refused to give all 10 members notes on presidential briefing papers written by some commission members who have reviewed the sensitive documents. That has prompted the commission to consider issuing subpoenas for what it considers its own documents.

The commission is also still attempting to secure private testimony from Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as from former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore.
Nobody wants to be the fall guy here, and that's understandable. The truth of the matter is that most agencies and branches of government and people within them failed - not in any one massive way, but little by little over a period of years. Those who did see this coming, such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, were criticized as paranoid anti-Muslim hysterics.

In the most retarded accusation of the week Palestinian National Security Advisor Brig. Gen. Jibril Rajoub accused the US of "blackmail" because it is threatening to cut off Palestinian funding unless more progress is made into the investigation of three Americans kill in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists.

Brig. Gen. Jibril Rajoub, Arafat's national security adviser, complained in a news conference with foreign reporters that the U.S. Embassy had stopped sending diplomats and other personnel into the Gaza Strip and West Bank because the Palestinians had not solved the case.
Imagine that!

Afterward, he said his remarks also referred to a U.S. threat to cut off funding to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority -- amounting to roughly $200 million a year for health, education, water and other programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development -- because so little progress was being made in the investigation.

A U.S. official confirmed that the threat had been made on several occasions.

"The Americans stopped their involvement, waiting for the results of the investigation. I think that's blackmailing," Rajoub told reporters. "Americans are using this isolated case in order either to not be involved [in efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] or to blackmail the Palestinian people."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said comments such as Rajoub's were "ridiculous."

"Our position is that there needs to be a resolution of the security situation in Gaza, including apprehension of those who were responsible for the killing of U.S. officials there," Boucher said. "We have seen some cooperation, but we think that cooperation needs to be further increased. And that's something we do talk to the Palestinians about on a regular basis."

In addition, Boucher said, "as far as our assistance programs, whether it's through the U.N. or in terms of our assistance to Palestinians through other nongovernmental and other organizations, that kind of assistance continues. USAID programs with the Palestinians continue."
The US diplomats in question were part of a group empowered to help Palestinians, yet they were deliberately targeted and murdered by members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of Yassar Arafat's Fatah movement. Almost as pathetic as is the "blackmail" charge is that the US isn't willing to cut all funding - including contributions via the UN or USAID - until the Palestinian government finally seriously addresses terrorism.

In a nutshell the Bush administration fears that abandoning the caucus system and allowing open elections for government posts in Iraq, as Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani insists, might open the door to a theocratically illiberal regime, as is in Iran, taking power. Because of this conflict Sistani has turned to the United Nations to resolve the dispute, basically saying he would agree to a compromise if the UN is involved. The down side to this is obvious - for all its lip service the UN doesn't actively promote liberty or democracy. One review of how it gives full representation to regimes that do not lawfully represent their own populace verifies this. So, which is the lesser of those two evils?

The WSJ says Sistani, arguing not to confuse Iraq's Shiites with those in Iran.

While Washington argues over old intelligence, in Baghdad newly free Iraqis are struggling with the transition to self-government. If we get the latter process right, the intell flap will end up as a historical footnote.

The U.S. is now in the anomalous position of having liberated Iraq in the name of democracy but opposing elections. This is adding to Iraqi mistrust of American motives and may lead to more trouble down the road.

All the more so because, like it or not, the success of any transition plan in Iraq depends on the assent of the Shiite majority. The Shiites have thus far welcomed American troops as liberators, but recent demonstrations have made it clear that unhappiness with the caucus proposal is hardly confined to their spiritual leader. Nor are their worries entirely unfounded. The caucus process is very difficult to understand and looks to many Shiites like a mechanism that would deny them the representation their numbers would justify.

Mr. Bremer's main worry seems to be that it is too early to turn over power in the total but unpredictable way that sponsoring genuine elections would entail. In particular, there is concern that elections could mean "one man, one vote, once." But there are risks no matter what the U.S. does, and we think this fear misjudges both the Shiite majority and especially Ayatollah Sistani.

Iraq's Shiites are, for starters, a highly diverse lot and surely won't vote en masse for Iranian-style mullahs. Iraq's most respected Shiite leaders, led by Ayatollah Sistani, show no intention of pressing for any such regime. Like his mentor, the late Ayatollah Abu Qasim Khoei (whose pro-American grandson was assassinated in Najaf last April), Ayatollah Sistani is a member of a "quietist" school of Shiite thought that tends to shun the idea of a clerical role in political affairs and explicitly rejects the idea of clerical rule.

The Ayatollah's statement regarding elections is well worth quoting for what it reveals about his thought: ". . . the mechanism to choose members of the Transitional Legislative Assembly does not guarantee the establishment of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. Therefore this mechanism must be replaced with one that guarantees the aforesaid, which is 'elections,' so the Assembly will emanate from the desire of the Iraqi people and will represent them fairly without its legitimacy being tarnished in any way."

Notice that the Ayatollah is appealing here to Western democratic notions of legitimacy, not to Allah or Islam. If we were to hazard a guess about what he's really up to, it's simply trying to protect his followers from the harm that could be caused by an unstable government. He probably understands, further, that moderate leaders could be damaged by association with such a government, empowering radicals like the young Moqtada al-Sadr.

The anti-American insurgency is centered in the "Sunni Triangle," and it's understandable that Mr. Bremer would want to lure the Sunnis into a new government. But the way to do that is by guaranteeing minority rights in a democratic system, not by denying the majority their proper representation. The worst possible outcome would be an ongoing Sunni insurgency coupled with a newly disaffected Shiite majority.

It is also not reassuring that President Bush is now turning to the United Nations to mediate all of this. The hope seems to be that Ayatollah Sistani will listen to the U.N. whereas he won't meet with Mr. Bremer. But this assumes that the Shiites will forget that it was the U.N. that appeased Saddam's tyranny for so many decades. It also assumes that the U.N. won't be unduly influenced by the Sunni Arab governments in the region that don't want the Shiites to run Iraq.

There is nothing magic about the June 30 date for Iraqi sovereignty, and if it takes longer than that to prepare for a national election so be it. The current Iraqi Governing Council could assume power during an interim period, and our sources say Ayatollah Sistani is amenable to such a delay. The key is a process that most Iraqis will find legitimate and have a stake in. The longer we keep Iraq's would-be democrats bottled up, the more space we create for leaders who have a very different vision of that country's future.

Searching in a suspected safe house of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zarqawi US forces have discovered a large block of cyanide salt, used for making poison.

The potentially lethal compound was located in what was believed to be the safe house of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a poisons specialist described by some U.S. intelligence officials as having been a key link between deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror network.

Cyanides salts are extremely toxic. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, exposure to even a small amount through contact or inhalation can cause immediate death.

Zarqawi, believed to have been operating in Iraq before March's invasion, was still being sought by coalition forces. It was not clear if anyone had been apprehended in connection with last month's find.
Zarqawi is wanted in connection with ricin poison plots throughout Europe and the assassination of State Department official Lawrence Foley. He was wounded in the war in Afghanistan and received medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002. A since leaked Department of Defense memo found that in 2002 Zarqawi "met with Iraqi Intelligence Service officials to procure weapons and explosives" and was "setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city." Wanna wager on where the explosives for all these suicide bombings originated?

Zarqawi is believed to be behind last year's bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, and may be meeting with current al Qaeda number three Saif al-Adel while traveling between Iran and Iraq, and with full knowledge of the Iranian government.

