Rosie's "greatest hits"

http://www.mrc.org/Profiles/odonnell/welcome.asp

This is "greatest hits" rundown of Rosie's most delusional.  Great exchange in 1999 with Tom Selleck at the bottom

ISU: Christians need not apply

Shockingly the most hostile campus to Christians in Iowa recently is not Iowa City but Ames ?!?!?

C'mon ISU, I count on you to balance out the hippies in Iowa City and Grinnell. First Dr. Gonzalez is targeted by a "petition" for daring to be a Christian. As we all know from the Duke Lacrosse story "petitions" are always beyond reproach. I have to say that only in academia would signing a "petition" be viewed as an acceptable reaction, what a bunch of wusses.

Considering this is a school that had not too long ago "In the year of our Lord" inprinted on it's diplomas, It's fair to say the hippies have won another one and have once again proven they have no intention of being educators but indoctrinators.

Of course this could all go away with a University President with a spine, but I might as well be asking for a Leprechaun to appear. Also don't forget ISU's Softball team refusing to stand at a Baylor game during the pre-game prayer. Gotta love that tolerance.

By the way, why doesn't the Register mention that religious studies professor Hector Avalos is an atheist and faculty adviser (aka Chaplain??) to the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.

Blood of Iraqi Martyrs

Blood of Iraqi Martyrs 
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2007

There is another tragedy taking in place in Iraq on a daily basis, far from the front pages and the TV news. It does not involve the kidnapping of U.S. troops, nor even the fire-bombing of Muslim shrines by other Muslims, both of which by now are familiar to most Americans.

This is a tragedy taking place in a total media vacuum. Even our government has remained silent as it continues.

Perhaps it’s because the victims are Christians. Indeed, members of the most ancient Christian communities in the world.

Over the past three years, Iraqi Muslim extremists have targeted Christians in systematic attacks, aimed at driving them from their homes, their work places, and their churches.

Just last week, a group of armed Muslims set fire to St. George’s Assyrian Church in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, completely decimating what remained of a church already hit by a deadly fire-bombing in October 2004.

The Christians of Iraq include Chaldeans, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrians. All trace their roots to the early church and use a liturgy still written and sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Read it all here:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28448

If We Fail.Been there, done that.

If We Fail…Been there, done that.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Read it all:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODk0NDc4ODYyOGM1YzA0MTc3YjgwMjY5Mjg4OGY5MmE=

 

3,000 Christians added daily in China

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53808

3,000 Christians added daily in China
Faithful undefeated by beatings, arrests, confiscations and destruction of churches

osted: January 18, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Worship services are being broken up by baton-wielding police officers, participants arrested, Bibles confiscated and Christian church buildings demolished. But still, an estimated 3,000 people every day come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ in China.

The report comes from Voice of the Martyrs, a U.S.-based Christian group that works specifically to help those members of the persecuted Christian church worldwide.

The most recent arrests happened just a few days ago, when a house church meeting in Henan province was broken up and 11 people arrested, the organization said.

(Story continues below)

"Police from Yongfeng township police station in Xiuwu county, Henan province, raided a Christian meeting in a home in Chencun village. Eleven Christians were arrested, two were released the next day and nine remain in jail," the report said.

"Police broke in and proclaimed the gathering a cultic and illegal activity," the report said.

Legal and financial help is being provided to those people during their detention.

However, VOM said that a more than 50-year campaign to eradicate Christianity from China has left that nation with the equivalent of a new mega-church being added each day.

"Chairman Mao Zedong declared the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 and quickly sought to purge society of anything religious, causing China's people to endure great hardship ever since," a VOM analysis of the nation said. "Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late '50s and the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s left millions of his countrymen dead or victimized.

"Today, with its policies of forced abortion and sterilization, China's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Authorities reportedly sell the organs of executed prisoners to meet the demand for transplants. It system of 're-education through labor' detains hundreds of thousands each year in work camps without even a court hearing. China's 'strike-hard' policy, presented as a crackdown on criminals, is hardest on Christians, putting more believers in prison or under detention than in any other country. The confiscation of church property and Bibles continues – even Bibles officially printed by the government," the report said.

"Yet the church grows: an estimated 3,000 Chinese come to Christ each day. China's house church movement, which comprises approximately 90 percent of China's Christians, endures unimaginable persecution, yet stands on its commitment to preach the gospel no matter the cost."

Two of the people in the latest raid by police were released a day later, but nine remained in jail, according to VOM and China Aid Association, which also reported on the arrests.

Among those still being held in detention for worshiping in the home were Ju Xiang, 48; Liu Xiaoduo, 42; Wang Shegin, 40; Fu Juyi, 36; Hong Xia, 37; Xue Xianghuo, 49; and Xue Xiaona, 34, officials said.

VOM said the persecution is having little effect on the desire to know more about Christ. "In the past year, we received more requests for Bibles and Christian books from Chinese believers because they wanted to share the gospel with others," a VOM source within the restrictive nation said. "The Communist government of China does not see Christ as the most important person in an individual's life. Christians count it a privilege to believe in and suffer for Jesus Christ."

The contact said Christians simply adjust to the persecution at hand – including arrests, demolished buildings and confiscated materials.

VOM currently is supplying Bibles and copies of other Christian books, including "Tortured for Christ" by VOM founder Richard Wurmbrand, to Christians in China.

"American Christians have also mailed more than 107,310 New Testaments to China through Bibles Unbound (www.BiblesUnbound.com)," VOM said. "Pray God will protect believers in China and give them strength and courage to continue their faith in him."

VOM is a non-profit, interdenominational ministry working worldwide to help Christians who are persecuted for their faith, and to educate the world about that persecution. Its headquarters are in Bartlesville, Okla., and it has 30 affiliated international offices.

It was launched by the late Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, who started smuggling Russian Gospels into Russia in 1947, just months before Richard was abducted and imprisoned in Romania where he was tortured for his refusal to recant Christianity.

He eventually was released in 1964 and the next year he testified about the persecution of Christians before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee, stripping to the waist to show the deep torture wound scars on his body.

The group that later was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs was organized in 1967, when his book, "Tortured for Christ," was released.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The secret for which Sandy risked his all

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53812

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel "Sandy" Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now-storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: Just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure? Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the committee, in fact, that Berger "indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review."

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, "designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents." Berger was Clinton's go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security adviser, not because of Berger's foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of national security adviser in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. "The full extent of Berger's document removal," reports the House committee, "is not known and never can be known."

As the report clarifies, "Archives staff would have no way to know" if any part of a given National Security Council document was removed. Further, had Berger removed papers from a Staff Member Office File – these more loosely enumerated than the NSC documents – "It would be almost impossible for the Archives staff to know."

Among his more flagrant acts of criminal mischief, Berger purloined some highly classified documents and stashed them "at a construction site where they could have been found by anyone." This behavior does not exactly classify as "inadvertent," the media's original characterization of Berger's motivation.

As the House report also establishes, the FBI never questioned Berger about those first two visits nor submitted him to a polygraph about any of the visits as his plea deal required. The Department of Justice's only source of information about possible theft during Berger's first two visits was the man himself, and Berger has proved almost comically unreliable.

