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| Wes Clark, Waco, Iraq, sources. |
| 01.31.04 (10:55 pm) [edit] |
Blogger Whoisjohngalt a week or so ago wanted to know where my Wes Clark sources came from. After all, a man so "Presidential" looking couldn't be the weirdo most of the world thinks he is. So here's my sources. They aren't hard to find.
I said Wes Clark donated military equipment to Waco that Janet Reno used to burn down a compound with dozens of innocents inside. The equipment came from Clark's base, Clark was the guy in charge at the time (his career, by the way, went off like a rocket after Waco). Logic serves. But anyway, here's one of the sources I used:
WND article-- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/...
I also said that Wesley Clark testified to Congress that he supported force against Iraq. Despite what Galt has said, Clark did say this-- he said he supported trying to get the UN on board, but acting if the US had to. Which is pretty much what evil neo-con Richard Perle said.
Of note, however:
"Such congressional resolution need not, at this point, authorize the use of force. The more focused the resolution on Iraq, the more focused it is on the problems of weapons of mass destruction. The greater its utility in the United Nations, the more nearly unanimous the resolution, the greater its utility is, the greater its impact is on the diplomatic efforts under way. "
Well, of course, the US Iraq war resolution basically says diplomacy first, force second. Which is what Clark is arguing in his testimony.
Key passages from the war resolution:
"SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the president to (a) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and (b) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION. The president is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."
Full text of Waco-Wes' Congressional testimony:
http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/us/hearing spreparedstatements/hasc- 092602.htm" title="http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/us/hearing spreparedstatements/hasc- 092602.htm" target="_blank"http://www.iraqwatch.org/gove...
Full text of Iraq war resolution:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_ea st/july-dec02/house_resol ution_10-02.html" title="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_ea st/july-dec02/house_resol ution_10-02.html" target="_blank"http://www.pbs.org/newshour/b...
And while he wasn't an overtly bombastic supporter of the war before the war, when Baghdad was liberated he could barely contain himself, as he wrote in a London Times article titled "What Must Be Done to Complete a Great Victory" (notice the words "great" and "victory").
Of note:
"Can anything be more moving than the joyous throngs swarming the streets of Baghdad? Memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the defeat of Milosevic in Belgrade flood back. Statues and images of Saddam are smashed and defiled. Liberation is at hand. Liberation — the powerful balm that justifies painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and reinforces bold actions. Already the scent of victory is in the air. Yet a bit more work and some careful reckoning need to be done before we take our triumph...
...As for the diplomacy, the best that can be said is that strong convictions often carry a high price. Despite the virtually tireless energy of their Foreign Offices, Britain and the US have probably never been so isolated in recent times. Diplomacy got us into this campaign but didn’t pull together the kind of unity of purpose that marked the first Gulf War. Relationships, institutions and issues have virtually all been mortgaged to success in changing the regime in Baghdad. And in the Islamic world the war has been seen in a far different light than in the US and Britain. Much of the world saw this as a war of aggression. They were stunned by the implacable determination to use force, as well as by the sudden and lopsided outcome...
...As for the political leaders themselves, President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt. And especially Mr Blair, who skillfully managed tough internal politics, an incredibly powerful and sometimes almost irrationally resolute ally, and concerns within Europe. Their opponents, those who questioned the necessity or wisdom of the operation, are temporarily silent, but probably unconvinced. And more tough questions remain to be answered."
Basically, in this column he argues the typical conservative line-- lots of work to be done, but the Liberation was right, even if the US and UK, who worked tirelessly to get the UN to enforce its own resolutions, balked. And he's right, too. But apparently he morphed into an anti-war Democrat, forgetting what he said before Congress and what he said before the world in his column. I guess this guy doesn't have any convictions.
The full column can be read here-- http://www.seanrobins.com/nat...
Now, it is possible to pull a John Kerry-- say you were 'duped' by the President, etc., WITHOUT ANY JUSTICIATION, but what makes Waco Clark so special are his flat-out contradictions and denials about things he said in the recent past. Is he crazy? Does he not know that he looks foolish now to oppose a war he praised just 9 months ago?
And not only that, but he's got really wacky view on abortion, and has made even wackier, and flat out ridiculous, impossible to prove statements-- like:
"If I were President, I would have had Osama bin Laden by this time."
or
"I think [9/11]could have been prevented. I think it can be prevented again if we have the right leadership. That's me. I will protect America."
or
"If I'm President of the United States... we are not going to have one of these incidents."
Whatever you want to say about President Bush, he never used such stupid rhetoric. If he had, his campaign and his presidency wouldn't have lasted. You get the feeling that Clark doesn't know or care what he's saying, is insane, or thinks he's a god. Perhaps all three.
I don't know why I even have to prove my sources, when it doesn't matter to Galt what Clark has done. He's so presidential looking, you know, and of course he graduate first at West Point.
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| Geoge Soros: the evil capitalist "daddy warbucks" of the Democratic Party |
| 01.31.04 (4:01 pm) [edit] |
Some facts on George Soros, the billionaire who is basically funding the entire Democratic Party.
*In a 1995 [i]New Yorker[/i] profile, Soros "reflected on the parallels between himself and the God of the Old Testament and observed that as a child he thought of himself as superhuman," according to the Left-wing journal [i]Tikkun[/i].
*According to the [i]Miami Herald[/i] Soros says his goal is "to become the conscience of the world" and that he sees himself as "some kind of God or an economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, like Einstein."
*According to the [i]Washington Times[/i] Soros claims that "capitalism and the spread of market values" is the greatest enemy to an "open and democratic society."
*It's ironic he says that, because he is using his billions to influence an election. And how did he get his billions? By stepping on the backs of the poor. Known as the "man who broke the Bank of England," Soros is hated by many Brits for the role he played in the late 1980s driving down of the value of the British pound. He made most of his money by short-selling the pound, which left many pensioners destitute.
*According to [i]Fortune[/i], Soros has been accused of "destablizing world currencies and wrecking the economy of nations." Soros made another fortune when Asia's financial markets crashed in 1997, a disaster many accuse him of creating.
*In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Soros used his money to defeat President Eduard Shevardnadze. According to the [i]Australian Herald Sun[/i], Soros paid $700,000 to an activist group that bussed in protesters to disrupt Georgia's parliament, leading to Shevardnadze's overthrow in November, 2003.
*In 2002, Soros was fined $2.3 million for insider trading by a French court.
*Soros is a key supporter of Catholics for a Free Choice, a group run by radical feminists that engage in open warfare against the Catholic Church by championing abortion and far-left causes.
*Soros donated over $5 million to MoveOn.org, which recently came up with completely slanderous and vicious Bush-is-Hitler ads. Said Soros in the [i]Washington Post[/i] before the ads came out: "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans... My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me." After the ads came out, and after they were widely condemned by sane people, Soros whined: "I have also been accused of comparing Bush to a Nazi, and I did not do it, I would not do it... I'm upset that I have to defend myself against this kind of accusation."
Well then-- stop making the comparison!
*Soros also funds the hilarious Center for American Progress, run by former Clinton WH Chief of Staff John Podesta. The center recently produced a movie called "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" featuring the would-be pedophile and friend of Hussein Scott Ritter and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson accusing the Administration of lying about Iraq. I note that both men supported the WMD claims of the US when Clinton was president, I note that one (Wilson) is a heavy contributor to the Democrats,and I note that the other (Ritter) testified to the existence of WMD under oath to Congress.
Oh, and Podesta claims that his group is "not engaged in political activities." Uh, yeah-- gotcha.
*Through his Open Society Institute, Soros donated $15 million to help enact the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act. Soros explained in [i]The Washington Times [/i]: "Soft money contributions taint our political system and taint our political leaders. They create, at minimum, the appearance of undue access and influence and conflict of interest."
But like every Leftist, Soros doesn't think the law applies to him! To violate the very (unconstitutional) law he forced upon America, Soros has donated over $15 million to support so-called "independent political groups." In what has been called the largest single political donation EVER, Soros pledged $10 million to ACT, or Americans Coming Together, which has sponsored such so-called "independent" gatherings as the star-studded "Hate-Bush" event in Hollywood.
*The Campaign Finance Reform Act prevented Soros from giving $10 million to the Democratic Party, so he gave it to ACT, which acts on behalf of the Democratic Party. Soft money that used to go to the Party had to be accounted for, while ACT is a group with no accountability.
As Rush Limbaugh puts it: If money corrupts politicians, why aren't the Democrats being corrupted by George Soros?
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| The Crisis of the Pope, Christian morality, and the UN |
| 01.31.04 (2:42 pm) [edit] |
A letter I wrote to the Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor:
Russell Shaw's arguments in "Just When Should We Consider War?" clearly show why those that are angry at the Pope's opposition to the Iraq war are just in their anger.
Shaw assumes that the US is trying to expand its 'hegemony' in the world, instead of merely trying to defend itself. Let's be clear: the entire Iraqi drama-- from Kuwait in 1991 to where we are now-- was a UN, not US, failure, eventually prompting the US, in defense of broken UN resolutions that made Hussein a special threat to the US, especially after 9/11, to invade last year. The UN's failure to properly respond to Hussein's 12 years of violating the UN cease-fire led the US to do its job for them. If the US was merely concerned with expanding its hegemony, it wouldn't have gone through the harmful task of acceding to the UN in 1991 in the first place. It wouldn't have waited and trusted the UN to do its job for 12 years, and wouldn't have spent billions of dollars in the process.
The Pope's soft-glove treatment of the UN and its hideous moral shortcomings also upset many Catholics. According to Shaw, the Pope may morally rebuke the US at what he thinks the US is doing, yet trust the UN to-- someday-- make the right decisions. What the UN supports and has accomplished in the world doesn't matter, apparently-- the UN is just such a great idea that it should always be defended.