The 'Bush-knew/Bush-lied!!!' crowd, led by John Kerry and Democratic National Convention Chairman Terry McAuliffe, is recirculating the myth that George W. Bush was AWOL from his Air National Guard post during his Vietnam years. If the media has covered this once they've covered it a million times, and if there was any truth to this charge it would be known by now. The charge is nothing more than recycled Democratic manure from the 2000 election. It was bogus then, and so it is now. Particularly disgusting are over the top charges by activists like Michael Moore, flat out accusing Bush of desertion - pretty serious as military desertion is something punishable by death. Moore made this charge while introducing Wesley Clark, whose own reputation is hardly spotless, who made no effort to counter Moore, disturbing even some in the Liberal community.

As for Kerry, his service should be noted and thanked - it is impressive. But it stops there for me for two reasons - first, military service does not give one a pass or entitled advantage for the presidency (unless you also want to charge Abraham Lincoln as unfit for the post of Commander in Chief since he, like Bush, was never in the military). Our country was founded in part on the notion that the civilians tell the military what to do, and not vice versa. If you don't like that you're welcome to move to Pakistan. Second, John Kerry's behavior after the war - association with Jane Fonda and VVAW; his support by the East German-created People's Peace Treaty; tossing somebody else's medals over the White House wall (and not his); publishing his book, The New Soldier, featuring hippies mocking Iwo Jima with an upsidedown flag, testimony before Congress in 1971, etc. - caused more damage to America than anything Bush ever did.

Fellow veteran Stephen Sherman wrote this (mirror):

He [Kerry] joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and emceed the Winter Soldier Investigation (both financed by Jane Fonda). Many veterans believe these protests led to more American deaths, and to the enslavement of the people on whose behalf the protests were ostensibly being undertaken. But being a take-charge kind of guy, Mr. Kerry became a leader in the VVAW and even testified before Congress on the findings of the Investigation, which he accepted at face value.

In his book "Stolen Valor," B.G. Burkett points out that Mr. Kerry liberally used phony veterans to testify to atrocities they could not possibly have committed. Mr. Kerry later threw what he represented as his awards at the Capitol in protest. But as the war diminished as a political issue, he left the VVAW, which was a bit too radical for his political future, and was ultimately elected to the Senate. After his awards were seen framed on his office wall, he claimed to have thrown away someone else's medals -- so now he can reclaim his gallantry in Vietnam.

Mr. Kerry hasn't given me any reason to trust his judgment. As co-chairman of the Senate investigating committee, he quashed a revealing inquiry into the POW/MIA issue, and he supports trade initiatives with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam while blocking any legislation requiring Hanoi to adhere to basic human rights. I'm not surprised that there are veterans who support a VVAW activist, if only because there are so few fellow veterans in politics. Ideally, there'd be many more. If you are going to vote on military appropriations, it would be nice if you didn't disrespect the soldiers. Congress hasn't had the courage to declare war in more than 60 years, despite numerous instances in which we have sent our military in harm's way. Of all the "lessons of Vietnam," surely one is that America needs a leader capable of demonstrating in himself, and encouraging in others, the resolve to finish what they have collectively started.

But the bond between veterans has to be tempered in light of the individual's record. Just as Mr. Kerry threw away medals only to claim them back again, Sen. Kerry voted to take action against Iraq, but claims to take that vote back by voting against funding the result. So I can understand my former comrade-in-arms hugging the man who saved his life, but not the act of choosing him for president out of gratitude. And I would hate to see anyone giving Mr. Kerry a sympathy vote for president just because being a Vietnam veteran is "back in style."
Beyond his own actions, Kerry has two standards for those who avoided Vietnam - one for Republicans and one for Democrats. In 1992 Kerry went on Sunday talk shows and defended Bill Clinton. Clinton didn't spend Vietnam in the Air National Guard, but rather in the Soviet capital of Moscow - you remember, that country which helped North Vietnam kill our soldiers.

The Annenberg political fact checking site, FactCheck.org, has compiled a list of news articles pertaining to the charge, including from the not-so-Bush-friendly NY Times and Washington post, and the consensus is that Bush fulfilled his military obligations and that AWOL charges are unfounded.

And there's one more point to be made here. Aside from the unfounded AWOL charge the Liberal elite attack Bush's character for being in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Well, in doing so the Democratic candidates and Bush-bashing pundits may not realize that they are, by default, attacking anyone who was in the Air National Guard, or National Guard, during the entire Vietnam Era (say 1963-72). Are all those people likewise "deserters" or "cowards"? I guess if we follow the twisted and insulting logic of Kerry, Clark or Michael Moore they are.

More information is coming out about Pakistani nuclear connections to Libya, but what the media is neglecting to do is point out the only reason we know about the connection is because of the war in Iraq. The NY Times reports today that Libya has handed over blueprints for nuclear warheads that Pakistan's premier nuclear scientist and national hero, Abdul Qadeer Khan, supplied to them. What does not make the Times article is the fact that Libyan leader Muammar Qadafi decided to come clean about his WMD program because of the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime - quite simply, Qadafi admitted he was scared that he would be next.

If you missed the news from last week, Khan admitted to supplying Libya, Iran and North Korea with nuclear technology for the past 20 years. In what may be an obvious attempt to protect himself from serious punishment Khan has implicated several high-ranking Pakistani military officials, including current President Pervez Musharraf, claiming they both knew of and approved transactions in the 80s and 90s. Once Libya came clean it uncovered Pakistan's connections to Libya through Khan. The only reason we know about this is because of the war in Iraq.

Here are the details on the nuclear warhead blueprints:

The warhead designs were the first hard evidence that the secret network provided its customers with far more than just the technology to turn uranium into bomb fuel. Libyan officials have told investigators that they bought the blueprints from dealers who are part of that network, apparently for more than $50 million. Those blueprints, along with the capability to make enriched uranium, could have given the Libyans all the elements they needed to make a nuclear bomb. What the Libyans purchased, in the words of an American weapons expert who has reviewed the program in detail, was both the kitchen equipment "and the recipes."

Experts familiar with the contents of the box say the designs closely resemble the warheads that China tested in the late 1960's and passed on to Pakistan decades ago.

American officials are still studying the designs flown out of Libya to determine whether, in fact, they are complete. There is no evidence, the officials say, that the Libyans actually produced the warheads, much less sufficient nuclear fuel. The Libyan nuclear program was just getting started, although Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said recently, "It was simply a matter of time."

American officials emphasize that they have no evidence that the Pakistani government itself was aware of the sales, and they wave aside recent accusations by Mr. Khan's allies that President Pervez Musharraf was himself aware of the transactions. But some experts inside and outside the government say it is difficult to believe that Pakistan's nuclear secrets could have been exported without the knowledge of some in the military and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, especially since some shipments were made on Pakistani military aircraft.

Whoever was responsible, the warhead design appears now to have been a sought-after prize of the network of nuclear middlemen and parts producers that American officials say is being broken up, from Germany to Malaysia, and from Dubai to the Netherlands.

Inside the White House and across the Potomac at the Central Intelligence Agency, the documents from Libya have raised as many urgent questions as they have answered.

American intelligence officials say they are uncertain who else possesses copies of the design, but they assume there are others. Obtaining the enriched uranium or the plutonium to make a bomb is more difficult than getting a workable bomb design, but their fear is that the network they are uncovering sold both.

