HT Dallas Morning News Online

PBS special redraws images of Crusade leaders

"Holy Warriors" takes new look at Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin

09:01 PM CDT on Friday, April 14, 2006

By MARY A. JACOBS / The Dallas Morning News

EVENT: Holy Warriors, a PBS documentary retelling of the Third Crusade and the leaders of each side, Christendom's King Richard the Lionhearted and Islam's Saladin.

[...]

WHAT: In 1187, a Muslim army battered down the gates of Jerusalem and seized the city from its Christian rulers. After Richard became king, he took up the challenge, and a bloody 18-month fight engulfed the Holy Land as a result.

With dramatic re-enactments and commentary from scholars, the program promises to "challenge popular views of both leaders."

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHIVALRY: Before their armies met in battle, Richard proposed a face-to-face meeting, but Saladin politely declined. Later, Saladin sent fruit as a gesture to an ailing Richard. At one point Richard offered to share Jerusalem by arranging a marital alliance between his sister and Saladin's brother. Saladin refused to massacre the Christians he captured in Jerusalem.

TRAGIC MOMENTS OF RELIGIOUS FANATICISM: Richard demanded the return of the True Cross, a relic Saladin had captured in an earlier battle. Saladin stalled, and Richard ordered the killing of 3,000 unarmed Muslim prisoners.

SURPRISING FACTS: While he remains a legendary Arab hero, Saladin was actually a Kurd, "an ethnic outsider," according to one expert, and was born in Tikrit, hometown of Saddam Hussein.

EERIE MODERN ECHOES: Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden compared President George W. Bush to Richard the Lionheart, and himself to Saladin. Richard isn't exactly a role model for civilized leadership, says executive producer Anthony Geffen, nor would Saladin appreciate the comparison.

"We didn't set out to be favorable to Saladin, but he emerges as a much more complex and sympathetic character than one would expect," he said in a phone interview. "If I ever were to meet bin Laden, and I hope I don't, I'd say, 'Do you realize the man you're emulating would never have been happy with what you're doing?' "

Link to source

HT Jerusalem Post Online via LGF

RBT has similar thoughts - it's time, to shi* or get off the pot!

Michelle Malkin has yet another example of the MSM being in bed with the enemy.

RBT posted an excerpt of a draft he's working on over at Roger L. Simon's.

Mr. President It's Time!

RBT

*****

Column One: The fateful hour has arrived
Caroline Glick Apr 13, 2006

[...]

After the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush was revered by Americans and lovers of liberty around the world. His soaring rhetoric and stated determination to fight for all that is good and sacred in this world won the hearts of millions and instilled in them the hope that the great battle for civilization had been joined by a force capable of defending it.

America is the greatest nation on Earth and it does have the ability to defend the world against regimes like Iran and its allies. It can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It can take those weapons out of North Korea’s hands. It can bring Damascus to its knees and force it to cough up Iraq’s arsenal of pathogens. And no, military might is not the only way for it to accomplish these tasks.

But America cannot, and it will not accomplish any of these goals if it continues to abide by strategies and frameworks that serve only to strengthen its enemies and permit its “allies” to behave perfidiously. It cannot and will not defend the world from evil, demonic regimes like Iran’s if it continues to allow the likes of the EU, Russia, Egypt and China to undercut its will at every turn.

This week Teheran threw down the gauntlet. The greatest battle of this war - the battle to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from attaining the most dangerous weapons known to man - has begun. The moment has arrived for President George W. Bush to make clear if he is, in the final analysis, the leader of the free world or its undertaker.

Read it All

Update:

Super Babe Atlas at Atlas Shrugs is in luv with John Bolton, a manly man, who shows no sign of wussing out like other metrosexual and mutlicultural wimps that are afraid of pissing off Iranian President MAD and Imam Yazdi.

Update II:

Super Babe Atlas at Atlas Shrugs minces no words on Iranian President MAD in a new post:

The midget must die.

HT LGF

RBT has been saying this for a long time. LGF also has come to the same conclusion.

RBT

*****

The Face of the Enemy

I’ve heard numerous TV and radio commentators say they thought Zacarias Moussaoui was psychotic, deranged, insane, and variations on that theme.

But if you understand that he looks at the world through a filter of radical Islam and jihad, his evil mindset—the same mentality that drove the hijackers on 9/11—makes perfect sense: Moussaoui: ‘No Regret, No Remorse’.

Moussaoui said he had “no regret, no remorse” about the 9/11 attacks. Asked by prosecutor Rob Spencer if he would like to see it happen again, Moussaoui responded: “Every day until we get you.”

Moussaoui also said on cross-examination that he is convinced President Bush will free him before the end of his term and that he will return to London.

Prosecutor Rob Spencer tried several times to get Moussaoui to say he didn’t really believe that, but Moussaoui was insistent.

“I haven’t doubted it for one single second,” said Moussaoui, adding that the vision came to him in a dream just like his dream of flying a plane into the White House.

[...]
Read More

A Doomsday Scenario

A very scary scenario from someone thinking outside the box.

RBT

*****

By Frederick W. Stakelbeck Jr.
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 17, 2006

On a clear spring day in Washington, televisions, radios and the Internet explode with shocking news — assassination attempts on world leaders have taken place from Paris to Athens. In the span of only a few hours, high-level Western politicians, corporate executives and military personnel are kidnapped or simply disappear. Throughout the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, bomb blasts in major cities and random acts of violence by armed gangs are reported. Unexplained illnesses in schools, businesses and public transportation centers leave thousands of people literally “falling down” sick.

Severe atmospheric disturbances, similar to periodic solar flares or electrical storms, shake the U.S. heartland – crippling the nation’s electrical grid and causing mass panic in American cities. Wall Street, U.S. government agencies and domestic military installations lose their ability to effectively communicate with the outside world and each other. Unconfirmed reports point to an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) missile launched from northern Mexico as the cause – although Cuba has also been mentioned as a possible source. Cyber-attacks originating in Eastern Europe and Asia assault the remaining vestiges of the worldwide Internet.

Attack satellites of unknown origin destroy or disable key components of the Western Global Positioning System (GPS) used by the U.S. and its allies to coordinate and track global military movements. The U.S. responds, but their technological advantage has been significantly diminished. Almost instantaneously, U.S. commanders are left “blind” on the battlefield making them susceptible to attack.

The U.S. is essentially “disconnected” for the first time.

[...]

Read it All

HT ITV Network

Gen Sada is shown shaking hands with a downed RAF navigator whose life he saved in GWI at great risk to his own.

Is this man a person who would lie for personal gain? RBT believes the answere is no.

As posted below the meme the LL and the MSM have been hammering for the last several years, Bush Lied! People Died! Is Toast!.

Someone needs to tell the American people the truth about Saddam's WMD before the enemy launches its next attack while we are lulled into complacency by the MSM that we are not in danger.

Again RBT says Gen Sada is a true Iraqi patriot who only wants the best for his country and his people after being liberated from the brutal Saddam Regime.

RBT

*****

Gulf War prisoner meets man who saved him
11.56PM, Wed Apr 12 2006


Former RAF navigator John Nichol, who was held prisoner by the Iraqis in the first Gulf War, has met the man who saved his life.

His plane had been shot down and for 49 days he was told he was going to be killed, but one Iraqi officer persuaded Saddam Hussein's son Qusay to spare him.

Mr Nichol has now finally met that officer, former Iraqi general Georges Sada after 15 years.

Mr Sada told the former navigator: "I was a general and I was responsible for the prisoners of war. I did the first interrogation with you.

"Immediately Qusay said all of them must be executed, but I said no.

"I told him that if you kill these people another war will begin against America and your family. Then he changed his mind."

Source Link

HT Melanie Phillips via LGF and Austin Bay Blog

It's Time to Loose Instapundit's Army of Davids!