It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, and many other Catholics, that the Pope would be against the war not only because he thought it was morally wrong but chiefly because it would destroy the great idea of the UN that, for almost 60 years, has been amoral, corrupt, ineffective, and anti-Christian. The Pope chooses faith in the UN over the US, a country that, with all of its flaws, has done more to foster world peace than any other country or institution. And if the Pope wants to change the UN for the better, wouldn't it be nice if he criticized it with the same passion that he has criticized the US?
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| 9/11 Panel Details Missteps in Attacks |
| 01.31.04 (12:48 am) [edit] |
Here's a bet you can make with certainty: the report will either blame the 8-month old Bush administration for not rectifying the decades-old bureacratic mess that let 9-11 happen or, if it is more balanced, will be reported by the media and shaped to look like 9-11 was Bush's fault. Even though the threat of al Qaeda was growing and growing during the Clinton years, even though the 1990s were strewn with massive terror attacks (Why didn't anyone ask how the 1993 WTC bombing happened? Sure was an intel failure there!), even though Clinton refused to fight the terrorists after they declared war on us in 1998, and even though Clinton refused to capture bin Laden when offered (twice, at least), Bush will be the fall guy.
[b]9/11 Panel Details Missteps in Attacks [/b]
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - It's long been known that U.S. authorities had opportunities to stop at least some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Now the extent of the government's failures is coming to light.
At a two-day hearing this week, the federal commission investigating the attacks revealed U.S. authorities had numerous opportunities to stop the hijackers, including many face-to-face encounters.
The missteps included miscommunications about al-Qaida operatives dating back to the mid-1990s, hijackers who were allowed to repeatedly enter the United States even with false or the wrong visa papers, and missed chances to stop suspects at airport security checkpoints despite warning signs.
"We were asleep. Opportunities were lost," said former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican who chairs the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. "The hijackers analyzed our system and developed a plan they felt sure would beat it in every case, and 19 out of 19 succeeded."
Congress established the commission to study the nation's preparedness before Sept. 11, 2001, its response to the attacks, and to recommend ways to prevent such disasters.
The errors documented by the commission date back to just after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and continued until the fateful day in 2001. The panel found airline security stopped nine of the 19 hijackers on the day of the attacks but let them go.
All five of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington were flagged as security risks. All that was required then was that their checked bags be searched for explosives. None was found, so they were allowed to board.
Three of them also had carry-ons that set off alarms on X-ray belts. However, despite one or two additional checks, they successfully got on the plane with pocket knives and box cutters. That plane crashed into the Pentagon (news - web sites).
Three of the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11 from Logan International Airport in Boston, as well as one hijacker on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, also were stopped as potential security risks. But they were allowed to board after their baggage tested negative for explosives.
The panel also found FBI (news - web sites) and CIA (news - web sites) officials did not share knowledge about al-Qaida or played down that information with customs, immigration and FAA (news - web sites) officials.
Consequently, some of the hijackers escaped capture despite questioning by customs officials after they submitted improper visa forms or acted suspiciously. The commission said if military intelligence were shared about al-Qaida and their tendency to travel on Saudi passports, authorities would have known to stop them.
But at least two and as many as eight of the hijackers were allowed to enter on fraudulent visas. Six of the hijackers eluded detection even though they overstayed their visas or failed to attend the English language school for which their visas were issued.
"The evidence is pretty damning," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "There were many signals to the White House that we were in a state of high danger in the summer of 2001, yet no leadership was exercised to shake the agencies down."
Two known al-Qaida operatives were on a special terrorist watch list known as Tipoff, but airline officials were unaware because it was separate from the FAA's list of people barred from flying. A former FAA official acknowledged at Monday's hearing he had not known until this week that Tipoff existed.
"The question is, can you take an institution like the FBI and change its culture so it is focused on prevention of acts of terrorism rather than prosecution of criminal acts," said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the panel's vice chairman. "That's a major question in homeland security."
The panel faces a May 27 deadline. It wants two more months to complete its work but faces resistance from House GOP leaders and the Bush administration. They fear the process could become too politicized if it's released in the days near the November elections.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: The resistance from the Bush administration has less to do with the election date (why is it that every Republican decision is a political one) and more to do with what the panel is asking for: the president's threat matrix is extremely classified, and has never been released to the public. There are legitimate national security concerns)
Kean has said many midlevel officials clearly could have prevented the attacks, but has reserved judgment on top officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations. The panel is seeking interviews with Bush and Clinton and plans to meet soon with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites).
"We'll pursue every lead and follow the trail wherever it goes," he said. "When our report comes out, we're not going to mince words."
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| My 'biased' news sources-- I'm coming clean. |
| 01.30.04 (10:43 pm) [edit] |
It was suggested by a fellow blogger that I use biased news sources. Obviously, if you are a 'right-winger' you are brainwashed, yadda, yadda, yadda. Here are my dangerous news sources:
Google news (which covers the nations' newspapers).
Yahoo news (which covers the wire services-- AP, AFP, Reuters, etc.).
Occasionally I get some news from WorldNet Daily, but wouldn't you know it-- I think it is a bit too right-wing. I only read WND for opinion.
The cat's out of the bag! I'm a right-wing nutjob. What is astonishing, truly astonishing is that all the lefties on this site get their 'news' from real biased sources, like Alternet, CommonDreams, MoveOn.org, and other 'progressive' 'news' sources.
My opinion is right-wing. My news sources arent'.
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| Gibson's view of `Passion' supported by Jewish texts. What does Israel have to say about the film? |
| 01.30.04 (4:00 pm) [edit] |
A funny thing happened on the way to the "crusade": it turns out that the only Jews that are virulently against Mel Gibson's new film are American Jewish activists like Abe Foxman (who basically believes that if you're a Christian, you're an anti-Semite). I've tried to find official Israeli reaction to the film, from Ariel Sharon and other members of the government, but I haven't been able to find them. Surely, I would think that if Ariel Sharon-- the major Jewish world leader-- had any opinion on the film, if he feared massive backlash across the world, he'd say something about it.
Now, he may have said something, but it obviously isn't important enough to be noted by the massive Google and Yahoo news search engines. I think perhaps he has to deal with real anti-Semitism.
(I also haven't read any massive anti-Passion sentiment at FrontPageMag.com, which is a very, very, very pro-Israel, pro-Jewish magazine...)
Turns out that at least some American Jews think the Passion is ok:
[b]Gibson's view of `Passion' supported by Jewish texts
Tradition acknowledges leaders played role in Jesus' execution[/b]
DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Los Angeles Times
Mel Gibson's movie about the death of Jesus, "The Passion of the Christ," has created an angry standoff between the filmmaker and Jewish critics who charge him with anti-Semitism. The controversy will continue to affect relations between Christians and Jews unless some way to cool it can be found. [b]One possible cooling agent is an honest look at how ancient Jewish sources portrayed the Crucifixion.[/b]
According to people who have seen a rough cut, Gibson's film [b]depicts the death of Christ as occurring at the hands of the Romans but at the instigation of Jewish leaders,[/b] the priests of the Jerusalem Temple. The Anti-Defamation League charges that this recklessly stirs anti-Jewish hatred and demands that the film be edited to eliminate any suggestion of Jewish deicide.
But [b]Jewish tradition acknowledges[/b] that our leaders in first-century Palestine played a role in Jesus' execution. [b]If Gibson is an anti-Semite, so is the Talmud and so is the greatest Jewish sage of the past 1,000 years, Maimonides.[/b]
We will never know for certain what happened in Roman Palestine around the year 30, but we do know what Jews who lived afterward said about Jesus' execution.
The Talmud was compiled in about the year 500, drawing on rabbinic material that had been transmitted orally for centuries. [b]From the 16th century on, the text was censored and passages about Jesus and his execution were erased to evade Christian wrath. But the full text was preserved in older manuscripts, and today the censored parts can be found in minuscule type, as an appendix at the back of some Talmud editions.[/b]
[b]A relevant example comes from the Talmudic division known as Sanhedrin, which deals with procedures of the Jewish high court: "On the eve of Passover they hung Jesus of Nazareth. And the herald went out before him for 40 days (saying, `Jesus) goes forth to be stoned, because he has practiced magic, enticed and led astray Israel. Anyone who knows anything in his favor, let him come and declare concerning him.' And they found nothing in his favor."[/b]
The passage indicates that Jesus' fate was entirely in the hands of the Jewish court. The last two of the three items on Jesus' rap sheet, that he "enticed and led astray" fellow Jews, are terms from Jewish biblical law for an individual who influenced others to serve false gods, a crime punishable by being stoned, then hung on a wooden gallows. [b]In the Mishnah, the rabbinic work on which the Talmud is based, compiled about the year 200, Rabbi Eliezer explains that anyone who was stoned to death would then be hung by his hands from two pieces of wood shaped like a capital letter T -- in other words, a cross (Sanhedrin 6:4).[/b]
These texts convey religious beliefs, not necessarily historical facts. [b]The Talmud elsewhere agrees with the Gospel of John that Jews at the time of the Crucifixion did not have the power to carry out the death penalty. [/b]Also, other Talmudic passages place Jesus 100 years before or after his actual lifetime. Some Jewish apologists argue that these must therefore deal with a different Jesus of Nazareth. But this is not how the most authoritative rabbinic interpreters, medieval sages saw the matter.
[b]Maimonides, writing in 12th-century Egypt, made clear that the Talmud's Jesus is the one who founded Christianity.[/b] In his great summation of Jewish law and belief, the Mishneh Torah, he wrote of "Jesus of Nazareth, who imagined that he was the Messiah, but was put to death by the court." In his "Epistle to Yemen," he states that "Jesus of Nazareth ... interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment. The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him."