In fact, Berger has changed his story about the documents as often as his boss did about Monica, in both cases to adapt to the emerging evidence. Berger even refused to be interviewed by the House committee, the one honest enterprise in the whole investigation.

We know too that on his first visit, according to Archives staff, "Berger was especially interested in White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's personal office files." Again, this confirms my suspicions. According to the committee, "Had Berger seen 'a smoking gun' or other documents he did not want brought to an investigatory panel's attention, he could have removed it on this visit."

The much-discussed Millennium After Action Review was hardly the gun that smoked. In fact, the DOJ saw the Millennium Review as "beneficial to the Clinton administration" in that it made them look "engaged" in the war on terrorism.

The Millennium Review made the news only because it was the first document Berger got caught swiping, then on his third visit. The benign nature of this review led the DOJ to conclude that Berger took the documents for his "personal convenience," and the media predictably played right along.

To understand what that "smoking gun" might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time, Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high-security assignments. One morning in "late-summer," Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."

As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The president's handwritten comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef's uncle.

Understandably, the 9/11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was asked on her first real question: "Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?"

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old, "5 years, 6 years old." He asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam's National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the president was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his handwritten notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before Sept. 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the "exit strategy" that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a "mechanical failure." In his book "Against All Enemies," he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied "wall" and work together on the creation of the notorious "zoom-climb" animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3,200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the "mechanical failure." The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting – a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security adviser. Berger's boss, the less "reliable" Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the "planes-as-bombs" talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger's task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with handwritten notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke and Clinton.

On Friday April 1, 2005, the Department of Justice announced its embarrassingly lenient plea deal with Berger. The timing was more than fortuitous. On March 31, Terri Schiavo had died. On April 2, Pope John Paul II would die. DOJ could not have chosen a day better calculated to give a casually indifferent media an excuse for ignoring a bombshell of a story.

"It remains unclear," asked the Washington Post about the Berger story line as it existed in April 2005, "why he destroyed three versions of a document, but left two other versions intact."

As I responded at the time, the answer to this question was too obvious to ask –handwritten notes on a document make one version entirely more dangerous than an identical document without those notes.

The Wall Street Journal, among other media, did not take kindly to ruminations like mine above. I will flatter myself that its editors had me at least somewhere in mind when they opined April 8, 2005, "Some people won't let a bad conspiracy theory go."

The Journal continued in full hauteur, "We're referring to those who loudly assert that former NSC adviser Sandy Berger was trying to protect the Clinton administration when he illegally removed copies of sensitive documents from the National Archives in late 2003."

The Journal cited chief of DOJ's Public Integrity Section, Noel Hillman, who claimed that "no original documents were destroyed, and that the contents of all five at issue still exist and were made available to the 9/11 Commission."

According to the Journal, the "confusion" stemmed from the "mistaken idea" that Berger destroyed handwritten notes by various Clinton administration officials in the margins of these documents. This, said Hillman, was simply an "urban myth."

As we know now, the only urban myth in play was that presumed Republicans like Hillman were, as Berger claimed, trying "to assassinate his character to pursue their own ends." In fact, they were covering for him. "Nothing was lost to the public or the process," said Hillman of Berger's theft in April 2005. This was transparently false.

The House Committee found the DOJ to be "unacceptably incurious" about investigating Berger's time in the Archives, especially his first two visits. Although Hillman would publicly claim that Berger "did not have an intent to hide any of contents of the documents or conceal facts from the [9/11] commission," Hillman had been told on at least four prior occasions that the opposite was true.

According to the House report, "The 9/11 Commission was specifically interested in the office files of White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, and never was told that Berger had access to Clarke's original office files on May 30, 2002, and July 18, 2003."

If not exactly apologizing to us humble conspiracists, the Journal has at least admitted its error. Hillman was indeed dissembling, Journal editors acknowledged last week: "Mr. Berger was in a position to remove documents from Mr. Clarke's files, and thanks to lax security, breaches of protocol and undue deference on the part of Archives staff, we may never know whether Mr. Berger took documents other than the five he's admitted to removing."

The media will assuredly "never know" for one good reason: They refuse to look. If they do, they will discover a rat's nest of conspiracy that will make Watergate seem as consequential as a Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.

Why the Leakers haven't been punished

[It's disturbing how many traitors we have working for us in key positions-if only we could catch one.  Why stop leaking, there is never any consequence]

Leak Probes Stymied, FBI Memos Show
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 10, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/46407
A lack of cooperation from one or more intelligence agencies led the FBI to abandon several recent criminal investigations into leaks of classified information to the press, records obtained by The New York Sun indicate.

In January 2005, a top FBI official asked the Justice Department to close three pending leak inquiries because the "victim agency" repeatedly refused to assist the probes. The FBI's contact at the agency "has been uncooperative with the investigating field office and on numerous occasions failed to return phone calls or provide the case agent with requested documents pertinent to the investigation," the memo said, adding that the agency "cancelled personnel interviews, security briefings and meetings at the last minute and failed to reschedule for another time."

"None of the cases can proceed without the cooperation of the substantive unit at the victim agency, therefore the FBI considers all logical leads covered," the FBI official wrote. Within days or weeks, the cases were closed.

The memo, which was among more than 300 pages of leak investigation files released to the Sun this week under the Freedom of Information Act, was heavily redacted by the FBI, which removed the name of the writer, the identity of the intelligence agency involved, and nearly all details about the alleged leaks.

The documents provide a rare window into the Bush administration's effort to combat leaks of classified information that the administration has said are damaging national security in wartime. "At some point in time, it would be helpful if we can find somebody inside our government who is leaking materials, clearly against the law, that they be held to account," the president said at a press conference last month. "Perhaps the best way to make sure people don't leak classified documents is that there be a consequence for doing so."

However the records suggest that reticence on the part of intelligence agencies sometimes contributes to the futility of leak probes, and that, at least when it comes to leak investigations, the much-vaunted full cooperation between the FBI and other intelligence agencies after September 11 has yet to come to fruition. "It turns out you never can find the leaker," Mr. Bush lamented.

In an exchange of e-mails in September 2005, FBI agents handling a leak investigation codenamed "May Apple," complained about difficulties in getting basic information about who saw classified documents key to the case. A meeting was planned with agency lawyers to discuss requests that were pending for a year. "So close it if they stonewall him tomorrow and/or we learn the distribution list is too great, right? I bet the latter will at least point us to closing even if they are totally cooperative," one agent wrote.

A few weeks later, the head of the FBI's leak-sleuthing section, Michael Donner, wrote to the Justice Department's counterespionage chief, John Dion, asking to close the probe. The FBI's Washington field office "concluded that the investigation had languished due to repeated requests for information…that have not been fulfilled in a timely manner," Mr. Donner wrote. "Due to noncompliance from the victim agency and wide dissemination of the classified information, the FBI was unable to determine the source of the leak." In all of the released records, the FBI deleted the name of the agency or agencies about which the investigators complained. However, a former Justice Department official said the vast majority of leak probes originate at the CIA. In the "May Apple" case, references in the files to top-secret cables and to an Office of General Counsel also point to Langley, as the government's other main user of cables, the State Department, does not have a general counsel's post.

