More evidence of Saddam's WMD capacity having been relocated to Syria
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
From the business section of the British newspaper The Spectator (online version)

http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?&StoryID=699BCFDC-3F0B-4625-B5A0-E2D75B759246&SectionID=F3B76EF0-7991-4389-B72E-D07EB5AA1CEE)

"Captured videos link Saddam to WMD in Syria
By Fraser Nelson
19 February 2006


REAMS of unpublished Iraqi documents from Saddam Hussein’s official archives may be translated after the disclosure of video evidence that shows him discussing germ warfare and attacks on the United States.

Some 36,000 boxes of captured documents may be opened to investigate claims suggesting the “smoking gun” evidence may lie in Syria. The discovery was made by non-governmental agencies – leading to calls for all the documents to be made public so similar groups can search them for clues which government auditors may have missed.

On Saturday, a meeting entitled The Intelligence Summit – an American donor-funded group – was convened in Virginia where it played video highlights of conversations they translated showing Saddam and his deputy talking about biological weapons.

One official asks to divert civilian electricity from Basra’s generators to help enrich uranium. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy, is on tape discussing biological weapons and what they would do if France and Russia would not help them.

Saddam also refers to terrorism. “This story is coming, but not from Iraq,” he says. This was taken to rule out his involvement in organising a terrorist attack, but there is a dispute over the translation of his comments.

Separately, Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a former Iraqi commander, gave an interview to an American website where he claims: “Saddam’s weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980s.”

Peter Hoekstra, a Republican who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is leading calls for other documents to be made public. The Pentagon is expected to agree. The Iraq Survey Group originally found 40m documents.

In recent months, interviews with Iraqi officials and translated recordings have shown Saddam was considering chemical weapons and may have had links to al-Qaeda and a secret weapons of mass destruction programme in Syria."

This is just one more piece of evidence that Saddam moved his weapons of mass destruction program to where UNSCOM inspectors couldn't find it. I don't expect the liberals to pay attention to this any more than to any of the other evidence that has been produced showing that Saddam was in the WMD business almost to the day of the invasion.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Welcome back to the Cold War.
More stuff I found on open source intelligence:

http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=4435"

"Amir Taheri on Iran: The second clock is ticking.

Amir Taheri just wrote a column in Asharq Al Awrsat pointing out that Iran's rush to nukes will be shaped by its domestic politics - specifically, an ongoing battle between the most dangerous faction led by Ahmadinejad, and a more risk-averse group of Mullahs, including former President Rafsanjani.

April is the critical month. That is when a new Supreme Guide, with supreme power over the President, may be elected by the Mullahs' "Assembly of Experts." If the fanatics gain control over the top job, there will be nothing to stop them from controlling Iran and its bombs.

Taheri also confirms that Ahmadinejad truly has an Apocalyptic vision about the return of the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam of the Shia sect. Ahmadinejad "puts the Mahdi ahead of all prophets and claims that he has" a private personal channel" to the "Hidden Imam."

Another important point is that Ahmadinejad's ideological guide, Ayatollah Yazdi, utterly rejects the usual warrant for double-talk:

"He is totally against both taqiyah (obfuscation) and kitman (dissimulation) which have been perfected into veritable arts by the mullahs over the centuries. Thus he often says aloud what most mullahs think in silence."

In sum:

1. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that he wants Israel wiped off the map.

2. For twenty years, Iran has been moving toward nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. They are now near the point of no return, where they can no longer be halted without a massive military attack.

3. Ahmadinejad, according to multiple sources, is a fanatic who wants to bring about an Islamic Apocalypse, a total world war that would bring back the messiah of Shia Islam.

4. Ahmadinejad rejects the policy of lying followed by previous Mullahs, so that we should take him at his word.

5. On the other side, Israel is said to have some 200 nuclear weapons, including a second-strike capacity, able to destroy Tehran if Jerusalem or Tel Aviv are hit by surprise.

6. France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others within the 2,000 km range of Iranian missiles cannot possibly believe that a massive nuclear exchange next door will leave them untouched.

It follows that all powers - European and Islamic - in and near the region must want Iran's radicals out, and nuclear development brought to a halt. It was France that secretly gave Israel the plans for Saddam's nuclear reactor in 1981, making it possible for the Israeli Air Force to destroy it in a single bombing raid. The French built the reactor, took Hussein's money, and then ensured that it was blown up.

If the past is prologue, it would seem that Russia, France, and even the Arab countries will secretly cooperate with a US-Israeli effort to destroy Tehran's nuclear capacity, simply to ensure their own survival. If that does not happen, we will be back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or much worse."

I think that Mr Taheri is mistaken - if the past is prologue, Europe - or at least the political movers and shakers in Europe - will be paralyzed by fear of the consequences of alienating worldwide Islam, far too paralyzed to act in time to save themselves or us.

