Monday, January 10, 2005

Today, I was Unprofessional



Click here for AmazonToday, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

And then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.

I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose -

"Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?

Something with its own inexhuastible power supply?

Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?

Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?

Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?

Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?

Well "Franz", us peasants in America call that kind of ship an "Aircraft Carrier". We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that's right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don't like. In fact, if memory serves,once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us.

Do you know who those people were? that's right Franz, Europeans.

Theres is a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse...

The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little f**knob..."

The room fell silent. My hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:

"Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can't you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they dont have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didnt have to, and no one but them would have done so. I'm ashamed of you all..."

He left the room, shaking and in tears...


Varifrank: Today, I was Unprofessional

Silent in the face of out-and-out brutality



Click here for AmazonI wonder if Nonie Darwish is describing the "mainstream" American-Islamic groups like CAIR? Hat tip: Charles at Discarded Lies.

Most Islamic studies professors and Islamist groups in America exercise their freedom of speech given to them by America, but only when speaking against America, Judaism, Christianity, President Bush and Pat Robertson. However, they never dare to criticize their culture of origin and some even still have respect for the tyranny of the old country. They leave the job of ridding the Muslim world of terror to the victims of terror, namely America and Israel. Whenever they criticize the Muslim world it is in the context of blaming America for supporting dictatorships. However, when America attempts to bring democracy and get rid of Arab dictators they turn around and accuse America of occupation or empire building. No matter what America does, they voice criticism. That can only mean they do not seem to be serious about reformation in Muslim countries. They are, however, very serious about embarrassing, criticizing and hurting America.

Many Muslim groups and Middle East studies professors are aligning themselves with the liberal ‘hate America’ crowd in Western academia and media. Three days after the Tsunami in South Asia, I saw an Arab-American leader criticize America’s response as “slow and too little, too late” on CNN. They have the audacity to criticize America and give a free pass to the oil rich Arab countries that should be the first to respond financially to save their poor Muslim brothers and sisters in Indonesia.

Islamism and the old defeated and failed ideology of pan-Arabism is what many Islamic groups in America are advocating. They are silent in the face of Muslim poverty, corruption, neglect of human rights, oppression of women, honor killings and the brutal and unusual punishments such as cutting off limbs, flogging and stoning. They are not using American freedoms as an opportunity to change their countries of origin, but as an opportunity to influence and change America to be like the countries they came from. Their goal is also to keep Muslim-Americans under their control and the control of Muslim world mullahs, sheiks and dictators they should have left behind. How can any one take them seriously when they do not lift a finger to protect human rights in Muslim countries, but are militant in turning Arab-Americans into yet another voting block to influence American politics? They take no stand to protect the life of the Muslim woman being stoned and explain away such atrocities and beheadings while crying ‘profiling’ in America by the FBI.


Silent in the face of out-and-out brutality. Also, if you can handle the graphic reference material, see Sumka and HolyCrime (caution: extremely graphic).

The Threat: Europe



Click here for AmazonInteresting -- and ominous -- news. German authorities indicate that there is a significantly increased threat from Al Qaeda-linked extremists on the European continent. Hat tip: JihadWatch.

BERLIN -- Islamic extremists accused of plotting to kill Iraq's prime minister in Germany are smuggling fighters from Iraq to Europe, raising a potential new terrorist threat on the continent, according to German officials.

More than 20 alleged supporters of Ansar al-Islam have been arrested in Europe in the past year as authorities move against the group linked with Al Qaeda and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been leading attacks in Iraq.

Ansar al-Islam is suspected of spiriting dozens of young Muslims to Iraq to join the insurgency, but the latest raids in Germany heightened concerns that the organization also could pose a menace outside Iraq.


AP: Terrorists targeting Europe

The Protest



Click here for AmazonIt's not easy to determine who benefits from the Democratic protest of electoral vote certification.

The Democrats? Not likely. To most observers, it appears like little more than sour grapes... fermented, perhaps. There is no credible evidence that the election was anything but legitimate.