A CIA spokeswoman, Michele Neff, flatly denied that her agency has resisted the FBI's efforts to hunt down leakers. "That's simply not the case," she said yesterday. "Why would we not want to get to the bottom of the leaks? The Office of General Counsel works closely with the Department of Justice on investigations regarding unauthorized disclosures."

Ms. Neff pointed to a November interview in which the current CIA director, General Michael Hayden, said recent leaking has caused serious harm to his agency's effectiveness and to individuals. "When that takes place our ability to protect both the security and the freedom of the nation is reduced," General Hayden told WTOP radio. "I can say as a matter of first principle that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information has actually led to the deaths of individuals."

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said it is uncommon for leak investigators to encounter resistance from their counterparts in the intelligence community. "Generally, we feel we receive excellent cooperation from the intelligence agencies and other victimized agencies in leak investigations," he said.

Ms. Neff and Mr. Boyd said they could not comment on specific cases, such as the ones where the agents reported a lack of cooperation. Mr. Dion, the Justice Department official who received the memos detailing the difficulties, and the current head of the CIA's Office of General Counsel, John Rizzo, declined requests to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Donner, the FBI official who oversaw some of the probes described in the memos, retired last year. In an interview yesterday, he also declined to discuss specific cases, but acknowledged some instances where agencies were not enthusiastic about helping the FBI. "They know if they do not give us more information or refuse to, the case will not push forward. They'd rather have it go away or have it dropped," the former agent said. Many of the leak cases are initiated by the CIA, which sends the Justice Department a standard, 11-item questionnaire. Asked why an agency would refer a leak for investigation and then decline to provide necessary information, Mr. Donner said, "They have a disclosure potentially of a violation of federal law. They're obliged to provide it or refer it to the FBI." He said resistance may sometimes be because of legitimate concerns about further dissemination of sensitive data.

According to the records, the main reason for dropping leak investigations is that the classified information in question was so widely distributed that it is difficult to focus in on suspects. Mr. Donner said the current drive to share intelligence information made his job even harder. "I'm an old-school guy. A lot of people don't ‘need-to-know,'" he said.

Mr. Donner, who helped crack some high-profile spy cases, such as that of Aldrich Ames, said the leak chasing was frustrating. "I wish we had better success in this area," he said. "This stuff is a wilderness of mirrors."

The friction apparent in the records obtained by the Sun calls into question assurances by senior government officials that law enforcement and the intelligence community are working hand-inglove to ferret out leaks. In an unusual op-ed piece published in the New York Times in February 2006, the-then director of the CIA, Porter Goss, decried illegal leaks and promised that close coordination to eradicate them was underway. The Justice Department "is committed to working with us to investigate these cases aggressively," Mr. Goss wrote. "In addition, I have instituted measures within the agency to further safeguard the integrity of classified data."

Mr. Goss took over in September 2004, months before the FBI's moves to abandon the probes. However, it is unclear how much control he was able to establish over the agency. The former congressman and his staff clashed repeatedly with veteran CIA officials, some of whom quit. A top aide to Mr. Goss, Patrick Murray, who once oversaw an anti-leak task force for the Justice Department, reportedly crusaded against leaks at Langley. In May 2006, Mr. Goss abruptly resigned, offering no public reason for his departure. A former prosecutor who has accused career CIA officials of waging a leak campaign to undermine President Bush, Joseph diGenova, said yesterday that he suspected the resistance to the investigations was part of that effort. He also questioned why the leak cases were dropped.

"Stopping a leak investigation, assuming it's a serious leak, just because the victim agency won't cooperate is the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life," Mr. diGenova said. "A grand jury subpoena should issue….It seems to me there should be some sort of Congressional investigation of those instances."

The disclosed records also suggest that many investigations into leaks of top-secret data are abandoned without pursuing some obvious, if intrusive, investigative techniques, such as seeking testimony or phone records from members of the press. Other components of the Justice Department have recently used those tactics in less sensitive cases, such as leaks about planned federal raids of Islamic charities and about a grand jury investigating steroid use in baseball.

"There is a stunning lack of balance in the way all these cases are approached," Mr. diGenova said. The FBI files were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought in July by this reporter. In November, a federal judge in San Francisco, citing the intense public interest in leak investigations, ordered the government to answer the requests within 30 days. The judge, Maxine Chesney, recently extended the deadline to April for some of the agencies involved.

Last month, the FBI told Judge Chesney that 22 of 94 files believed to relate to recent press leaks were missing with no indication of who had removed them.

Read the documents here.

THE BEAR GOES WALKABOUT

http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=24

THE BEAR GOES WALKABOUT
You gotta love these alternative theories for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the late “Russian dissident” (and there’s a phrase one hadn’t expected to make a comeback quite so soon). Relax, say the Kremlinologists (and there’s another), it wasn’t Putin who had the guy whacked. It was rogue elements within the state apparatus who gained access to supposedly secure facilities and then contaminated five international jets and dozens of joints all over London in order to pull off the world’s first radiological assassination.
Oh, well, that’s okay then. Nothing to worry about.
The late Mr Litvinenko, on the other hand, added to the story some last-minute wrinkles of his own. On his deathbed, the former KGB agent converted to Islam and asked that one day his corpse be reburied in a peaceful and independent Chechnya.
Now what’s that about? Well, like many in Russian political and media circles – including his fellow murder victim Anna Politkovskaya – Litvinenko had become intrigued by the 1999 Moscow apartment-house attacks that killed 300 people and provided the pretext for the Second Chechen War: Were they, in fact, a set-up intended to advance the career of Vladimir Putin? In other words, his entire presidency is founded on a lie. One can understand why a belief in such a conspiracy might destroy one’s faith in one’s country, and even that it might lead one to embrace Chechen separatist leaders, as Litvinenko did. But it doesn’t entirely explain the Muslim conversion business.
I say somewhere or other in my new book that, just as the export of Russia’s ideology was the biggest destabilizing factor in the last century, so the implosion of that ideology could be one of the biggest in this century. That’s to say, what’s left of the Soviet Union has hit the apocalyptic jackpot: the Middle East has Islamists, Africa has Aids and North Korea has nukes, but only Russia has the lot – a disease-riddled Slav population and a fast growing Muslim population jostling atop a colossal nuclear arsenal. The Litvinenko murder is only the first of many stories in which Islam, nuclear materials and Russian decline will intersect in novel ways.
There are ten million people in Moscow. Do you know how many of them are Muslim? Two and a half million. Or about a quarter of the population. The ethnic Russians are older; the Muslims are younger. The ethnic Russians are already in net population decline; the Muslim population in the country has increased by 40% in the last 15 years. Seven out of ten Russian pregnancies (according to some surveys) are aborted; in some Muslim communities, the fertility rate is ten babies per woman. Russian men have record rates of heart disease, liver disease, drug addiction and Aids; Muslims are the only guys in the country who aren’t face down in the vodka.
Faced with these trends, most experts extrapolate: thus, it’s generally accepted that by mid-century the Russian Federation will be majority Muslim. But you don’t really need to extrapolate when the future’s already checking in at reception. The Toronto Star (which is Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper and impeccably liberal) recently noted that by 2015 Muslims will make up a majority of Russia’s army.
Hmm. That’ll add an interesting dimension to the Chechen campaign. Say what you like about Russia but it doesn’t want for plot twists. It is, in that sense, a textbook example of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”: a thing we know we don’t know. What will happen in Russia? A remorseless evolution into a majority Muslim state? Bosnian-style civil war? The secession of a dozen or so of Russia’s 89 federal regions? A Muslim military coup? Or a panicky attempt to arrest decline by selling off your few remaining assets, including national resources to the Chinese and nukes to anyone who wants them? None of us knows, but we should know enough to know we don’t know. The Russia of 15 years ago is already ancient history.
Which brings me, alas, to the Iraq Study Group. This silly shallow report, of which James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the rest should be ashamed, betrays no understanding of how fast events are moving. It falls back on the usual multilateral mood music. It wants Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel and everything else to be mediated by the transnational jet set – the Big Five at the UN, the EU, the Arab League. Just for starters, look at the permanent members of the Security Council: America, Britain, France, Russia, China. What’s the old line on those fellows? The World War Two victory parade preserved in aspic? If only. By 2050, Russia will be the umpteenth Muslim nuclear power, but the first with a permanent seat on the UNSC. Or maybe the second, if France gets there first. And, judging from London literary offerings like George Walden’s Time To Emigrate?, Britain might not be far behind. But, as I said above, forget the extrapolations: already, domestic Muslim constituencies are an important factor in the foreign policy thinking of three out of the big five. Are Baker and Hamilton even aware of that?
As I always say, there is no “stability”. We thought we’d “contained” Soviet Communism. Instead, the social pathologies that took hold during the Russian people’s half-century of “containment” will have profound consequences for us and the rest of the world long after the last Commie is dead and buried.National Review, December 18th 2006
NEW YEAR RESOLUTION
My New Year's resolution is not to make any New Year predictions. I called last year pretty badly -- readers may remember my confident assertions every week or two that the Republicans would hold the House and Senate. War is a tough sell in a democracy, particularly the kind of war we face today. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the seductiveness of complacency. If you happened to catch John Edwards, the hair-today-gone-tomorrow pretty boy of the 2004 campaign, re-emerging in the artfully positioned debris of New Orleans last week, it was hard not to be impressed: An empty suit had somehow managed to get emptier. He's running for president on five big priorities: 'guaranteeing health care,' 'leading the fight against global warming,' 'strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty,' and by then my fingers were too comatose to write down the fifth theme but, if memory serves, it was guaranteeing to lead the fight to strengthen ending the shame of platitudinous campaign rhetoric.