RBT first saw Melanie's post in the comment in the Austin Bay Blog, linked in the previous post. LGF is now linking to the Melanie's post.

RBT is posting the entire interview with Gen Sada here because of the extreme significance this has to winning the war of information. Hopefully the Blogos will begin to buzz and pass this interview directly to the American people. So far what Gen. Sada has said has not gained much traction in the MSM. Obviously this will shred the meme, Bush Lied! People!

This has been the mantra of the LL and the MSM for the last several years in news reports that falls squarely into the enemy's disinformation compaign in the GWOT.

It is extremely important that the American people hear the words of Gen. Sada. While the US Military and our allies in the GWOT our crushing the enemy on the ground, there is a danger will we lose this war for lack of political will of the American people. This is because of the highly distorted view of the GWOT as portrayed by the MSM.

RBT for a number of reasons expressed before believes in what Gen. Sada has said with regard to Saddam's WMD. RBT has read Gen Sada's book cover to cover and finds it very illuminating on the inner workings of the Saddam Regime [See links below]

RBT

*****

April 12, 2006
Saddam's Secrets

In London yesterday, I met General Georges Sada. An Iraqi Christian, he was Air Vice Marshal in Saddam’s Iraq and, despite being an Assyrian and not a member of the Ba’ath party, was by his own account a close adviser to Saddam and was very much at the heart of the action during Saddam’s regime. Somehow he survived and became, among other things, the President of the National Presbyterian Church in Baghdad and head of the Iraqi branch of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, whose headquarters are based at Coventry Cathedral and whose bishop bestowed upon him the Prize for International Peace and Reconciliation.

Last year, an American Christian organisation that raises funds for needy Iraqi children invited Sada to a conference. At that conference, he raised eyebrows when he announced that he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Saddam had hidden his weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3 by transporting them to Syria. He was persuaded to set down his account in a book, Saddam’s Secrets, which was published in America earlier this year by a small Christian publisher, Integrity. This is what Sada says in his book about Saddam’s WMD.

The UN inspectors found and destroyed thousands of tons of weapons in Saddam’s Iraq.

But I can assure you, they didn’t find everything. Because of his rapid rebuilding capabilities, Saddam managed to hide many of these weapons, along with the raw materials for building weapons of mass destruction. During the times when these weapons were not actually in production – mainly because of the threat posed by the United Nations inspectors – Saddam gave orders that the scientists who had been working on these programmes were to keep their plans, diagrams, formulas, raw materials and everything else in highly secure underground vaults so that they could continue their work the minute they were no longer being observed...

If Saddam ever suspected that there was any chance the inspectors would find something, he would have everything destroyed. But even then, nothing was really destroyed: the scientists had the knowledge and the budget, and when the time was right they would simply begin again. This was even true in the nuclear weapons programme. Even though we had not yet developed actual nuclear warheads, we were working on them. We had some components, and Saddam had developed sources in Europe, Asia and America who were willing to supply whatever we needed.

As Sada says, prior to the Iraq war no-one in Europe or America ever doubted that Saddam possessed WMD. So what happened to it?

...there is a tremendous volume of intelligence on these matters and mountains of anecdotal evidence. These are issues the Americans would likely have pursued diplomatically. But if they did, they have not wanted to make any of that information known to the media or the public. I am in quite a different situation, however, as a former general officer who not only saw these weapons but witnessed them being used on orders from the air force commanders and the president of the country.

Furthermore, I know the names of some of those who were involved in smuggling WMDs out of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I know the names of officers of the front company, SES, who received the weapons from Saddam. I know how and when they were transported and shipped out of Iraq. And I know how many aircraft were actually used and what types of planes they were, as well as a number of other facts of this nature...

Everyone in the international arms community knew that Saddam had them and that he was spending like a sailor to buy more…The point is that when Saddam finally grasped the fact that it was just a matter of time until Iraq would be invaded by American and coalition forces, he knew he would have to take special measures to destroy, hide or at least disguise his stashes of biological and chemical weapons, along with the laboratories, equipment and plans associated with nuclear weapons development...

Saddam had ordered our weapons teams to hide the WMDs in places no military commander or United Nations weapons inspector would expect to find them. So they hid them in schools, private homes, banks, business offices and even on trucks that were kept constantly moving back and forth from one end of the country to the other. And then fate stepped in...

On June 4 2002, a three-mile long dam collapsed in Syria, causing a disaster over 40 square miles. When Syria asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam seized his opportunity.

For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq’s WMDs. Weapons and equipment were transferred both by land and by air. The only aircraft available at the time were one Boeing 747 jumbo jet and a group of Boeing 727s. But this turned out to be the perfect solution to Saddam’s problem. Who would suspect commercial airliners of carrying deadly toxins and contraband technology out of the country? So the planes were quickly reconfigured...

Eventually there were fifty-six sorties. He [Saddam] arranged for most of these shipments to be taken to Syria and handed over to ordnance specialists there who promised to hold everything for as long as necessary. Subsequently I spoke at length to a former civilian airline captain who had detailed information about those flights. At the time he held an important position at Iraqi airways, which is the commercial airline in Baghdad...

In addition to the shipments that went by air, there were also truckloads of weapons, chemicals and other supplies that were taken into Syria at that time. These weren’t government vehicles or military equipment but large cargo trucks and eighteen-wheelers made to look like ordinary commercial operators...

To keep all these transfers under wraps, the operators worked through a false company called SES.

This company played a key role in transporting equipment back and forth between Syria and Iraq, as well as in smuggling many former government officials out of Iraq prior to and immediately after the US invasion in March 2003.

When I spoke to Sada yesterday, he told me the pilots involved were now terrified for their lives. As a result, he has undertaken not to name them. This obviously makes verifying his account very difficult.

He told me that the pilots told him that they saw yellow barrels with a skull and crossbones motif being loaded onto the planes. Comical as this sounds, he says the skull and crossbones is a recognised signal of dangerous contents, and yellow signals the presence of chemicals.

He also says that he lived and worked with the ever-present daily reality of Saddam’s tactics of hiding his WMD from the weapons inspectors. Whole environments were transformed and rebuilt – buildings, whole factories – in the largely successful strategy of hiding the stuff. The idea that Saddam suddenly stopped hiding it and secretly destroyed it instead, he says, is utterly ludicrous. Hiding WMD was the unchanging pattern of his regime.

He has listened to the tapes that recently surfaced of Saddam’s discussions with his top brass about the problems being caused by the UN weapons inspectors. He says the translations that have so far been made of these tapes are inadequate because the translators, who are of course Arabic speakers, do not however speak Tikriti Arabic, the dialect in which these discussions were conducted. Sada does speak Tikriti. He has translated a crucial three and a half minutes of these tapes, he says, in which Saddam and his generals are discussing how to outwit the UN inspectors; in which they say that the problem of the chemical weapons is solved but the biological are still causing a problem; that this problem will probably be solved with the help of the Russians and the French; and in which Saddam says: ‘In the future the terrorism will be with WMD’.

In April 2004, a group of al Qaeda terrorists was caught in Jordan with 20 tons of Sarin gas. When Sada heard of this, he says, his blood ran cold. There was only one place which was capable of producing 20 tons of Sarin: Saddam’s Iraq. To his horror, he says, he realised at that moment that Saddam’s WMD had got into the hands of al Qaeda.

Earlier this year, Sada was interrogated about his claims by the American House Intelligence committee, to whom he gave the names of the Iraqi pilots. Subsequently, he says, the Committee went to Iraq and spoke to the pilots. The result, he says, is that a major American investigative and diplomatic effort is now under way to finally locate the missing WMD.

But in Britain, I say, people now firmly believe that there were no WMD and that we were taken to war on a lie. Sada looks utterly flabbergasted. ‘How can they possibly think that?’ he asks in bewilderment and anger, and puts his head in his hands.

