Tuesday, December 14, 2004

The Cultural Ignorance of the Left



Click here for Amazon...Despite the homage the urban liberals pay to the idea of diversity, you have to live in rural, red state America to experience intellectual diversity.

We hear both sides of the story. On abortion, the environment, gay marriage, war, and taxes, we hear the liberal side from the national media, and we hear both sides in the local media and radio. Sure, we hear the liberal side twice, but at least we hear the conservative side once.

Another reason liberals never hear the other side is that they're such bullies. Intellectual bullies, that is. I'm sure Manhattan has conservatives, but they live in such an intolerant environment, they probably keep quiet.

Things like this are hard to quantify, but you can detect it in how liberals argue their political positions. Consider hate crimes laws. They criminalize thought. We can all agree that things like assault, murder, and theft should be illegal, but only an intellectual bully is interested in whether you had the correct thoughts about those you were murdering or assaulting.

Or consider sex education. Liberals oppose laws requiring abstinence education. These laws don't forbid schools from continuing on with the traditional "we know you're going to have sex, so here's a condom" philosophy, they merely require that schools also inform kids of the benefits of abstinence. Only intellectual bullies would feel so threatened by the idea of students hearing both points of view.

Another trademark of intellectual bullies is that they can't resist calling people names. They honestly think their opponents are evil or stupid. We're homophobes. Patriarchs. Greedy. Fundamentalist. Bigots. Gun-toters. White trash. Bible-thumpers. It's hard to listen to new ideas with these thoughts in your head...

...These city folk are victims of a new cultural hegemony in America. Whenever we turn on the TV or watch a movie, we learn all about life in their little corners of the world. They seldom get a glimpse at us.

I tried to think of current TV sitcoms or recent movies which tell our story. There aren't many. The closest I came was "Northern Exposure," a '90s show about a New York medical school graduate forced to practice in a small town in Alaska. But I ruled that one out. It was about a New Yorker. And towards the end, the story line was hijacked by two gay men who moved to town to operate a bed-and-breakfast and an environmental wacko who lived in an air-tight dome and claimed he could sense releases of toxic gasses thousands of miles away.

Those plots are really about Hollywood life, not ours...

...I think the TV series "Roseanne" was set in a red state, hence the blue staters' belief that we're mostly fat, poor, and stupid. It's very hard to think of a recent movie or TV show which sympathetically portrays our lives. "The Waltons," "The Andy Griffith Show," and "Petticoat Junction" were set in red states, but they're all set in the past. A few movies, like "A Walk to Remember," are sympathetic portrayals of contemporary rural American life, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule. If you want to see a small-town southern preacher who is wise and compassionate, watch this movie. You won't see it again soon.

But every election day, our stories and our values count just as much as those in blue states. And for just a little while, they notice us.


Alan Aker: The Cultural Ignorance of the Left

Monday, December 13, 2004

No More Tyrants, Please



Click here for AmazonAn excellent piece by former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky: Palestinians Do Not Need Another Tyrant.

Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian “fear society” would always pose a grave threat to Israel and would never prove a reliable peace partner. It was Andrei Sakharov, the foremost dissident in the Soviet Union, who taught me that regimes that do not respect the rights of their own people will not respect the rights of their neighbors.

The link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior is not always understood. Democratic leaders, whose power is ultimately dependent on popular support, are held accountable for failing to improve the lives of their citizens. Therefore, they have a powerful incentive to keep their societies peaceful and prosperous.

On the other hand, the power of dictators is not dependent upon popular will. For them, staying in power is a function not of bettering the lives of their subjects but rather of controlling those lives. To justify the degree of repression necessary to sustain their illegitimate rule, dictators need to constantly mobilize their people against external enemies.



