Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
We just have to hope that the suspicions the following article raises are correct:
America has mounted a covert operation to safeguard Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and prevent warheads from falling under the control of rogue commanders or Islamist terrorists. Teams of American specialists, deployed in Pakistan's most sensitive military sites, have formulated launch codes to prevent the unauthorised use of nuclear missiles....America's involvement in compiling missile codes raises the possibility that it might be able to prevent Pakistan from launching its nuclear weapons.
We'd better hope so, because the Taliban is taking power inside Pakistan:
Fame was no protection for one of Pakistan's most celebrated pop stars when he indulged in the "un-Islamic" practice of singing in public. Gulzar Alam was beaten with rifle butts and fists when 20 policemen armed with AK47s raided a wedding party where he was performing....
Mr Alam had fallen foul of the Islamist coalition running Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. For the first time, extreme religious parties have won outright control of the government of this crucial area near the border with Afghanistan. They have a simple manifesto: to reinvent the Taliban in a corner of Pakistan.
Since winning power less than 18 months ago the coalition has banned anyone from playing music or singing in public and confiscated thousands of music tapes from the bazaars. These were heaped on a huge bonfire in Peshawar and set alight by the local police chief....
When the provincial assembly meets next month the authorities will press ahead with the next stage of their campaign. They will introduce a law creating a new body modelled on the Taliban's "ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice."
This will have sweeping powers to intervene in any area of life and uphold "Islamic standards." The law will also create a parallel police and judicial system to implement a Sharia Law Act passed by the provincial assembly last year. [UK Telegraph]
The same reporter reports that nothing has changed in the Pakistani religious schools, who support the Taliban.Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Apologists for Palestinian terrorism often claim that Zionists are terrorists too--citing acts such as the July 22, 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin. James Taranto comments:
Now, it's probably fair to characterize the attack on the King David Hotel as terrorism. But the question is at least somewhat murky. The Irgun, the group that carried out the bombing, selected the hotel as a military target, since it was the headquarters of the British military command. And, as the Jewish Virtual Library points out:
Irgun leader Menachem Begin stressed his desire to avoid civilian casualties and said three telephone calls were placed, one to the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post, warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would soon be detonated.
On July 22, 1946, the calls were made. The call into the hotel was apparently received and ignored. Begin quotes one British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying: "We don't take orders from the Jews." As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: a total of 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews. Few people in the hotel proper were injured by the blast.
In contrast to Arab attacks against Jews, which were widely hailed as heroic actions, the Jewish National Council denounced the bombing of the King David.
Taranto continues:
If the attack on the King David was terrorism, surely Palestinian Arab massacres of bus passengers or disco revelers--whose purpose is to murder civlians--qualify for the term.
Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
We may need to strengthen our intelligence services, but with regard to the invasion of Iraq, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a non-issue. As Barbara Amiel writes in the New York Sun:
This, after all, was a regime that just before the first Gulf War sent its entire air force for safekeeping in Iran. If the intelligence services were wrong, every Western service and regime, from France to America, from Clinton to Chirac, failed. It is conceivable that Saddam Hussein found it important to pretend that he had nuclear weapons. He might have been like any moronic hooligan or bank robber who, faced with the police, pretends they have a weapon and often die as they reach for their toy pistol--or sunglasses.
Iraq was a regime that had a nuclear reactor (before Israel bombed it), attempted to acquire technological information abroad, refused to follow 16 U.N. resolutions, and periodically kicked out U.N.
inspectors. If its WMD program was only disinformation, it was believed because Iraq did its level best to make it credible.
Mr. Bush's policy was that his was a pre-emptive doctrine. His action was based on the notion that once you find WMD it's too late. If deployment is to be the proof of their existence, the price tag becomes too high.
Leftist (former leftist?) Christopher Hitchens adds, in an editorial a day later:
[If Saddam Hussein] really didn't have any stores of unlawful weapons of mass destruction, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change....
It has since been established, by the Kay report, that there was a Baath plan to purchase weapons from North Korea, that materials had been hidden in the homes of scientists, and that there was a concealment program run by Qusay Hussein in person. This may look less menacing now that it has been exposed to the daylight, but there was no reason not to take it extremely seriously when it was presented as latent.