Posted by melanie at April 12, 2006

Link to Original Source

Update:

Michelle Malkin is coming about and leveling her cannons for another broadside on the MSM on another bout of Wagging the Dog:

IS THE AP STAGING NEWS?
By Michelle Malkin · April 12, 2006 06:01 PM

Bill Roggio investigates. (Hat tip - Instapundit)

Also a related must-read at The Jawa Report:

Bilal Hussein and the Continuing Saga of Insurgent Propaganda via the Media

And Neil Munro's investigation of phony MSM war photography at The National Journal:

Real Or Fake?

Stay tuned...

Read More

*****

Armed Liberal at Winds of Change has an excellent discussion underway on media propaganda

Update II:

Israpundit is now linking to Melanie Phillip's interview with Gen Sada. Hopefully many other bloggers will also link to this interview.

HT Austin Bay Blog

RBT continues to maintain Saddam's WMD went to Syria with Russian help. RBT tends to follow John Loftus lede with his premiss that Saddam and Qadaffi were colloberating on the Islamic nuke underground in Libya. RBT will find previous link later.

RBT has said before if you're a speed [meth] cook, you're not going to have your clandestine lab in an obvious place the police will be searching/inspecting. No street cop common sense. DAH!

Anyway see the first comment in this excellent post by Austin Bay.

RBT

*****

Iranian missiles and Iraqi WMD

Triple hat-tip to Realclearpolitics.

At rcp Anne Applebaum files a column from Kiev. This is an excellent column looking at “the breakup of the “Orange Coalition.”" After the revolution the struggle begins. Her conclusion: “For Ukraine, the Orange Revolution was the easy part, compared with what lies ahead.”

Alas, her fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius takes us on a spin-cycle. His column doesn’t begin with spin. Ignatius compares Iran’s nuclear weapons quest with the Cuban missile crisis It’s a rather brittle comparison bot nottotally unreasonable– both involve missiles, nukes, and ideological clash. (One big difference is quantity. The USSR had lots of nukes and could threaten the US with annihilation. Iran’s threat is nascent. There are others.) Ignatius also compares the situation to 1914.

[...]

[Comment by Merv Benson]

I take issue with Hughes on one point. It is not clear that the weapons did not exist. It is clear that Saddam could not account for them before the war, and we could not account for them after the war. This is not just a semantic distinction. There is some evidence that the weapons were moved.

Melanie Phillips has an interview with former Iraqi Air Force General Sada, in her Diary today that is worth looking at.

Some have suggested that Lybia’s nuclear program was basically a front for Iraq. If so, that would certainly explain another reason why Qadaffi was so eager to get rid of it after Saddam was pulled from his hole, as well as Saddam’s comments on the tapes suggesting that the program had been moved out of the country. It would also explain why Iraqi agents were interested in Niger yellowcake.

[RBT noted at the time that Col. Qadaffi couldn't squeal fast enough and turning over his as yet undiscovered nuke processing facilities after seeing Saddam being drug from his rat hole by US Mil forces. This makes sense in the crook world]

Read it All

Update:

Michelle Malkin has found where some of the agitated women are. Perhaps we could redirect all this female wrath on the Mad Mullahs of Iran who do more than interfer with free speech.

HT LA Times

Twice in less than a day RBT is linking to a LA Times article. This is a new record!

RBT has long wondered where the world's feminist groups have been on the horrors perpetuated on women by men in the name of Islamofascisim. The Mad Mullahs of Iran hang female juveniles in the name of this religion of peace (RoP). The House of Saud of which some princes are the biggest hypocrites in the world of Islamic fundamentalism are not far behind in their treatment of women.

Why are the feminists not howling and screaming in moral outrage and indignation on these male hegemonic Islamofascist totalaritian theocracies?

RBT is guessing they're too busy protesting at the Augusta National Golf Course. site of The Masters Golf Tournament, for not allowing women members. Go figure!

See this LA Times article as an example of RBT's thinking that the women of Islam are a strategic weapon in the GWOT. RBT also suggests empower them economically. RBT has stated before women can moderate/damper the madness of the men in the RoP like the control rods of a nuclear reactor. See excerpt from a previous thought below the Times article.

RBT

*****

Female Nobel Laureates Launch Peace Bid
By LINDA DEUTSCH
AP Special Correspondent

2:44 AM PDT, April 12, 2006

LOS ANGELES — Shirin Ebadi remembers a time years ago when she was one of 100 female judges in Iran. She also recalls when the Islamic revolution changed everything.

"After the revolution, we were informed that women could not be judges anymore and women judges were demoted to administrative levels," she said in an interview Tuesday. "I became the clerk of the court in which I had been the judge. Of course, I couldn't tolerate that and I got early retirement."

But retirement wasn't her style.

Ebadi became a human rights activist and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Now she has a new goal: She's teamed up with other women laureates to launch a campaign to promote a peaceful solution to U.S.-Iran tensions.

Jody Williams, an American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work to outlaw the use of land mines, has joined Ebadi in spearheading the initiative.

"Shirin and I feel a particular responsibility to let the world know that the people of Iran and the United States do not support violent resolution of this crisis," Williams said.

The new Women Nobel Peace Laureates' Initiative also includes Betty Williams of Ireland, Rigoberta Menchu Tum of Guatemala and Wangari Maathai of Kenya.

"No more military attacks. No more war," they said in a written statement. "We demand a nonviolent world where human security is the basis of our common global security."

Ebadi and Williams believe they can have an impact. Thirteen years after Ebadi began advocating for women's rights in Iran, the government changed course and decided that Islam did not forbid women to be judges.

"Now we have a few women judges," she said, speaking through an interpreter. "When women unite, you can see the results. This is our philosophy."

Though they are still working out details of their campaign, Williams said they want to use the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize to advance a new message.

"We want to redefine peace as not just the absence of armed conflict," Williams said. "If there is not equal and social justice in the world, it is not peace."

Link to Source LA Times

*****

Islamic Women - Our "Ace in the Hole" in the GWOT

[...]

Our "ACE IN THE HOLE" is Islamic women who are nothing more than chattel of men in this radical Islamic extremist world. Young girls were burned to death because the Saudi religious police prevented them from escaping a burning building, because they were not veiled! A more reasoned approach is to appeal to the maternal instincts these women. They have been kept in the dark for centuries without basic human rights and the respect that women of enlightened cultures were given years ago. They have been denied these rights by the male dominated ruling theocratic hegemonies.

These women have not received the degree of indoctrination as have the young intransigent "hot heads." They are more amenable to be persuaded by the TRUTH. If they realize in the end, their sons will continue to die for a failed cause, the maternal bound will prevail and they will put a stop to this madness. Just like the control rods of a nuclear reactor when inserted into the core can moderate the critical mass that is now out of control.

The cultures of the world that have undergone religious reformation and/or cultural enlightenment will prevail though there may be many losses. Those who have experienced freedom will overpower any repressive culture that seeks to constrain the free will of man. The radical Islamic extremists believe there is a need for Devine government to control man, as he will only do evil if given free will. This is a failed ideology. This region of the world was the cradle of modern mathematics, science, medicine, and the arts. Where are they now? What was the cause of this stagnation? I suggest, it is the recognition and acceptance of the free will of man to CHOOSE to do good or evil. The power of this universal TRUTH is unending.

In terms of today, Dr. Phil always asks, “How’s that workin for ya?” The answer is not very well. This struggle has continued for many centuries and yet the radical Islamic extremists have remained as they were in the 12th and 13th Centuries of the old Islamic Empire. Once man has taken the bit of freedom in his mouth, there is no turning back. The Internet and blogging is interconnecting the world. The free flow of information is becoming transparent to international borders. The collective consciousness of the world is growing together at an ever-increasing exponential rate. This is the beginning of collective cognitive thought. This is much like the cellular development of the human brain as synaptic connections and pathways form which give rise to consciousness, and ultimately sentient thought and existence.

[...]