LGF: No more tyrants, please

Dowd-eriffic



Click here for AmazonI really didn't think Maureen Dowd could sink any lower into the fever swamp. And, remarkably, she has. Her latest is not only a laughably feeble attempt at a partisan hack-job and intellectually dishonest to boot -- nothing new for her -- but is also of such patently inferior quality that it likely was authored by Maureen's pet monkey, Shrub.

Someone, please, save Maureen and the Times before it's too late. I hear the Tehran Times needs a new op-ed columnist.

Maureen Dowd is drowning in the fever swamp

Sunday, December 12, 2004

The Motivation of the Enemy



Click here for AmazonThe Washington Times' Sam Harris details the nearly unspeakable implications of the Iraqi insurgency. Read the whole thing (hat tip: JihadWatch).

However mixed or misguided our intentions were in launching this war, we are attempting, at considerable cost to ourselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.

Despite the numbers of Iraqi dead and the travesty of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgents know that we did not come to their country to rape their women or to kill innocent civilians. Every thinking person in the Muslim world understands that if our goal had been to kill Iraqis and steal their oil, millions of Iraqis would now be dead and their oil would be flowing. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on Earth, we should still expect tomorrow's paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself to bits for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women and children.

The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos.

We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances...

...Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism.


Washington Times: Sam Harris on the War

Let... it... go.



Click here for AmazonThe always insightful Polipundit web site points us to this unintentionally hilarious story of a few lonely Democrats that can't seem to get over the... well, I guess we can call it as we see it... mandate. This effort has all the compelling drama of a gridiron contest between the Cedarville Junior High School Cylones and the New England Patriots, only with more certainty of the outcome.

Clifford Arnebeck won’t let it go. He can’t let it go. Not, he says, while America refuses to recognize that John F. Kerry was elected president Nov. 2.

Arnebeck, a Democratic lawyer here and co-chairman of a self-styled national populist alliance, is petitioning the state’s highest court to throw out official results that favor President Bush and instead hand Ohio’s 20 electoral votes — and thus the White House — to Kerry. Or, at least, order a revote.

The bid appears quixotic, to put it politely, as Bush has been officially declared the winner by 119,000 votes and Arnebeck is arguing before a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in Ohio. Nor is the Massachusetts senator helping him out, said Arnebeck.

"I can’t for the life of me understand why Kerry isn’t fighting harder for this. Maybe it’s some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you’re not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck said, referring to the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members...


Stubborn and stupid is no way to go through life, son

LA Times... in deep weeds



Click here for AmazonThere's nothing better than seeing the egregiously biased LA Times disintegrating faster than a dime-store suit at a moth festival. Did you pay cold, hard cash for your subscription to the Times? Mickey Kaus has one word for you...

If you paid real money for the L.A. Times, we have a word for you: "Sucker"! Kf readers email with more evidence of the LAT's near-desperate near-free distribution policy: ...

I just subscribed for LA Times for 2$ a week for A YEAR. This was after I
had tried to cancel my subscrtiption ..." --reader S.

"I subscribed to a full 52 weeks of Saturday and Sunday delivery to the LA Times for a $5 add-on to my Wired magazine renewal---and I didn't have to give my phone number ... " --reader C.


KausFiles on the LA Times

Weekend at Yasser's



Click here for AmazonIt's a laff-a-minute funfest when PLO underlings Abdullah (Andrew McCarthy) and Faisal (Jonathan Silverman) visit their leader's compound in Ramallah. Unbeknownst to them, a rival faction has "terminated the Arafat problem" and left them holding the body. It's high-larious hijinx aplenty as the dimwitted pair try to prove to the world that Yasser is still alive... ("Five thumbs up", Gene Shalit).

Picture credit: AP (no, not the Associated Press).

Friday, December 10, 2004

"Baghdad is Booming"



Click here for Amazon"Baghdad is booming," says Mohammed Fadhil Ali, one of three remarkable Ali brothers who oversee the Web log, Iraqthemodel.com. Mohammed and his younger brother Omar came this week to the Journal's offices, their first trip to the States, to discuss Iraq's future.