For extended excerpts from CIA director George Tenet's Georgetown speech reviewing the quality of American intelligence, click here, or, for a briefer summary--and a discussion of how Tenet's points specifically undermine John Kerry's campaign rhetoric--see the New York Sun's lead editorial, "Tenet's Finest Hour."Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
And the educrats who defend programs like these call their opponents "ideologues" who are out of touch with reality:
The number of students in city bilingual education programs who passed English proficiency exams plummeted to less than 4% last year--an 82% drop from the year before. [NY Sun]
New York Sun columnist J.P. Avlon has more details about the source of "The Scandal in Bilingual Ed."Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
A good example of the injustice of unearned forgiveness, and of its destructive effects:
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Thursday for giving technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, heading off a showdown with hardliners....Musharraf also lashed out at fellow Muslim nations Iran and Libya for cooperating with international inspectors and turning over documents on their nuclear programs. "Muslim brothers did not ask us before giving our names," he said....He said Pakistan would not submit to any U.N. supervision of its weapons program, and that no documents would be handed over to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also ruled out an independent investigation of the military's role in proliferation. [USA Today]
Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Daniel Pipes:
"I Had a Good Time at Guantanamo, Says Inmate."
So reads the jaw-dropping headline in today's Sunday Telegraph (London). It tells the story of Mohammed Ismail Agha, 15, an Afghan boy who spent 14 months in detention as a terrorist suspect at the Guantánamo Bay base. In the first interview with one of the three juveniles held there, Mohammed spoke to a reporter in southern Afghanistan, close to his home village:They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons. … At first I was unhappy … For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer.
The American soldiers taught him and the two other underage captives to write and speak a little English and supplied them with books in their native Pashto language. As the three boys departed the base, U.S. soldiers gave them a send-off dinner. "They even took photographs of us all together before we left," Agha said.
As the Sunday Telegraph notes, these words of praise echo those of Faiz Mohammed, an elderly Afghan farmer released in October 2002 after spending eight months at Guantánamo: "They treated us well. We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes."
These testimonies need to be remembered at a time when so-called human rights agencies insist that the U.S. detention of prisoners in Guantánamo is immoral, contravenes international law, and so on.
Feb 7, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
Larry Elder writes in On Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Did the American President Lie?:The near pathological contempt so many hold for President Bush clouds their ability to put themselves in the commander-in-chief's shoes. On Sept. 11, in America, over 3,000 people lost their lives. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein continued to defy United Nations Security Council resolutions to come clean. He flouted the U.N.-sponsored Oil-for-Food program, diverting the money from its intended purpose.
Critics quite properly accuse the U.S. intelligence community for failing to connect the dots and thus prevent 9/11. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the advanced nature of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program shocked intelligence analysts. Nuclear bomb testing in India and Pakistan came as a surprise, as did the advanced nature of Iran's and Libya's WMD programs. By all means, the U.S. intelligence failures call for serious soul-searching, and possibly housekeeping to improve accuracy.
But, in the case of pre-war Iraq, the president's critics suggest the following: Cross your fingers, hope for the best, and run the risk of another attack on American soil, this time possibly with chemical or biological weapons. No, the president acted upon the best available information and properly discharged his responsibility as commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile, this same commander-in-chief and other members of the U.S. government don't seem very concerned about the danger posed by the Iranian Islamofascist regime, from its funding of terrorists to its development of WMD. In fact, unlike Iraq, there's been a concerted effort even court diplomatic relations with this Axis of Evil member.
Michael Ledeen recently wrote about the danger of this policy of appeasement with Iran: The Seventh Level: Americans appeasing evil.If the Specter/Ney/Biden efforts to "improve relations" [with the Iranian theocracy] were simply acts of folly by men who don't know better, one might laugh them off. But they have serious consequences, as our diplomats -- who actively encouraged the representatives' acts of appeasement -- must realize. The Iranian people overwhelmingly hate the regime, and look to Washington for encouragement and support to carry out a democratic revolution, and therefore the mullahs try to create opportunities to convince the people that the Bush administration in fact approves of the regime itself. Any warm statement from a famous American is a body blow to the democratic opposition, and a balm to the mullahs, just as every critical word from President Bush has encouraged the people, and weakened the tyrants. Appeasers are sent deep into the Inferno, because their acts are truly wicked, shoring up our would-be killers and discouraging our would-be allies inside the country.
Also see: Winds of Change features Iran In Focus, a great collection of links compiled by 'Free Iran' News. Winds of Change also had this Iran entry from early this week: Iran: Pay Attention, which features a good post by Oxblog, and via 'Free Iran' News: Telegraph reports: Iran 'has secret atomic bomb project'.America has convincing new evidence that Iran is hiding an atomic bomb project despite Teheran's promise to open up all of its nuclear facilities to international inspectors, a senior US official has told The Telegraph. He said the Teheran regime was secretly trying to build a second and more advanced uranium enrichment plant in parallel to the large facilities in the town of Natanz revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year. "There is no doubt in our mind that the Iranians have a lot that the IAEA does not know about," said the official. "The Iranians have a military programme that the IAEA has never set eyes on."
Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Michael Kinsley on Democrats "desperately seeking electability":
"Democrats are cute when they're being pragmatic. They furrow their brows and try to think like Republicans. Or as they imagine Republicans must think. They turn off their hearts and listen for signals from their brains..."
Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the New York Sun:
An Iranian diplomat was arrested in Nigeria under suspicion that he was spying on Israel, Reuters reported.The Shin Bet confirmed the report. A police source in Nigeria told the news agency that the man was arrested on January 23rd after he was caught taking pictures of the Israeli embassy in the capital Abuja, with a digital camera. "A digital camera was found in his possession, with surveillance pictures of the embassy and several other international and local official buildings in the capital," a senior Israeli security source told Reuters. A Nigerian police spokesman said last Thursday that an Iranian was being questioned after taking photographs of strategic buildings in the capital.
This is the same Iran one of whose "diplomats" Argentina wants to arrest for blowing up a Jewish community center. Meanwhile, according to UPI, here's what Saudi "diplomats" are doing in the U.S. (Thanks, James Taranto.):
On Thursday State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed that 16 Saudi nationals who had been accredited to the embassy in Washington had been asked to leave. "We were able to determine that they were not, in fact, working as diplomats in the Saudi Embassy, but rather were teaching in Northern Virginia and therefore were not entitled to diplomatic status. Since they were on diplomatic visas, ... we had to tell them your visa status is no longer valid. We gave them till Feb. 22 to clean up their affairs and leave the country," Boucher said. The place of instruction is the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America in Fairfax, Va. Phones at the institute were not answered Monday. The institute's Web site says it was established in 1989 and is affiliated with al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
A New York Sun lead editorial says about all that needs to be said about John Kerry:
[I]f Tuesday night was an indicator of where the Kerry campaign is headed, we predict the senator from Massachusetts is in for a rocky ride. And not only because the message is weak, in a country where lots of us enjoy miracle cures and cheap gasoline because of "the drug companies" and "big oil," and where a lot of middle-class workers have retirement accounts or union pension funds swelled with stock in energy and drug companies. But because the messenger is, well, hampered by his own circumstances.
How John Forbes Kerry can credibly campaign against "the economy of privilege" is beyond us. He was in Skull and Bones at Yale. He lives in a $10 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in Boston's Beacon Hill. He summers in Nantucket. Forbes estimated his net worth at $550 million, more than Jay Rockefeller.
Maybe between the guilty rich and the angry poor Mr. Kerry can cobble together a coalition to defeat Mr. Bush in November.Our guess is that there are far more of a third category of people--optimists who are happy that America is a place where hard workers with some luck can build vast fortunes. [January 29, 2004]
Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Brooklyn middle-school teachers told city lawmakers yesterday they were ordered not to expel students no matter how severe the crime under the Education Department's school safety plan....
The directive came from a principal during a September staff meeting, he told admittedly "shocked" City Council members in a hearing on school safety. Students have choked each other, stabbed each other with pencils, and shot off bottle rockets in the cafeteria, but weren't punished, teachers at J.H.S. 258 testified. In some cases, there were under-the-table suspensions where a troublemaker was walked home and kept out of school for five days, but there's no record of a suspension, according to another J.H.S. 258 teacher, Dorian Hunter Jr. [NYSun, January 29, 2004]
An article the following day reports that "Whistle-blowers who share tales of woe about school safety, micromanagement, and other education issues with Chancellor Joel Klein have suffered a backlash from their superiors..."
Feb 5, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
You've probably heard that former weapons inspector David Kay doesn't think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But here's what else he thinks:
"We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here," he said. "My view was that the best evidence I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction." ... Mr. Kay said he doesn't think members of the administration pressured analysts to shape evidence to make the case for war. "I deeply think that is the wrong explanation," Mr. Kay said, adding that numerous analysts had come to him in recent months to apologize about incorrect estimates. [NYSun, Jan 29, 2004]
Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services committee:
In the course of doing that, I had innumerable [intelligence] analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance. And never--not in a single case--was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it." [CNN, Jan 28, 2004]
James Taranto adds:
Earlier in the week a New York Times editor "sexed up" the paper's coverage of Kay, leading the paper to publish this embarrassing correction Tuesday:
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about David A. Kay, the C.I.A.'s former weapons inspector, misstated his view of whether the agency's analysts had been pressured by the Bush administration to tailor their prewar intelligence reports about Iraq's weapons programs to conform to a White House political agenda. Mr. Kay said he believed that there was no such pressure, not that there was. (His view was correctly reflected in a quotation that followed the error.)
Feb 5, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
How's this for cynical whitewashing of tyranny and amoral stability-worship:
Commerzbank, Germany's third largest bank... seemed particularly eager to curry favor with Tehran. At a session on "fiscal framework, regulations and contracts," Commerzbank's representative at the conference, Richard Greer said, "Since that moment in 1908 when oil was found in Iran, great benefits have passed on to the people of that country, despite great difficulties and foreign aggression." He later said, "At Commerzbank we see Iran as an island of stability."