It's unfair of Jewish critics to defame Gibson for saying what the Talmud and Maimonides say, and what many historians say.
Would it have been better if Gibson never undertook to make this movie in exactly the way he did? Maybe, but trying to intimidate him into fundamentally reworking it was never a realistic or worthy goal. [b]Considering that Gibson's portrayal coincides closely with traditional Jewish belief, leaving him alone is the decent as well as the Jewish thing to do.[/b]
[i]David Klinghoffer is a columnist for Jewish Forward and author of "The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism." [/i]
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: I DISAGREE WITH THE NOTION THAT IT 'WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER' IF GIBSON NEVER UNDERTOOK THE FILM. CHRISTIANITY HAS A RIGHT TO PROCLAIM ITS MESSAGE OF FORGIVENESS, HOPE, AND LOVE. IT SOUNDS TO ME, BASED ON HIS EXPLANATION OF THE TALMUD, THAT THE TALMUD WAS PERHAPS MORE BLAMEFUL OF THE JEWS THAN GIBSON'S FILM OR EVEN THE NEW TESTAMENT. CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN TOLD, BASICALLY, AND BELIEVE THAT HUMANITY, SIN, KILLED JESUS-- THAT ALL PEOPLES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. THIS IS EVEN ARGUED IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT GIBSON'S FILM IS A CHRISTIAN FILM, IT IS NOT ANTI-SEMITIC, IT JUST TELLS THE STORY OF JESUS. IT'S TIME THAT WE COOLED IT A LITTLE AND PARSE WHAT IS ANTI-SEMITIC AND WHAT ISN'T)
More reading:
Gibson adding pro-Jewish ending to 'Passion'?-- http://worldnetdaily.com/news...
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| Iraqi oil irony: US, Bush, Cheney, only ones that didn't take bribes from Hussein |
| 01.30.04 (12:33 pm) [edit] |
The recent Hussein government documents unearthed in an Iraqi newspaper and being examined by the provisional government, documents that show that government organizations, officials, and businessmen in China, France, Russia, and Germany, among other countries took oil bribes from Hussein, fail to implicate the very men accused of orchestrating this entire charade for oil -- US OIL FIRMS, PRESIDENT BUSH AND DICK CHENEY.
Gee, wonder why that is. Any answers, Bush critics?
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| Civility as weakness -- Israel and radical Islam |
| 01.30.04 (12:13 pm) [edit] |
A very long time ago I opined that there is virtually no difference in political outlook between radical Islam and the Left. Both believe in worldwide unity under a single ideology, both believe in violence to reach that goal. It is also apparent that both see civility by the other side as a sign of weakness.
For example, every time President Bush has decided to break rank with conservative principles and employ asinine spending measures, the Dems push for more. Bush is a huge spender, but he's not doing enough, according to the Left. Every one of the economic plans that the Democratic Presidential candidates are proposing would greatly outstrip Bush in new spending and deficits (from 170 billion to over a trillion dollars). Bush's attempt to forge unity in the country are met with aggressive attacks from the Left. It's interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Ditto this on a much larger and violent scale with the Israelis. Every time they've met their terrorist neighbors halfway, every time they've tried to be civil with them, it has been interpreted by the radical Islamic community as a sign of weakness. In short, real men don't compromise. The irony is that Israel knows this intuitively-- it's the reason why it won every war the Arabs thrust against it. It is a requirement for dealing with the radical Muslims. But when Israel tries to use its superior morality to end the fighting (fighting that is integral to the part of the radical Islamicists) by engaging in things like peace talks and, oh, prisoner exchanges, it merely encourages the barbarism of the enemy. You can't win with these people-- unless you believe in absolute, total, crushing defeat.
Don't think so? After yesterday's prisoner exchange between the terror group Hezbollah and Israel, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said "This is yet another movement showing that the evil Zionist regime is defeatable by the strong wills and concrete faiths of the Mujahedeen of Islam, and I hope that the rest of the prisoners would be freed."
Radical Islamicists interpret civility as a weakness because God is on their side. Radical Leftists interpret civility as a weakness because Humanity (secularism) is on their side.
Oh well. I don't know how you can change the Lefties. But for Israel, they should kill Arafat, destroy the PA, and leave the Palestinian people to come to terms with their own future.
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| John Kerry served honorably, but his lies about the war misled a generation |
| 01.30.04 (12:15 am) [edit] |
January 27, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
[b]Vetting the Vet Record
Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester?[/b]
John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against, and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician: Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities imaginable.
John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be Vietnam.
Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.
The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.
Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold ? he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."
Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.
In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.
Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.
Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some months ago.
The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.
But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, rejected the argument that the biggest U.S. atrocity in Vietnam, My Lai, was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong....The men who were at My Lai knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves."
My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation. But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness and righteous anger. In the Iliad, it is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus that causes Achilles to leave sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans.
But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai.
But My Lai also must be placed within a larger context. The NVA and VC frequently committed atrocities, not as a result of thumos run amok, but as a matter of policy. While left-wing anti-war critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam were always quick to invoke Auschwitz and the Nazis in discussing alleged American atrocities, they were silent about Hue City, where a month and a half before My Lai, the North Vietnamese and VC systematically murdered 3,000 people. They were also willing to excuse Pol Pot's mass murderer of upwards of a million Cambodians.
The second cliché is that is that Vietnam scarred an entire generation of young men. But for years, many of us who served in Vietnam tried to make the case that the popular image of the Vietnam vet as maladjusted loser, dehumanized killer, or ticking "time bomb" was at odds with reality. Indeed, it was our experience that those who had served in Vietnam generally did so with honor, decency, and restraint; that despite often being viewed with distrust or opprobrium at home, most had asked for nothing but to be left alone to make the transition back to civilian life; and that most had in fact made that transition if not always smoothly, at least successfully.
But the press could always find the stereotypical, traumatized vet who could be counted on to tell the most harrowing and gruesome stories of combat in Vietnam, often involving atrocities, the sort of stories that John Kerry gave credence to in his 1971 testimony. Many of the war stories recounted by these individuals were wildly implausible to any one who had been in Vietnam, but credulous journalists, most of whom had no military experience, uncritically passed their reports along to the public.
I had always agreed with the observation of the late Harry Summers, a well-known military commentator who served as an infantryman in Korean and Vietnam, that the story teller's distance from the battle zone was directly proportional to the gruesomeness of his atrocity story. But until the publication of the aforementioned Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and its History, neither Harry nor I any idea just how true his observation was.
In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans. They were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.
Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt could have done: he used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to check the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse, criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. [b]More often than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera about his dead buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life, was an impostor. [/b]
Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam veteran as dysfunctional loser, [b]had fabricated their war stories.[/b] Many had never even been in the service. Others, had been, but had never been in Vietnam.
Stolen Valor made it clear why John Kerry's testimony in 1971 slandered an entire generation of soldiers. Kerry gave credence to the claim that the war was fought primarily by reluctant draftees, predominantly composed of the poor, the young, or racial minorities.
The record shows something different, indicating that 86 percent of those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black, from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the population. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, and volunteers accounted for 77 percent of combat deaths.
Kerry portrayed the Vietnam veteran as ashamed of his service:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, and so when in 30 years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
But a comprehensive 1980 survey commissioned by Veterans' Administration (VA) reported that 91 percent of those who had seen combat in Vietnam were "glad they had served their country;" 80 percent disagreed with the statement that "the US took advantage of me;" and nearly two out of three would go to Vietnam again, even knowing how the war would end. Today, Sen. Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House. He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But an honest, enterprising reporter should ask Sen. Kerry this: Were you lying in 1971 or are you lying now? We do know that his speech was not the spontaneous, emotional, from-the-heart offering that he suggested it was. Burkett and Whitley report that instead, "it had been carefully crafted by a speech writer for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it."
But the issue goes far beyond theatrics. If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service. Who can be proud of committing war crimes of the sort that Kerry recounted in his 1971 testimony? But if he is proud of his service today, perhaps it is because he always knew that his indictment in 1971 was a piece of political theater that he, an aspiring politician, exploited merely as a "good issue." If the latter is true, he should apologize to every veteran of that war for slandering them to advance his political fortunes.
[i]? Mackubin Thomas Owens is an NRO contributing editor and a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-1969.[/i]
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| Democrats, for the good of the country: Stop Wesley Clark! |
| 01.29.04 (11:25 pm) [edit] |
PEGGY NOONAN
General Malaise
Democrats, for the good of the country: Stop Wesley Clark!
Tuesday, January 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Let me assert something that I cannot prove with a poll but that is based on serious conversations the past few months with Republicans and also normal people: 9/11 changed everything. Yes, I know you know that. But it has even changed how people who usually vote Republican think about Democratic candidates for
president. Our No. 1 question used to be: Can we beat this guy easily? But now we feel the age of terrorism so profoundly challenges our country, and is so suggestive of future trauma and national pain, that our No. 1 question has become: Is he . . . normal? Just normal. Is he stable and adult and experienced?
Only then we ask if we can beat him.
The Democratic nominee in 2004 could win the election. There may be something to the idea that Democrats in general want to get rid of George W. Bush more than Republicans in general want to keep him. One of the men running in New Hampshire tonight could become the next president, and lead the war on terror. And our country cannot afford a bit of a nut. Which get us of course to Howard Dean. But not for long. I do not know how Democrats in New Hampshire will judge him today, but I can say with confidence that the American people will not choose him as president, because they will not want him near the nuclear arsenal.
Which gets me to Wesley Clark. Forgive me, but he seems to be another first class strange-o. He has been called arrogant and opportunistic. That's par for the course in politics, but what worries me about Gen. Clark is that it seems to be true to greater degrees than is usual.