Not to be unnecessarily insulting, but if the past is prologue we face the prospect of not one but a whole group of Hitlers with weaponry far in advance of anything Nazi Germany had, and with an ideology just as murderous, intolerant and ruthless.

Waiting for Europe (not to mention the International Atomic Energy Agency or any other part of the UN) to take the action needed to defuse the threat from militant, nuclear-armed Iran and some of the other rogue nations and organizations which have nuclear weapons or are apt to have them soon is suicidal.

The United States must act. Further, it must act without the fuzzy-minded dithering we've seen so far from the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. It's because of them that we've gotten into the mess we have now.

I'd be lying if I said that this was the fault of the Democrats alone. Obviously the Abramoffs and Safavians of the Republican party elite have trivialized their party's influence.

But one Republican in particular may cost us victory in the more active phase of the war against terror with his autocratic control of his Congressional subcommittee.

That would be Rep. David Hobson (R, Ohio), who has kept funding for research into new types of nuclear weapons particularly suited to digging enemy installations out of deep reinforced-concrete bunkers and new installations for maintaining the nuclear weapons we have now bottled up for years.

Since some of the Iranian nuclear resources we're most concerned about are buried as much as 1,000 meters - 5/8ths of a mile - deep, we NEED that technology vitally. Actually, we needed the funding for that technology many years ago if we were to have the actual bombs we need now. Hobson has already done the damage that Islamist terrorists have been praying for.

And it's difficult to understand under any circumstances why a patriotic American would prevent our nation from having the facilities we need just to maintain the nuclear weapons already in our arsenal.

Those weapons accumulate "poisons" - products of radioactive decay of the fissile materials which make the big boom. The fissiles must be removed and replaced by re-conditioned fissile material. The largest facility we had for doing this, Rocky Flats in Colorado, has been shut for several years.

Pantex in Amarillo, Texas is an old and dated facility, but Hobson has even held up funding for its remodeling to meet our country's needs, much less the additional plant we need to replace the capacity we lost when Rocky Flats was shut down.

Thanks loads, Rep. Hobson.

I don't think that any chance exists at all that Iran will dismantle its nuclear capacity voluntarily. They have protected the facilities they need to build nuclear weapons much more effectively than even we have.

The protection the Iranians have placed around their nuclear program, burying parts of it a thousand meters underground, indicates that they are ready for it to survive even a nuclear attack.

We really need the nuclear bunker busters that Senator Kerry spoke so disparagingly of during one of the presidential debates, and which Represenative Hobson has effectively prevented us from designing, much less building. Thanks again, guys.

Now, because of faint-hearted, misguided idiocy on the part of some of our own politicians, we will have to use "silo-buster" nuclear warheads to burn out Iran's buried nuclear weapons program.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the Iranians have buried their nuclear facilities so deeply that several successive hits will be needed on the kilometer-deep facility and probably on the others as well, in order to assure their total destruction.

This will, because these weapons are not designed for the task of destroying bunkers of that depth, and because the targets consist of special nuclear materials themselves, mean that a successful nuclear bomb run on those facilities will create huge plumes of radioactive fallout hundreds of miles long.

Not only will much of Iran be rendered too radioactive to support life for weeks, but parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, perhaps even Malaysia, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Australia, Hawaii and our own West Coast will be affected as well.

The mission probably wouldn't be worthwhile if it wasn't a certainty that the fallout from the destruction of Israel by Iran (or the terrorists they support) and Israel's retaliatory strikes would be even more deadly and widespread. Not acting is no longer an option.

Iran has just succeeded in making itself Public Enemy Number One. No clear-thinking world power can sit by and let Iran make nuclear weapons which it will either give to Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, or use itself in ways that cannot be sanctioned.

Welcome back to the Cold War, ladies and gentlemen.

Carthage Must be Destroyed!
I found this in the Yahoo group "open source intelligence" today.

It bears reading, because it is the most sensible thing I've read so far about Islam's demand to censor our newspapers:

"Muslims and the imperceptibility of the West
-----------------------
By Mohammad Asghar
2006/02/12

http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/MohammadAsghar60212.htm

SOME political cartoons published by a Danish newspaper are behind the Muslims' rage, which they have been displaying for some days by resorting to all kinds of violence in the part of the world they call their own. They have attacked foreign embassies; they have burned the national flags of even those nations, which have nothing to do with the publication of the cartoons. Their agitation is also responsible for the death of some people.

Muslims' violent reaction against the cartoons has generated huge debate among those people whose voice and discourses demand our attention. Some of the renowned debaters believe that the publication of the cartoons was not appropriate because, they maintain, Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was not a political figure. They also tell us that, since depiction of his features in any form or shape is offensive to the Muslims, all the non-Muslims of the world should respect their religious sensitivity by being sensitive to the Muslims' Islamic beliefs.