Baby Mullet

Our Fallout-Shelter Future
We’ll be back to duck and cover if we don’t stop Iran first…

By Stanley Kurtz

American politics is about to undergo a sea change. Our lives are going to be transformed on a more personal level as well. Sometime between now and five-to-ten years from now we’re going to be forced to choose between preemptive war with Iran, and living in a post-proliferation world. War with Iran will probably mean casualties on American soil. Iran has likely placed terrorist agents in the United States, with instructions to retaliate against civilian targets in the event of war. We’ll also likely see attacks on Persian Gulf oil shipments, and therefore a huge spike in the price of gasoline, with major economic consequences.

 
But what if there is no preemptive strike? What if Iran gets the bomb? (I find it tough to credit the notion that a negotiated agreement with Iran can prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. At any rate, only an imminent American military strike would have any hope of generating a verifiable bargain.) An extraordinary new article by Stephen Peter Rosen, “After Proliferation: What to Do if More States Go Nuclear,” makes it obvious that our lives and our politics are going to change dramatically in a post-proliferation world. So either we go to war with Iran — likely a more costly war than any we’ve faced since 9/11 — or our lives will transform forever. To see what I mean, let’s take a tour of Rosen’s remarkable argument.

Who Hit Me?
Rosen begins by sidestepping (or seeming to sidestep) the controversy between hawkish proliferation pessimists and dovish proliferation optimists. Proliferation pessimists (like yours truly) see only a limited chance of averting disaster if states like Iran get the bomb. For hawkish proliferation pessimists, tough action in the present is our last, best chance to keep the dangerous nuclear genie corked-up in his bottle.

Proliferation optimists, on the other hand, see reasons for hope in the record of nuclear peace during the Cold War. While granting the risks, proliferation optimists point out that the very horror of the nuclear option tends, in practice, to keep the peace. Without choosing between hawkish proliferation pessimists and dovish proliferation optimists, Rosen simply asks how we ought to act in a post-proliferation world.

Rosen assumes (rightly I believe) that proliferation is unlikely to stop with Iran. Once Iran gets the bomb, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are likely to develop their own nuclear weapons, for self-protection, and so as not to allow Iran to take de facto cultural-political control of the Muslim world. (I think you’ve got to at least add Egypt to this list.) With three, four, or more nuclear states in the Muslim Middle East, what becomes of deterrence?

A key to deterrence during the Cold War was our ability to know who had hit whom. With a small number of geographically separated nuclear states, and with the big opponents training satellites and specialized advance-guard radar emplacements on each other, it was relatively easy to know where a missile had come from. But what if a nuclear missile is launched at the United States from somewhere in a fully nuclearized Middle East, in the middle of a war in which, say, Saudi Arabia and Iran are already lobbing conventional missiles at one another? Would we know who had attacked us? Could we actually drop a retaliatory nuclear bomb on someone without being absolutely certain? And as Rosen asks, What if the nuclear blow was delivered against us by an airplane or a cruise missile? It might be almost impossible to trace the attack back to its source with certainty, especially in the midst of an ongoing conventional conflict.

More Terror
We’re familiar with the horror scenario of a Muslim state passing a nuclear bomb to terrorists for use against an American city. But imagine the same scenario in a multi-polar Muslim nuclear world. With several Muslim countries in possession of the bomb, it would be extremely difficult to trace the state source of a nuclear terror strike. In fact, this very difficulty would encourage states (or ill-controlled elements within nuclear states — like Pakistan’s intelligence services or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) to pass nukes to terrorists. The tougher it is to trace the source of a weapon, the easier it is to give the weapon away. In short, nuclear proliferation to multiple Muslim states greatly increases the chances of a nuclear terror strike.

Right now, the Indians and Pakistanis “enjoy” an apparently stable nuclear stand-off. Both countries have established basic deterrence, channels of communication, and have also eschewed a potentially destabilizing nuclear arms race. Attacks by Kashmiri militants in 2001 may have pushed India and Pakistan close to the nuclear brink. Yet since then, precisely because of the danger, the two countries seem to have established a clear, deterrence-based understanding. The 2001 crisis gives fuel to proliferation pessimists, while the current stability encourages proliferation optimists. Rosen points out, however, that a multi-polar nuclear Middle East is unlikely to follow the South Asian model.

Deep mutual suspicion between an expansionist, apocalyptic, Shiite Iran, secular Turkey, and the Sunni Saudis and Egyptians (not to mention Israel) is likely to fuel a dangerous multi-pronged nuclear arms race. Larger arsenals mean more chance of a weapon being slipped to terrorists. The collapse of the world’s non-proliferation regime also raises the chances that nuclearization will spread to Asian powers like Taiwan and Japan.