On the night of John Kerry's win in Iowa, Gen. Clark went on "Larry King Live." The other guest was Bob Dole, not exactly an ideologically rigid man. His presence seemed to signal the establishment giving a big hello and an insider's teasing to the relatively new candidate. Remember how it went? Mr. Dole, a little emollient, then a little mischievous, told Gen. Clark, first, that "somebody [had] to lose" in Iowa and, next, that "politically you just became a colonel instead of a general." This little barb set off a pompous harrumph of a retort: "Well, I don't think that's at all--Senator, with all due respect, he's [Kerry's] a lieutenant and I'm a general. You got to get your facts on this. He was a lieutenant in Vietnam. I've done all of the big leadership." The exchange ended with Gen. Clark telling Mr. Dole that he, Wesley, had "been in a lot of tough positions in my life, one of them was leading the operation in Kosovo . . ."
"I won a war"? "I pitch a 95-mile-an-hour fastball"? "I've done all of the big leadership"? "I've been in a lot of tough positions"?
Oh no. Another one.
Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest--the actual meaning of his candidacy--he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate's hunger. He is passionately for the war until he announces for the Democratic nomination facing an antiwar base, at which point he becomes passionately antiwar. He thanks God that George Bush and his aides are in the White House, then he says they're the worst leaders ever. Anyone can change his mind; but this is not a change, it's a swerve, and without a convincing rationale. Last week, Brit Hume asked Gen. Clark when it was that he'd "first noticed" that he--Gen. Clark--was a Democrat. There was laughter, but that was a nice big juicy softball. Gen. Clark flailed and fumbled. Later he blamed Mr. Hume for being a Republican agent.
When you are making it up along the way you make mistakes that might, politely, be called tonal. It is not terrible that he was introduced the other day in New Hampshire by a bilious activist, Michael Moore, who called the president a "deserter." Gen. Clark didn't address the charge when he took the stage. He could have been distracted, and it certainly would have been ungracious to say, "Thanks for that introduction, which I must disavow because it suggests a grassy knoll extremism with which I cannot associate myself." But in the days afterward Gen. Clark was repeatedly questioned about Mr. Moore's charge. He dug the hole deeper by leaving open the possibility that it was true.
More telling is Gen. Clark on abortion. A pro-lifer wouldn't have the smallest of chances in the Democratic Party, but a certain Clintonian politesse is expected when the question is raised. "Abortion is always a tragedy but denying a woman her reproductive rights under the Constitution would also be a tragedy"--that kind of thing.
This is what Gen. Clark said when he met with the Manchester Union-Leader and was questioned by the newspaper's Joseph McQuaid:
Clark: I don't think you should get the law involved in abortion--
McQuaid: At all?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Late-term abortion? No limits?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to delivery?
Clark: Nope, nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to the head coming out of the womb?
Clark: I say that it's up to the woman and her doctor, her conscience. . . . You don't put the law in there.
Gen. Clark was then asked, "What about when she's grown up and at the prom, can you kill her then?" He said, "Absolutely. Chase her across the dance floor. This is a personal decision for the mother." Oh--sorry--I made that last part up. He did not advocate killing children 18 years after they're born. Though one wonders why not. Maybe he does have nuance. His campaign tried to spin it into a plus. He forgot to speak "artfully," "precisely." But he was nothing if not precise. He forgot to speak sanely.
All of this was captured by Camille Paglia last summer, in an interview with Salon that at the time struck me as extreme and now seems prescient. Asked what she, as a pro-military Democrat, thinks of the retired general, she said: "What a phony! . . . Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in '2001: A Space Odyssey'--a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless." But, said the interviewer, his supporters say he is handsome and great on TV. Ms. Paglia: "Doesn't anyone know how to 'read' TV? The guy's an android . . . a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man's man. And he's no Eisenhower. . . . This is just another hysterical boomlet, as when the nerdy Northeast media went gaga for John McCain--'Finally, a soldier we like!'"
After this interview, Gen. Clark's military colleagues began to speak critically of him on and off the record--an apple-polishing operator who abused the chain of command. It is true that Americans respect and often support generals. But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring. The title "general" is loaded enough. We don't want one who is temperamental and unpredictable and strange.
And so my Democratic friends, patriots who vote Democratic and are voting in today's primary and the ones down the road. Please. We will take Joe Lieberman or John Kerry or even young John Edwards, men who appear to be somewhere in the normal range. We need a person who could rally the nation on a terrible day, and who could arguably meet the security demands the age requires. We can't afford flip-outs, or people who are too obviously creepy. Just a person in the normal range. Is that asking too much? Say it ain't so. Give Gen. Clark his marching orders: Retreat! One suspects the Democrats will send him packing. Just as one suspects he might eventually withdraw, saying something like, "You won't have Wes Clark to kick around anymore."
[i]Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.[/i]
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| South Dakota law set to make abortion a crime |
| 01.29.04 (11:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]South Dakota Set to Pass Legislation Making Abortion a Crime[/b]
Tuesday, January 27, 2004 12:00:00 AM GMT
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jan. 27 (LifesiteNews.com/CWN) - With legal assistance from the Thomas More Law Center, South Dakota state [b]Rep. Matt McCaulley introduced a bill last Thursday making abortion a crime unless it is necessary to save the life of the mother.[/b] House Bill 1192, which already has the support of a majority in the state house and senate, [b]directly confronts the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which gave women a constitutional right to abort their babies. [/b]
Rep. McCaulley presented the legislation on the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, saying, [b]"Medical and scientific discoveries over the last 30 years have confirmed that life begins at conception, a question the Roe Court said they could not answer." [/b]
[b]HB1192 provides for exceptions to protect the life of the mother if birth or continued pregnancy constitutes a clear and immediate threat of death to the mother or serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.[/b] The bill would make the crime of abortion punishable by up to 5 years in state prison.
Support for the legislation has been building during the past few days, with 47 representatives and 18 state senators co-sponsoring the bill. [b]The bill is supported by majority leaders in both the house and the senate including the minority leader in the state senate.[/b] With the sponsors alone, the legislature has the majority votes needed to pass the bill. Once approved, HB1192 would ultimately be sent to South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds who has previously vowed to protect life under all circumstances.
Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, acknowledging the likely court battle that would ensue if the legislation is passed, commented, [b]"Roe v. Wade was an exercise of raw judicial power, not based on any reasonable interpretation of the constitutional text. The Roe decision carries the same moral implications as the Dredd Scott decision that upheld slavery by regarding a segment of our population as non-persons. The court was wrong then, and the court is wrong now. [u]We have a moral responsibility to confront this lawless decision whenever the opportunity presents itself."[/u][/b]
[i]This article courtesy of Catholic World News. To subscribe or for further information, contact subs@cwnews.com or visit www.cwnews.com[/i]
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| The Iraqi election mess explained in a few words. |
| 01.29.04 (6:24 pm) [edit] |
Wonder what's going on in Iraq with elections versus a national caucus system by July 1? Here you go:
[b]Background: Gulf War I[/b]
After the Gulf War, which was a [b]UN operation designed to liberate Kuwait[/b], President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Shiites in the south of Iraq and the Kurds in the north of the country to agitate, to overthrow Hussein. The only problem with this is that the UN mandate for the coalition was not to overthrow Hussein, but to merely liberate Kuwait, which it did. What Bush did seemed cruel: he knew that he couldn't overthrow Hussein if he honored the UN mandate, but at the same time he supported these groups in Iraq to revolt-- the help that the Kurds and Shiites hoped for never came because of our unwise loyalty to the UN. Bush should have never encouraged the revolt if he wasn't prepared to help them-- even if it meant squashing the narrow UN mandate.
As a result of their rebellion and inevitable slaughter by Hussein, the US decided to belatedly help the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south by instituting the no-fly zones, protecting the groups from Hussein's air and ground forces. Naturally, the Lefties decried this, too-- it wasn't mandated by the all-knowing UN. This Johnny-come-lately response helped the Kurds feel autonomy for the first time in their history in the north, and allowed relative peace for the Shiites in the south.
The 1990s were spent with the US and UK running missions over the no-fly zones, and occasionally bombing Hussein for violations. Speaking of violations, Hussein was violating his obligations under the cease-fire left and right. Usually concerned with violations of UN mandates, the Left didn't utter a peep at the center of the conflict-- Hussein's violations, his refusal to dismantle the WMD that he had used on his own people. If you're scratching your head, you're not alone.
[b]Presently: Gulf War II[/b]
So the US and a coalition went to war on behalf of the world, justifiably, because Hussein, after many chances and goodwill by the world, after 17 UN broken resolutions demanding his honor his cease-fire agreement, resolutions that [b]testified to known WMD[/b], WMD still not accounted for, and liberated Iraq.
Enter the war critics. The French, Russians, even Kofi Annan all wanted a quick handover of power from the coalition of the willing to the Iraqis. The sooner the better, everyone said.
The US desire, initially, was for a plan to implement direct elections with no timetable. If you take your time on something, the end result is usually better. Unfortunately, the Bush administration, as it does so often, caved to the critics who wanted the US and the UK out ASAP-- and instituted the Nov. 15 plan. The US would be out by July 1st.
One of the critics that forcecd the US's hand was the Shiite cleric Sistani. This revered cleric, who is supposed to shun all things modern yet has his own website, wanted the US out ASAP, even though the US administration knew that direct elections are impossible by the date it was compelled to transfer power by. Of course, for Sistani, that makes no difference-- he believes that direct elections are possible at any time-- it's not hard at all to marshall 30 million people in a country that hasn't had a census in 50 years.
The US, in an effort to salvage its stupidity in rushing the process that allowed the July 1 date to occur, a stupid decision that the Left-- at the time-- wanted, suggested a national caucus that would choose a provisional government, and that government, in lieu of the US, would oversee the very long election process. The process cannot be altered-- elections take awhile (look at Afghanistan). This would ensure some legitimacy to the process.