In my judgment, most of the non-Muslim debaters are wrong. All of them, who hold the above views, are misinformed. They are not aware of the True Islamic History, nor are they aware of the Islamic agendas that drive each Muslim's life on earth.

Apart from being a religious dictator, Muhammad was also a brute and ruthless political leader. While forcing Islam on the Pagans, Jews and Christians of the Arabian Peninsula, he also established the first Islamic State, with its capital in Medina. It was this action of his that had led his successors to establish the Islamic Empire over one-third of our earth, and to rule over it for over 1,100 years.

Since Muhammad was both a religious as well as a political dictator, non-Muslims have every right to publish, and see his cartoons in their newspapers. Any action taken by the Muslims to prevent them from expressing themselves and their views tantamount to interfering in their internal affairs as well as to denying them the right of _expression their political systems have granted them through their constitutions.

No self-respecting and freedom-loving people should cave in to the Muslims' demands, no matter how violently they want to impose them on others. They should stand up, and face the madness of the Muslims, with all available means at their disposal. Failure to do so would eventually prove disastrous for the West.

One day, it would find itself in the same position in which, the Philippines finds itself today. Emboldened by its soft attitude towards its fast growing Muslim population, it is now fighting for its own existence. Had the authorities in the Philippines adopted a hard posture towards the Muslims before they could become a threat for its existence, it would have saved itself all the trouble, and the bloodbath, it is now struggling to prevent in the wake of a war of secession they have been fighting on its soil.

The Quran tells the Muslims that the earth and all that it contains belong to Allah (3:109). It also tells them that the only Religion that is acceptable to Him is Islam, which He made perfect (cf. 5:3), while Muhammad was still alive.

As the followers of the perfect religion of Allah, Muslims are His Representatives on earth. This position of theirs makes them the owner of the whole earth as well as of everything that it contains.

According to the above doctrine of Islam, non-Muslims are the illegal occupiers of the lands they are now living on. Since their religions are not acceptable to Allah, all of them must either be evicted from their homes, or be killed for refusing to submit themselves to Islam.

Most Muslims' mind is heavily influenced by the above doctrine of their religion. It makes them dream for the day when they would become the owner of the entire earth by evicting or killing its non-Muslim inhabitants. They have been working secretly on their mission for a long time, but the publication of the cartoons by the Danish Newspaper has exposed their secret. It has also enabled the whole world to know how infuriated Muslims can become, if one dares to publish some cartoons of their Prophet.

By their violent actions, Muslims are telling all the non-Muslims of the world that they cannot express their views even in their own backyard, as it
hurts or is likely to hurt their religious sentiments. They are also telling them that they would be beheaded, if they dared to offend them by doing anything that is prohibited in their religion.

Instead of realizing the grave threat that the Muslims pose to the non-Muslim world, many Christian debaters and commentators have chosen to take their side by claiming that since Muslims do not insult the revered personalities of other religions, non-Muslims should reciprocate their so-called noble gesture by not insulting their Prophet. This is a fallacious position and those who propagate it must be told that they are digging their own graves by using the above argument in favor of the Muslims.

Muslims do not respect or revere the personalities of non-monotheistic religions. Given the opportunity, they would not hesitate even for a second before razing to ground all the Hindu temples and the Buddhist monasteries together with all the idols and statues that are housed in them.

How easily Muslims can trample the feelings of other religious people is discernible from one of the actions of the Muslim leaders of Afghanistan. They destroyed three of the old statues of Buddha who is deeply revered, and worshipped, by his followers.

Despite this outrageous action of the Muslim leaders of Afghanistan, no Buddhist is known to have reacted against the ordinary Muslims, nor are the Buddhists known either to have burned the national flag of Afghanistan, or destroyed Muslims' property anywhere in the world.

Why?

As Buddhism is a real non-violent way of life, its practitioners do not react violently even against those who insult, defile or destroy the statue of its founder. This Buddhist attitude cannot be found in the Muslims, hence their destructive agitation against Denmark, and the Christians of the West.


The West must take note of it, and take appropriate actions for defending its peoples' rights in the face of the Muslim onslaughts. Its inability or unwillingness to act now is likely to produce two results:

1. Muslims would take over the West and then turn it into their own Islamic State.

2. They would turn all of its inhabitants into Dhimmis and treat them according to the directive of the Quran, which is:

[Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth {i.e. Islam}, (even if they are) of the People of the Book {i.e. Jews and the Christians}, until they pay the Jizya {protection tax} with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued] (Sura - or Chapter - 9; verse 29).

Do you, the people of the West, want the Muslims to take over your land? Do you want to become their slaves?

If your answers are in negative, in that event, please refuse to submit to the mad demands of the Muslims. Instead of defending them on one pretext or another, tell them to behave and to mind their own business so that you may be able to accommodate them in your midst.