And of course, possession of nuclear weapons is likely to embolden Iran, especially in the transitional period before the Saudis develop weapons of their own. Like Saddam, Iran may be tempted to take control of Kuwait’s oil wealth, on the assumption that the United States will not dare risk a nuclear confrontation by escalating the conflict. If the proliferation optimists are right, then once the Saudis get nukes, Iran would be far less likely to make a move on nearby Kuwait. On the other hand, to the extent that we do see conventional war in a nuclearized Middle East, the losers will be sorely tempted to cancel out their defeat with a nuclear strike. There may have been nuclear peace during the Cold War, but there were also many “hot” proxy wars. If conventional wars break out in a nuclearized Middle East, it may be very difficult to stop them from escalating into nuclear confrontations.

Duck!
What would life be like in such a world? Rosen argues that we must lose no time in constructing a specialized radar and satellite warning network trained on the Middle East. Without knowing who’s sending missiles against us, we cannot strike back or deter. Rosen also argues that even a somewhat leaky anti-missile defense system is going to be a must. A star-wars-type missile-defense system may have seemed powerless against the massive might of the old Soviet nuclear force. But against a growing nuclear power with a small arsenal, or against Islamic radicals who manage to commandeer an isolated nuclear-armed missile, an anti-missile defense could make a real difference.

This leads us to what may be Rosen’s most striking recommendation. “Duck and cover” is back! In a post-proliferation world, we are going to be raising another generation of children (probably several generations of children) marked by nerve-wracking “retention drills.” And get ready...the fallout shelter is coming back, too. Given the Soviets’ overwhelmingly large nuclear arsenal — capable of turning the entire United States to dust in the event of a major nuclear exchange — fallout shelters came to seem like a joke. But when dealing with a possible strike from a single weapon, or at most a mere handful of weapons, the logic of the fallout shelter is compelling. We’re going to need to be able to evacuate our cities in the event of a direct attack, or to avoid radiation plumes from cities that have already been struck. Tens or hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by such measures.

But what about the problem of retaliation? Is there a middle way between the seemingly intolerable option of doing nothing to respond to a nuclear strike on New York or Washington, and indiscriminate nuclear retaliation against a country that may not even have attacked us? Rosen says the answer is a massive conventional campaign to take over and transform the countries that have struck us. That may seem intolerable now, but the public will demand no less in the wake of a nuclear attack on American soil.

So this is the upshot of Rosen’s remarkable article. Now let’s think through the implications.

Dead Doves
For starters, the dovish Democrats are doomed. In “Hawkish Gloom,” I pointed in broad terms to the imminent hawkification of the United States. Well, Rosen’s detailed account of a post-proliferation world makes it clear that the revitalized George McGovern-Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party cannot survive much past the moment when Iran gets the bomb. As soon as that happens, we’re going to plunged into a proliferation crisis and a new Cold War, at least as dangerous as the first Cold War (arguably more so). At that point, the Democrats are going to beg Joe Lieberman to come back and give them his blessing. It turns out that we really are going to see a purge of the Democratic doves, and the accession of a Truman-like party, although it will probably take quite a few election cycles before the Democrats finally manage to remove taint of their Ned Lamont wing.

Funny how the very thing the doves don’t want — a preemptive strike on Iran, is the only thing that can save them. A nuclear Iran, followed by cascading proliferation throughout the Middle East and beyond, means the death of the dove. Even a negotiated and verifiable agreement to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program is inconceivable without the sort of credible threat of force the doves have made impossible to sustain.

A fully nuclearized, multi-polar Middle East will put us onto a permanent war footing. With Americans building fallout shelters, running evacuation drills, and otherwise preparing for a terrorist nuclear strike, dovishness won’t even be an option. Our political choices will probably be of two types. Exactly how hawkish shall we be, and how shall we shape our alliances?

After Iran gets the bomb, the fantasy that we can handle the post-9/11 world with our tiny military is going to disappear. As Rosen points out, the only middle way between helpless acceptance of nuclear terror and massive nuclear retaliation against countries that may not even have attacked us, is going to be through conventional invasions. Before, and certainly after a nuclear attack (even a terrorist and/or Iranian nuclear strike on Israel or Saudi Arabia), Americans will be forced to raise a large army capable of transforming the Middle East before final Armageddon strikes.

What’s that you say? We tried that in Iraq and it didn’t work. Well, after the bomb goes off, I assure you we’re going to try it again. In fact, you’ll demand that we try it. And with your patience and political support, at that point, who knows, it just may work.

New Arguments
Over and above our political arguments over precisely how much to expand our military (really a lot, or a whole heck of a lot), we’re also going to argue about our alliance strategies. With multiple nuclear powers, there will probably be a lot of shifting coalitions. True, the initial alliances are already evident. In a nuclear Middle East, we will be allied with Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia against Iran. But who knows whether Iran may try to strike a deal with one of the other Muslim states at some point, perhaps cozying up to Saudi Arabia if America puts too much pressure on the House of Saud. Just as America (very imperfectly) peeled Pakistan away from the informal rogue-state coalition after 9/11, shifting alliances between multiple nuclear camps will become a real possibility. American power will no longer command a fully nuclearized world. Instead, we’ll be the first among nuclear equals, jockeying for position against coalitions of powers who collectively may be able to stand us down. In this new world, Ned Lamont and the Daily Kos will be a distant memory.

The most egregious American doves don’t even bother to think out a position on the prospects for deterrence in a post-proliferation world. Implicitly, however, like their realist counterparts, the Howard Dean doves are proliferation optimists. Whether they’ve thought it through or not, their policy preferences require them to believe that a nuclear Iran can be deterred on the model of the Cold War.

Rosen claims to be neutral between the dovish proliferation optimists and the hawkish proliferation pessimists. But the truth is, everything Rosen says inclines us toward pessimism. One after another, Rosen knocks down the pillars of the Cold War deterrence analogy, showing that in a post-proliferation world, the balance of forces will tend toward instability. The lesson is that we face two choices: preemptive war with Iran, or a nightmare world on the brink of nuclear war and nuclear terror for the foreseeable future. Anyway you slice it, the doves are doomed. Unfortunately, so may we be all. Ready or not...duck and cover!

Iran's Day of Terror?

 
Iran's Day of Terror?           
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 27, 2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has frustrated Western officials by refusing to reply to their offer of various incentives in exchange for Iran’s discarding its nuclear program until August 22. The Western governments had asked Ahmadinejad to reply by June 29; why would Tehran need two extra months?

Farid Ghadry, the president of the Reform Party of Syria, has offered a provocative explanation for this delay. He asserts that the Supreme National Security Council of Iran chose the August 22 date “for a very precise reason. August 21, 2006 (Rajab 27, 1427) is known in the Islamic calendar as the Night of the Sira’a and Miira’aj, the night Prophet Mohammed (saas) ascended to heaven from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on a Bourak (Half animal, half man), while a great light lit-up the night sky, and visited Heaven and Hell also Beit al-Saada and Beit al-Shaqaa (House of Happiness and House of Misery) and then descended back to Mecca.…”

The Night Journey, or Miraj, is central to Islam’s claim to Jerusalem as an Islamic holy city. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was carried on a Buraq, a miraculous horse with a human head, from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he ascended into heaven and met the other prophets. The only thing the Qur’an has to say about it is this: “Glory to (Allah) Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth (all things)” (17:1). There is no identification of the “farthest Mosque” with any mosque in Jerusalem in this, but the Hadith is very clear on the identification of its location with Jerusalem.