The American People? Hardly. To most, it appears to be a feeble attempt to chip away at the foundations of the Republic.

This isn't doing anyone any good, least of all the Democratic party.

Mark Steyn on the Democrat’s protesting the electoral vote certification:

A Democrat chum said to me on Thursday, oh, well, they’re just doing this to toss a bone to the base. But they’re running out of bones to toss, and the base needs a reality check, not more pandering. One reason why the party has shriveled away to Greater New England plus the ‘’minority neighborhoods'’ of a few cities is that it’s all fringe, and no mainstream. The base is out of control; the kooks still holding their post-election vigil outside one of John Kerry’s mansions sound no loopier than the big-time senators. The party has no urge to move on from moveon.org.


Indeed, on Thursday, one Democrat senator and 31 Democrat House members voted to decertify Ohio’s electoral votes and disenfranchise 62 million people who voted for President Bush. Among the “honorable” members of Congress who took this outrageous action were:

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), former presidential candidate
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), son of former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson

These aren’t just kook grassroots Democrats. They’re high-ranking elected officials who would hold significant sway over public policy if the Democrats ever managed to take back the House or Senate.


PoliPundit: The Protest

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Plastination



Click here for AmazonThe Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, through Jan. 23, delves into "plastination," a process for preserving cadavers to better represent the structures of the human body. The traveling show has sparked controversy for some of its more graphic portrayals.

Plastination was invented by Dr. Gunther von Hagens at the Institute for Anatomy at Heidelberg University in 1977. Most plastinated bodies have been donated by people who declared while living that they want to advance human knowledge.

The exhibit includes about 200 "plastinates," including individual organs, body parts, transparent slices and whole body plastinates. It travels next to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where it will go on display starting Feb. 4.

In plastination, reactive polymers (such as silicone rubber, epoxy resins or polyester) replace water and fat content and then harden to retain tissue structures. For a full body, the process takes about 1,500 hours...


News.com: Plastination Exhibit

Saturday, January 08, 2005

The Five D's of Dodgeball



Click here for AmazonI saw the movie Dodgeball again last night. When dodgeball legend Patches O'Houlihan taught his young charges the five D's of dodgeball ("Dodge, duck, dip, dive and... dodge"), it reminded me of nothing less than the Gonzales hearing. How? When the question arose of whether the use of torture would ever be justified, the Left dodged, ducked, dipped, dived... and dodged again.

These are the hard thinkers, the academics, the intellectual leaders of the Left. And they can't answer the question. The following transcript tells the story.

SPECTER: And now with three individuals who are more, perhaps, academicians or at least in part academicians, we could explore a subject which we have not taken up, a delicate subject, and that is the issue of the so-called ticking bomb case on torture. There are some prominent authorities -- and I do not subscribe to this view but only set it forth for purposes of discussion -- that if it was known, probable cause, that an individual had a ticking bomb and was about to blow up hundreds of thousands of people in a major American city, that consideration might be given to torture.

...Dean Koh, start with you. Are considerations for those tactics ever justifiable, even in the face of a ticking-bomb threat?

KOH: Well, senator, you're a former prosecutor, and I think that my approach would be to keep the flat ban, and if someone -- the president of time of the United States -- had to make a decision like that, someone would have to decide whether to prosecute him or not. But I don't think that the answer is to create an exception in the law, because an exception becomes a loophole, and a loophole starts to water down the prohibition. I think what we saw at Abu Ghraib is the reality of torture.


Hmmm... peel the veneer of academia away, present the tough questions of the real world, and what do we get? Nothing. He can't answer the question. And Abu Graib is related to this question... how?

Here's Admiral Hutson, the judge advocate general during the Clinton administration.

SPECTER: Dean Hutson, what do you think? Ever an occasion to even consider that?

HUTSON: I agree with, uh, with Dean Koh that it is always illegal. Now, you may decide that you are going to take the illegal action, ummm, because you have to.


So Hutson agrees with a non-answer. Let's see what Douglas Johnson, director of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, has to say.