The US is faced with disappointing everyone, and that is because it failed to adhere to the important point: setting up a democratic Iraq no matter how long it takes. It acceded to anti-US critics in pushing for a faster transfer of power, which compromised its commitment to direct elections (as they can't be organized by the transfer date), and this upset Sistani.
On top of this, we have the Kurds in the north wanting a serious amount of independence from a federated Iraq, something that will anger the Turks, Syrians, and Iranians. Of course, they deserve their freedom, but they must be part of a federal Iraq divided geographically, not ethnically.
And as far as the Sunnis go, they fear that a government with a majority of Shiites means that they will suffer reprisement for the sins of Hussein, a Sunni Muslim himself.
All of this relates to time: if the US had a real chance to steer Iraq into representational government, instead of being forced by those on the outside who only have their self-interest at heart (the UN, the anti-war Left), reconciliation among ethnic groups and a trust of the US would take place. As it is now, whatever is left behind will be chaotic.
The US had good intentions in reconstructing Iraq, but that is all being chipped away. The US should abandon the July 1 idea, and strike a compromise with Sistani, the Kurds, and the Sunnis. Iraq will work if you allow the US and the UN, too, to come in and set up the foundation for a lasting democracy. Do away with the current provisional government, or reform it, and work on direct elections. But above all else, the US should take the time required to finish the job. It should not let itself be influenced by politics.
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| Shocking arrogance: groups say that Hutton report threatens freedom of the press in Britain |
| 01.29.04 (2:14 pm) [edit] |
The BBC oversaw and encouraged a false report about the British government, WMD, and Iraq. Andrew Gilligan reported that a source, later found out to be David Kelley, told him that the government 'sexed up' the case for war.
Even though the Blair government denied this, even though Kelley denied this in testimony, even though Gilligan himself admits he made it up (offering an unserious apology), the scandal created the impression of serious wrongdoings. David Kelley killed himself, and the BBC, along with much of the Left, blamed the Blair government.
Well, what do you know, Lord Hutton, an independent judge, found that the government did not have anything to do with Kelley's death, and that it did not 'sex up' the case for war. He also blamed the BBC for running a shoddy operation.
The BBC chariman stepped down and apologized.
Yet because they screwed up, journalists and other groups are claiming that their freedom is being hindered with Hutton's report. Never mind that it was their freedom of the press that allowed them to slander a government, misrepresent a renowned scientist's testimomey, and tell the world that the war was based on false pretenses. Never mind also that this freedom of the press helped a man kill himself, too.
Freedom has responsibility. The BBC, and others out there, believe that freedom of anything means you don't have to be accountable-- not true. The BBC messed up, pure and simple.
They did the same thing with their false coverage of the whole Jessica Lynch thing. It is just pure arrogance to think you shouldn't have to be held accountable for your actions-- freedom to do anything without respect for the law is called tyranny.
Hutton Iraq report threat to British press freedom say rights groups
1 hour, 26 minutes ago
LONDON (AFP) - The findings of the Hutton report into the death of Iraq (news - web sites) weapons expert David Kelly which exonerated the British government and castigated the BBC constitutes a threat to press freedom, critics said.
"The report is selective, grossly one-sided and a serious threat to the future of investigative journalism," said Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of National Union of Journalists.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: AND WHAT ABOUT GILLIGAN'S ONE-SIDED THREAT TO TRUTH???)
The BBC was badly mauled in the report which was drawn up by one of Britain's leading judges Barry Hutton and which investigated the circumstances that led up to Kelly's death.
The inquiry looked into allegations by one of the BBC's journalists that the government had deliberately embellished a report on the extent of Iraqi weapons or mass destruction -- knowing the information to be false -- to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein.
The source for Andrew Gilligan's report was later revealed to be Kelly.
The findings of the Hutton report totally cleared the government, and the judge's ire was trained on the BBC, which received a devastating dressing down for organisational failures at just about every level.
"People recognise that mistakes were made but the main facts of what Gilligan reported were true ... that is the most important thing and that is what the government wants to hide," said Barry White, national organiser for the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE-- THIS IS NOT TRUE, AS PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS HAVE BORNE OUT)
"The report is not balanced at all. It's a whitewash for the governement and a tar and feathering for the BBC," he said.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: WHEN IT'S YOUR FAULT IT CAN'T BE BALANCED)
The governor of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, who resigned almost immediately after Hutton's findings were made public, admited certain key allegations reported by Andrew Gilligan were wrong, but also issued a note of caution.
He said that criticisms of the BBC did not take "sufficient account of the extenuating circumstances" created by government attacks on the BBC during the Iraq war, when it was accused of having an "anti-war agenda".
"Are his conclusions on restricting the use of unverifiable sources in British journalism based on sound law and, if applied, would they constitute a threat to the freedom of the press in this country?," he asked.
"I am sure that these questions will be widely debated."
Dear said that Hutton's conclusion that the government could not be criticised for allowing David Kelley's name to become public as the source of the leak dealt a severe blow to the principle that a journalist always protected his sources.
"That means people who would expose corruption or injustice are less likely to come forward for fear of what could happen to them," he said.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: IF THE GOVT DIDN'T DISCLOSE KELLEY, WHAT WOULD HAVE STOPPED THE BBC FROM CLAIMING A GOVERNMENT COVER UP? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. FURTHER, THE IDEA OF 'PROTECTED SOURCES' MEANS THAT YOU COULD EVEN MAKE UP THE SOURCE. AND NOTE: THE SOURCE WAS REVEALED AFTER THE DAMNING REPORT WAS MADE-- AND THE SOURCE DIDN'T SAY WHAT WAS REPORTED-- THE PRESS CANNOT SIMPLY MAKE STUFF UP AND CLAIM IT IS PROTECTED TO DO SO)
"You also have journalists who fear that the kind of situation that Andrew Gilligan has faced could happen to them," he added.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: GILLIGAN FACES THAT KIND OF SITUATION BECAUSE HE MADE IT UP-- HE CREATED A SCANDALOUS SITUATION-- HE DUG HIS OWN GRAVE)
He said this was an especially dangerous development at a time when two journalists in Northern Ireland were being threatened with jail terms for their refusal to reveal their sources for a report over the controversial Bloody Sunday killings.
British journalist Alex Thomson and his colleague from Northern Ireland Lena Ferguson investigated the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when British soldiers shot dead 14 people during a civil rights march in the city of Londonderry.
An initial inquiry in 1972 absolved the British army. But the two journalists produced a television documentary in 1997 that revealed new elements about the killings which led to a second inquiry.
White said journalists should not give in to bullying by governments who were using the inquiry to settle their own scores, but he also criticised the BBC.
"The management of the BBC is crumbling where it should be standing up and defending its journalists," he said.
"Most of the public and the journalists do not think the findings are credible. The fact that it put only the blame on one side makes people very suspicious about it," he added.
A poll in London evening newspaper the Evening Standard published on Thursday showed that 56 percent of those questioned judged the Hutton report "not balanced" while only 36 percent said it was "convincing."
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: THE BBC HAS SHAPED THE PUBLIC INTO BEING ANTI-WAR. THE PRESS TOOK A SIDE AND THE PUBLIC WAS FORCED TO SWALLOW IT. IT'S NO WONDER THAT THEIR OWN PRESS WOULD REPORT THAT THE PUBLIC 'DOUBTED' HUTTON'S FINDINGS..)
Unreal-- the BBC is saying "boo hoo, we have to be accountable for the things we say and do....we have freedom of the press-- we should do whatever we want, no matter how wrong and slanderous..."
If the BBC was right, it would have come out-- no one, including Lord Hutton, supports the war in Iraq. Yet Hutton came out blaming the BBC for failing to live up to the principles it's now using to deflect the world's attention from it's sad conduct.
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| Jerusalem bus bombed-- at least 10 killed. Palestinian terror masters decry 'cycle of violence'... |
| 01.29.04 (12:21 am) [edit] |
I am so fucking tired of the Palestinian leadership decrying every one of their own suicide bombings as part of this 'cycle of violence'. There is no moral equivalency between Israelis defending themselves from the knuckle-dragging radical Muslim terrorists and the intentional killing of civilians by the said terrorists. None whatsoever. Repeating the "cycle of violence" pap serves to shadow this fact, and you'd better drill it into your head: the Palestinian leadership does not want peace, does not want a state, and does not want an end to the violence. Their government charter, and the terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that support the government all have one stated goal-- the destruction of Israel.
As of 3:18am there is no claim of responsibility-- as if it matters. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, some f-ed up 'martyrs' brigade-- they all come from the same ideological stock pot. To call a terrorist 'moderate' is to call your life 'almost' worth living.
It is the same ideology that led to 9-11, and unless we call it like it is, another 9-11 is going to happen.
You knew something was up: peace negotiations were being restarted, Hezbollah and Israel were about ready to swap prisoners. For the Palestinians it's one step forward, and then a bomb that makes you go 1500 years back.
Arafat should be killed, the PA should be disbanded, and the Palestinian people should be left to figure it out for themselves.
I'm sick of this shit. Please excuse the language.
Jerusalem Bomber Kills Self, 10 Others
By RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM - A suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem on Thursday, killing at least 10 bystanders and wounding about 30 in an attack outside Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s official residence, police and paramedics said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The explosion coincided with a German-brokered prisoner swap between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah. It was not clear whether there was a connection.
The explosion went off just before 9 a.m. in the Rehavia district in downtown Jerusalem, just 15 yards from Sharon's official residence. Sharon was at his farm in southern Israel at the time, his aides said.
Bret Stephens, editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, said he heard the boom and ran to the scene.