Read More

HT Jinsa

RBT knows it's bad form to quote an article in its entirety but in this case I don't think JINSA much cares.

RBT

*****

Iran, Iran, Iran and Iran

That's it. That's the whole list of national security priorities.

Whatever we do in Iraq and whatever Iraqi politicians do; whatever we do to Hamas; however hard we look for Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri; whoever runs our port terminals; whatever the price of gasoline; however we secure our borders; whoever leaked Valerie Plame's name - under the shadow of a nuclear-capable Iran, American and allied options are reduced.

Iran's announcement that it has mastered the enrichment of uranium on an industrial scale, and thus stands steps away from being weapons-capable, was poetic. "Iran's nuclear activities are like a waterfall which has begun to flow. It cannot be stopped."

Poetry aside, we disagree.

At least one analyst suggests that Iran could only generate enough for a one-shot demonstration to halt the current round of talks at the UN by presenting the Security Council with a fait accompli. An Israeli official said Iran had proved a "rudimentary research and development capability" needed to create nuclear weapons, but it did not mean that the Iranians had "mastered the nuclear fuel cycle." Israel's Chief of Military Intelligence, Amos Yadlin, called the announcement "a bargaining chip... meant to move the debate to the next point - the extent of enrichment."

However, even a demonstration project means that Iran has acquired the knowledge to enrich uranium after which, like biting the apple, you cannot "un-know." If the Iranian program is not stopped, some analysts believe Iran could master the fuel cycle by the end of the year. This is what Israel considers the "point of no return."

The Iranians themselves say they are looking to increase the centrifuge string from the current 164 (enough to test the technology) to 3,000 (enough for industrial purposes, or to make one bomb per year) and then to 50,000 (do the math yourself). The ringer here, of course, is that we don't know what we don't know. There are suggestions of a parallel, clandestine program; that the 3,000 centrifuges already exist, that the knowledge base is stronger than we think.

It is easier, in this case, to be Iran than it is to be the rest of us. Iran has only to determine its path and travel along. The key diplomatic players (the US, Russia, China, the EU-3, Israel, and the UN) are still working through a jumble of plans, policies and possibilities, with some still wedded to their financial objectives and others wedded to the idea that the US or Israel will make the problem disappear without involving them - except in the condemnation phase.

It won't happen. This Iranian demonstration may be the only warning we get to dispense with our individual financial or political goals and find a unified way to a) make the Iranians stop, or b) make the Iranians stop. That's it. That's the only priority.

[emphasis added]

Link to Source

RBT is not a big fan of the LA Times' editorial/political views or it's political reporting. From time to time its Column One has a significant piece.

This is one of those pieces.

RBT

*****

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE

Brain's Darwin Machine

Scientists find evidence of a perpetual evolutionary battle in the mind. The process, they suspect, is the key to individuality.

By Robert Lee Hotz
Times Staff Writer

April 11, 2006

LA JOLLA, Calif. — Alysson Muotri was looking for brain cells that glow in the dark.

With growing frustration, the 31-year-old Brazilian cancer biologist stared through his microscope at slides of brain tissue for any evidence his experiment had succeeded. His eyes ached.

Maria Marchetto, 28, took pity on her husband. Let me look, she said. In a darkened room at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies here, she began to scrutinize the tissue samples for firefly flecks of fluorescent light.

Together, the couple stalked an elusive sequence of DNA hidden in the heredity of every human cell. The wayward strand appeared to seek out developing brain cells and, like a virus, arbitrarily alter their genetic makeup.

In this way, it might be partly responsible for the infinite variety of the mind.

In debates over creationist doctrines, evolutionary biologists often are hard-pressed to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. Even Alfred Wallace, the 19th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.

No two brains are exactly alike, despite their overall anatomical similarity. Each brain changes throughout a lifetime, altered by experience and aging. Even the simplest mental activities, such as watching a moving dot, can involve slightly different areas in different people's brains, studies show.

Underlying every personal difference in thought, attitude and ability is an astonishing variety of brain cells, scientists have discovered.

Some neurons fire only when they perceive a straight vertical line, others when they are exposed to a right angle. Some respond to the emotions in a facial expression or to social cues. Others retain a memory long after conscious recollection has faded.

To respond so selectively to experience, each of these cells must vary incrementally from its neighbors, as singular as a face in a crowd.

Yet what could generate such diversity?

If Muotri's suspicion was correct, a peculiar string of biochemicals caused the billions of neurons in each person's brain to develop in distinctly different ways, so that even identical twins could develop minds of their own.

Muotri and Marchetto searched hundreds of slides for any sign that the DNA sequence had altered brain cells. Each tissue sample took an hour to analyze under ultraviolet light.

When Marchetto closed her eyes, she could see the glowing afterimage of neurons.

The spidery cells, she would say later, crawled through her sleep.

[...]

Read More

Instapundit has been running with this for awhile and has been linking to the Porkbuster site.

Yesterday Instapundit ran a piece and linked to an article by John Fund in the WSJ about Republican spending problems, Flirting With Disaster.

In this piece was a reference to a compromise on the budget resolution that just fell through. Fund was blaming Congressman Jerry Lewis (R-CA):

But not to House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis. "The appropriators deep-sixed it," Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told National Journal. "They're taking their toys and going home." Last Thursday at 6:20 p.m., Mr. Lewis's staff sent out an e-mail declaring that the reforms were unacceptable and trod on the prerogatives of the powerful committee, which is known as "Congress' favor factory."

In his email, Dave Gibbons, an Appropriations Committee staffer, told fellow committee staffers that Mr. Lewis "will NOT SUPPORT passage of the RULE and/or the BUDGET RESOLUTION tomorrow. He also requested that you inform your members of his position in this regard and asks that they likewise support the Committee." Mr. Lewis followed up with his own statement saying it was "unfortunate that the whims of a few would prevent the overwhelming majority of our members" from passing a budget.

"Lewis's move is political suicide for the party," one top GOP official told me. "He is putting his self-interest ahead of the GOP caucus, the party and the country. If the president and Speaker [Dennis] Hastert don't shut him down, then any pretense we are a reform party goes out the window."

Congressman Jerry Lewis is the chair of the House Appropriation Committee. I happen to live in his district. Ala Instapundits Army of Davids I thought I would make an inquiry. I regularly eat my morning bagel next door to his district office. I've developed a relationship with one of his district reps.

I emailed and alerted her to this story. I further said it had been linked to by the grandaddy of all bloggers and this could be bad news for the congressman.

Later in the day I received an email back from her with info supplied by Congressman Lewis' Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Specht. Here's the reply:

He [Specht] indicated that the gentleman has things a bit
jumbled. The earmarks plan wasn't part of the budget bill. What Congressman Lewis objected to was a rule that would mean that there could be NO emergency spending without the approval of the budget committee, and that any member could challenge emergency spending on the floor and the challenge couldn't even be waived by a vote.

So there you have it. Form your own opinions and conclusions.

Again the unique ability of the Blogos and the Army of Davids to bring forth alternative information that may be missed, overlooked, or ignored by the MSM.

Update:

Just received this link from my source at Congressman Lewis' Office re article at Human Events Online. Here's another perspective from conference call attended by blogger N.Z. Bear. See original source for audio and MP3 links.

Jerry Lewis: Whipping Boy of Congress

by Robert B. Bluey
Posted Apr 11, 2006

During a conference call with bloggers yesterday, Rep. Jack Kingston (R.-Ga.) told me House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R.-Miss.) is tired of having his committee being singled out as the "whipping boy" for fiscal irresponsibility.

Last week I was one of those people singling out Lewis, writing that he and his Appropriations Committee cohorts were to blame for the budget impasse in the House. While I might usually direct such complaints at GOP leaders, this time blame seemed to rest squarely on the shoulders of Lewis, according to an e-mail obtained by the National Taxpayers Union.