JOHNSON: On the specifics of the -- of the ticking time bomb, I think that it's very overblown in our imaginations, and -- and it's very ripe with what I would...could only call fantasy and mythology.


Quite telling. The Academicians of the Left can't answer that single, simple and eminently important question.

Friday, January 07, 2005

A Case for Sharansky



Click here for AmazonNatan Sharansky was born in the Ukraine and became a mathematician. His early involvement with the human rights movement led to his emergence as a spokesman and dissident for freedom. In 1973, he applied for an exit visa to Israel, and was refused. He was subsequently convicted of treason and spying on behalf of the U.S., and spent 16 months on Moscow's infamous Lefortovo prison.

After frequent isolation in solitary confinement -- and a special "torture cell" -- he was then transferred to a Siberian gulag prison camp.

During his years of imprisonment, he became a symbol for repressed human rights. Freed in 1986, he became the Minister of Industry and Trade in Israel. He is the author of Fear No Evil and, more recently, The Case for Democracy.

Unlike those that mouth platitudes about freedom, but have never experienced a day without Starbucks and their daily newspaper, Sharansky has lived in a society of utter fear and repression, torture and lost opportunities.

I heard Sharansky give a talk about his [latest] book at the American Enterprise Institute, and I was very moved... Sharansky made three points.

One, democracy is good for everybody in all countries. All people of all races and cultures desire freedom.

Two, democratic countries make the world safer:

[I]t's much better for any country to deal with democracy which hates this country than with dictator who loves this country, because democracy which hates you, there is very little chance that it will start a war against you, but dictatorship which loves you, tomorrow can lead the campaign against you for its own soil.

Three, we have the power to spread democracy around the world, and it is our role to do so:

[T]he free world has the great power, the great weapon, as I said, the only nonconventional weapon which nobody else has except the free world. That's the weapon of freedom and democracy....Security and human rights and democracy are inseparable, and we have to unite our efforts.


Having experienced life under the cruelly repressive Soviet regime, including spending 9 years in the gulag, Sharansky spoke passionately and powerfully from personal experience. He had a wonderful turn of phrase too--"free societies and fear societies" and "weapons of mass construction" stick in my mind. It was a fantastic speech, and I'm looking forward to reading the book.

The Bush Doctrine sounds very much like this Sharansky Doctrine, and while I don't know if Bush was aware of Sharansky's case for democracy (which he has been making for years) when he formulated his post-9/11 foreign policy, he certainly is now--both Bush and Condi Rice met with Sharansky in the White House last month to discuss his book. Sharansky told Bush:

In spite of all the polls warning you that talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East might be a losing issue — despite all the critics and the resistance you faced — you kept talking about the importance of free societies and free elections. You kept explaining that democracy is for everybody. You kept saying that only democracy will truly pave the way to peace and security. You, Mr. President, are a dissident among the leaders of the free world.


What a breathtaking compliment. It makes me proud to have Bush as my president.


A Case for Sharansky

Thursday, January 06, 2005

CNN's Crossfire to be snuffed



Click here for AmazonHugh Hewitt reports the following welcome news, which simply could not happen fast enough. Here's a suggestion for a replacement show: simply find two talented representatives from the left and the right and let them go at it, perhaps with a centrist also represented. Oh, wait, Britt Hume already hosts that show on Fox every night at 6PM. Okay, just forget it.

CNN has announced plans to snuff Crossfire. The Wall Street Journal reports that Crossfire "averages 447,000 viewers each weekday, down 21% from the previous season." I hadn't realized the show had fallen so far. That's the sort of number you get from patients in hospitals who can't change reach the remote and airport lounge prisoners. It wasn't the format that killed the show, it was Begala, who is unwatchable except by the Michael Moore left.


Hugh Hewitt: CNN's Crossfire to be snuffed

East Boston Gang tied to Al Qaeda



Click here for AmazonThis ain't good. Hat tip: LGF.

A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to ``turn up the heat'' on its members, the Herald has learned.

MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 ``hardcore members'' in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore...

In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico.

The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged.

Also, the commercial jets that hurtled into the World Trade Center towers in New York City were hijacked from Logan International Airport...

MS-13 members congregate near the Maverick Square train station sporting white and blue bandannas, their skin inked with spider webs and ``laugh now, cry later'' clown faces.

``MS-13 is the most dangerous gang in the area,'' Fiandaca said. ``They are big. They are mobile. Now they have a terrorist connection.''

The theory that Salvadoran criminals manage to smuggle people over the border was bolstered this month when two Boston men described as MS-13 leaders were spotted on the North Shore days before Christmas - a year after they were deported by Boston Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators for gang-related crimes...


East Boston Gang tied to Al Qaeda

Delay's Gaffe



Click here for AmazonTom Delay's choice of words is... inappropriate at best. Let it never be said that I condone unacceptable behavior, from the Right or the Left.

By all means, let's have a debate over terrorist interrogation



Click here for AmazonThe White House appears to be dreading today's confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales now that Democrats seem ready to blame the Attorney General nominee for Abu Ghraib and other detainee mistreatment. But this is actually a great chance for the Administration to do itself, and the cause of fighting terror, some good by forcefully repudiating all the glib and dangerous abuse of the word "torture."

For what's at stake in this controversy is nothing less than the ability of U.S. forces to interrogate enemies who want to murder innocent civilians. And the Democratic position, Mr. Gonzales shouldn't be afraid to say, amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament that is likely to do far more harm to civil liberties than anything even imagined so far.

The dispute here stems from the Bush Administration's decision, in early 2002, that Taliban and al Qaeda detainees didn't automatically qualify for prisoner of war status. This caused a fuss in some quarters. But it was in accord with the plain language of the original Geneva Conventions, which require POWs to have met certain criteria such as fighting in uniform and not attacking civilians. The Administration understood what critics don't want to admit --namely, that POWs may not be interrogated, period. The Geneva Conventions forbid even positive reinforcement such as better rations to coax them to talk...


WSJ: By all means, let's have a debate over terrorist interrogation

Winter got you down?



Click here for AmazonTake a gander at the pictures from last year's Harbin Ice festival, courtesy of R. Todd King.

Feds Search for Attempted Ammonium Nitrate Purchaser



Click here for AmazonThe ATF is searching for a man of apparent Middle Eastern descent -- and false construction documents -- who attempted to purchase large amounts of ammonium nitrate. You may remember that substance from the catastrophic Oklahoma City bombing; it's what Timothy McVeigh used to destroy the Federal Building (hat tip: LGF):

“We’re still running down leads. But we thought it would be prudent putting out an advisory to the fertilizer industry,” said Tom Mangin, an ATF agent in Phoenix, where the investigation is centered.

The suspect also made several Internet email inquiries to vendors seeking to buy between 500 to 1,000 metric tons of the explosive — a quantity larger than McVeigh used to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995 but smaller than amounts companies typically might buy in bulk for construction, explosives or farm work.

The International Society of Explosives Engineers, based in Cleveland, sent an e-mail Wednesday alerting its members and asking them to call ATF in Phoenix to report any suspicious activity.

“ATF has recently been made aware of a suspicious attempt by an individual to purchase mass quantities of ammonium nitrate, specifically between 500 to 1,000 metric tons,” the alert said. “This individual, who uses a Middle Eastern name, purports to be a representative of a construction corporation. However, indications are that this is most likely false.

”The individual has previously made contact with other industry members via e-mail seeking the large amounts of ‘fertilizer grade’ ammonium nitrate," the alert said...


Feds Search for Attempted Ammonium Nitrate Purchaser

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The Western Media's Abuse of Power



Click here for AmazonThe Power Line crew points us to a startlingly well-written speech given by Melanie Phillips. It's an important statement and one certain to resonate for months, if not years, to come.

A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk: 'Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel?' 'There is no case for Israel', the counter clerk replied...