"There was glass everywhere, human remains everywhere, shoes, feet, pieces of guts. There were pieces of body everywhere," he said.
"A number of people were able to clearly walk off the bus ... some of them were badly injured. Some of them were not so badly injured."
Stephane Ben Shushan, who owns a chocolate store in the upscale neighborhood, was walking to work and was outside his shop, about 10 yards away, when the explosion went off.
"It's indescribable," he said. "It's a real nightmare, you can smell the blood." He said there was heavy traffic and the bus was driving slow at the time.
The bomber was in the back of the bus when he detonated the explosives, said Jerusalem Police Chief Mickey Levy.
"It was a very serious attack on a bus packed with passengers," Levy said at the scene. "According to what we know at the moment ... we're talking about a suicide bomber."
The green Egged bus was charred, with wires dangling everywhere. One side of the bus had been blown out and the back half of the roof was blown off.
Police investigators with sniffer dogs searched the bus. Paramedics were taking away the wounded on stretchers. Others were treated at the scene. People, dazed and crying, wandered around the area. One crying woman said she had been walking down the street when she heard a loud explosion.
The explosion came just two days after senior Egyptian officials made another attempt to win a pledge from Palestinian militants to halt attacks on Israelis. The attack was a further setback to international efforts to bring about a resumption of peace talks. The U.S.-led "road map" peace plan has been stalled almost since its inception in June.
Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) officials condemned the bombing. "This vicious cycle can only be broken by renewal of a meaningful peace process," said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. "Otherwise, otherwise violence will breed violence, bullets will breed bullets."
Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, said the attack illustrated why Israel is building a contentious separation barrier in the West Bank. Israel says the structure is needed to keep suicide bombers out of Israel. "The rest of the world should sit back and let us do what we need to do to defend ourselves," Gissin said.
The last attack in Israel was a suicide bombing at a bus stop outside of Tel Aviv on Dec. 25 that killed four people.
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| No abortion left behind, and a hatred for democracy. A stunning article. |
| 01.28.04 (10:30 pm) [edit] |
[b]No Abortion Left Behind
From the February 2, 2004 issue: How much is worldwide access to abortion worth?[/b]
by Joseph Bottum, for the Editors
02/02/2004, Volume 009, Issue 20
HOW MUCH is worldwide access to abortion worth? What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any woman--at any place, for any reason--to have an abortion?
We might start with the deaths of more than 6 million children [i]after[/i] birth. Of the world's 10 million children who died last year of preventable diseases and starvation, [b]two-thirds could have been saved by effective international intervention through UNICEF, [/b] according to a recent essay in the British medical journal the Lancet. [b]But Danny Kaye's old international children's fund has been taken over by abortion activists who have radically shifted the organization's focus away from rescuing children.[/b]
Jim Grant, the widely respected executive director of UNICEF, launched what he called the "Child Survival Revolution" in 1982. Upon Grant's death, however, [b] the Clinton administration demanded the appointment of New York activist Carol Bellamy. And [u] under Bellamy, UNICEF has decided its job is not to save sick and hungry children, but to join the great march toward universal sex freedom--agitating for minors' access to condoms, requiring that refugee camps provide abortion services, and handing out sex-education manuals to grade-school students in the third world. "We, a group of concerned scientists and public health managers, call on . . . UNICEF . . . to act on behalf of children," the authors in the Lancet pleaded. "Child survival must be put back on the agenda." [/u][/b]
[b]A worldwide decline in democratic government, too, is apparently a small price to pay for bringing about the universal legality of what international documents call "reproductive rights."[/b] Why should voters be consulted about the laws that govern them--if consulting actual citizens might not bring about the all-trumping right to abortion? (BLOGGER'S NOTE: THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE US WITH THE COURTS-- BYPASSING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE) That, at least, is the feeling manifest in recently obtained internal memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a lawyers' nongovernmental organization (NGO) that specializes in suing local and national governments that fail to allow unfettered access to abortion.
A copy of these abortion-strategy memos was mailed anonymously late last year to Austin Ruse, who heads the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey reprinted them in the Congressional Record on December 8, and they make fascinating reading--[b]for they show how NGO activists speak behind closed doors. "There is a stealth quality to the work," one memo noted. "We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions."[/b]
Such disingenuousness is necessary for the abortion activists' strategy,[b] which consists primarily of inserting vague passages in as many international treaties, reports, and working papers as possible--and then getting the enforcement agencies and entities such as the European Court of Human Rights to interpret those passages to mean a universal right to abortion has been established.[/b] (BLOGGER'S NOTE: VAGUENESS IS BEHIND THE INTL MOVEMENT-- WITNESS THE VAGUENESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT-- THE AIM IS TO NOT CONFINE TO ANY DEFINITIONS-- IT'S A POWER GRAB) Although the phrase "reproductive rights" is omnipresent in U.N. documents--a draft for the 1999 report from the Cairo + 5 conference, for instance, used it 47 times in the section on adolescents alone--[b] there is not a meaningful definition of "reproductive rights" in any official U.N. resolution.[/b] (BLOGGER'S NOTE: THIS IS INTENTIONAL)
Perhaps the most interesting portion of the memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights is the admission that this strategy has failed thus far to establish the "soft norm" of abortion--for the center claimed exactly the opposite two years ago when it brought suit against the Bush administration for reinstituting the ban on federal agencies' funding of international organizations that promote abortion. In its brief in that case, the center explicitly insisted that the performances of international courts had already established a "customary right to abortion" that American courts are obligated to obey. "Our goal is to see governments worldwide guarantee women's reproductive rights out of recognition that they are bound to do so," the center's memos admit--and, "What good is all our work if the Bush administration can simply take it all away with the stroke of a pen?"
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: A UN DECLARATION IS NOT INTERNATIONAL 'LAW'. TREATIES ARE LAW. PLUS, THE US IS A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. AND A DEMOCRACY.)
The cease-and-desist letter the center's president sent Austin Ruse after these embarrassing memos were leaked to him is hilarious in its arrogance and frankness. The memos are "privileged communications, proprietary information, and trade secrets" that must be returned unused, since "disclosure of this material has caused, and further disclosure will cause, CRR irreparable harm." And the harm is, finally, the revelation of the circularity in the abortion activists' technique. Their legal briefs routinely cite phrases they themselves crafted in U.N. directives, international court decisions, and
treaty-organization minutes. [b]Every time a court admits one of these "soft norms"--as the U.S. Supreme Court did in its Lawrence decision last June--the activists move closer to achieving their goal. [/b]
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: AND, OF COURSE, THE LAWRENCE CASE HAD NO LEGAL BASIS-- AS EVEN THE JUSTICES IN THE MAJORITY AGREED. IT VIOLATED 10TH AMENDEMENT, BUT WAS THE 'RIGHT' THING TO DO.)
The memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights are hardly the long-sought smoking gun that at last exposes the schemes of the pro-abortion NGOs. Freshly fired pistols litter the floors of the United Nations and the World Court--all the treaty organizations at which the world's legal and practical norms are decided these days. At the Cairo world conference on population and development in 1994, or the Beijing conference on women in 1995, the international community did little to hide the centrality of its abortion agenda or its disdain for the opponents of abortion.
[b][u]But the memos do at least reveal the extent to which the activists for international abortion hate the forms and participatory nature of democratic government. [/u]These people are fanatics, in the truest sense of the word: [u]All other issues must be warped to reflect solely their concerns, and the mere existence of opposing views convinces them that radical evil is afoot in the world. Their adversaries seem to them demons and monsters, against whom no tactic of deceit or slander is ever forbidden. [/u][/b]
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: THIS IS THE M.O. FOR THE LEFT ON ALL ISSUES. THEY CAN'T STAND OPPOSING VIEWS, AND IF YOU HAVE ONE, YOU'RE EVIL. IF YOU ARE IN THE MAJORITY, YOUR GROUP HAS EITHER BEEN DUPED AND/OR IS EVIL OR STUPID. THAT EXPLAINS BASICALLY EVERY LEFTIST YOU'LL EVER MEET-- ON THIS SITE, NEXT DOOR, IN GOVERNMENT, AND ALL OVER THE WORLD...)
[b]Various women's groups this summer, for instance, denounced the government of Peru--because the Peruvian congress apologized for the more than 200,000 poor women coerced into sterilizations under the 1990s "compulsory family planning program" of President Alberto Fujimori. "We do not condone forced sterilizations," one activist explained, "but no one can deny that Fujimori's program was excellent in terms of access and information." The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy issued a press release declaring the "apology is part of a right-wing strategy to limit family planning options in Peru."[/b]
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: SO AN APOLOGY IS A 'RIGHT-WING STRATEGY'! INSTEAD OF BEING A SINCERE APOLOGY FOR FORCING WOMEN TO DENY THEIR BABIES LIFE...)
This November, Ellen Sauerbrey, representing the United States on the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, promoted a mild resolution--"very near and dear to us in America," as she explained--that urged greater political participation by women around the world. [b]Nineteen pro-abortion NGOs promptly sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Negroponte, rejecting the resolution because it didn't mention abortion.[/b]
[b]The examples of fanaticism go on and on. UNESCO has drifted so far into the abortion fight that an irritated [u]Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, finally sent a letter this month to the U.N. asking what declarations such as "Governments should make abortion legal, safe, and affordable" have to do with UNESCO's supposed mission of promoting education, science, and culture[/u]. When Secretary of State Colin Powell cut off American funding for the United Nations Population Fund in 2002--[u]on the reasonable grounds that UNFPA was hopelessly implicated in China's forced-abortion policy--he was immediately attacked by E.U. development and humanitarian aid commissioner Poul Nielson, for creating a worldwide "decency gap" in failing to help UNFPA spread international abortion rights.[/u] [/b]
Meanwhile, Douglas A. Sylva, the vice president of Ruse's group, reports that the U.N.-backed European Population Forum this month blamed the United States for bringing, as one official put it, "near-collapse to international gatherings on [b]children's rights[/b], development and population by opposing any language that might allow for abortion." The fundamental job of every international agency in coming years, the president of International Planned Parenthood explained, will be to fight the opponents of abortion by "discrediting their pseudo-science and unmasking their ideological motives. It is essential to demonstrate the truly dangerous consequences of their approach."