Investigators are also trying to determine whether the network of suppliers and experts sold a similar weapons design to North Korea.

American and South Korean officials say North Korea traded its missile technology to Pakistan in return for nuclear weapons technology in the late 1990's. That is during the same period when Libya paid to obtain the design and the centrifuge parts, investigators say.

According to American and European investigators, the network that supplied Libya was enormously complex, and not all the paths led directly back to the Khan laboratory. Centrifuge parts were made in Malaysia, and other parts were obtained in Germany and Japan. The Japanese last year seized critical equipment headed for North Korea, though they never announced it.

But both the centrifuge designs and the bomb designs seized in Libya appear to have come from the same country, according to experts who have reviewed them. "My understanding is that it did come from Pakistan," said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security here.

Bush administration officials said Tuesday that they are waiting to see if Mr. Musharraf is willing to order his arrest, and face the wrath of Pakistani nationalists who regard Mr. Khan as a hero.

Statements by Mr. Khan's supporters already leave little doubt about the scientist's strategy: if arrested, he appears ready to argue that the Pakistani leadership knew about his transaction at the highest levels. That would put the White House in a difficult position, because President Bush is attempting to support Mr. Musharraf, a critical ally in tracking down members of Al Qaeda, while forcing him to shut down what officials say was a widespread source of nuclear proliferation.
The most disconcerting part of this piece is that more blueprints could exist and be in the hands of people who would love to smuggle in and detonate a bomb in the heart of the US, whether NY or Washington.

The Times seems to make its central focus Khan's implication of Musharraf (because it embarrasses Bush), who was a military commander before he became president a few years ago by coup, but that's what one expects from the Times. But the reality is that Musharraf is protected as long as he takes stern action against Khan and any other Pakistani nationals involved. On his own initiative, or perhaps with behind the scenes pressure by Bush, Musharraf has disclosed the covert nuclear proliferation. The damage done, it's now important that Musharraf put an end to it as complete and as quickly as possible.

As for Bush and US foreign policy, everyone knows that Musharraf is the most pro-Western guy in Pakistan. This gives Musharraf some leverage with us, but at the same time means that the US has leverage with Musharraf - it's not by accident that the US military is planning an unprecedented spring offensive against al Qaeda inside Pakistan. Bush has no choice but to support Musharraf, and the NY Times knows this. It would create more problems for a new faction, and likely more Islamic, to take power in Pakistan. Indeed, it would be tragic and dangerous.

Call it money not that well spent. If you didn't know, the United Nations is made up of 191 countries, but of those 191 countries just one, the United States, funds the entire annual UN budget by 25 percent. Are we getting our money's worth? Not in Iraq, not by a long shot. I guess that's why it leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I read that Bush's new budget includes a $1.2 billion, 30-year loan for the UN to renovate its headquarters. The UN says they are disappointed that they will have to pay interest on the loan, but what does one expect from a bunch of socialists who expect us to pay for everything and then bitch about how we provide for them.

Politically, Kofi Annan has been a thorn in Bush's side. In Iraq, the UN has been neither here or there, neither supportive of the effort but not so adamantly opposed that Bush could completely brush them off for good, which believe me, he's tried. It simply makes no sense to trust an international body so filled with third-world illiberal dictatorships to bring liberal democracy to Iraq (or anywhere else).

The latest wrinkle came from Ayatollah Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq. While Sistani isn't all powerful he's the most influential cleric for the Shiites, meaning he can sway, or not sway, 60 percent of Iraq's population. When Sistani told the Iraqi Governing Council and the US that he wanted the UN to oversee Iraqi elections it cracked the door back open for Annan, which Bush had all but slammed shut beforehand. The timing of this $1.2 billion to the UN is thus payoff money to get Kofi Annan to sway Sistani to be practical about any future Iraqi elections. In not so coincidental news, from the White House, Kofi Annan told reporters he plans on persuading the Iraqis to meet in the middle.

"I hope this team I'm sending in [to Iraq] will be able to play a role [in] getting the Iraqis to understand that if they could come to some consensus and some agreement on how to establish that government, we're halfway there," Annan said. "So we do have a chance to help break the impasse which exists at the moment and move forward."

The team will meet with the Iraqi Governing Council and "as many Iraqis as possible," Annan said. But U.N. and U.S. officials said it is still unclear whether the U.N. election specialists will talk with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Muslim cleric, who has not left his home in six years and has not met any occupation officials. Sistani's call for direct elections -- and his challenge of a U.S. plan calling instead for 18 regional caucuses to select a provisional Iraqi government -- precipitated the current crisis.

We'll see how our investment pays off. It's just one step above trusting the French. Here are the details on the loan:

The loan to fund the U.N. Capital Master Plan still must win approval by Congress and the U.N. General Assembly. The world body must agree to accept the 5.54 percent interest rate. Interest and principal is to be paid off by all member states.

Catherine Bertini, the U.N. undersecretary-general for administration and management, who accompanied Mr. Annan on his Washington trip, called the loan provision "great."

"It's exactly what we wanted, but we were hoping it would be interest-free," she said.

If approved, Washington will pay out $400 million a year for three years, and the organization will have 30 years to pay it back, plus interest. The total bill, with interest, will be close to $2.5 billion.

As part of its assessed contribution to the U.N. budget, the United States will supply 22 percent of that repayment figure — $265 million on the principal alone.
Isn't that grand! We're paying twice for a quarter of our own money!

Senator Joe Lieberman was by far the most moderate candidate in the Democrat's field, but when he quit last night so did any chance that if a Democrat did win it wouldn't completely screw up life as you know it. Lieberman is the only Democratic candidate who wouldn't hike up your taxes, impede one-seventh of the economy by universalizing health care, bring drug research to a standstill, repeal the Patriot Act and guide US foreign policy back to September 10, 2001, and thus repeat the mistakes that brought it on.

Senator John Kerry won five of seven states - Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico, Delaware and North Dakota - while Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) South Carolina and the ex-Clinton staff backed Wesley Clark won Oklahoma. Thus, Dean is in trouble, and the chop-licking from Republicans hoping to run against such a left-winger is likely done.

Kerry won at least 50 percent of the vote in Missouri, the biggest delegate prize of the day, and in Delaware and North Dakota, and more than 40 percent in Arizona and New Mexico. Coupled with his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, the results put Kerry in a commanding position in the Democratic race, but with his opponents determined to contest his claim to the nomination as the race turns to Michigan, Washington and Maine this weekend, Tennessee and Virginia next week and beyond.

In his victory speech, which he delivered in Seattle, Kerry noted that "for the second time in a few days, a New England patriot has won on the road." Then he excoriated President Bush, attacking the president for abandoning veterans and yielding to drug and energy companies and other corporate interests.
Friggin hypocrite - of all the Democrats Kerry is the worst at "yielding to drug and energy companies and other corporate interests."

I've often said that it's pointless for Republicans to try and make Democrats like them and work with them by passing piecemeal legislation designed to placate liberals. No matter what conservatives do it will never be enough in liberal standards.