They were not overwhelmed by New York's holiday crush; Baghdad's population is roughly 5.7 million people. Stores there are overflowing with goods and the streets jammed with shoppers. It appears that the number of cars has doubled in a year. "The middle class is growing," says Omar. After the April 9, 2003, "liberation," Mohammed was determined to photograph every new building in Baghdad. "Now there is a new building in Baghdad every day; I can't count them all." Land and real-estate prices are surging. Most of the investment is coming out of the Arab world, not the West.

They made a couple of other interesting points about Iraq's political mood. One, Iraqis won't vote for a government dominated by Islamist religionists. Why? The abhorred next-door example of Iran's mullahs...


Wonder Land

"Trust the People"



Click here for AmazonNearly a quarter-century after the Reagan earthquake first rocked our economy, the aftershocks are still a very real and continuing phenomenon. Every tax cut, every regulatory stranglehold broken, every economic shackle unlocked, and every despot or totalitarian regime toppled increases freedom, creativity and entrepreneurship. And in the ultracompetitive world that has sprung from the ashes, "old line" hegemony and subjugation lose their strength.

As Ronald Reagan said in 1981, "We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success--only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive and free. Trust the people." ...


The "Reagan earthquake" still reverberates through the world economy

Google-based metrics for Journalists



Click here for AmazonThe little blog has been getting a few new viewers lately, thanks to an overly kind Hugh Hewitt, who mentioned it in his latest WorldnetDaily Column ("Do the Math").

Hugh's premise is that web journalists, and especially their patrons, should be interested in the traffic generated by their columns. Is the WaPo, for instance, really getting their money's worth with the likes of E.J. Dionne? And how does that traffic stack up against, say a Bill Bennett?

Even without Nielsen-style ratings, there are some interesting metrics to be gathered on the web. Google made its fortune by using hyperlinks to determine the importance of a page. Why not try a similar approach for Journalists? Here's a quick list I just assembled, which summarizes the number of mentions of each exact phrase in the Google index.

518,000 Rush Limbaugh
469,000 Ann Coulter
368,000 Hugh Hewitt
254,000 Walter Williams
204,000 Sean Hannity
189,000 Thomas Friedman
177,000 Bill Bennett
77,000 E.J. Dionne
40,100 Alan Colmes
32,000 Thomas Oliphant (includes Tom Oliphant)


I think this is useful data, even without vetting the results (which we can do) or using date ranges (an advanced capability of Google). With date ranges, we could plot trend-lines and determine which pundits are quickly rising or falling - in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

Failing accurate Nielsenesque ratings, perhaps the powers-that-be can use a Google-based approach to determine how relevant (or irrelevant) their contributors truly are. And what the trends are...

###

All of this was reminiscent of my activities during the recent presidential campaign season, in which I -- without realizing it -- was following the Hewitt playbook.

I had a blog that, at the peak of the electioneering, was attracting a modest number of visitors per day. I wrote a guest editorial for the local newspaper that touted the president's activities in the war on terror and, strangely enough, offered facts to back up its core assertions. I even subbed for Ann Coulter on the Billy Cunningham show, which may have been my personal highlight of the year.

Of course, a few weeks later, I actually read Hewitt's playbook, entitled "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat (subtitled, "Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It")... I then realized I'd been doing most, but not all, of the right things an individual can do to help win an election. My advice? Read it. We only have a couple more years to prepare for Hillary.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Target Iran



Click here for AmazonOne potential military option that would be available... includes the use of air strikes on Iranian weapons of mass destruction and missile facilities.

In all, there are perhaps two dozen suspected nuclear facilities in Iran. The 1000-megawatt nuclear plant Bushehr would likely be the target of such strikes. According to the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, the spent fuel from this facility would be capable of producing 50 to 75 bombs. Also, the suspected nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak will likely be targets of an air attack.

American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted.

Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities in an effort to delay or obstruct the Iranian program or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq...


Global Security: Target Iran

Chemical Weapons in Fallujah



Click here for AmazonThe holy warriors in Fallujah were working on some very nasty surprises: Holy Warrior Chemical Laboratory in Fallujah.

How many similar labs exist around the world?


Fallujah Chemical Laboratory Slideshow

Higher education in decline



Click here for Amazon...[The] strong campus leftist bias goes a long way to explain mindless university courses like: "Canine Cultural Studies" (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "I Like Ike, But I Love Lucy" (Harvard), "History of Electronic Dance Music" (UCLA), "Rock and Roll" (University of Massachusetts) and "Hip-Hop: Beats, Rhyme and Culture" (George Mason University). There are many other examples documented by Accuracy in Academia...

...A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25 percent did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500, 42 percent could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century, and 31 percent thought Reconstruction came after World War II...

...Americans as donors and taxpayers have been exceedingly generous to our universities. Given our universities' gross betrayal of trust, Americans should rethink their generosity as well as rethink who serves on boards of trustees that, in dereliction of duty, permit universities to become hotbeds of political activism and academic fraud...


Walter Williams: Higher education in decline

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Hewitt on Metrics for Journalists



Click here for Amazon...In today's Washington Post, E.J. Dionne has another howler that I suspect will draw far fewer readers than [conservative pundit Bill] Bennett, as consumers of op-ed journalism migrate to serious writers in the blogopshere as opposed to tenured scribblers who can actually toss off a sentence that begins: "In the wake of President Bush's narrow reelection victory..." and a line that reads in part "now the Republicans are moving to weaken Social Security."

Every publisher in America ought to be asking their internet techies for comprehensive stats on viewership of columnists via the web. Does Dionne score 1,00 readers, 10,000, or 10 million? Compared with, say, Charles Krauthammer, do Dionne's tired cliches justify his salary in terms of readers he brings to the Post's web site? This can now be measured --traffic is a very definite thing. Shareholders have a right to demand that the company in which they are invested not subsidize silliness that doesn't bring any readers to the game. There are plenty of fine lefty columnists out there --this isn't a call for purely market driven commentary, though surely shareholders should want to know if their products underrepresent the opinions that draw viewers to their internet editions. But deadwood is deadwood, and traffic statistics can diagnose dead wood in an afternoon. It may be that Dionne draws a crowd, but wouldn't those numbers be interesting to view? Don't hold your breath, though. MSM believes in accountability for other institutions, not its own tenured elites...


Hewitt on Metrics for Journalists

Oil-for-Food May Have Funded 9/11 Attacks



Click here for AmazonIn what may be the most shocking news to emerge from the already stunning Oil-for-Food scandal, investigators say that Saddam Hussein bankrolled key al-Qaida players in the late 1990s - a period of time when the terror group was planning the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi dictator was ripping off billions from the U.N. program.

"Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley on Saturday.

"It's likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil-for-Food] money to al-Qaida."

In an eerie coincidence, an October 2001 estimate by the Justice Department put the entire cost of the 9/11 operation at $300,000.

While the inception of Iraq's financial relationship with al-Qaida predated the 1996 Oil-for-Food program, the U.N. jackpot enabled Saddam to become much more generous toward his terrorist allies in the years before 9/11.

Hayes said the total amount of Iraqi cash funneled into al-Qaida reached into the "millions." ...


Oil-for-Food May Have Funded 9/11 Attacks

They Still Haven't Figured Him Out



Click here for AmazonFred Barnes:

* OUTSIDER. Bush is an alien inside the Beltway. His election was the equivalent of getting a green card to work in Washington. He's not part of the social whirl. Nor has he made many close friends on Capitol Hill or around town. What separates him from the Washington crowd? More than anything else, it's religion... It's not a part-time, Sunday-only thing. Leave Washington and you frequently encounter people who say of the president, "He's one of us." You don't hear that in Washington. A Texas friend recently sent the president a copy of Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy. Bush read most of it and asked Sharansky to meet with him at the White House. Bush praised Sharansky for his years as a dissident in the Soviet Union. To which Sharansky replied, "Now you are the chief dissident of the world."