Yesterday on the call with Kingston, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, I asked if Lewis' unwillingness to include a line item for emergencies — the sticking point, according to NTU — was the problem. I also asked Kingston if he supported or opposed budgeting for emergencies. (Click here to listen to audio of our conversation.)

"I support it philosophically, but the problem is, as you know, that we don't ever save for a rainy day. An emergency fund one day is spent down for something else. And another thing that happens whenever we do emergency spending is that you've got a lot of non-emergency items in there. You know, there's growing frustration with putting so many war supplementals on an emergency basis because it's no longer an emergency. We're at war and we know that.

[...]

Conservatives, led by Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Pence (R.-Ind.), are demanding new rules be put into place for budgeting. Meanwhile, moderates such as Rep. Mike Castle and members of the Republican Main Street Partnership, aren't happy with the funding levels endorsed by President Bush.

Something provoked Kingston. He rallied to his chairman's defense, saying Lewis had grown tired of the Appropriations Committee's becoming the "whipping boy" for such debates.

[...]

I'd love to see the transparency on Ways and Means. Where do all these little, strange tax loopholes come from? Who put it in? And why was it put in? Wouldn't that be educational for us all to know?

"And the transportation bill, I think you can trace that a little bit easier, but there's a lot of nuances and peculiar things that are put into the energy and commerce bill. What about all the telecom stuff? Which one of the wireless networks asked for this wording and that wording?

[...]

At this point, fellow blogger and crusading Porkbuster N.Z. Bear interrupted to interject an important point:

"Just to say it out load, the distinction you point out of picking on Appropriations vs. everybody else is one that doesn't exist at all from my perspective and I think from the activists' perspective. I would like to see the same rules applied to every committee."

Kingston's response:

"Well, I hope y'all will continue to educate your readers on it, because it's really frustrating to us."

I'm in N.Z.'s camp on this one: I'm happy to pick on any member of Congress for spending my money irresponsibly. It just so happens that when it comes to the budget, Lewis is standing in the way of a sensible reform.

Look at it this way: We know the United States will be hit by hurricanes this fall. It happens every year. So what's the harm in budgeting money for that?

Granted, it won't mean anything if Congress lets the President throw billions away without any accountability, as he's done on Hurricane Katrina spending. It's about time the Appropriations Committee got its act together and put into place some sensible reforms as outlined by the Republican Study Committee.

UPDATE — 2:07 p.m.: I neglected to include reactions from other bloggers, who picked up on the other topic that came up during the call. Here's a link (courtesy of Kington's blog):

* Captain Ed of Captain’s Quarters
* Mary Katharine of HughHewitt
* Tim Chapman of Townhall.com’s Capitol Report
* Kim Priestap of Wizbang!
* John Hawkins of Right Wing News

Mr. Bluey is editor of Human Events Online.

Read it All

Ok as O'Reilly says, we'll let the folks decide, what to believe or not.

Update II:

OUCH! WSJ Editorial Today

The Minority Maker
The clever GOP strategy for defeat in November.

Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:01 a.m.

If Republicans lose control of Congress in November, they might want to look back at last Thursday as the day it was lost. That's when the big spenders among House Republicans blew up a deal between the leadership and rank-in-file to impose some modest spending discipline.

Unlike the collapse of the immigration bill, this fiasco can't be blamed on Senate Democrats. This one is all about Republicans and their refusal to give up their power to spend money at will and pass out "earmarks" like a bartender offering drinks on the house. The chief culprits are the House Appropriators, led by Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis of California and his 13 subcommittee chairmen known as "cardinals." If Republicans lose the House--and they are well on their way--Mr. Lewis deserves the moniker of the minority maker.

For weeks, the Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscally conservative Members, had been negotiating a spending outline with the House leadership. But when they finally struck a deal last week, Mr. Lewis refused to go along and threatened to defeat the budget on the House floor if Speaker Denny Hastert brought it up. With Democrats opposing the budget as a matter of party unity, GOP leaders gave up and left town for Easter recess without a vote on their budget blueprint for 2007.

Political hardball isn't new to Congress, but what's especially notable here is the utter cluelessness by Mr. Lewis and his friends about how much trouble they're in and how to get out of it. The rank-and-file Members who haven't yet gone native in Washington realize that their biggest problem is the disappointment of Republican voters at Congress's free-spending ways. If those voters stay home in November, Mr. Lewis will soon be known as Mr. Ranking Member.

Then again, he's been there before and doesn't seem to mind. Mr. Lewis, who is now in his 14th term, was one of those Republicans who were utterly comfortable in the minority before the Gingrich Revolution in 1994. As chairman of the GOP Conference, Mr. Lewis was the No. 4 Republican in the House before Dick Armey challenged him for the post in 1992 and won--in part because Mr. Lewis was a lot less than revolutionary.

Since that defeat, he's hunkered down as one of the GOP's spenders-in-chief, presiding over multiplying earmarks and chopping to bits the party's reputation as fiscal conservatives. When President Bush recently asked Congress to pass a modified line-item veto, among the first to complain was Mr. Lewis. The spending baron told the Rules Committee last month that the line-item veto "could be a very serious error" that threatens the separation of powers. "We are the legislative branch of government."

Translation: Mr. Lewis is opposed to any budget reform that would give the President more leverage to limit his ability to spend tax dollars like there's no tomorrow. On the item veto, this puts him to the fiscal left of John Kerry, Al Gore, and, well, it's hard to get any further left than that.

[...]

Read More

And now this reply by Congressman Lewis to the WSJ editorial with a volly back from Bluey at Human Events Online:

Jerry Lewis Responds to WSJ's Criticism

by Robert B. Bluey
Posted Apr 13, 2006

A Republican House leadership staffer just forwarded me the following letter that Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R.-Calif.) sent to the Wall Street Journal in response to today’s editorial, “The Minority Maker.”

Kudos to the Journal for awakening the sleeping giant. It’s too bad Lewis didn’t correct the “factual inaccuracies” after my piece ran last Friday. I might also mention that Rep. Jack Kingston (R.-Ga.), an appropriator himself, had an opportunity to rebut what I wrote when I asked him about it on Monday.

Here’s the letter Lewis sent to the Journal:

It has been said that facts are stubborn things. They are hard to refute and difficult to dismiss. I welcome any objective criticism of my service as Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee that is based on facts. However, the April 13 editorial, "Minority Maker" is so riddled with factual inaccuracies I am writing to set the record straight.

The Wall Street Journal editorial ignores the revolutionary reforms that have taken place at the Committee in the last year. Rather than being the alleged refuge for big spenders as the Journal contends, the House Appropriations Committee has played the leading role in reducing federal spending. As a result of reforms put in place by the Committee last year, Congress reduced non-security discretionary spending below the year before for the first time since the Reagan Administration. .

Just last year, we eliminated 53 programs saving taxpayers $3.5 billion, cut earmark funding by nearly $3 billion, passed each of our bills on time and under budget, and avoided a massive, year-end omnibus budget package. As we implemented these changes, the committee defeated $18 billion Democrats tried to add in politically popular spending. We also reduced, from 13 to 11, the number of Appropriations subcommittees (a fact overlooked by the recent editorial) allowing the Committee to spend less time on process and more time providing necessary oversight of federal spending.

The Appropriations Committee's concern over proposals in the Fiscal Year 2007 Budget Resolution is not about how to reduce spending. Appropriators remain committed to continuing last year's successes with reducing discretionary spending and will support a resolution with those tough fiscal constraints.

The Committee strongly supports reforming the earmark process and has led by example. We have dramatically reduced the number of projects and the dollars spent on them since in the past year. Our concern is that any reforms we enact need to be comprehensive and address earmarks where ever they appear. The infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," which was allocated $233 million of the taxpayer's dollars, was part of the highway reauthorization bill and was not a part of the Appropriations process. It would not be addressed by any of the proposals by budget reformers. Earmark reform that does not address the "Bridge to Nowhere" is not real reform.