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them...

The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility.

And it is perhaps the single greatest incitement to terror. Terrorism is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. That’s why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable.

The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.

It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west’s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western media’s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all.


Melanie Phillips

Security Holes That Run Deep



Click here for AmazonInteresting discussion from SecurityFocus on some implementation details in ASP.NET (Microsoft's strategic web application serving platform) that have dramatic ramifications for its overall security posture.

The specific flaw Beaumont found was deceptively simple: by using a backslash instead of a forward slash you could access secure ASP.NET resources that normally required authentication.

So, if accessing www.example.net/secure/private.aspx is supposed to require authentication, anyone who wants to could still access the file by entering the URL as www.example.net/secure\private.aspx (or using %5C instead of the backslash in IE). Even if you set NTFS permissions to block anonymous users from accessing the file, ASP.NET still allowed access.

As simple as it was to exploit, the existence of the bug told us a lot about ASP.NET's basic security posture -- none of it good.:

* ASP.NET was not always using NTFS permissions to enforce file access.
* You can fool ASP.NET by disguising the file path.
* ASP.NET did not properly filter URL requests.
* ASP.NET authentication fails open rather than failing closed.

...The ASP.NET authorization code determines if the resource requires authentication or not by checking the configuration file of the current application, and looking for rules that match the requested URL. If the URL does not match any of those rules, it checks the configuration of the parent application for a match. If it still finds no match, it continues up to each parent application until it reaches the machine configuration. By default, the machine configuration allows anyone to access anything without authentication.

This means that if you can disguise a URL so that it doesn't match any rule, you will eventually end up at the default rule that says there is no need to authenticate you to access this file.

In other words, if ASP.NET thinks everyone is authorized to access the file, it won't bother running its authentication code to see if a particular user is authorized to have access. ASP.NET opens the file with the security context of the ASP.NET machine account (ASPNET), unless you specifically configure the application to use impersonation. Therefore it completely bypasses any NTFS permissions you might have set on the file...


Security Holes That Run Deep

Journalists Shouldn't be Cheerleaders



Click here for AmazonI know who I would pick to win a fight between a young Mailer, pictured at left, and a young Rumsfeld, below.

Hat tip: LGF...

Click here for AmazonIt’s hardly a shocker that Norman Mailer could show up at a place like Cambridge, Mass., and win big applause with a speech attacking President Bush. After all, employees of Harvard University gave more money to John Kerry’s presidential campaign than people who work anywhere else (except the University of California). What made the standing ovation for the novelist so disappointing, though, was that it came from a great big pack of journalists.

Claims of media bias were a major theme during this past election year - from Dan Rather’s doctored documents questioning Bush’s military service to a convention of minority journalists loudly cheering Kerry when he addressed them in August. But conservatives who want proof of their longstanding claims that the mainstream media harbor a liberal bias could do worse than ordering the audio recordings of the Cambridge conference that are on sale from its sponsor, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

They would hear laughter and applause from reporters after Mailer said he wished he "was young enough to thrash" Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and scattered applause when he claimed that it was not Jesus but "the devil who speaks to George Bush every night."

Admittedly, some of the attendees were academics, publicists and students, so it’s hard to say who was laughing at which remark. But the thousand-member audience was dominated by freelance writers and editors and reporters from nearly every major paper in the country. None of the dozen people who stood up to question Mailer challenged any of his political assertions. And only a few failed to stand and applaud at the end of a speech that had characterized Bush as “lord of the quagmire” in Iraq.

"I’m a newspaperman - these people don’t seem to understand what their role in society is," said Jack Hart, managing editor of the Portland Oregonian, which cosponsored the conference along with the Boston Globe and the Poynter Institute (which owns the St. Petersburg Times and Governing magazine, where I work). "It makes me very uncomfortable."


Journalists Shouldn't be Cheerleaders

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

THE WHIG HUT



Click here for AmazonThe The Anagram Server is awesome (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt, whose anagram is the heading of this post).