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: "Children's rights"! Really? So children have rights-- except to live. This is evil, folks. And what ideological motives? Basic concern for life? )
[b]Only zealotry and extremism can explain all this: the warping of every institution, every issue, and every occasion to concern abortion. The pro-abortion fanatics have taken over the entire international forum. And to achieve the ability of any woman--at any place, for any reason--to have an abortion, they are willing to pay any price.[/b]
--Joseph Bottum, for the Editors
© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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| Passionate thoughts |
| 01.28.04 (9:50 pm) [edit] |
[b]Passionate thoughts[/b]
William F. Buckley
January 28, 2004
The argument over Mel Gibson's dramatization of the death of Jesus needs analysis, and this is not difficult to undertake, even for those who have not seen the movie, scheduled for release in February, on Ash Wednesday.
The plot line is remarkably brief. The biblical writers had no interest whatever in the kind of thing that interests Mel Gibson. He has taken on, after all, the greatest drama in human history, the crucifixion of the Jew who claimed divinity and persuaded much of the civilized world to accept his word. Matthew handles the whole thing -- from the order given down by Pilate, to the expiration of Jesus -- in less space than is taken by this newspaper column.
In that account, one line is spoken that most grievously offends several Jewish critics who have seen the two-hour film. The moment comes when Pilate attempts to free Jesus, on the grounds that he has not been proved guilty of anything. A colloquy ensues, Pilate vs. "the Jews" who are clamoring for Jesus' death. Pilate declares, "I am innocent of the blood of this just person. You see to it." Matthew 27:25: "And all the people answered and said, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'"
That curse is not recorded in the three other gospels' accounts of the Crucifixion. Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, comments, as reported by The Christian Science Monitor, that "a tremendous number of Jews never turned against Jesus during Holy Week," and records that [b]"the Gospel use of the phrase 'the Jews' referred to Jesus' Jewish opponents, not all Jews. It was a common construction of writing of the time." [/b]
But Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, believe that the language that includes the tribal curse should be removed from the film, which Mel Gibson actually thought to do in one version of it. ("The Passion" is still being edited.) Their more general objections are to the depiction of the murderous, bloodthirsty Jewish mob, as feeding a negative stereotype of Jews. "Do I think it will trigger pogroms?" said Mr. Foxman. "I don't think it will. But will it strengthen and legitimize anti-Semitic feelings? Yes, it will."
[b]That judgment is incautious. Nothing legitimizes anti-Semitic feelings.[/b] The movie's play to human emotions is of course central to its purpose. Mel Gibson is a professional producer of movie drama, and an essential part of drama is to show on screen what happened, or is said to have happened. Nothing would be more ridiculous than to sweeten the voices of the mob that cried out for crucifixion.
But the notion that this generates anti-Semitism is not entirely to be scorned. Movies about the Holocaust generate a measure of straight-out anti-German sentiment. Mel Gibson's movie ("Braveheart") about the Scots generated, however fleetingly, anti-British sentiment. The movie "Zulu" is here and there resented as depicting black Africans as savage.
[b]The danger that the reiteration of the story of the Crucifixion will do anti-Semitic damage is, happily, slight. The Vatican in 1965 rejected and indeed denounced the proposition that the acts of individual Jews 2,000 years ago justify anti-Semitism. [/b]The nightmare of the Holocaust will always keep us awake to the awful lengths to which ethnic and religious hatred can go. But if there is consolation to be sought, surely it is that [b]Hitler was utterly indifferent to any crimes any Jews might have committed against Jesus Christ. His antagonism -- his hatred -- was based on preposterous, but no less lethal, ideas of racial purity. I know of no text by Hitler against the Jews -- and they are legion -- in which the death of Christ is even hinted at as indicating 20th-century Jewish culpability. [/b]
The idea of corporate guilt is stultifying. Yet it is constantly being fed, as by such doings as President Bill Clinton's going about Africa apologizing for slavery. [b]It is one thing for modern Americans to regret slavery, quite another to apologize for it. Slavery, like anti-Semitism, is perpetually regrettable,[u] but only those who engage in regrettable activity need to apologize for it. [/u]If it were otherwise, who among us could be free of ethnic or racial or religious taint from one or more historical abominations? [/b]
(blogger's note: apparently Abe Foxman)
And even as we continue to see depictions of the Holocaust, and to learn from them, we will continue to see depictions of the tragic end of Christ on Earth, and learn from them.
[i]William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review, a Townhall.com member group.[/i]
©2003 Universal Press Syndicate
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| Why aren't more civil libertarians concerned about the Limbaugh case? |
| 01.28.04 (9:39 pm) [edit] |
[b]Smugness[/b]
Emmett Tyrrell
January 29, 2004
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Really, it is not very amazing that a government vendetta has been launched against Rush Limbaugh, the very successful and gifted talk show host. Governments have attempted to suppress criticism for centuries. The Founding Fathers were acutely aware of that, and provided strong protections in our system of government for dissent and for free speech. But would Thomas Jefferson, for instance, have anticipated that a journalist's fellow communicators would remain silent while one of their own was being threatened with jail?
Right now, extreme measures are being taken against Limbaugh, and what impresses me more than a government's repressive measures against him is the meekness of his colleagues. First, there is the quietude of the press in general. I suppose that was to be expected. Many years ago, when the great dissenter, H.L. Mencken, was being harassed on a petty and very much trumped-up obscenity charge, the national press averted its gaze. At the time, Mencken was no small fish. He was then considered a champion of their great cause, freedom of speech. Mencken attributed the press's cowardliness to "smugness."
Yet the American press is today highly politicized, and its politics are antithetical to Limbaugh's. The press is liberal. Limbaugh is a dissident in the best sense of the word. He is conservative. That the press in general ignores the attempts to suppress him is another example of its stupendous hypocrisy, but this is not surprising.
What is surprising is the quietude of the conservative press. Why is it not hollering from its syndicated columns, its intellectual reviews, its handful of newspapers and Fox News? I assume this is another example of what Mencken diagnosed as "smugness." Still, it is dismaying.
Limbaugh has admitted to becoming hooked on prescription drugs while trying to mollify the pain he has suffered from back and ear maladies. No one disputes he suffered this pain. No one I have encountered claims he was taking the prescription medication OxyContin for kicks. If he were, I am told that there are superior drugs pursuant to kicks. Anyway, the misuse of medications and reliance on OxyContin all end in the same hell on earth. Limbaugh has involuntarily been there, and he has now sought treatment. He wants out. Every authority I have consulted tells me that given his admission and given his voluntary rehab, he would normally be let off.
The Hollywood coke snorters get this sort of judgment. Why not Limbaugh? Should he have been snorting coke?
But Palm Beach County prosecutors, having apparently leaked information about the case as well as some of the negotiating documents between them and Limbaugh's lawyers, now want Limbaugh to plead guilty to a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Limbaugh's lawyer, the respected civil libertarian Roy Black, considers this "preposterous." It is worse than that, which is presumably why the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a legal brief on behalf of Limbaugh. Another brief on his behalf has been filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which wants to scotch the prosecutors' release of his medical records.
The harassment of Limbaugh provides another unlovely glimpse into the workings of the liberal elites. From the days of FDR, they have used the law to persecute political opponents. FDR used the IRS and FBI against such an array of opponents from former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, to publishers Moses Annenberg and Col. Robert R. McCormick, to labor leader John L. Lewis. All were innocent. Limbaugh is in good company.
Still, it is repulsive to see the rest of the press sitting quietly by. That Limbaugh, a first offender and recovering addict to pain killers rather than street drugs, is being unfairly harassed is clear to anyone but a political zealot. Conceivably, his harassment will end in court appearances and even a jail term. Will that please his opponents? "We got Limbaugh on an OxyContin charge." It might be a first.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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| Top French officials bribed by Saddam to oppose US, government papers reveal (surprise, surprise) |
| 01.28.04 (5:15 pm) [edit] |
This is why you don't take just causes through the UN. Expect similar revelations about all the other countries who took "moral" opposition to the US liberation of Iraq:
[b]Iraqi govt. papers: Saddam bribed Chirac[/b]
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The oil ministry papers, described by the independent Baghdad newspaper al-Mada, are apparently authentic and will become the basis of an official investigation by the new Iraqi Governing Council, the Independent reported Wednesday.
"I think the list is true," Naseer Chaderji, a governing council member, said. "I will demand an investigation. [b]These people must be prosecuted."[/b]
[b]Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac sought to couch his opposition to the invasion on a moral high ground.[/b]
A senior Bush administration official said Washington was aware of the reports but refused further comment.
French diplomats have dismissed any suggestion their foreign policy was influenced by payments from Saddam, but [b]some European diplomats have long suspected France's steadfast opposition to the war was less moral than monetary.[/b]
"Oil runs thicker than blood," is how one former ambassador put his suspicions about the French motives for opposing action against Saddam.
Al-Mada's list cites a total of 46 individuals, companies and organizations inside and outside Iraq as receiving Saddam's oil bribes, including officials in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Sudan, China, Austria and France, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Communist Party, India's Congress Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
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| Remember that damning WMD report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace? |
| 01.28.04 (4:33 pm) [edit] |
Of course you do! For if you read a newspaper you'd know that their report that came out recently "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications" concluded that "There was a pattern of misrepresentation, or inaccurate statements, by [Bush] administration officials over and above the intelligence failures."