"We believe in a stronger America," Kerry said last night. "George Bush, who speaks of strength, has made America weaker: weaker economically, weaker in education, weaker in health care."
We had a 20-year high in gross domestic product growth last quarter, but Bush is taking a pounding because he spread his tax cut over a 10 years instead of all at once to placate the Democrats in Congress. By doing so he limited the injection benefit from tax cutting and spread deficits over 10 years instead of just one or two - that press would have been over now, but instead we have to wait for 2006 for the tax cuts to maximize the economic gain. Next, you may recall Bush rubbed elbows with Ted Kennedy on a massive education bill, which Kennedy has repaid by calling Bush a liar on the war; and Bush passed the biggest Medicare entitlement increase in history. What has he earned from these genuflexes before the liberal community? Nothing other than attacks by the same left he was trying to win over. What a waste.

Some will contend that the Pentagon's decision to cut force levels in Europe by up to a third are motivated by revenge, but the truth is that after 50 years and the Cold War's end there's just no reason to have 70,000 US troops in Western Germany. The Eastern Europeans, such as the Poles and Czechs, were hoping that the US would transfer those troops to eastern bases to reward those countries for supporting the war. In simple economic terms 70,000 soldiers, many with families in tow, buy a lot of beer and diapers.

"If anything, the troops taken out of Europe will be sent home," said a Nato diplomat. "From there, they will be sent on exercises or training missions to small bases established on a temporary basis in Poland, Romania or Bulgaria. The old days of the giant US barracks . . . are over."

Romania and Bulgaria will be disappointed by the news, although east European diplomats played down their concerns. "We will be delighted if we now get a little base," one said.

The US has 119,000 troops in Europe, 80,000 of which are stationed in Germany. At the height of the Cold War, Washington had more than 300,000 troops in western Europe.

Russia has warned against moves by Nato or the US to shift forces eastwards once seven new countries, all former communist states, join the European Union in May.

In Moscow last week Colin Powell, US secretary of state, told Vladimir Putin, Russian president, that Washington had no intention of encircling Russia.

Friggin paranoid Russians - hasn't anyone told them that they already lost?

Truth be known this is part of what US Secretary of Defense termed "modularization" of the military. Rummy wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he envisions a better mix and match capability of our forces. Here's a couple key paragraphs:

However, the fact that we have to increase force levels at all [by 33,000] should give us pause. U.S. Armed Forces currently total about 2.6 million men and women -- 1.4 million active forces, 876,000 guard and reserve in units, and 287,000 individual ready reserves. Yet despite these large numbers, the deployment of 115,000 troops to Iraq has required that we temporarily increase the size of the force.

That should tell us something. It tells us that the real problem is not necessarily the size of our active and reserve military components, per se, but rather how forces have been managed, and the mix of capabilities at our disposal.

Our real problem is that the way our total force is presently managed, we have to use many of the same people over and over again. In Gen. Schoomaker's analogy, the answer is not a bigger barrel of more than the current 2.6 million men and women available, but to move the spigot down [the barrel], so more of the potentially available troops are accessible, usable, and available to defend our nation.

Take the Guard and Reserve for example... we have not mobilized over 60% of the Selected Reserve to fight the global war on terror. Indeed, 58% of the current Guard and Reserve force have not been involuntarily mobilized in the past decade. Clearly they have not been stressed. That suggests that our problem is certainly not too few forces. Rather, it is that we have too few forces with the skill sets that are in high demand, and too many forces with skills that are not in high demand.
Rebuilding the military to fight the modern enemy as opposed to the Cold War, just like retooling our intelligence community such, takes time. The career bureaucrats, both military and civilian, within the Pentagon have been fighting Rumsfeld tooth and nail because like all bureaucracies oppose to change is natural.

The naked streaker from the Super Bowl halftime show is upset that Janet Jackson upstaged him:

[Serial streaker Mark] Roberts’s only regret about the Super Bowl streak was that it was overshadowed by Janet Jackson’s own moment of exposure.

Her half-time performance, which ended with Justin Timberlake tearing her top to reveal her right breast, has caused uproar in America.

“She took my thunder. If she hadn’t done that I would have been front page material,” Roberts said.

Columnist David Frum says Colin Powell's answer to the Washington Post regarding the legitimacy of war is particularly snotty considering it is because of Powell that the US relied so heavily on WMD above all else. I noted similarly today. Here's Frum:

Can we recall please that it was Colin Powell’s insistence on working through the UN process that forced the United States to base its case for action in Iraq so very largely on the WMD issue? In his address to the UN a year ago, Colin Powell could have stressed Iraq’s record as a haven for terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. He could have, but he did not, because the UN is full of states that also shelter and support terrorists and denunciations of terrorism might offend them. He could have stressed the tyranny and cruelty of Saddam’s rule – but again that might have discomfited Zimbabwe and Burma and of course China.

There were other arguments too that could have been made, if not at the UN, then in other forums: arguments about strategy, about the need to cut the connection between the United States and Saudi Arabia, about the need for political change in the Middle East, about the need to show that anti-American radicalism is a weak and failing force not a strong and growing one. NRO readers know all these arguments well. It was as much because of Colin Powell as because of any other single person that these arguments were not made by the government of the United States to the American people and the world.

Now, when the strategy on which Powell himself insisted has put the administration in an embarrassing position – guess who is the first guy to get off the bus?
It's another lesson in the dangers of "moderation" for the sake of appearing moderate. Powell was brought into the team specifically to counter the more hawkish Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. Frum is right - Bush would be a million times better off had he relied more on human rights or terrorism or overall strategy in the Middle East.

Newsweek has a surprisingly blunt piece pertaining to Kerry's 1996 election scandal with infamous Taiwanese businessman Johnny Chung and the Chinese military. In it, they all but call Kerry a liar.

Like all other Democrats, especially the presidential contenders and the 'Bush lied!!!' crew, Senator John Kerry makes it a habit to attack President Bush for his ties to "special interests" and the corporate world in general. If so, Kerry is just as guilty. Worse, unlike Bush, Kerry gave political favors to a colonel in the Chinese military. That's kind of a no-no if you want to run for president.

Feb. 9 issue - John Kerry needed cash, and soon. In July 1996 the Massachusetts senator was locked in a tough re-election fight, so he was more than happy to help when he heard that a generous potential contributor wanted to visit his Capitol Hill office. The donor was Johnny Chung, a glad-handing Taiwanese-American entrepreneur. Chung brought along some friends, including a Hong Kong businesswoman named Liu Chaoying.

Told that Liu was interested in getting one of her companies listed on the U.S. Stock Exchange, Kerry's aides immediately faxed over a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The next day, Liu and Chung were ushered into a private briefing with a senior SEC official. Within weeks, Chung returned the favor: On Sept. 9 he threw Kerry a fund-raiser at a Beverly Hills hotel, raking in $10,000 for the senator's re-election campaign.

In a 30-year career untainted by scandal, Kerry's encounter with Chung and Liu would turn into a political embarrassment. Federal investigators later discovered that Liu was in fact a lieutenant colonel in China's People's Liberation Army and vice president of a Chinese-government-owned aerospace firm. And Chung, who visited the Clinton White House 49 times, went on to become a central figure in the foreign-money scandals of 1996. Chung eventually pleaded guilty to funneling $28,000 in illegal contributions to the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Kerry. According to bank records and Chung's congressional testimony, the contributions came out of $300,000 in overseas wire transfers sent on orders from the chief of Chinese military intelligence—and routed through a Hong Kong bank account controlled by Liu.