The Nuke Trader



Click here for AmazonThe Jersusalem Post reports (hat tip: LGF) more disturbing news about AQ Kahn. You'll remember Kahn as the ringleader of the Pyongyang/Tripoli/Islamabad nuclear parts network, which thrived for years under the Clinton administration and was exposed and dismantled once George W. Bush took office.

The implications of the latest revelations? Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia may have acquired some sort of nuclear weapons capability through Kahn. But that's not all. Intelligence sources also indicate serious terrorist efforts to acquire nukes:

Days after former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy expressed fears that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia might have acquired some kind of nuclear capability via an illicit weapons trafficking network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the chief architect of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Israeli military sources have told The Jerusalem Post that, thanks to Khan, one of those three Arab states now has the potential to achieve a "significant nuclear leap."

The sources said that Israel is aware of Khan's contacts with all three countries, but that he had provided to one of them expertise and material to manufacture nuclear bombs. They would not specify which country.

The sources also spoke of an assessment in the IDF that Arab terrorist organizations are stepping up their efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs.

They noted that there is now evidence of increased debate as to whether Islamic law could allow for the deaths of Muslims as part of the price when tens of millions of heathens are killed – a debate whose very nature, the sources said, implies that thought is being given to the notion of using weapons of mass destruction...


Jerusalem Post: The Nuke Trader

Monday, January 03, 2005

How the Left Betrayed my Country - Iraq



Click here for AmazonThis article by Naseer Flayih Hasan has gravitas. Heft. Power. Emotion. Read the whole thing. Hat tip: Power Line.

Before the last war, we Iraqis spent decades cut off from the outside world. Not only did the Baathist regime prevent us from traveling during the Iran-Iraq conflict and the period of the sanctions, but they punished anyone possessing satellite television. And of course, internet access was strictly limited. Because of our isolation, most of us had little idea or sense about life beyond our borders.

We did believe, however, that democracy and human rights were important factors in Western civilization. So it came as a shock to us when millions of people began demonstrating across the world against America’s build-up to the invasion of our country. We supposed the protests were by people who had no idea about the terrible atrocities that the regime had inflicted upon us for decades. We assumed that once they learned what had happened in Iraq, they would change their minds, or modify their opposition to the war...

...We came to understand how these "humanitarians" experienced a sort of pleasure when terrorists or former remnants of the regime created destruction in Iraq—just so they could feel that they were right, and the Americans wrong!

Worse, we realized it was hopeless to make them grasp our feelings. We believed—and still believe--that America’s removal of the regime opened a new way for democracy. At the same time, we have no illusions that the U.S. came to Iraq on a white horse to save our people. We understand this war is all about national interests, and that America’s interests are mainly about defeating terrorism...

...I have become disillusioned, at least with the Leftists I met in Iraq. So noble in their rhetoric, they looked to the stars, yet ignored what was happening around them, caring only about what was inside their minds. So glorious in their ideals, their thoughts were inflexible and their deeds unnecessary, even harmful. In the end, they proved to me how dogma and fanaticism had transform peace activists into—lifeless peace "statues."


How the Left Betrayed my Country - Iraq

Iraqis Undeterred By Violence



Click here for AmazonPower Line:

We've said before that, with few exceptions, those who want to postpone the elections in Iraq are those who would prefer that they never take place at all. Haider Ajina adds further support for that view with this translation of poll results that appeared in the Iraqi Arabic newspaper Alsabaah this morning. The poll was of 4,974 Iraqis living in and around Baghdad:


Will the security problems cause you to?

Not come out and vote the day of elections = 18.3%
Come out and vote the day of elections = 78.3%
No opinion = 3.4%

Do you support military action against the terrorists?

Yes = 87.7 %
No = 11.1%
Don’t Know = 1.2%


My guess is that the turnout in Iraq at the end of the month will exceed what we normally get in a Presidential election here in the U.S. If the terrorists aren't deterring the Iraqis, why should they deter us?


Power Line: Iraqis Undeterred By Violence