The traditions say that Muhammad and the Buraq, along with the angel Gabriel, went to the Temple Mount, and from there to heaven itself, where Muhammad encountered various prophets. In the sixth heaven was Moses, occasioning a dig at the Jews. “When I left him,” Muhammad says, “he wept. Someone asked him, ‘What makes you weep?’ Moses said, ‘I weep because after me there has been sent (Muhammad as a Prophet) a young man, whose followers will enter Paradise in greater numbers than my followers.’”

Evidently, however, Muhammad’s stories of his journey were not altogether convincing: even some of the Muslims abandoned their faith and challenged Muhammad’s most faithful follower, Abu Bakr, to do the same. Abu Bakr was contemptuous: “If he says so then it is true. And what is so surprising in that? He tells me that communications from God from heaven to earth come to him in an hour of a day or night and I believe him, and that is more extraordinary than that at which you boggle!” The world has continued to witness such unshakeable devotion from Muslims to this day.

Did Muhammad really go anywhere? According to his favorite wife, Aisha, he did not: “The apostle’s body remained where it was but God removed his spirit by night.” Nevertheless, the Night Journey has become firmly embedded in the Islamic consciousness, such that Muslims today celebrate it as one of the central events of Muhammad’s life. And now, according to Ghadry, Ahmadinejad is planning an illumination of the night sky over Jerusalem to rival the one that greeted the Prophet of Islam on his journey. What the Iranian President, he says, is “promising the world by August 22 is the light in the sky over the Aqsa Mosque that took place the night before. That is his answer to the package of incentives the international community offered Iran on June 6.”

Certainly a nuclear attack on Jerusalem or even an all-out conventional assault against Israel by Iran would be consistent with Ahmadinejad’s oft-repeated denials of Israel’s right to exist and recent predictions that its demise was at hand. He hinted at the use of nuclear weapons in his phrasing when he said that Israel “pushed the button of its own destruction” by finally retaliating against Hizballah’s relentless rocket barrage from south Lebanon.

“Arrogant powers,” Ahmadinejad said, “have set up a base for themselves to threaten and plunder nations in the region. But today, the occupier regime” – that is, Israel – “whose philosophy is based on threats, massacre and invasion, has reached its finishing line.”

Will he attempt to make good on these threats this year on the anniversary of the Miraj, illuminating the night sky over Jerusalem? Will Western powers heed Farid Ghadry’s words and move to stop Iran before it is too late?

Torture found rife in China

Torture found rife in China
December 3, 2005
From combined dispatches
BEIJING -- A United Nations rights investigator said yesterday that torture was still widespread in China and accused authorities of trying to obstruct his work on a historic fact-finding mission.
"Torture is on the decline, but it is still widespread," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on torture, told reporters at the end of his two-week trip.
"There is much that still needs to be done; there is a need for many more structural reforms," said Mr. Nowak, a law professor in Vienna, Austria.
Torture methods he cited include the use of electric-shock batons, cigarette burns, submersion in pits of water or sewage and exposure to conditions of extreme heat or cold.
In Tibet, Mr. Nowak was told that sleep deprivation was frequently used, in one case for 17 days.
The victims were usually "monks and nuns who still uphold their allegiance and support of the Dalai Lama and who are seen as endangering national security because they are often seen as separatists," he said.
Mr. Nowak said Chinese authorities had closely monitored and obstructed his work, which included interviews conducted in Beijing as well as in the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.
"There was frequent surveillance of my interviews that I had outside prison with victims' family members," Mr. Nowak said.
He and his team were not allowed to bring photographic and electronic equipment into the prisons and their visits to correctional facilities were limited to the working hours of the staff.
"As the authorities were generally announced an hour in advance, the visits could not be considered to have been strictly 'unannounced,' " said a press release distributed at the end of Mr. Nowak's visit.
Mr. Nowak told reporters he also had received reports that victims' family members were prevented from meeting him -- as they were either put under house arrest, stopped physically from seeing him or simply intimidated.
While interviewing prisoners, Mr. Nowak said he observed "a palpable level of fear and self-censorship," he said.
"Unfortunately, a number of people did not wish to talk to me, which I regretted," he said.
However, the U.N. envoy said he was allowed to speak to any detainee he wished to meet. "Not one single request was actually refused by the prison authorities," he said.
During a two-week visit, Mr. Nowak met 30 detainees held in Beijing, Tibet and the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.
Beijing-based civil rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng said earlier that he was followed and monitored closely by security agents when he met with U.N. rights officials who came to China with Mr. Nowak.
At the beginning of his trip last month, Mr. Nowak praised China's leaders for acknowledging the widespread abuse of prisoners in the nation's jails, saying there was a growing awareness that improvement was needed.
Mr. Nowak came to China after receiving government assurances it would cooperate with him and allow him unannounced visits to prisons and private talks with prisoners.
In the early 1990s a U.N. special rapporteur on arbitrary detention visited prisons in Tibet, but prisoners were punished for what they told the investigator, rights group have said.
Beijing said Mr. Nowak's visit shows the government's commitment to banning torture.
"Through this visit, we can demonstrate our sincerity," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Thursday, the day before Mr. Nowak's press conference. "It is conducive to promoting understanding."

So there is at least 1 Democrat that understands National Security.....

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007611
Our Troops Must Stay
America can't abandon 27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists.

BY JOE LIEBERMAN
Tuesday, November 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.

Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.

There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing. And Sunni candidates are actively campaigning for seats in the National Assembly. People are working their way toward a functioning society and economy in the midst of a very brutal, inhumane, sustained terrorist war against the civilian population and the Iraqi and American military there to protect it.

It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority.

Before going to Iraq last week, I visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has been the only genuine democracy in the region, but it is now getting some welcome company from the Iraqis and Palestinians who are in the midst of robust national legislative election campaigns, the Lebanese who have risen up in proud self-determination after the Hariri assassination to eject their Syrian occupiers (the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias should be next), and the Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Saudis who have taken steps to open up their governments more broadly to their people. In my meeting with the thoughtful prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he declared with justifiable pride that his country now has the most open, democratic political system in the Arab world. He is right.

In the face of terrorist threats and escalating violence, eight million Iraqis voted for their interim national government in January, almost 10 million participated in the referendum on their new constitution in October, and even more than that are expected to vote in the elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Every time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam was overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them. Most encouraging has been the behavior of the Sunni community, which, when disappointed by the proposed constitution, registered to vote and went to the polls instead of taking up arms and going to the streets. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.

None of these remarkable changes would have happened without the coalition forces led by the U.S. And, I am convinced, almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.

The leaders of Iraq's duly elected government understand this, and they asked me for reassurance about America's commitment. The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this. I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

The leaders of America's military and diplomatic forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, have a clear and compelling vision of our mission there. It is to create the environment in which Iraqi democracy, security and prosperity can take hold and the Iraqis themselves can defend their political progress against those 10,000 terrorists who would take it from them.

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground. The administration's recent use of the banner "clear, hold and build" accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.