There was never any suggestion that Kerry knew about the dubious origins of Chung's largesse. Still, the appearance that the senator had played a cynical cash-for-favors game forced him to play damage control. In January 1998 he told the Boston Herald that the timing of the SEC meeting and the subsequent fund-raiser was "totally coincidental" and "entirely staff driven." He said the Beverly Hills event had been set up by a professional fund-raiser, and that he had never even met Chung until the night of the event. But congressional documents obtained by NEWSWEEK seem to tell a different story. "Dear Johnny, It was a great pleasure to have met you last week," Kerry told Chung in a handwritten note dated July 31, 1996. "Barbara [a Kerry fund-raiser] told me of your willingness to help me with my campaign... It means a lot to have someone like you on my team as I face the toughest race of my career." That same day the Kerry fund-raiser faxed a memo to Chung that read, in part: "The following are two ways in which you can be helpful to John." No. 1 was "Host an event in L.A. on Saturday, Sept. 9th." (A Kerry spokesman acknowledged that the senator may have met with Chung prior to the fund-raiser, but not in his Senate office.)
Let me stop the article right here to say... Kerry LIED!!!

Okay, continuing:

On the campaign trail, Kerry routinely attacks the president for his ties to big-dollar donors. Kerry championed campaign-finance reform, and refused money from corporate or labor political-action committees. But in some ways, he has played the Washington money game as aggressively as the Republicans he scolds. Over the years, reports the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, Kerry has raised more than $30 million for his Senate campaigns. A good portion has come from industries with an interest in the committees on which Kerry has a seat—including more than $3 million from financial firms (Kerry serves on the Senate Finance Committee). Kerry insists he is meticulous about avoiding any conflicts. "If these interests are giving money in hopes of buying influence with the senator, well, they should save their money because it won't work," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.

Though he has shunned PAC donations, which are limited to $5,000 apiece, the senator in 2001 formed a fund-raising group called the Citizen Soldier Fund, which brought in more than $1.2 million in unregulated "soft money." Kerry pledged he would limit individual donations to $10,000. But in late 2002, just before new federal laws banning soft money took effect, Kerry quietly lifted the ceiling and took all the cash he could get. In the month before the election, the fund raised nearly $879,000—including $27,500 from wireless telecom firms such as T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. That same month, Kerry cosponsored a bill to overturn a judge's ruling and permit the wireless firms to bid on billions of dollars' worth of wireless airwaves. Kerry aide Cutter says it's a "stretch" to draw any connection between the two events.

Why did Kerry abandon his own rules about contribution limits? "This was just before the election, and it was clear the Democrats needed all their resources to fight the Bush money machine," Cutter says. Kerry spread the windfall strategically. More than a third of the fund's contributions went to just three states critical to a senator plotting a run for the White House: Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Today that certainly seems like money well spent. Now, after a tough, expensive fight to the front, Kerry once again finds himself scrambling to find new sources of cash. He has personally urged more than a dozen top supporters to raise $100,000 each before the Feb. 3 primaries. As the money rolls in, he'll likely be taking a hard look not just at the numbers on the checks—but at the signatures, too.
What a hypocrite. These Democrats slay me - for the most part they all supported the campaign finance "reform" act on the basis that lobbyist money supposedly corrupts politics. But they bend and break their own campaign finance pledges at the drop of a hat defending themselves saying the money won't corrupt them - no, only those wicked Republicans are corrupted by money, but not us Democrats. Never! - and that, "well, it's the only way we can beat Bush." Oh, really? Well, if accepting huge contributions from special interests is non-corrupting for Democrats so it is for Republicans. And if corporate financing is the only way for Democrats to be competitive then so it is for Republicans.

What would we do without polls? Fortunately, four out of five dentists agree that most polls are worthless, and this is especially true of presidential polling ten whole months before the election. Nonetheless, polls this past week by Newsweek, Quinnipiac University, and USA Today/Gallup/CNN all find Bush behind in a tight race with John Kerry.

Besides timing there are several reasons why Bush supporters don't have reason to worry (yet).

First off, Bush has yet to politick one iota. He's yet to fire off one barb at Kerry, Wes Clark, Howard Dean or John Edwards. For now Bush has the luxury of hyper-examining each candidate for weaknesses as they tear one another to shreds. Sure, that also means that every Democratic candidate can unleash with impunity all sorts of verbal assaults towards Bush, and thus find themselves with media coverage 24 hours a day. Given the amount of Democratic attacks while yet to truly start a campaign what candidate wouldn't find themselves either behind or at most a few points ahead. What happens in January is almost irrelevant; polling in July and August is a different story.

Second, and most importantly, whether the poll is in January or November one can tell a lot about the sample size a pollster uses to make conclusions and predictions.

Let's examine the three above:

Newsweek: "For the NEWSWEEK poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 1,259 adults aged 18 and older Jan. 29 and Jan. 30 by telephone."

USA Today/Gallup/CNN: "The results are based on interviews conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2004 with 1,001 national adults aged 18 and older."

Quinnipiac U: "From January 28 – 31, Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,219 registered voters nationwide, with a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percent."
Have you spotted the difference yet? Of these three polls the Quinnipiac poll is the only one worth a damn (and that's just at a quick glance and not really digging into the sample size, sample location or political region, wording of questions, etc). The reason is that Quinnipiac is the only survey that uses "registered voters." Political polling of "adults" is useless. Indeed, only 50% of our adult population even bothers to show up on voting day, and that's in a good turnout year. Politicians don't give a damn how an "adult" is going to vote; they want to know how a registered voter is going to vote.

Now the bad news: the Quinnipiac poll has Bush eight points behind Kerry. So from there one would have to examine other factors, such as by percent what regions the "nationwide" poll was conducted.

In any event Bush cannot take Kerry lightly, nor can he just paint Kerry with the broad "Liberal" label. When the time comes Bush is going to have to expose Kerry's inconsistency, his record harmful to intelligence community, the Democrat's desire to weaken the country over unfounded civil libertarian concerns, and their strategy for fighting terror - which is by Kerry's own words (1,2) to return to the 1990s.

[UPDATE] The Wall Street Journal is a little bit kinder to Bush, but still cautiously notes that his budget proposal to curb domestic non-security spending is just that - a proposal. Only time will tell if Bush would be willing to reject any added expenditures by Congress, and Bush's veto record is nonexistant. Aside from Bush you have to love the Journal's focus on the Democrat's response to Bush's budget, particularly Ed Kennedy:

Yet this attempt to reassert modest spending control is being greeted as the end of days. Ted Kennedy captured the Beltway panic yesterday by calling it the "most anti-family, anti-worker, anti-health care, anti-education budget in modern times." Not ancient times too? This criticism over too little spending is accompanied by complaints that the budget "deficit" is too large. So Mr. Bush is said to be too stingy but also not stingy enough.

Readers should keep this highway robbery in mind when they hear moans about "the deficit." The Members who deplore the deficit the most are the same ones who want to increase spending the most. They're angry mainly because the size of the deficit has become an obstacle to their spending even more. Mr. Bush is proposing to restore annual spending "caps" of the kind that prevailed in the early 1990s, but don't look for hosannas from the Hill on that one.

The other reason for whining about the deficit is as an excuse to raise taxes. But the nation is hardly in a fiscal crisis. The 2004 deficit estimate of $521 billion is 4.5% of GDP--well below the 5%-6% records of the 1980s when interest rates were falling and the economy did splendidly. The White House deficit estimate for 2005 falls to only 3% of GDP, as tax revenues generated by faster economic growth will return to more normal levels. The deficit average as a share of the economy over the past 40 years is 2.2%. Deficits are manageable as long as the economy grows, and raising taxes will only hurt growth.
The Journal concludes that it is the long term liabilities, ie entitlements, and not our short-term spending that risks true fiscal damange in the future.