* PRESS-BASHER. Bush has not made peace with the press, far from it. He views most reporters as political opponents eager to pepper him with gotcha questions. In Colombia last month, he appeared before reporters with President Alvaro Uribe. Bush didn't like the first question about a scuffle two days earlier involving the Secret Service. "This is a question?" he said, and gave a curt answer. Uribe said, "Do you want to get in one more [question]?" Bush said, "That's plenty. No. Thank you," ending the press conference prematurely...


They Still Haven't Figured Him Out

Monday, December 06, 2004

Bodyweight Excercises



Click here for AmazonI'm still rehabbing from an injury incurred while playing basketball in August of 2003. A freak shot to the head broke a disc at C4-C5, which resulted in, among other things, a fair amount of pain, assorted bizarre feelings in my appendages, and (eventually) surgery in November of '03. I documented the experience in one of my very first blog entries.

Anyhow, after twenty-plus years hitting the weights, it was time to scale back. In July, I wrote about the Furey workouts I'd been doing, namely body-weight exercises that combine elements of yoga, stretching and resistance training. I thought I'd regale all twelve of my regular readers with my progress thus far. The last time I wrote about my workouts, it went something like this:

7/24/2004

Warmup: 30 minutes biking
1) Three sets of Hindu pushups
2) Three sets of diamond (close-grip) pushups - super-set by moving to knees when exhausted
3) Three sets of pullups
4) Five sets of curls using chin-up bar - basically, a very short form a of a chin concentrating only on biceps


Tonight, I did the following:

12/06/2004

Warmup: 20 minutes biking
1) 125 Hindu squats
2) Set of 16-18 dive-bomber pushups, then set of 10-12
3) Set of 20-24 elevated pushups (feet on exerball, hands on floor with 1-second pause at bottom), then set of 15-18
4) Four sets of Michigan dips (brief pause at bottom and top)
5) Three sets of lat pulldowns
6) Four sets of hammer curls


So I'm not completely machine-free, but it's close. And I have bulked up a bit since July. So far, so good for the body-weight regime.

My kingdom for a time machine!



Click here for AmazonLet’s go back exactly 17 years - to November 30th 1987. You want to register a domain name. To date, only 99 .com domains have ever been registered. Yours will be the 100th. So, what do you get?

Music.com? It’s available! Games.com? Available! Loans.com? Drugs.com? Cars.com? All unregistered! Take your pick. Think carefully now… which will you choose?

Decision made; it’s got to be… nynexst.com...