Should Muslims fail to pay heed to the above conditions, you must boycott them and their businesses. Should you fail to do the above two things, please note, your future is bleak and you, your children or your grandchildren may end up being their slaves.

In your action lies your future wellbeing. So, do not hesitate nor procrastinate; rather, act quickly, if you want to save yourselves and your progeny from the evil designs of the Muslims. But should you choose to ignore this advice, and you or your progeny become the victim of the Muslims, in that event, you would have none to blame but yourselves for the plight and sufferings that are in store for you and your descendants."

Hard words, but true ones.

By going to the ridiculous lengths we have gone to in order to accommodate the Muslim governments of the world, we have allowed a well-known sponsor of worldwide terror, Iran, to accumulate all the equipment and supplies needed to produce nuclear weapons.

Now Iran has elected a leader who says in no uncertain terms that he thinks Israel (which has done his country no harm at all) should be wiped out, and implied that we're next. All because we listened to the fools in our news media and the even more foolish and crooked liberals in Congress and failed to act when it would have been cheap and safe to do so.

Now we have either got to undertake a massive campaign to subdue Iran and destroy her nuclear capability - which, realistically, given the location of some of her nuclear stockpile under 1,000 meters (about 5/8ths of a mile) of concrete, rock and soil, must be a nuclear attack, using the same weapons we have developed to destroy Communist missiles in THEIR underground storage - or sit there and wait for our major cities and those of Europe and our allies elsewhere to be vaporized.

As horrible as it seems, even to me, this is our only chance to strike while it can still be done without mass murder happening.

And after that, we must leave worldwide Islam in no doubt that ANY attempt to impose their mores, lifestyle or politics on us will be met with violent resistance of a sort they are not prepared to deal with.

The ancient Romans failed to take sufficient steps to deal with the Carthaginians in their time and were nearly conquered for it. Like us, they tolerated foolishness from a republic that was just corrupt enough to put political patronage (in the appointment of the two generals at Cannae who allowed themselves and their troops to be encircled and slaughtered not far from Rome herself) above the welfare of the Republic - and Rome nearly died of it.

It's time to put an end to all of that now.

No more pretending that the UN and Europeans have a say in OUR self-defense. America must destroy those who would enslave us, and we must do it NOW while we still can.

Any other course would be disastrous to our children and grandchildren.

Is Dubya Trying to Hustle the East?
Mood:  not sure
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Watching George W. Bush's first address after Hurricane Katrina cut her swath across the Gulf Coast, I was encouraged at first by his announcement that New Orleans would be rebuilt - higher. That made sense, and moreover, it was classic Dubya - common sense response.

Then he started promising billions and billions of dollars for reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and everything went to hell in a hurry.

Waving multi-billion dollar works projects ($60 billion, I believe was the figure mentioned) before local politicians is... the mind runs out of metaphors vivid enough to plumb the outright stupidity of the act. And to name a figure before relief agency workers have had a chance to estimate what fixing New Orleans will actually cost... the President all but invited the $240 billion counter-proposal from Louisiana's Congressional delegation... a figure magnificent in its temerity, impudence and ambition.

But Bush held out a subtlety which most people may have missed - he promised to propose these massive spending bills to Congress. Proposing massive spending programs is not the same thing as writing the checks.

Congress, especially the Democratic Congressional caucus, is now potentially in a severe bind of their own creation. Nancy Pelosi and the other members of the Hate Bush First Club didn't even wait for Katrina to make landfall before blaming George W. Bush and FEMA for every death and every dollar of damage caused by the storm, loudly demanding investigations into the incompetence.

It turns out that the incompetence which prevented the FEMA aid from getting to Jean Q. Stormvictim was mainly traceable to local people, most of whom belonged to the same party as Nancy Pelosi and friends. Oops. The press gracefully pointed their cameras elsewhere as Congress, New Orleans' loud-mouthed blame-flinging mayor, and the Governor of Louisiana rearranged their positions to cover their badly-exposed asses.

Bush also demanded investigations, and (with a mischievious gleam in his eye?) promised plenty of inspectors general to look into
- why there weren't enough buses ready in New Orleans to transport elderly citizens to prevent over forty of them from drowning in one old folks' home alone, and
- why one parish emergency preparedness official was found to have four truckloads of badly-needed emergency supplies in his home, and
- why the mayor of New Orleans was at one point inside a room at the Hyatt Regency with a couple of staffers and a laptop computer instead of his designated post, the city/parish emergency operations center.

Before Ray Nagin started blaming everyone else but himself for the events surrounding Katrina, he should have taken a little time to reflect that as the chief executive of New Orleans city government, making sure that the city emergency preparedness plan would survive contact with a category five hurricane and twenty-foot storm surges long enough to coordinate the provision of aid with FEMA was... HIS responsibility.