[UPDATE END]

Bush's new budget on the surface seems to issure increases in defense and national security - both are important and relevant - while cutting some unnecessary programs favored by the Democrats. But at the end of the day this is still a nanny-state $23 trillion budget, says columnist and economist Stephen Moore.

A federal budget that will spend more money in a single year than the entire GDP of France and three times what it cost to fight World War II can hardly be disparaged as inadequate or celebrated as tight-fisted. Uncle Sam, Inc., will spend more money in just this year than it spent combined between 1787 and 1900 — even after adjusting for inflation. Ironically enough, we are now celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Newt Gingrich's bold declaration that "we Republicans will make government smaller and smarter." It didn't exactly turn out that way, given that the budget is now nearly $1 trillion larger than it was when the Republican revolution was launched.

Here's another way to think about it: If you took all our government spend divided it evenly among all families of four in America, each family would be more than $50,000 richer... The question American taxpayers need to ask is this: Does my family really get anywhere near $50,000 worth of services every year from city hall, state government, and Uncle Sam, Inc.?

President Bush has allowed the budget to grow by 8 percent per year after inflation in his first three budgets. What's worse, many in Washington want government to grow a lot more in a hurry. Most of the Democrats running for president, and even some Republicans in Congress, yearn for the day when government entirely takes over the health-care industry — so we can have a socialized system more like France and Canada. (This would put about 5 to 10 percent more of the economy under direct government control.) Many in Congress also want government to fully take over the financing and control of the education of pre-school children (ages 3 to 5) and to provide free universal college to all 18-to-22 year olds. This, too, could add another 5 to 10 percent to the government's total take.

In his bloated budget for 2005, the president seeks funds to keep marriages intact, to prevent overeating, to encourage teenagers not to have sex, and to help give Americans the willpower to stop smoking. Should it bother us that both parties have bought into the belief that government now needs a federal program, bureau, agency, or grant contract to deal with every conceivable human need? An indoor rainforest in Iowa? Arts festivals in Alaska? Swimming pools in New York? What's next, my teenager's right cheek gets a relief from acne?
The sad thing is that, currently, whether you vote Democrat or Republican the issue of the government becoming a full nanny-state, controlling every aspect of your life, is no longer a question of if, but when.

Were it not for the war, and my absolute fear of the Democrats statements which make it clear that they intend to fight terrorism with September 10, not 11, tactics, I'm not even sure if I would vote this year. But not every conservative thinks like me. Some will be so disgusted with his un-conservative moves on spending, immigration or the steel trade fiasco (among other things) that they might decide to forgo as well.

Bush's obsession with winning over the moderates might lose his base of conservatives... something his father did.

Remember how the press responded to the 2001 anthrax attacks by immediately focusing on the likelihood that they were perpetrated by some right-wing nut because the recipients of the anthrax letters were either Democrats or associated with left-wing media?

Well, now that someone has planted poisonous ricin in Republican Senator Bill Frist's office will the media speculate it as a "left-wing nut" attack?

According to [U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W.]Gainer, the first of the tests on the powder came back positive for ricin; the second was negative. Three more tests were all positive. After that, three more tests were conducted at an outside laboratory. Two of those three turned out positive, Gainer said.

The discovery of the powder came after several days of intense concern about terrorist threats to aviation. However, federal officials expressed doubt last night that the powder -- even if it turned out to be ricin -- was part of a terrorist plot.

They asserted that ricin, which is made from the castor bean, appears poorly suited to inflicting mass casualties of the kind sought by international terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. Specialists also pointed out last night that some of the preliminary tests of the sort conducted after yesterday's discovery can raise false alarms.

"A lot of the time these field tests are wrong," said one federal security specialist.

In explaining why specialists doubt that ricin would be the instrument of large-scale terrorism, one federal security official said the material is not easily prepared for dispersal in a fashion that would affect many people.

"This does not have the earmarks of international terrorism," the official said. Assuming that the material involved was ricin, he said, "this is more of a criminal issue and is likely to be handled by the FBI."
Well, we'll see.

Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."
The problem with Colin Powell's answer, probably due to his persona of being a typical career diplomat, is that it's indecisive. Why bother giving the Washington Post an interview just to tell them, "I don't know." Such an answer opens the administration to more attacks than had he simply said "yes" or "no." The smart and proper answer would have been for Powell to say "absolutely."

Powell could have then pointed out that President Bush went before the UN and laid out five demands that Saddam Hussein must comply with to avoid war, end the oppression of his people, end illicit oil trading and end all support for terrorism. Saddam Hussein complied with none of these.

Powell does not that Iraq was supposed to have complied with every UN resolution against the regime, including those regarding weapons programs - remember, the UN resolutions included a banning of not just the weapons but the programs. David Kay has been oft quoted as saying Iraq had "no weapons" and such, but not the rest of his statement.

That intent [to create more WMD], Powell said, was also demonstrated by Hussein keeping in place the capability to produce weapons. He said Hussein continued to train and employ people who knew how to develop weapons, "and there's no question about that and there's nobody debating that part of the intelligence."

Moreover, Powell said, Iraq continued to have the "technical infrastructure, labs and facilities, that will lend themselves to the production of weapons of mass destruction." Such facilities "could produce such weapons at a moment in time, now or some future moment in time," Powell said. "I think there's evidence that suggests that he was keeping a warm base, that there was an intent on his part to have that capability."

Powell asserted that Hussein was intent on creating delivery systems, such as longer-range missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.

"If you look at my presentation from last year, I talk about intent," Powell said. "I talk about the capability I think is there, the stockpiles, but a large part of the presentation is also what happened" and the unanswered questions about Iraq's weapons holdings. "He got a chance to answer the questions and he didn't answer the questions."

Powell noted that when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. troops expected to be hit with chemical weapons. "We weren't hit with chemical weapons but we found chemical weapons," he said. "So it wasn't as if this was a figment of someone's imagination."
This is all fine, but the president's critics will focus on just one line from Powell ("I don't know...", just as they have with David Kay "we were all wrong." Powell missed an opportunity to show conviction and instead cracked the door for more attacks.

[Wa. Post] Congressional Democrats, who had demanded an independent commission to assess the prewar claims about Iraq, criticized Bush for deciding to make all the appointments to the panel himself.

"A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues," said a letter signed by Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), Senate intelligence committee Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democratic congressional leaders. "Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President Cheney need independent scrutiny. A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues."
Speaking of persons who make statements which need independent scrutiny, here's Nancy Pelosi from December 16, 1998, arguing to give Bill Clinton UNILATERAL power to attack Iraq, which he did:

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
Likewise Tom Daschle also agreed that Iraq was a WMD power and a threat, which is why he and most other Democrats signed the Iraqi Liberation Act and gave Clinton UNILATERAL power to bomb Iraq, which he did:

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."

Now, people might want to argue that much has changed since 1998. No, nothing but the president in charge. Really, Iraq grew worse since 1998 - Saddam had four years without any inspection process; containment weakened as did international resolve; Iraq's illegal oil trade skyrocketed, giving him money to bribe officials purchase more security and weapons. He was just waiting us out.

The worst offender of all was co-Chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, who all but promised that Iraq would be a nuclear power "in five years." Even Bush never such a bold prediction.