Indeed, this is more harsh than David Kay's recent testimony that the US had bad intel. The folks at Carnegie say that there was intentional conduct to promote a war. And the nut wing rejoices!
But, there's a problem-- the past. For in the recent past, just like the hypocrites on the Left and internationally that supported the common wisdom that Hussein had WMD, the big brains at Carnegie argued that Hussein had WMD and was a danger.
According to Eric Pfeiffer in today's National Review:
[i]As recently as late 2002 in their report titled "Deadly Arsenals," [b]CEIP compiled a detailed list of Iraq's suspected chemical weapon stockpiles, [/b]staunch refusal to fully cooperate with coercive inspections, and the ability to reconstitute their nuclear program, including the production of a nuclear weapon, within a matter of months.[/i]
Some excerpts from the report:
On nuclear weapons: "Iraq's ambitions and accumulated nuclear technical expertise remain, however, and with them the capability to restart the program covertly ... If Iraq were to acquire material from another country, it is possible that it could assemble a nuclear weapon in months."
On biological/chemical weapons: "The absence of U.N. monitoring since 1998 has aroused concerns that Iraq may again have produced some biological warfare agents. Iraq currently maintains numerous science and medical facilities furnished with dual-use equipment where potential biological warfare-related work could easily take place."
"Because of the size of the Iraqi program, however, [b]it is widely believed that significant quantities of chemical agents and precursors remain stored in secret depots ... Rough estimates conclude that Iraq may have retained up to 600 metric tons of agents, including mustard gas, VX, and sarin. Approximately 25,000 rockets and 15,000 artillery shells with chemical agents also remain unaccounted for."[/b]
Note the word "UNACCOUNTED FOR"-- something that was Hussein's responsibility.
The report concludes, "Saddam Hussein may have begun to reconstitute Iraq's WMD programs, including the nuclear weapons program."
So is it ok for most Democrats, the UN, France, Russia, Germany, and left-wing organizations to contradict their claims in stunning displays of hypocrisy, while President Bush-- for believing the very same intelligence-- gets called a "liar"?
Apparently, yes.
Pfeiffer continues:
[i]CEIP's pivot on Iraq's WMD threat appears to have political implications beyond saving face in light of the as-yet failure to locate stockpiles of chemical weapons. The report calls for ending the policy of preemptive military action a half-dozen times, even going so far as to require "United Nations approval before engaging in defensive military action in the face of imminent threats." Such a stark contrast to their previous findings led to a source no less than the BBC to describe the group as "The left-leaning Carnegie Endowment," [/i]
That's what this all is-- by screaming all the louder, the CEIP can divert attention from its hypocrisy, just like the Democrats and the UN.
There was no "lie" about Iraq's WMD. The accusation is the only lie.
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| Kay implicates the UN: where's the outrage there? "THE UN LIED!" |
| 01.28.04 (3:23 pm) [edit] |
People without brains, er, I mean the Democrats, insist that because David Kay said there was 'bad intelligence' regarding the Bush administration's claims regarding WMD in Iraq, claims shared by some of the leaders making the worst accusations (John Kerry and Carl Levin, ,for example, both who voted for the war resolution, and both who voted for the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998. They saw the same intel that President Bush did-- and they spoke of Iraq's WMD in the same concrete terms), Bush "lied" to the American people.
As I've pointed out many times, and as anyone that knows how to read a UN resolution knows, everyone believed that Hussein had WMD. What is beyond doubt is that Hussein violated the terms of his UN cease-fire by not verifying that he disarmed. The US had every right, especially after 9-11, to change the regime in Iraq. And the Iraqis are very happy that we liberated them in protecting ourselves.
Interestingly, Kay's statements before the Senate Armed Services Committee indict not only the bad intel of the CIA, but the UN itself. [b]According to Katherine Pfleger of the Associated Press, "Kay said U.S. intelligence agencies became so dependent on information from U.N. inspectors, they didn't develop their own sources. He also said he would favor an independent investigation into the intelligence failures. "[/b]
So where is the international outrage at the UN? This is the only 'credible' world institution, right? The Left loves the UN, they think it should be a world government, and like the Left itself, should be always right, even if it is wrong. Like many have said: this is intel that had existed for awhile, it was believed by all, including many of the Dems criticizing the President. Even Jacques Chirac admitted Hussein probably had WMD.
Of course, there are some who go beyond the unjust accusation of "Bush lied"-- these are members of the nut wing. They are folks like Wes Clark and Howard Dean. Folks that don't just stretch the truth, they create a parallel universe.
Ted Kennedy: This was a fraud cooked up in Texas for political gain (yes, a war is always a political winner!)
Wes Clark: The President is a criminal and a deserter. Absolutely no proof. Slanderous stuff.
Howard Dean, today: "The administration did cook the books....I think that's pretty serious."
Absolutely no proof.
[b]The thing is, if there was an intel failure, and it was partly because we relied on the UN, then we need to officially abandon the UN. And if we do have an intel problem in this country, it existed long before 9-11, and should be corrected before another 9-11 happens.[/b]
[b]So Where's the WMD? [/b]
Anti-Bush partisans aren't listening to what David Kay is saying.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Iraq weapons inspector David Kay speaks to the Senate today, and our (probably forlorn) hope is that his remarks will get wide and detailed coverage. What we've been hearing from him in snippets so far explains the mystery of whatever happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
His answers, we should make clear, are a long way from the "Bush and Blair lied" paradigm currently animating the Democratic primaries and newspapers. John Kerry of all people now claims that, because Mr. Kay's Iraq Study Group has not found stockpiles of WMD or a mature nuclear program, President Bush somehow "misled" the country. "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception," he said on "Fox News Sunday." This is the same Senator who voted for the war after having access to the intelligence and has himself said previously that he believed Saddam had such weapons.
The reason Mr. Kerry believed this is because everybody else did too. That Saddam had WMD was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community for years, going back well into the Clinton Administration. The CIA's Near East and counterterrorism bureaus disagreed on the links between al Qaeda and Saddam--which is one reason the Bush Administration failed to push that theme. But the CIA and its intelligence brethren were united in their belief that Saddam had WMD, as the agency made clear in numerous briefings to Congress.
And not just the CIA. Believers included the U.N., whose inspectors were tossed out of Iraq after they had recorded huge stockpiles after the Gulf War. No less than French President Jacques Chirac warned as late as last February about "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq" and declared that the "international community is right . . . in having decided Iraq should be disarmed."
All of this was enshrined in U.N. Resolution 1441, which ordered Saddam to come completely clean about his weapons. If he really had already destroyed all of his WMD, Saddam had every incentive to give U.N. inspectors free rein, put everything on the table and live to deceive another day. That he didn't may go down as Saddam's last and greatest miscalculation.But Mr. Kay's Study Group has also discovered plenty to suggest that Saddam couldn't come clean because he knew he wasn't. In his interim report last year, Mr. Kay disclosed a previously unknown Iraq program for long-range missiles; this was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions.
Mr. Kay has also speculated that Saddam may have thought he had WMD because his own generals and scientists lied to him. "The scientists were able to fake programs," the chief inspector says. This is entirely plausible, because aides who didn't tell Saddam what he wanted to hear were often tortured and killed. We know from post-invasion interrogations that Saddam's own generals believed that Iraq had WMD. If they thought so, it's hard to fault the CIA for believing it too.
Mr. Kay has also made clear that, stockpiles or no, Saddam's regime retained active programs that could have been reconstituted at any time. Saddam tried to restart his nuclear program as recently as 2001. There is also evidence, Mr. Kay has told the London Telegraph, that some components of Saddam's WMD program "went to Syria before the war." Precisely what and how much "is a major issue that needs to be resolved." The most logical conclusion is that Saddam hoped to do just enough to satisfy U.N. inspectors and then restart his WMD production once sanctions were lifted and the international heat was off.
By all means let Congress explore why the CIA overestimated Saddam's WMD stockpiles this time around. But let's do so while recalling that the CIA had underestimated the progress of his nuclear, chemical and biological programs before the first Gulf War. We are also now learning that the CIA has long underestimated the extent and progress of nuclear programs in both Libya and Iran. Why aren't Democrats and liberals just as alarmed about those intelligence failures?Intelligence is as much art and judgment as it is science, and it is inherently uncertain. We elect Presidents and legislators to consider the evidence and then make difficult policy judgments that the voters can later hold them responsible for. Mr. Kay told National Public Radio that, based on the evidence he has seen from Iraq, "I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat." He added that "I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war."
As intelligence failures go, we'd prefer one that worried too much about a threat than one that worried too little. The latter got us September 11.
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| American librarians unjustly hate the Patriot Act, but have no problem with Fidel Castro imprisoning |
| 01.28.04 (12:49 pm) [edit] |
Librarians Covering for Castro
By Nat Hentoff
Washington Times | January 28, 2004
Although Fidel Castro has imprisoned 10 independent librarians for such crimes against the state as circulating copies of the United Nations' International Declaration of Human Rights and George Orwell's "1984," the leadership of the American Library Association (ALA) — the world's largest organization of librarians — has been resisting calls by some ALA members to urge the Cuban dictator to let them out.
Along with 65 other Cuban dissenters, the "subversive" librarians were sentenced to 20 or more years in Mr. Castro's gulag. Some urgently need medical attention, which they're not receiving.
At the ALA's annual midwinter meeting earlier this month in San Diego, Karen Schneider, a member of the ALA's governing council, wanted to amend a final report to call for their immediate release. Mrs. Schneider, in proposing her amendment, told her colleagues that Mr. Castro's police had confiscated and burned books and other materials at the indepe | |