The 100 Oldest Currently Registered .COM Domains
Created Date Domain Name
----------- -----------
03/15/1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
04/24/1985 BBN.COM
05/24/1985 THINK.COM
07/11/1985 MCC.COM
09/30/1985 DEC.COM
11/07/1985 NORTHROP.COM
01/09/1986 XEROX.COM
01/17/1986 SRI.COM
03/03/1986 HP.COM
03/05/1986 BELLCORE.COM
03/19/1986 IBM.COM
03/19/1986 SUN.COM
03/25/1986 INTEL.COM
03/25/1986 TI.COM
04/25/1986 ATT.COM
05/08/1986 GMR.COM
05/08/1986 TEK.COM
07/10/1986 FMC.COM
07/10/1986 UB.COM
08/05/1986 BELL-ATL.COM
08/05/1986 GE.COM
08/05/1986 GREBYN.COM
08/05/1986 ISC.COM
08/05/1986 NSC.COM
08/05/1986 STARGATE.COM
09/02/1986 BOEING.COM
09/18/1986 ITCORP.COM
09/29/1986 SIEMENS.COM
10/18/1986 PYRAMID.COM
10/27/1986 ALPHACDC.COM
10/27/1986 BDM.COM
10/27/1986 FLUKE.COM
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10/27/1986 MENTOR.COM
10/27/1986 NEC.COM
10/27/1986 RAY.COM
10/27/1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
10/27/1986 VORTEX.COM
11/05/1986 ALCOA.COM
11/05/1986 GTE.COM
11/17/1986 ADOBE.COM
11/17/1986 AMD.COM
11/17/1986 DAS.COM
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11/17/1986 OCTOPUS.COM
11/17/1986 PORTAL.COM
11/17/1986 TELTONE.COM
12/11/1986 3COM.COM
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12/11/1986 CONVERGENT.COM
12/11/1986 DG.COM
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06/26/1987 IDE.COM
07/09/1987 TRW.COM
07/13/1987 UNIPRESS.COM
07/27/1987 DUPONT.COM
07/27/1987 LOCKHEED.COM
07/28/1987 ROSETTA.COM
08/18/1987 TOAD.COM
08/31/1987 QUICK.COM
09/03/1987 ALLIED.COM
09/03/1987 DSC.COM
09/03/1987 SCO.COM
09/22/1987 GENE.COM
09/22/1987 KCCS.COM
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09/22/1987 WLK.COM
09/30/1987 MENTAT.COM
10/14/1987 WYSE.COM
11/02/1987 CFG.COM
11/09/1987 MARBLE.COM
11/16/1987 CAYMAN.COM
11/16/1987 ENTITY.COM
11/24/1987 KSR.COM
11/30/1987 NYNEXST.COM


Andrew Moulden: My Kingdom for a Time Machine

Bias beyond a reasonable doubt



Click here for Amazon...The question is, Who is right? Is there a left- or right-wing bias, or have the media actually managed to be objective? A serious assessment requires quantification of the output put forth by the media. The best analysis I know along these lines is the ongoing study "A Measure of Media Bias," by professors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri.

These researchers use a clever statistical technique to construct an objective measure of conservative or liberal bias in the news coverage of major U.S. television and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Their main finding is that the liberal inclination of the mainstream media is clear. Among 20 major outlets, Fox News and the Washington Times emerge as conservative, but the other 18 range from slightly to substantially left of center.

Groseclose and Milyo's analytical method begins not with the media but with the voting records of members of Congress...


Yes, the media are overwhelmingly liberal

Iran's nukes: a missing detail



Click here for AmazonThe Telegraph reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency bowed to pressure from the mad mullahs of Iran, and removed a small detail from their final report on Iranian nuclear compliance.

That small detail is the Iranian purchase of "huge amounts" of a metal used in the construction of nuclear weapons: Watchdog ‘bowed to pressure from Iran’ on bomb materials.

The world nuclear watchdog dropped a claim that Iran bought large quantities of a metal used to trigger explosions in atomic weapons after bowing to objections from Teheran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency at first accepted Western intelligence reports that the Islamic republic had bought “huge amounts” of beryllium from “a number of nations”, but removed the claim from its final report on Iranian compliance with nuclear non-proliferation rules, published 10 days ago.

An earlier draft of the IAEA report, seen by The Telegraph, said that Iran had manufactured material to use with the beryllium that it had purchased as a “nuclear initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons”.

A spokesman for the IAEA conceded that the agency had removed any mention of beryllium from its report, but said that the change was insignificant. She said: “There are all kinds of technical details in first drafts which are later removed. That’s part of the drafting process.”

Jacky Sanders, the American ambassador to the IAEA, however, said that Iran’s assertions that it has never acquired or used beryllium were no longer reliable.

The climbdown by the IAEA reflected Teheran’s insistence that it had never acquired or used beryllium, and helped Iran escape immediate referral to the UN Security Council over its nuclear ambitions.



Iran's nukes: a missing detail