We are now embedding a core of coalition forces in every Iraqi fighting unit, which makes each unit more effective and acts as a multiplier of our forces. Progress in "clearing" and "holding" is being made. The Sixth Infantry Division of the Iraqi Security Forces now controls and polices more than one-third of Baghdad on its own. Coalition and Iraqi forces have together cleared the previously terrorist-controlled cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Tal Afar, and most of the border with Syria. Those areas are now being "held" secure by the Iraqi military themselves. Iraqi and coalition forces are jointly carrying out a mission to clear Ramadi, now the most dangerous city in Al-Anbar province at the west end of the Sunni Triangle.

Nationwide, American military leaders estimate that about one-third of the approximately 100,000 members of the Iraqi military are able to "lead the fight" themselves with logistical support from the U.S., and that that number should double by next year. If that happens, American military forces could begin a drawdown in numbers proportional to the increasing self-sufficiency of the Iraqi forces in 2006. If all goes well, I believe we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007, but it is also likely that our presence will need to be significant in Iraq or nearby for years to come.

The economic reconstruction of Iraq has gone slower than it should have, and too much money has been wasted or stolen. Ambassador Khalilzad is now implementing reform that has worked in Afghanistan--Provincial Reconstruction Teams, composed of American economic and political experts, working in partnership in each of Iraq's 18 provinces with its elected leadership, civil service and the private sector. That is the "build" part of the "clear, hold and build" strategy, and so is the work American and international teams are doing to professionalize national and provincial governmental agencies in Iraq.

These are new ideas that are working and changing the reality on the ground, which is undoubtedly why the Iraqi people are optimistic about their future--and why the American people should be, too.

I cannot say enough about the U.S. Army and Marines who are carrying most of the fight for us in Iraq. They are courageous, smart, effective, innovative, very honorable and very proud. After a Thanksgiving meal with a great group of Marines at Camp Fallujah in western Iraq, I asked their commander whether the morale of his troops had been hurt by the growing public dissent in America over the war in Iraq. His answer was insightful, instructive and inspirational: "I would guess that if the opposition and division at home go on a lot longer and get a lot deeper it might have some effect, but, Senator, my Marines are motivated by their devotion to each other and the cause, not by political debates."

Thank you, General. That is a powerful, needed message for the rest of America and its political leadership at this critical moment in our nation's history. Semper Fi.

Mr. Lieberman is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.

Trouble for L'il Assad

Unsilenced Voices
Damscus’s road to Damascus.

By Nir Boms

With increasing international pressure over the U.N. investigation into the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, Syria's young president, Bashar al-Assad, has taken the identification of his country with the Assad name to new levels. In a recent speech he defiantly stated: "It will not be President Assad who will bow his head nor the head of his country. We only bow to God almighty." As he desperately calls for an emergency meeting of the Arab league that might help alleviate the growing international pressures, Assad is trying to reassert control in a troubled country that now must handle parallel attacks from the United Nations, United States, and, increasingly, the Syrian opposition

 
Just hours before the reported suicide of Syrian interior minister Ghazi Kanaan in his Damascus office, President al-Assad vehemently denied that his administration was linked to the February assassination of Rafik Hariri. "Any Syrian involved in the killing," said Assad, "would be guilty of treason." Kanaan, who ran the powerful network of Syrian agents that dominated Lebanese politics for most of the past 25 years, reportedly shot himself in his office following the release of Lebanese reports implicating him in fraud and corruption, and three weeks after he was questioned by a U.N. team investigating the Hariri assassination. It may be the case that Kanaan independently understood that treason in Syria is punishable by death. But recent evidence seems to indicate that somebody else in Syria understood this for him.

Kanaan had information that could have reached the wrong ears. One of his key rivals was none other than Assef Shawkat, the head of the Syrian military intelligence and a brother-in-law of the Syrian president. Shawkat is now considered one of the key suspects in the Hariri plot, according to a recently released U.N. report. Syrian sources noted that Kanaan's liquidation was possibly a direct result of fears amongst Shawkat and his subordinates that the U.N. indictment would lead to Kanaan's trying to remove Shawkat and his followers from power.

The U.N. report implicating Damascus in the Hariri murder is clearly disrupting Syrian domestic politics, stating as it does that "many leads point directly towards Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination." "In Damascus, fear is now in the camp of power, the camp of Bashar," a senior official told the Washington Post. All this has not escaped notice by the Syrian opposition.

The Syrian opposition, a term that was a misnomer just two years ago, now has over 20 visible outlets with an increasing number of political activists who meet regularly inside and outside Syria. The Syrian Democratic Coalition — a dynamic group of ten Syrian opposition organizations led by Farid Ghadry — held a recent conference in Paris with representatives from political parties, human-rights organizations, tribes, and religious groups. The conference unveiled a registry for Syrians who are interested in voting and establishing a parliament-in-exile. The next conference — scheduled for mid-December — is expected to be the largest gathering of liberal Syrian activists, most of whom are under the age of 40. Ghadry is not the only one. Riyad al-Turk, a leading opposition politician publicly called on President Assad and his government to resign, and Rifaat al-Assad, the exiled uncle of Syria's current leader, is also positioning himself as possible successor to his nephew.

Inside Syria, a coalition of oppositions groups issued the "Damascus declaration." The declaration, signed by a number of opposition groups, including the extremist Islamic Brotherhood, calls for an end to Syria's emergency laws and other forms of political repression, and for a national conference on democratic change. The Brotherhood, however, was quick to release other statements against the participation of Kurds, Alawaites, and Syrian exiles in the process. The Syrian police responded with a series of raids on the opposition and by disrupting a campaign launching meeting in the office of 72-year-old lawyer and activist Hassan Abdul Azim. The Syrian police also arrested Kamal Labwani, a Syrian human-rights activist who had just returned from a trip to the U.S. Labwani, who is also the chairman of the Democratic Liberal Gathering in Syria was charged with spreading news outside the country that "threatened national unity."

But the opposition grows and the Assad regime is losing its grip on power. The United States should sit tight as President Assad, caught in a trap of his own making, will struggle to give answers to the U.N. prosecutor on the one hand, and to his growing circle of critics on the other. In the meantime Europe and the United States should pay attention and listen to the new Syrian voices. Unlike Assad, they belong to the future.

— Nir Boms is the vice president of the Center for Freedom in the Middle East.

The "Moral Authority" Canard

http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200511280803.asp

The “Moral Authority” Canard
Senator McCain is heroic, awe-inspiring, and wrong.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
( a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.)

Key Passages:

I spent a number of years in the eye of the counterterror storm: prosecuting jihadists, putting my family through the attendant anxieties, and watching the criminal-justice system writhe through what the Clinton administration called its "war" on terror — a curious battle plan in which the enemy kills you and is then presumed innocent. I came away thinking the whole prosecution paradigm was a national-security debacle.

"THE TICKING TIME BOMB
Senator McCain well knows this. That's why the most telling part of his essay is his wholly dissatisfying answer to the so-called ticking-time-bomb scenario. Yes, he admits, "if we capture a terrorist who we have sound reasons to believe possesses specific knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack ... an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives." "

"But why, Senator? You just got done telling us such information would be inherently unreliable — aside from its method of extraction somehow causing our own soldiers to be tortured by the same countries that foreswore such abuse when they solemnly signed the Geneva Conventions. Why is it that we "might well" try some rough stuff?"