Not President George W. Bush's, not Governor Kathleen Blanco's (who was intelligent enough to realize that FEMA was not totally responsible for the countless glitches between federal, state and local officials in providing aid to the besieged), but Mayor Ray Nagin's.

So George W. Bush has bought himself some time by making it clear that the decision-making process surrounding both the preparations which were not made before Katrina and the provision of even the sixty billion dollars suggested for Bush's proposed rebuilding program was everyone's responsibility. Some Congresscritters took the initiative, identifying "pet projects" (otherwise known as "pork") which could be cut or deferred in order to fix what broke after Katrina and Rita.

But getting back to what I believe is a mistake the President will regret, loudly mentioning a dollar figure without having any idea of how much money will really be required to fix everything that broke looked like a phony gesture. New Orleanians and the people of the Gulf Coast in general aren't possessed of super-normal intelligence or exceptional in very many ways, but they are wise enough in the ways of the world to notice when something doesn't add up. They'll be curious about that sixty billion-dollar figure, about how it was arrived at and how much actual help they can count on from the President and Congress.

Usually, when you rebuild a house that was flattened by a storm, you get estimates, THEN start lining up financing and writing checks. The President did the process backwards, without asking the people in the area to contribute their opinions as far as I can tell. Not good.

Rudyard Kipling had a cautionary tale for those who mistake simplicity of manner for lack of sophistication:

"...And the end of the fight
Is tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear,
“A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East."

(to the Secret Service - this quotation refers to the President's possible political future, nothing else - I am actually a strong supporter of the President and wish him and his family nothing but prosperity and length of days):

While Kipling was referring to the "East," he meant Afghanistan and the rugged country around the Khyber Pass. New Orleans has often been referred to as America's "Mediterranean port" - it is on the same subtropical latitude as Cairo, and many of its inhabitants speak with an accent more redolent of Brooklyn or lower Manhattan than the Cajuns of the surrounding swamps or the Scots-Irish who live across Lake Pontchartrain in what are known as the "Florida Parishes." It is a sophisticated Eastern Seaboard city, or even, as Robert Penn Warren said, a Mediterranean one moved down to the very core of the Deep South.

And New Orleanians will be watching carefully to see what the President meant by naming a firm dollar figure for storm repairs and relief while Katrina's flood waters were still hiding the storm dead and much damage whose extent was unknown, and some of which a month later is still unknown.

The president may have been a sharp trader in the petroleum futures market, but in bandying about huge figures to repair damage whose extent is unknown, he has placed not money, but his reputation up on the trading block. Even a lame-duck President has to consider the worth of his word... at least, I had strong hopes that we have gone back to the days when lame-duck Presidents didn't wade resignedly into disgrace at the end of their terms from abusing their word. I hope I was right.

Hurricanes, Lies and the Mainstream Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
The Mess After Hurricane Katrina isn't Bush's Fault.

I'm feeling like crap, but feel as though I must weigh in on the merde du boeuf emanating from the Democratic Party's designated Newt Gingrich surrogates (Pelosi, Schumer, Kennedy, et al and ad nauseam) and their groupies in the alleged mainstream media.

The Mayor of New Orleans, from his "emergency operating center" in a hotel room at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, issued a missive blaming everyone else for the inundation of his city, especially the President of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. His analysis is a bit skewed, to say the least.

I have observed civil defense and emergency preparedness operations for many, many years, and have some observations about the mess post Hurricane Katrina:

- In peacetime and the absence of an immediate disaster or crisis, FEMA and Homeland Security basically write checks to state and local governments, trusting the local agencies to prepare for floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc., as each agency perceives its needs. Not much checking up on how the money is spent happens unless an extraordinary cock-up or scandal occurs.

- The Levee Board of New Orleans is infamous for scandals, misappropriation and outright stupidity in its operation. Last year, they spent $2 million dollars of money which might have been used to buy concrete, aggregate and labor to shore up the levees near the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish on a statue. A statue.

Before then, there have been a regular succession of low-key scandals involving defrauding of gun companies and such at the Levee Board.

- Not much clarity of thought is used to determine where emergency operating centers (basically bunkers or other facilities used to coordinate emergency action during a disaster). The practice has been to bury the things in basements of tall buildings, assuring that

(a) the Governor, Mayor, whoever would be entombed under many tons of rubble in the event of nuclear attack and

(b) in the event of a flood, these people would at the very least be driven from their emergency operating center by flood waters (I've seen it happen personally at the Louisiana State Emergency Operating Center after unusually severe rainstorms).

Perhaps the most cheering part of the President's speech tonight is the promise to send inspector generals to audit how the sums we've spent to date to assure the people of New Orleans failed to do so - and possibly to arrange the relocation of those responsible across the Gulf Coast to the Federal Prison for political crooks in Eglin Air Force Base known as "Club Fed".