Finally, one of our proudest accomplishments was that, for the first time in years, Congress avoided a year-end omnibus budget package last year. In 2004, Congress wrapped up its budget work with a 3,500 page monstrosity that was more than a foot thick. This type of legislating breeds fiscal mischief and should be avoided at all costs. The proposed procedural reforms would allow any member from either party who thought spending was either too high or too low to disrupt the Appropriations process.

Appropriations bills must be passed every year. Failure to pass spending bills raises the specter of a government shutdown. Our last experience with this, in 1995, did not turn out so well for the Republicans in Congress. Politically, it led to a loss of seats for our majority in the next two election cycles, and the easy re-election of a president who just a year earlier had been declared "irrelevant." Any reforms we enact should make it easier, not harder, to get our work done on time and under budget.

I welcome constructive dialogue with anyone--Wall Street Journal editorial writers included--interested in real reform that serves the interests of taxpayers.

Sincerely,

Jerry Lewis
Chairman
Committee on Appropriations

Link to Source

Do you get the feeling you're watching a tennis match from courtside as each side volleys back and forth attempting to explain their side?

I think Jerry Lewis is sincere but has been operating as a clinician trying to do the right thing within a byzantine framework of rules.

Unfortunately the American people are not well informed of the actual sausage making process and as Bluey's title to his first article suggests, the appropriations committee is becoming the whipping boy of the whole Congress for talking a good line but not having the political will to openly fix the earmarks issue and take the personal hit when they don't bring home the bacon.

RBT

Update III:

Wizbang has this additional thought re conference calls with bloggers by members of congress.
Rep. Jack Kingston Gets It: The GOP Needs Blogs

UpdateIV:

Bluey fires back:

Jerry Lewis: No Friend of Conservatives

by Robert B. Bluey
Posted Apr 13, 2006

Congress is in recess and lawmakers are back home, but House Republicans are being hit hard today from the right on the collapse of the budget last week.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal editorial attacking House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis for his refusal to go along with common-sense budget reforms riled him so much that he fired off a don’t-blame-me response to the Journal this afternoon.

In the meantime, leading conservative blogs RedState.com and Townhall.com’s Capitol Report criticized Lewis for the budget debacle. But perhaps most troublesome for Lewis was the decision by the American Conservative Union to launch an attack late this afternoon — not only on him, but the entire House GOP leadership.

Here’s the message sent by Bill Lauderback, executive vice president of ACU:

It is becoming ever more apparent that the House Republican leadership is dangerously out of touch with the responsibilities of governing. The latest refusal by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Majority Leader John Boehner, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt to honor their commitment to conservatives on the budget is tantamount to surrender. The refusal by Jerry Lewis, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to rein in spending is a slap in the face to the efforts of conservative House members, led by Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Pence, to re-instill fiscal sanity.

While it is rare for ACU to send our members an editorial, we believe that the below one, from today’s Wall Street Journal, merits your attention.

Read it All

Update V:

HT Beltway Blogroll via Instapundit

Vlogs: The Cure For 'Gotcha' Journalism?

Yesterday's update to my ongoing list of links to candidate and lawmaker interviews included a series of pointers to video blog clips with Sen. John McCain at Ankle Biting Pundits.

That site has a new clip up today, this one with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The topic is the war in Iraq.

Gingrich is not technically a lawmaker or candidate, but that's not the reason for this separate blurb. Rather, my goal here is to draw attention to something profound that Patrick Hynes said about video blogs, or vlogs, in his blog entry to highlight the video.

"Blogs have already damaged the credibility of the MSM," he wrote. "I believe vlogging has the potential to kill off agenda-driven, gotcha journalism. Newsmakers can now go straight to the people with the facts, not run them through the filter of what Rush [Limbaugh] calls 'the drive-by media.'"

He's absolutely correct — and that's why I expect to see more vlogging in both the political and policy arenas.

Posted by dglover | 12:51 PM

****

RBT posted this comment in the thread:

Vlogs Will Collapse News Cycle -
Ultimately Causing More Truthfulness

Great Idea,

[...]

Lewis is my congressman and I did the Army of Davids thing on his staff. There is another side to this whether you buy it or not that's your decision but the info was available via the Blogos for others to see that probably will not be forthcoming from the MSM.

[...]

The news cycle will collapse to a matter of minutes if Vlogs become available to the Blogos. It's hard to spin when the news cycle is that short. The BS spin will become immediately obvious :--)

Update VI:

The Press-Enterprise (Regional paper in Lewis' home district) ran this editorial concerning Congressman Jerry Lewis and the House Appropriations Co et al:

Spending addicts

10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, April 15, 2006

Congressional Republicans missed yet another opportunity this month to stop unaccountable, cynical and corrupting pork-barrel spending. And one of the chief culprits was the Inland region's own Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands.

The House GOP leadership this month agreed to force better public disclosure of earmarks, the process by which members of Congress quietly slip spending for pet projects into federal legislation.

The deal, part of the 2006-07 budget resolution, said that legislators would have to attach their names to individual earmarks. And pork-barrel spending that legislators tacked onto bills while in conference committee, where the House and the Senate hammer out the differences between competing bills, would also be subject to debate and a vote on the House floor.

Such reforms attempt to embarrass members of Congress into responsible spending. Of course, not every project in a member's home district is frivolous. Federal money could help expand the choked interstate freeways of the Inland area, for example. But legislators might blush over taking public responsibility for funneling $3 million to a documentary on infrastructure achievements of Alaska (Thanks, Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska), or $25 million to bike trails in Sheboygan County, Wis.

However, Lewis, the powerful Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, killed the transparency effort April 6. Or, as spending reformer Rep. Ryan Paul, R-Wis., told the National Journal: "The appropriators deep-sixed it. They're taking their toys and going home." Lewis has staunchly refused to reform the spending process in any meaningful way. He even opposes a proposal to put limits on "emergency spending" bills, typically used for catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina, that end up larded with hundreds of expensive, unrelated and certainly non-emergency earmarks.

Lewis said April 7: "It's unfortunate that the whims of a few would prevent the overwhelming majority of our members" from passing a budget resolution on April 6, as planned. Actually, it's more lamentable that Lewis and the Republican leadership refuse to embrace principles of good, open government, content instead with their addiction to reckless spending.

Online at: http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/editorials/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_16_ed_pork1.306a74b.html

House Republicans have reduced spending

07:33 PM PDT on Sunday, April 23, 2006

By JERRY LEWIS

The recent editorial, "Spending addicts" (Our Views, April 16), seemed so far off the mark from The Press-Enterprise tradition of fact-based journalism that I felt it was important to set the record straight.

The record shows that the House Appropriations Committee has been central to reining in government spending.

During the past year, the Appropriations Committee instituted revolutionary reforms and played a leading role in fiscal restraint. As a result, Congress cut non-security discretionary spending to less than the prior year for the first time since the Reagan administration.

We eliminated 53 programs, saving taxpayers $3.5 billion, cut earmarks by nearly $3 billion, passed 11 bills on time and under budget, and avoided a year-end omnibus budget package. We also passed three emergency appropriations bills without extraneous earmarks.

Appropriators are committed to continuing last year's discretionary spending reductions and will support a budget resolution with tough fiscal constraints. I have made that commitment personally to both the House leadership and the Republican Study Committee.

Our committee strongly supports reforming the earmark process. We have dramatically reduced the number of projects and the dollars spent on earmarks in the past year. But reforms must go beyond appropriations measures. The infamous $233 million "bridge to nowhere" was included in the highway reauthorization bill and was not a part of the appropriations process. Under the budget reformers' proposals, it would not be addressed, and that is not real reform.

To avoid an expensive, year-end omnibus, it is vital that we move our 11 bills along. Our biggest concern is that the proposed budget resolution would allow any member of either party to slow down and even stop must-pass appropriations bills. This provision would also apply to disaster relief: Any member could force a lengthy review of how to offset emergency spending with cuts in other programs.