"The best way, the honest, bright-line way, is to acknowledge that there are circumstances in which coercive interrogation would be appropriate; to be forthright about what those circumstances are and the lengths you would be willing to go; to require personal approval by a very high-ranking executive-branch official who would then be accountable; and to prove you mean business by aggressively prosecuting anyone and anything that does not meet the rigorous standards you've taken pains to establish."

Pop Quiz

Pop Quiz: 

Who said the following?
1.  "You, who have used nuclear weapons against innocent people, who have used uranium ordnance in Iraq, should be tried as war criminals in courts,"

        A. Michael Moore
        B. Cindy Sheehan
        C. Howard Dean
        D. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
   
Give up?  Surprisingly the answer is "D".   
Doesn't this illustrate the insanity of the American Left?  They are sharing the same talking points with the enemies of this country.  Apparently liberals have their conscious removed while in college.

Tehran raps U.S. as 'war criminals'
November 27, 2005

TEHRAN -- Iran's hard-line president said yesterday the Bush administration should be tried on war-crimes charges, and he denounced the West for pressuring Iran to curb its controversial nuclear program.

"You, who have used nuclear weapons against innocent people, who have used uranium ordnance in Iraq, should be tried as war criminals in courts," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.

    Mr. Ahmadinejad did not elaborate, but he apparently was referring to the U.S. military's use of artillery shells packed with depleted uranium, which is far less radioactive than natural uranium and is left over from the process of enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel.

    Since the Iraq war started in 2003, American forces have fired at least 120 tons of shells packed with depleted uranium, an extremely dense material used by the U.S. and British militaries to penetrate tank armor. Once fired, the shells melt, vaporize and turn to dust.

    "Who in the world are you to accuse Iran of suspicious nuclear-armed activity?" Mr. Ahmadinejad said during a nationally televised ceremony marking the 36th anniversary of the establishment of Iran's volunteer Basij paramilitary force.

    Iran has been under intense international pressure to curb its nuclear program, which the United States claims is part of an effort to produce nuclear weapons. Iran denies such claims and says its program is aimed at generating electricity.

    Iran insists that it has the right to fully develop the program, including enrichment of nuclear fuel -- a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors or atomic bombs.

    State-run TV said more than 9 million Basij members formed human chains in different parts of the country to mark their militia's anniversary. Thousands linked hands to make a 12-mile chain along an expressway in northern Tehran.

    It is estimated that the Basij comprise 15 percent of Iran's population, or about 10 million people.
    Meanwhile, a leading German newsweekly reported that Iran has offered North Korea oil and natural gas as payment for help in developing nuclear missiles.

    A senior Iranian official traveled to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, during the second week of October to make the offer, the Der Spiegel magazine reported yesterday, citing unidentified Western intelligence sources.

    It was not clear what North Korea's response was, the magazine said.
    Diplomats and intelligence sources say Iran is pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium in defiance of international pressure to stop developing sensitive nuclear technology to calm fears it is seeking nuclear weapons.

    Iran's Shahab-3 missiles are based on North Korea's No-Dong rockets and Pyongyang is Tehran's most important partner in developing missile technology, Der Spiegel said.

Biting the Hand
Why is the ADL going after evangelical Christians?

BY DAVID BROG
Friday, November 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Earlier this month, Abraham Foxman took to the podium to address the key members of his Anti-Defamation League, the leading watchdog of anti-Semitism in America. In somber tones, Mr. Foxman sounded the alarm over the "key domestic challenge to the American Jewish community and to our democratic values." The threat he described was neither Islamic terror nor assimilation but a much more imaginative one. "Make no mistake," Mr. Foxman warned, "we are facing an emerging Christian Right leadership that intends to 'Christianize' all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker room of professional, collegiate and amateur sports, from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants."

Mr. Foxman is an intelligent and experienced man. Thus one must marvel at his ability to scan the nation and determine that the key challenge facing American Jews comes from socially conservative Christians. The fate of beloved cartoon characters aside, there are very serious threats facing American Jews today, and they have nothing to do with social conservatives.

Al Qaeda and the home-grown cells who serve it have targeted Jews around the world, including in America. In 2002, the FBI warned Jewish leaders that al Qaeda was plotting to attack domestic Jewish targets with gasoline trucks. In 2003, the Bush administration raised the homeland-terror threat level to orange due in part to a large volume of threats against Jewish targets. And in August, the Justice Department secured the indictments of four American Muslims in a conspiracy to attack Los Angeles synagogues.

Outside of physical threats from without, Jewish life in America is seriously threatened from within by assimilation. The intermarriage rate has grown in every decade since 1970 and has now reached an alarming 47%. Only one-third of the children of these intermarriages are raised Jewish. These statistics, combined with the very low fertility rates of those Jews who do marry other Jews, explain why the Jewish population in America is steadily shrinking.

Far from being the source of such threats to American Jews, Christians are actually important allies in combating them. Conservative Christians surpass Jews as proponents of a robust war on terror at home and abroad. And when it comes to assimilation, these Christians demonstrate the only solution by their example. Evangelicals take their faith seriously: They go to church, teach religion to their children, and act on their faith through good works. If Jews followed their lead, assimilation rates would plummet.

More troubling than Mr. Foxman's misdiagnosis of the threats facing American Jews is his mischaracterization of Christian goals. Just because Christian activists are motivated by their Christian faith does not mean that they are seeking to "Christianize" America. As every schoolchild knows, Christian churches have been the driving force behind some of the most important social movements in America, from the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights movement. What is relevant, of course, is not a policy's source or motivation but its merits.

And there is indeed merit to the agenda pursued by Christian conservatives. Evangelical Christians are rock-solid supporters of Israel--a fact that the Jewish community has belatedly begun to acknowledge and appreciate. What remains unacknowledged, and certainly not appreciated, is the fact that socially conservative Christians have become the leading proponents of Judeo-Christian values--and, therefore, traditional Jewish values--in America.

When Christians recognize that human beings are influenced by the surrounding culture, and therefore seek to persuade the entertainment industry to stop degrading that culture, they are taking a stand for Jewish values. When Christians fight genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and raise funds for victims of natural disasters around the globe, they are acting out Jewish values. And yes, when Christians stand up for the sanctity of human life and oppose euthanasia or abortion as birth control, they are protecting the most fundamental of Jewish values. Jews are of course free to differ on all of the above issues, but they should not wrap themselves in the flag of Judaism when they do so.

In one of the most poignant moments in the Hebrew Bible, King David's son Absalom is killed while leading a failed rebellion against his father. When David weeps for his son, David's top lieutenant, Joab, argues that the king is disgracing all those who have just risked their lives to defend him, admonishing: "You love your enemies and hate your friends." American Jews have much to learn from this story. In some ways we are Absalom, rebelling against the conservative beliefs of our religious forebears. And in other ways we are David, mourning the loss of a beloved but destructive family member--liberalism--while ignoring the true friends that surround us and preserve us. Either way, we need to follow Joab's advice and dry our eyes.