Again, out of respect for states' and municipal rights, FEMA and the Federal Government basically wrote checks to local governments and told them to go forth and make their people safe. If FEMA had sent people down to assure that this really happened, there would have been sharp words about the Federal Government's interference in local affairs.

In New Orleans that approach failed dismally.

Another encouraging statement by the President was the announcement that emergency operations would from now on be coordinated from the top down, with Federal confirmation of state and local actions.

I believe the investigations into what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will show that this Federal oversight is badly needed in many local government emergency preparedness agencies.

The Democratic flakmeisters on Capitol Hill tried to blame President Bush for something which was mainly local responsibility. They are going to wind up with plenty of egg on their faces, God willing.

Just don't hold your breath waiting for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and PBS to report on it when it happens, because they prostituted their journalistic integrity in exchange for a chance to be king-makers, trying to shoe-horn their favorite party back into power last year.

They just don't get it - no one believes them any more.

"Hello, Mrs. Matt, I am Mrs. Zacarias.... " or, "Al-Qaeda Goes to Flight School"
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: No Truce with Terror!

This article (from intelligence analyst and famous "Sovietologist" Daniel Pipes) came in the digest from the "open source intelligence" group on Yahoo.

It shows how clumsily the "20th 9/11 hijacker" went about getting flight instruction - clumsily enough that you'd think he'd have tripped an alarm somewhere.

"Zacarias Moussaoui Asked, Can an Airplane Pilot Shut off Oxygen to
Passengers?

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
April 29, 2005
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2564
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17894

Zacarias Moussaoui, 36, a French national of Algerian origins, pleaded guilty on April 22, 2005, to six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism. He says he intended to take part in a post-9/11 air attack on the White House. "I came to the United States of America to be part, O.K., of a conspiracy to use airplane as a weapon of mass destruction, a statement of fact to strike the White House, but this
conspiracy was a different conspiracy than 9/11."

He never got to hijack a plane because two of the staff at the flight school where Moussaoui was enrolled, Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims, smelled something fishy and alerted law enforcement. In their first public interview, with Greg Gordon of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the two men tell a fascinating, sinister, and instructive tale.

Moussaoui initially wrote to Matthew Tierney at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in May 2001, using a Hotmail account with the name "zulu mantangotango." His English left something to be desired:

'Hello, Mrs. Matt, I am Mrs. Zacarias. Basically I need to know if you can help to achieve my "goal" my dream. I would like to fly in a "professional" like manners one of the big airliners. The level I would like to achieve is to be able to takeoff and land, to handle communication with ATC [air-traffic control]. ... In a sense, to be able to pilot one of these Big Bird, even if I am not a real professional pilot.'

(Blogger note: and if he'd given up at this point, I'm sure Lorne Michaels could have found a job for him on the writing staff at "Saturday Night Live...")

By a "Big Bird," Moussaoui meant a 747-400, the latest model Boeing wide-bodied jumbo jet that seats more than 500 passengers. He wanted to fly a simulated journey from New York to London. Admitting to limited flying time in a single-engine Cessna, he wrote, "I know it could be better but I am sure that you can do something. After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible."

The Pan Am academy accepted him for instruction and Moussaoui turned up in early August 2001, at its school in Eagen, Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis. Nelson and Sims each found nearly everything about Moussaoui to be suspicious.

* He was a solitary student coming in on his own tab, whereas students learning 747-400s normally come in groups sent by an airline.
* He'd flown mainly a single-engine Cessna, yet he wanted to be trained to fly the largest aircraft in the commercial fleet. Sims asked him, "Why would you spend that much money?" Moussaoui replied that he wanted "a joy ride" or "an ego trip." To his instructor Clancy Prevost, he said it was "an ego thing" he would brag to his friends about.
* He claimed to be an international business consultant in the export-import business but did not fit the part. He lacked a credit card, paying $8,300, most of it in hundred-dollar bills. He was
dressed poorly, turning up in a T-shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and tennis shoes. Nelson observed, "OK, ratty jeans, ratty shirt, ratty
hat. If he's dropping that kind of money to play, I'm expecting to see Rolexes and Guccis."
* He was a couple of hundred dollars short in paying his bill to Pan Am, undercutting his claims to be a rich businessman.
* He lacked a pilot's license of any sort.
* He had flown for 57 hours at a flight school in Oklahoma, but had yet to fly solo, pointing to a severe incompetence that should have caused him to give up his "dream" of flying.
* Prevost found Moussaoui reluctant to talk about himself but turned the discussion to an aircraft accident involving a flight carrying pilgrims to the hajj in Mecca. Casually, he inquired about Moussaoui being Muslim. An FBI affidavit takes it from there: "Prevost described Moussaoui's reaction as being one of surprise and caution. …
When he recovered, Moussaoui informed him that he was not a Muslim."
* When Nelson discovered that Moussaoui is a native speaker of Arabic, his response was, "Oh great, one more strike."
* Moussaoui asked about the possibility of the pilot shutting off oxygen to the passengers.