It may interest you to know that the budget changes we oppose almost certainly would have blocked the $500 million in disaster relief I helped secure for California after the terrible 2003 fires.

Nearly all of the funding to fight the bark beetle outbreaks in our mountains has come through earmarks. The seed money to create the UC Riverside Salinity Laboratory came through earmarks. The funds to renovate the new Kelso Depot Visitor Center for the Mojave National Preserve came through earmarks. Thousands of prostate cancer patients are alive today because of the innovative proton beam treatment at Loma Linda University Medical Center -- funded through earmarks.

There is no question that Congress must make spending reduction a top priority.

The House Appropriations Committee is committed to doing its part, but we control only one-third of the federal budget. Nearly two-thirds is formula spending on benefits such as Social Security and Medicare. Earmarks make up less than 1 percent of the total budget.

Appropriators will bring discipline to the earmark process and reduce discretionary spending, but Congress must focus on the big picture to make the kind of major changes essential to balancing our budget.

Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, represents the 41st Congressional District.

Online at: http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/localviews/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_24_lewis_loc.ceae9f.html

The LL's and MSM's logjam on the truth is begining to leak

RBT

*****
The ChronicleHerald.ca (Nova Scotia, Canada)

Pro-war evidence keeps piling up

By PAUL SCHNEIDEREIT

FASCINATING.

Newly released audio-tapes of Saddam Hussein while in power, along with some of the thousands of Iraqi government documents seized in the invasion in 2003, now being declassified and translated, provide yet more reminders of the true nature and intentions of the former Baathist regime; at least, that is, for all those open to considering the evidence.

I say that not to provoke those in the anti-war movement, by the way, but merely to restate the obvious: Those diehards in the "Bush lied, people died" camp (otherwise known as the cult of the parrot) have been sadly oblivious, consciously or not, to all facts that tend to undermine those passionate, if misleading, chants. That’s highly unlikely to change.

According to media reports on the materials, the tapes and documents reveal Saddam and his officials openly gloating in the late ’90s about how easily they could mislead UN weapons inspectors; and as late as 2000, Saddam discussing ongoing plans for an Iraqi nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, other documents recount that Saddam’s regime held meetings with al-Qaida as early as 1995; the dictator later ordered his officials to form a "relationship" with Osama bin Laden; and Iraq provided financial aid to al-Qaida’s surrogate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf, in the summer of 2001. Yet another document, dated just before the war in March 2003, outlined an Iraqi plan to recruit suicide bombers for strikes against U.S. "interests."

[...]

Read More

HT Kokayashi Maru

WWJBD?

No more multiculturual, metrosexual Mr. Nice Guy.

It's time to bring out the Jack Bauers.


WWJBD? [What Would Jack Bauer Do?]

The Blogos has been churning away on the lastest Seymour Hersh journalistic andir on that the Bush Administration may be considering an Iranian nuclear option. This to stave off the march of the Mad Mullahs to acquire nuclear weapons.

Kobayashi Maru has the best insightful analysis that RBT's seen so far and would consider it a must read!

RBT

*****

Iran, Negotiations and the Nuclear Option

The allegation by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that the Bush administration is considering the use of special, tactical nuclear warheads in order to penetrate deeply buried Iranian nuclear weapons development bunkers is creating a major kerfuffle. In an otherwise check-mated situation is it more rational to keep one's queen out of play and resign the game or to bring her out and prevail? The question had barely been asked before the administration's critics and old-line thinkers have come out pounding the simplistic idea that 'nuclear' automatically means 'insane'.

[...]

And yet any rational discussion of nuclear weapons must start with an assumption that Truman and his successors (including the current holder of that office) have been rational and largely moral men. Whatever else may be said about the American system and its dysfunction, the serpentine gauntlet of American politics, plus the checks and balances in the American system ensure that the Manchurian Candidate is and will in all likelihood remain a Hollywood fantasy. Unhinged Bush-bashing rhetoric aside, that scenario is so extremely unlikely as to be laughable.

One cannot secretly harbor a megalomania of Hitlerian, Stalinesque of Maoist proportions and reach the Oval Office, much less exercise once there the kind of insane power they did. Our presidents have all had their flaws. They are neither saints nor kings nor gods. (That thought itself is something of an American innovation.) Yet the worst haven't even approached the delusional psychosis of say, a Nero or Pol Pot

[...]

We read of leaders advocating further diplomacy with Iran without any reference to what that means, how failure might be defined or what might back it up should failure occur. Diplomacy has become a code word for unilateral pacifism.

[...]

The proper response if one is a megalomaniac bent on developing nuclear weapons and wiping Israel off the map is to keep that endless loop going - playing one's opponents for the fools they too often can be. All options lead to talk and they know it. One side is bargaining in bad faith. The other side is bargaining with utter naïveté - wishing and hoping that their opponents don't really mean what they say and will "come to their senses", play by Queensbury rules and lose gracefully.

nother thing that's the same vis a vis Japan is the intent of the nation's leadership. Iran has repeatedly stated its intent to destroy both the U.S. and Israel and has supported groups working to take down both (not to mention Europe). The tactics and pace may be different from Tojo's but the intent is the same: world domination by a fascist empire.

[...]

We challenge anyone to argue why that would not be the case. I.e., why they would not carry out their stated intent. It is a reasonable argument to make, but an extremely difficult one in that it tacks against an extremely poor track record for sunny Chamberlainian rhetoric or pre-Wilsonian isolationism. In a post 9-11 age of nuclear proliferation, the room available to make that argument is so thin as to be non-existent.

[...]

[Ed note: If you read this far just click over and read the whole thing!]

Random thought (which we know has costs in terms of American lives but is nonetheless worth considering): Give twelve hours' warning. E.g.: "Citizens of Natanz: please leave the city immediately. We have no quarrel with you. We seek to destroy your nation's nuclear weapons capability. The bombers are in the air. This will be your only warning."

[...]

. . . Without a benevolent power to provide options beyond mindlessly looping through 100 variations on ineffective talk, life is indeed nasty, brutish and short - especially for women, and potentially for us and our allies.

At least one person in the White House is asking and thinking about those gut-wrenchingly difficult trade-offs and making decisions as he must. If you aren't praying for him, you should be. Most would be paralyzed if not crushed under that load.

[...]

. . . To date, there's been general consensus that all options on Iran stink. For the record, the nuclear option Hersh has uncovered does too. It just may turn out to stink a little bit less than all of the others. We still pray that diplomacy will work, but recognize that it would be insane to assume that it will, or to engage it to no purpose.

Seymour Hersh is asking us to buy into the notion that thinking beyond the bounds of conventional wisdom is a bad thing and that not prevailing in this conflict is somehow optional - its consequences immaterial to our well-being and that of our allies. That anti-intellectual stance is deeply ironic for an icon of the liberal intelligentsia. Thank goodness for butterfly ballots.

A MUST READ!

Update:

JT at Wizbang is also pondering on Hersh's article.

HT The American Thinker

RBT's been druming on this for some time. The American Thinker has had several pieces on this before and now has this excellent summary.

Also The American Thinker is the source of the interesting angle of the Plame - Wilson Affair being a high level French disinformation campaign to cover their tracks by discrediting the Bush Administration.

As RBT has said before with friends like the French gov't who needs enemies!

RBT

*****

Missing the Big Story: The CIA's War with the White House
April 10th, 2006

Did the lead editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post that defended the President’s authorizing the declassification of a secret NIE report on Iraq WMD misstate the facts surrounding the Administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence?

The entire left wing of the blogosphere believes so. Jay Rosen believes so. Even Tom McGuire, still doggedly carrying his lantern in daylight looking for one honest man in the Fitzgerald prosecution, believes so.