Mr. Greer later recounted a story from his recent trip to Iran. As he was discussing the current turmoil in the Middle East with his hosts, one Iranian official remarked, "We have already had our revolution." Mr. Greer then remarked, "That stability we see in Iran is a product of that revolution."
The 1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power was followed the following year by the outbreak of war with Iraq and the beginning of Iran's relationship with Hezbollah and campaign to assassinate former high ranking officials from the Shah's government living abroad.
When asked whether he believed the demonstration of July 9, 2003, to commemorate the five year anniversary of the state's crackdowns on student protesters, was a possible sign of instability, Mr. Greer was dismissive. "The July 9 demonstrations is a sign of letting off steam. Half the population is very young and there is high unemployment." [NYSun, Jan 29, 2004]
Feb 4, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Andrew Sullivan observes:
I'm beginning to worry that the president has lost his political touch. He's still under 50% on the re-elect question in most polls.
And the base is very restless. The domestic spending explosion and the immigrant temporary-worker program have hardly helped him cement his core supporters. However, if I were to come up with one single idea to enrage the base--after all the spending criticism--I'd come up with doubling spending on the one federal agency the right loathes the most. And sure enough, the president is now pouring more money into the NEA. Does he think National Public Radio listeners are going to rally to him over this? Has he lost his mind?
Feb 3, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Bet the environmentalists are in a tizzy about this:
Mayor Bloomberg said it came as no surprise to him that an analysis by the New York City Independent Budget Office released yesterday found recycling metal, plastic, paper, and glass to be more expense than simply throwing them out. The budget office study concluded that recycling cost the city about $35 million more in 2002 than had conventional disposal methods of landfills and incinerators been employed. "The numbers have been out there for a long time. If you've listened, I've been saying it again and again and again," Mr. Bloomberg said. "Anybody that thinks it saves money is just wrong." The study was released to coincide with the city's plan to restart weekly recycling and glass recycling this spring, after a year-long hiatus to save money. "You've got to drive two trucks with two crews down the same streets," Mr. Bloomberg said. "It's going to cost you more than if you do it once."
Feb 3, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From a column by Marquis Harris in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, (by way of James Taranto and Joanne Jacobs):
Recently, I interviewed with a school in one of the metro Atlanta counties, only to receive an e-mail from the principal stating, "Though your qualifications are quite impressive, I regret to inform you that we have selected another candidate. It was felt that your demeanor and therefore presence in the classroom would serve as an unrealistic expectation as to what high school students could strive to achieve or become. However, it is highly recommended that you seek employment at the collegiate level; there your intellectual comportment would be greatly appreciated. Good luck."
Feb 3, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Steven Malanga in the New York Sun:
Jersey's floundering Republicans face a similar problem to that of their equally unsuccessful New York brethren: powerful public-sector groups that live off government money and push incessantly for ever higher taxes have seized control of the state's politics, and feckless GOP leaders have accommodated them, leaving the state party without core principles and alienating its voting base. Jersey's overburdened taxpayers--they pay the second-highest state and local taxes in the country (behind only New York's)--have nowhere to turn for a real alternative to Democratic big spenders....
The latest outrage: a legislative proposal, sprung on voters immediately after the election, to hike gasoline taxes by up to 12.5 cents a gallon,even as the local economy struggles to get out of a recession. In a state that's sixth in the nation in cars per capita,the new levy, initially backed by Democrats and some Republicans, drew opposition from more than 70% of Jersey residents. Taxhikers backed off.
Empower the People is doing more than opposing new taxes, however. It is seeking passage of state constitutional amendments limiting state government spending and rewarding municipalities that live within budget limits by distributing surplus state funds to them for property-tax relief. These "return the money" amendments, as Mr. Schundler dubs them, would prevent the state from spending recklessly when tax receipts are rolling in, as it has traditionally done.
Feb 3, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Maybe the following article has mischaracterized the arguments, but if it's right it makes quite clear that egregious context-dropping as a characteristic vice of academicians is not confined to the left:
The study of 399 syphilitic black men in Tuskegee, Ala., began in 1932 and proceeded for 40 years, until an outcry spurred by an Associated Press story in 1972 caused it to be shut down. The men were never treated for syphilis, even after penicillin became available in the 1940s and 1950s.... However, an alternative view espoused by a University of Pittsburgh historian, Jonathan Erlen, and a University of Pittsburgh Medical School professor, Dr. Thomas Benedek, argues that the study was not racist, because syphilis was more prevalent in black men than in white men at the time. Another academic, who has also written about the study, University of Chicago anthropologist Richard Shweder, says the men recruited all had tertiary-stage syphilis, an incurable stage of the disease even after treatment with penicillin, and that the argument for so-called informed consent is founded on modern-day standards.
The article makes clear just how flimsy these arguments are.