Prevost described Moussaoui as "just a weird duck," and said "there's really something wrong with this guy." Gordon reports that Alan McHale, Pan Am's manager of pilot training, put all these factors
together and called Pan Am's headquarters to vent his suspicions, but a company salesman replied, "Alan, he's a paying customer. He paid. Leave him alone."

Official channels thus closed, Nelson and Sims separately decided to go the unofficial route and on their own initiative each called the FBI's Minneapolis office. Nelson reached Dave Rapp, a counterterrorism agent. "Here's my position," Nelson recalls telling Rapp, "I'm calling on a customer. I'm sticking my neck out. I'm going to either be a hero or a goat. ... If I'm wrong, it's probably going to cost me my job."

He said he would "rather call and be wrong than not call and be right."

An hour or two later, FBI agents were at Pan Am's Eagen facility, inquiring about Moussaoui. He was arrested on August 17 on immigration charges. None of the other Al-Qaeda operatives was apprehended and
Moussaoui alone sat in jail as his fellow pilot trainees hijacked four airliners on 9/11.

Comments: (1) How can one overlook this little touch, when Moussaoui wrote to the flight school, "After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible." Or that he denied being a Muslim. The
cynicism and falsehood of the Islamists knows no bounds.

(2) In retrospect, it is awfully convenient that Moussaoui had immigration irregularities; how would law enforcement have kept him from his appointed rounds had he been legally clean?

(3) "I'm sticking my neck out. I'm going to either be a hero or a goat," said Nelson. He was perversely lucky that Moussaoui turned out to be an apprentice terrorist; for had he not been, Nelson could well
have lost his job. But the rules need to change so that a person who suspects terrorism in the making does not pay such a price if his hunch turns out wrong."

In response to Dr. Pipes' point #1 above, it isn't the cynicism or falsehood of these people that gets me, but the hypnotic combination of lameness and chutzpah. Moussaoui reminds me of Beldar the Conehead - "Alien... I don't know what you mean - we're from Remulac, a city in France...."

This also should refute the charges that Muslim detainees in the US are routinely mistreated - Moussaoui sat in his cell without saying a damn thing, when in many countries he'd have been strongly "encouraged" to tell everything he knew about the conspiracy of which he was part.

"The Wall" in Berlin, 1990 - Anti-American Postmodern Nostalgia and PBS Fund-Raising (...spooky)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Stupid PBS Tricks
While I'm writing this, several civil-service suits from PBS's Boulder, Colorado affiliate are urging me to give them lots of money in exchange for videos, CDs, and DVDs of Roger Waters' multimedia performance of the rock opera the Wall on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I had lots and lots of spare change (I don't) and were inclined to support what I consider the morally bankrupt political agenda followed by PBS (I'm not), I'd pop for the package that includes ALL of the Wall Berlin 1990 multimedia stuff, and a Dark Side of the Moon CD and a "Making of" documentary on "Dark Side," having been idiot enough to miss Pink Floyd when they did a concert at Louisiana State University and I was there anyway trying to get through a pre-med degree.

But enjoying Pink Floyd and at least some of Roger Waters' dark vision doesn't mean I've gone out and had a lobotomy. I've seen this video four times now, thanks to Boulder PBS (and every time they say it's the "Colorado Broadcast Premiere") and each time, a little of the glamor flakes off, revealing the shoddy thought processes behind it all, masquerading as moral insight.

Somehow, shoehorning Cyndi Lauper and Sinead O'Connor and Bryan Adams and Jerry Hall and Thomas Dolby and the Scorpions and the Hooters and Marianne Faithful and the Marching Band of the Combined Soviet Forces in Germany (I kid you not) and Van Morrison and Alan Parsons (as sound engineer) into this production diminishes it. Too damn many cooks...

Cyndi Lauper's bogus Cockney accent and capering around the stage kind of screwed "We Don't Need No Education (Leave Those Kids Alone!) up beyond saving. Not to mention the weird overtones caused by Sinead O'Connor singing "Mama," asking if her new girl would break her balls... a moment only Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang might fully treasure.

And the macabre irony of bringing the damned Red Army - who helped throw the Wall up and mine a quarter mile on their side of it and set up machine gun nests to kill any poor East German ungrateful enough to want to get away from the Workers Paradise - to do the orchestral backup only throws the utter stupidity of the people who so fatuously praise the Berlin 1990 performance into razor-sharp relief.

What the perky PBS lady just called a "conceptual masterpiece" may in time become known to historians as a piece of dark, pro-totalitarian propaganda (those poor, poor Soviets - damn our forces for humiliating them, anyway) which rivals Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for technical virtuosity in the service of the enemies of democracy.