Here's Jay Rockefeller from October 2002, before he voted in favor of using military force in Iraq. Note how in his statements Rockefeller seems to be arguing that it would be too late to wait for Iraq to become an imminent threat:

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources — something that is not that difficult in the current world. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."

"When Saddam Hussein obtains nuclear capabilities, the constraints he feels will diminish dramatically, and the risk to America's homeland, as well as to America's allies, will increase even more dramatically. Our existing policies to contain or counter Saddam will become irrelevant. Americans will return to a situation like that we faced in the Cold War, waking each morning knowing we are at risk from nuclear blackmail by a dictatorship that has declared itself to be our enemy. Only, back then, our communist foes were a rational and predictable bureaucracy; this time, our nuclear foe would be an unpredictable and often irrational individual, a dictator who has demonstrated that he is prepared to violate international law and initiate unprovoked attacks when he feels it serves his purposes to do so."

"The global community - in the form of the United Nations - has declared repeatedly, through multiple resolutions, that the frightening prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam cannot come to pass. But the U.N. has been unable to enforce those resolutions. We must eliminate that threat now, before it is too late."

"I am forced to conclude, on all the evidence, that Saddam poses a significant risk."
Investigate yourself, chairman.

Don’t believe Senator Joe Biden for a second when he says that questions about the US intelligence community’s analysis of Iraq “isn’t about politics anymore.” For the Democrats, that’s all that this is about, and it’s only going to get worse. That’s unfortunate, because our knowledge, and lack thereof regarding Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. Former head of the Iraqi Survey Group David Kay says “we were all wrong” about our assumptions of Iraq. That’s often quoted in the papers. What is rarely quoted is that Kay noted that unlike Iraq we underestimated Iran and Libya; believes the intelligence community let down the president, and not that the president let down his people; or that everyone whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, all assumed based on previous intelligence that Saddam had massive quantities of WMD; or that Saddam ran a gambit designed to make the world think he had WMD in order to save face in the Arab world.

Many are going to view Bush’s decision either as an admission of guilt or as a political maneuver to get him through the election. But they miss the forest for the trees. Bush is, at most, only here another 4 years, but the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI and an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies are with us forever. We better fix them fast.

Consider that we were surprised upon discovering that the weapons programs in North Korea, Iran and Libya were much further along than we believed. The admissions by Libya alone have been shocking. What’s more frightful of a false positive as in Iraq is that we had three false negatives in North Korea, Iran and Libya. And those are just the false negatives we know of. Consider also that Pakistan was supplying all three with nuclear know-how through out the 1990s, under the not so watchful eye of the Clinton administration. Indeed, when India and Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, again during the Clinton administration, it was a complete shock to the CIA. So, there’s lots of blame to go round. The point here is that Iraq isn’t our only failure, but there’s bound to be more failures if don’t fix our spy agencies without turning this into a political nightmare. The only way to do this is to approach it as an intelligence failure. But the Democrats are not going to let that happen. They want it to be a witch hunt for the Bush team, and nothing more.

Mr. Bush's agreement to set up a commission to study the Iraq intelligence failures was first reported Sunday by The Washington Post. The officials described the commission Mr. Bush will create as a broader examination of American intelligence shortcomings — from Iran to North Korea to Libya — of which the Iraqi experience was only a part.

The pressure to establish such a panel became irresistible after David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that "it turns out we were all wrong, probably," about the perceived Iraqi threat, which was the administration's basic justification for the war.

The commission will not report back until after the November elections. Some former officials who have been approached about taking part say they believe it may take 18 months or more to reach its conclusions.

"It became clear to the president that he couldn't sit there and seem uninterested in the fact that the Iraq intel went off the rails," said one senior official involved in the discussions. "He had to do something, and he chose to enlarge the problem, beyond the Iraq experience."

Mr. Bush's effort is intended to put the study into a broader context — the retooling of American intelligence-gathering for a new era of terrorism and nuclear proliferation by rogue scientists and countries that may pass weapons into the hands of groups like Al Qaeda. But it is far from clear that those steps will insulate him from Democrats' charges that the White House tried to manipulate the Iraq intelligence to justify the March invasion.

Nor is it clear whether the commission's broader mandate will keep it from delving too deeply into the specific failures by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies in the case of Iraq. Mr. Bush has been trying to avoid identifying individuals or agencies responsible for the Iraq failures. Senior administration officials concede they do not want to risk further alienating the C.I.A. or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet.

The draft of the executive order specifically orders the commission to compare intelligence about Iraq with what was found on the ground there. But it is not clear whether the commission will decide to delve into issues beyond how the intelligence was gathered, and specifically how it was used. In the case of Iraq, that could put the commission into the midst of the politically charged question of whether the most dire-sounding possibilities were de-emphasized by Bush administration officials to build a national and international consensus on the need to take military action. The White House has denied any such effort to filter the intelligence.

"It has to have that included," Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on Fox News, making an argument that has divided Democrats and Republicans for months in the debate in Congress about prewar intelligence. "And that is still not settled."

While other studies of American intelligence lapses have been ordered by past administrations, none has taken place at the level of a presidential commission. Nor have they operated in the midst of a heated political debate over whether the president was the victim of bad intelligence, as Republicans argue, or whether he sought to cherry-pick the evidence that would justify the decision to go to war, as many of the Democratic candidates for president have contended.

Officials familiar with the discussions over the creation of the commission say that besides the Iraq experience, the commission may examine the failure to detect preparations for the nuclear tests that Pakistan and India set off in 1998, missed signals about how quickly Iran and Libya were moving toward a bomb with the aid of Pakistani scientists, and Al Qaeda's focus on an attack on the American mainland.

In Dr. Kay's testimony, he noted that the same intelligence agencies that overestimated Iraq's abilities seemed to have underestimated Iran's and Libya's, and still cannot get a clear fix on North Korea's.

One senior House Republican aide said an independent review could also have a political benefit for Republicans by providing a forum to attack Democrats for shortchanging intelligence in previous years, an emerging Republican theme against Senator John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. Mr. Kerry has been particularly blistering in his assessment of how Mr. Bush used American intelligence, saying he was "misled" by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as they urged him and his colleagues to vote for a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.
As long as the Democrats try to politicize the war and intelligence Bush is going to have no choice but to reply in kind, at least until November 20 or so. Once that date comes and goes this intelligence panel will be more likely to develop meaningful conclusions.

It is particularly revolting that those charging Bush with exaggerating intelligence or misleading the public about Iraq’s WMD – aka the Bush lied! crew – are guilty of making statements as notable or even more convincing than Bush. Because of this one cannot say that Bush lied, as it were, without acknowledging that if true than so did scores of Democrats who, among many other occasions, took to the House and Senate floor and argued (with outright conviction) that Iraq had WMD and was a threat before voting in favor of military action. (Senator Jay Rockefeller is particularly revolting considering his promise that Iraq would “have nuclear weapons within the next five years.” The senator is the head of the Senate Intelligence Select Committee, which means he gets the same CIA briefs as Bush.)

To combat this major wrinkle presidential candidate John Kerry has concocted a new strategy. As reported in the NY Times article (post above) Senator John Kerry would have you believe that the Bush team fooled him into claiming that Iraq had WMD and was, to quote Kerry from February 11, 2003, “much further down the road towards the creation of nuclear weapons than we thought. We learned [from 8 years of inspections] also that he had much more biological and chemical weaponry than we thought.”