Certainly the figure at the center of the firestorms believes so. Three years ago, Joe Wilson was a nobody, an ex-Ambassador just trying to start a new business venture using his extensive contacts in Africa in order to facilitate the usual introductions and business deals, oiling the machinery of international trade as only someone with Mr. Wilson’s credentials is able to do.

Then a request from the CIA; we understand from talking to your wife that you’re planning a trip to Africa. As long as you’re going to be there to establish your business contacts, why not visit some old friends in Niger and look into this cockamamie story about Saddam trying to purchase yellowcake uranium in order to reconstitute his nuclear program?

Wilson denies to this day that his wife had anything to do with his being selected by the CIA for this routine assignment, despite sworn testimony and memos to the contrary. At best, he may be engaging in a little wishful thinking, ashamed in a macho sort of way that his wife was assisting him in furthering his career.

At worst, he’s a bald-faced liar.

[...]

This, of course, is the context of the entire Wilson/Plame affair. And the question arises what should the White House have done? Clearly, the effort to counteract Wilson’s charges had both political and policy overtones. But Wilson had been shopping his “story” for months prior to the publication of his Niger adventure in the Times.

What appeared to be more of the same effort to “get” the President by the CIA couldn’t go unanswered. Scooter Libby is paying for the White House trying to do something about the leaking and sniping done by the Administration’s partisan opponents and others may as well. But to posit the notion that the Wilson/Plame imbroglio took place in a vacuum and was a matter of sheer “revenge” is lunacy. The facts do not support such a claim. But you’d never know it because of the curious reluctance on the part of both the mainstream press and the New Media to face up to the consequences of CIA perfidy in the lead up to the election.

I honestly don’t know how many of the millions of words written about pre-war intelligence are true and how much is fantasy, a construct of thousands of unrelated parts that are shaped and shaded to fit into a conspiracy of monstrous proportions. But by failing to illuminate this story by placing all the revelations in the context of the continuing war by the CIA against the Bush Administration, an enormous disservice is done to the American people. Because in the end, in order to find the truth of the matter, you have to understand the motivating factors of both sides. And the way writers are approaching the story now, that just isn’t happening.

Rick Moran is a frequent contributor and proprietor of Rightwing Nuthouse.

Read it All

These sentiments are being echoed in the Blogs. Investor's Business Daily has a very good summary on the new findings from the release of the Saddam Regime's docs as they are being digested by the Blogos.

Investor's Business Daily is a subscription svs but this came in the open from a Google bot news alert.

RBT is posting it in its entirety because of its fundamental message that our intel svs's seers were either brain dead or their crystal balls were very dim.

Again I like what Newt Gingrich said re our intel community:

Hire Artists Fire the Bureaucracts!

RBT

*****

Investor's Business Daily
Issues & Insights
More Damning Documents On Saddam

Posted 4/7/2006

Origins Of War: The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out?

Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.

According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests."

Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows that Saddam's regime was not only providing aid and support for terrorist organizations of other countries. It was also planning its own bombings directed at U.S. facilities and personnel.

As counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling wrote last week on the Weekly Standard's Web site, that would mean Russian intelligence services under Vladimir Putin were better informed about Iraq's terrorist abilities than the U.S. spy community.

Though little noticed by the press, during a July 2004 visit to Kazakhstan the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."

This new document, said Darling, "would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush." Darling cites former National Security Council official Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies," which contends that the NSC, the CIA and the FBI all agreed Iraq posed no terrorist threat to the U.S.

Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation.

According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe — including London, where 10 people were assigned.

Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."

The Pentagon has obviously been sitting on a treasure trove of paper incriminations against Saddam's regime. So far, just a minuscule amount of the more than 3,000 hours of tape recordings of Saddam and 48,000 boxes of intelligence documents has been translated and deciphered.

What has come out so far has confirmed Americans' worst fears about Saddam's evil regime. To review:

Saddam is heard on a 1997 tape predicting terrorism would soon be coming to the U.S., while his son-in-law — who was in charge of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction — gloats about lying to U.N. weapons inspectors to hide the extent of Iraq's WMD program.

Saddam, in a tape made in 2000, talks with Iraqi scientists about his plans to build a nuclear device. He discusses Iraq's plasma separation program — an advanced uranium-enrichment technique completely missed by U.N. inspectors.

An Iraqi intelligence document, released just two weeks ago, describes a February 1995 meeting between Saddam's spies and Osama bin Laden. During that meeting, bin Laden offered to conduct "joint operations" with Iraq. Saddam subsequently ordered his aides to "develop the relationship" with the al-Qaida leader.

A fax, sent on June 6, 2001, shows conclusively that Saddam's government provided financial aid to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf is an al-Qaida offshoot co-founded by bin Laden's brother-in-law.

These are just a few of the revelations about Saddam and terrorism to be found in a handful of documents and tapes. When all are fully translated, we're betting the terror links will be clear, damning and irrefutable.

At present, we're relying too much on translations by bloggers and other amateurs. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., says the White House has been dragging its feet for fear of embarrassing supposed allies (such as Russia) whose links with Saddam would come under scrutiny.

These documents make it even plainer who our enemies are and why we're at war. The administration should move to get out accurate translations so Americans can better understand why we fight.

[RBT's emphasis]

Link to Original

[Ed note: Don't know how long this link will stay active]

HT Captain's Quarters via Ray Robison

April 08, 2006
Saddam Targeted American Assets For Terrorism: Case Closed

A few days ago, I posted a translation of a document culled from the captured Iraqi documents that the US found during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This particular memo, dated March 17, 2001, comes from a brigadier general in the Iraqi Air Force and requests a list of volunteers from all units under his command for suicide attackers. The memo explicitly explains the targets for these terrorist attacks, as the original translation from Joseph Shahda shows:

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

When I posted this document, readers of this blog questioned the accuracy of the translation. People know that Joseph translated this for Free Republic, a strongly pro-war website, and that it was distributed by Laurie Mylroie, another pro-war commentator. Skeptics felt that this pedigree lent itself to a possibly warped interpretation of the memo. While the accuracy of the translation remained in question, the actual text — which showed an active Iraqi terror program aimed at Americans — would not get the attention it deserved.

In order to solve this problem, I decided to hire two Arabic translators on my own.

Read it All

HT Ray Robison

An interesting coincidence

Update below: the original post

Captain's Quarters also has a post about a document that refers to moving WMD into the Rashad area. I looked at the document and my non-expert stab at the date (waiting to hear from Sammi) is Jan 24th, 2002. I decided to google al Rashad and came up with this BBC article.

[...]

[Ed note: See this comment by Scott Malensek *]

The doc refers to 1/02, but the UN didn't go back to Rashad until when? (bear in mind that Georges Sada's story about movement of wmd took place in June/July/Aug of 02. Also of note, the ISG reported that Saddam's regime ordered nerve agent protective gear as well as meds from a Turkish front company in 8/02, MSM and ISG reported that the regime was getting the expensive chem suits etc in 8 and 9/02, and US forces found LOTS AND LOTS of chem gear in Iraqi position as they approached Baghdad (pics avail upon req).

I think the dates are important to note-on the docs, in the reports, and in the allegations of removal. Combining them paints a picture that's much easier to prove imo.

Posted by: Scott Malensek | Sunday, April 09, 2006 at 02:58 PM

imo? intent motive opportunity?

Posted by: Ray Robison | Sunday, April 09, 2006 at 03:06 PM

..and means (see also the unprecedented smuggling via OFF, and the dam break cover story-corroborated by four sources and setting corroborated by MSM).

[...]

Read More

**

* Scott Malensek -

Sam Pender, author (AKA Scott Malensek) has just posted at Freepers, Part I of a 5 part series on Saddam's WMD and where they went as claimed by Iraq Gen. Sada claims in his new book, Saddam's Secrets. This is from an article he wrote for The New Media Journal.

See prior post here:

IRAQ - Saddam's WMD According to Gen Sada Part V