To recap: Bush, by the way, didn’t formulate regime change in Iraq as official US policy. The Democratic-led Senate and Bill Clinton White House did by passing and signing the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act. Clinton then used Iraqi WMD and the Iraqi Liberation Act as an impetus to launch 300+ cruise missiles into Iraq in 1998 Operation Desert Fox.

Thus, Kerry voted twice in favor of regime change in Iraq, once in 1998 and again in 2002. Point being, if Kerry’s current defense is that he only said those things because the Bush team convinced him they were true, does it then mean that Clinton also lied to Kerry? Also, what does this say about Kerry’s ability to be president? Were it true that Bush fooled Kerry should the American voters allow so gullible a person into the Oval Office? What’s the worse charge, misleading or incompetence?

No, folks, Kerry’s defense is pure spin, and smelly spin at that. The truth of the matter is that Kerry is guilty of the same sin as the rest of us – believing that Iraq had large quantities of WMD.

“without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but it is not new. It has been with us since the end of the Persian Gulf War.”
That above quote is from John Kerry in January 2003, just two months before the war began. So, if Bush lied!, so did Kerry.

For all their empty attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft the Liberal community might want to take a second look instead at Howard Dean. Little noticed two weeks ago amid Dean’s sore loser tirade in Iowa was a speech he gave regarding technology that should be an affront to his own campaign of “the constitutional principles of equality, liberty and privacy." Six months after September 11 Howard Dean implied that as president he would force computer manufacturers to create ‘smart card’ readers so consumers would be forced to login to the Internet with a national ID card.

Fifteen months before Dean said he would seek the presidency, however, the former Vermont governor spoke at a conference in Pittsburgh co-sponsored by smart-card firm Wave Systems where he called for state drivers' licenses to be transformed into a kind of standardized national ID card for Americans. Embedding smart cards into uniform IDs was necessary to thwart "cyberterrorism" and identity theft, Dean claimed. "We must move to smarter license cards that carry secure digital information that can be universally read at vital checkpoints," Dean said in March 2002, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. "Issuing such a card would have little effect on the privacy of Americans."

Dean also suggested that computer makers such as Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway and Sony should be required to include an ID card reader in PCs--and Americans would have to insert their uniform IDs into the reader before they could log on. "One state's smart-card driver's license must be identifiable by another state's card reader," Dean said. "It must also be easily commercialized by the private sector and included in all PCs over time--making the Internet safer and more secure."

The presidential hopeful offered few details about his radical proposal. "On the Internet, this card will confirm all the information required to gain access to a state (government) network--while also barring anyone who isn't legal age from entering an adult chat room, making the Internet safer for our children, or prevent adults from entering a children's chat room and preying on our kids...Many new computer systems are being created with card reader technology. Older computers can add this feature for very little money," Dean said.

There's probably a good reason why Dean spoke so vaguely: It's unclear how such a system would work in practice. Must Internet cafes include uniform ID card readers on public computers? Would existing computers have to be retrofitted? Would tourists be prohibited from bringing laptops unless they sported uniform ID readers? What about Unix shell accounts? How did a politician who is said to be Internet-savvy concoct this scheme?

Perhaps most importantly, does Dean still want to forcibly implant all of our computers with uniform ID readers?

Unfortunately, Dean's presidential campaign won't answer any of those questions. I've tried six times since Jan. 16 to get a response, and all the press office will say is they've "forwarded it on to our policy folks." And the policy shop isn't talking.
So much for the “privacy” president.

Pakistani national hero and father of their nuclear arms program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted in writing that he supplied North Korea, Iran and Libya with nuclear technology and know-how in the 1980s and 1990s. The Pakistani government claims that Khan did so for money and status, whereas Khan says he did so to alleviate international pressure on Pakistan by promoting a second Islamic-bomb producing country. Rubbish, of course, because it fails to explain his motive for North Korea, which last time I checked was about as Islamic as Mexico. It matters not, the damage is done; but what is curious is how all this unfolded.

The wealth that Khan accumulated during 30 years as a government servant, on a salary estimated now at $2,000 per month, is part of evidence that officials say led Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, to conclude that he had no choice but to take action against Khan, the flamboyant, European-trained metallurgist, widely regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.

Musharraf postponed a decision on whether to pursue criminal charges against Khan. Musharraf is under heavy domestic pressure to go easy on Khan. At the same time, Musharraf is eager to remain on good terms with the US and to demonstrate Pakistan's commitment to curbing the spread of nuclear weapons technology.

Among those present at Saturday's meeting was Lt. Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, who presented the case against Khan at the meeting and said firing him "would go a long way in establishing Pakistan's credibility with the IAEA," according to a participant.

Khan has a history of strained relations with Musharraf, who in 2001 forced his retirement as director of the Khan Research Laboratories, the uranium-enrichment plant that Khan founded nearly three decades ago following his return to Pakistan from the Netherlands.

His current job amounted to little more than a sinecure. "I swat flies and read newspapers," an associate recalled him saying.

Pakistani officials also acknowledge that a public airing of the technology sales could prove embarrassing for the military, which has principal responsibility for the multitiered security system – overseen by two army brigadiers and a special detachment of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency – that surrounds the top-secret Khan laboratory.

Moreover, while the investigation has focused exclusively on transactions involving Iran and Libya, US officials also suspect Pakistan of bartering uranium-enrichment secrets to North Korea in return for help with ballistic missiles. US officials have said they believe that some of the dealings, in which Khan is said to have played a prominent role, occurred as recently as August 2002. Pakistani officials deny the accusation. Officials say they believe that Khan grew rich from his black-market activities.

Khan, 67, counts among his assets four houses in Islamabad, a palatial lakeside retreat, ownership shares in two restaurants and a hotel in Timbuktu, Mali.

He has divided his time between his Mediterranean-style villa on the edge of the capital and an equally imposing residence – complete with lighted brick driveway and dolphin-shaped fountain – on the edge of Rawal Lake in Bani Gala.

One of the Khan's more exotic investments was the 24-room Hotel Hendrina Khan in Timbuktu, which opened in March 2002. It is outfitted with carved-wood furniture that in 2000 was flown on a Pakistani army C-130 aircraft from Islamabad to Tripoli, Libya, from where it made its way to Timbuktu.

It’s worth pointing out that Khan’s admission, after a long period of denial, came only after the Libyan government came clean about its WMD programs, including nuclear program, and thus implicated Khan, who had been supplying them for decades.

Furthermore, the Libyan government made this admission because Col. Muammar Qadafi was scared that the Bush administration might topple his regime as was done in Iraq. Thus the war in Iraq has now led to two separate governments promoting transparency in their weapons programs.

The more information that comes out about North Korea the harder it will be for the far Left to roll their eyes every time Bush calls that regime “evil.” We already knew that North Korea imprisons hundreds of thousands of its citizens in concentration camps, but we didn’t know that they have gas chambers.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.

'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'

His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'

Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.'

Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: 'It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].'

The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.

Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime.

Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
Doubted that we will ever militarily intervene in North Korea so long as the Chinese are protecting this regime, but were Bush ever to intervene for humanitarian reasons would the “humanitarians” on the Left support the effort? Like you don’t already know the answer to that one. Still, it would be nice to watch them squirm; they couldn’t use the statute of limitations defense for mass murder as they now so grotesquely use in Iraq.