Roger Waters is protesting the choking, corrupting power of a State which controls every facet of its people's life with the help of... a state which used choking, corrupting power to control every facet of its people's lives - until the money to do it with ran out. I wonder how much Waters or his backers paid the Russians to stop threatening West Berlin for an evening and do a bit of orchestra playing.

And if enough people had succumbed to Waters' vision for the strong Western states which held Communism at bay to have let down their guard and lay down their guns, how many of Waters' fans would have survived either the resulting war of Soviet conquest or the purge that followed?

But the audience was sure pumped at the end of "I Want A Dirty Woman," when the plaintive "Mrs Floyd" and a nasal operator introducing herself as "the United States" gets hung up on... twice. That showed us nasty Yanks, didn't it? We'll sure think twice about taxing our own economy into several recessions to defend Europe from invasion next time, huh?

And the Red Army was there in full force for "Bring the Boys Back Home," the early parts of which were performed against comic-bookish drawings of wartime tragedy (one of which was helpfully labeled "Vietnam" - for which the Red Army did more than its bit, equipping North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and interrogating downed American airmen in shithole POW camps, not to mention egging North Vietnam on to invade neighbors at which it was at peace, initiating the hostilities which inspired that comic book page against which Waters emoted so brilliantly). How many Vietnam veterans did Waters check with before using their war - their blood, and anguish, and sweat and valor - as a fig leaf for Communist expansionism?

But Roger Waters is apparently irony-proof, and his audience for the Berlin 1990 concert were apparently just too stupid to see the cognitive dissonance of using a military orchestra that under other conditions might have been marching down that same Potsdamer Platz in triumph as West Berlin and the rest of Europe were crushed under Stalin's (or Brezhnev's, or Gorbachev's) heel.

I have to admit to massive emotional conflict. This music formed a large part of the soundtrack against which my life has played out, and I have watched this production four times now because it is so brilliant, possibly one of the finest pieces of art to which the term "rock opera" has been applied.

And yet it was used to condemn militarism when the only militarism in any way responsive to Waters' arguments - Western militarism in all its efficient and deadly and civilian-controlled panoply - was the only thing defending Europe and Western Civilization from being destroyed by the soldiers of the very same totalitarian monster whose orchestra played so lustily on stage.

Replace the US Army in Europe and Canadian Forces and the British Army of the Rhine and France's forces in Germany, and the West Germans' own army from Germany at any point during the Cold War with Roger Waters and his brilliant conceptual work and all the jerks who condemn militarism by reflex, and the Soviet Army would have been staring across the English Channel at their next conquest a week later.

It would have happened, because the Russian economy never got out of trouble, all the time they were pointing missiles at us and keeping dozens of army divisions just on the other side of the Iron Curtain poised to roll all over Western Europe the minute we became weak enough to make that move worthwhile. All that time, they were hoping to be able to loot Western Europe to balance their checkbook and save their politicians' worthless asses.

Roger Waters - splendid musician, immortal composer and conceptual artist - and complete idiot where geopolitical and moral analysis are concerned.

What the hell, we play Wagner again and again and again even though we know that he had no problem whatsoever with German militarism and German adventurism and the whole line of immoral crap that compelled German armies to tear Europe apart in 1870, 1914 and 1939 - where all that was concerned, Wagner apparently had no conscience.

Their music is just so damn cool.

Jon Stewart as Rather's "permanent replacement" - who does that ding worse?
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

I inadvertently left my TV tuned to the local station that broadcasts "Access Hollywood" tonight and learned something valuable, just as inadvertently - 53 percent of their viewers think Jon Stewart should be Dan Rather's permanent replacement on the CBS Evening News. I think it was a "Yes/No" question, but I try not to allocate valuable space in my asymptotically shrinking middle-aged memory to things like whether that poll may have mentioned an more appropriate choice - Chevy Chase, maybe.

Think about it, though. Even CBS president Les Moonves (in an interview I referenced a few months earlier in this blog) thinks Jon Stewart might be a reasonable choice for the job. His network's competitors probably think Jon Stewart looks good for the CBS Evening News, too - which goes to show that Moonves and the people polled by "Access Hollywood" may not know the crucial difference between a comedian and a joke. (I'm willing to give Moonves' competitors credit for having a sly sense of humor and a morbid curiosity as to how long it would take the CBS Evening News to self-destruct - further - under a Jon Stewart regime).

Jon Stewart is rumored to be a comedian (I don't see it) and does, in fact, portray a television journalist on what is purportedly a comedy show (again, I don't see more than sporadic comedy in the little of his show I've watched). As a television journalist, Dan Rather was undoubtedly a joke on what is purportedly a news program (one which spends up to half its air time editorializing against the party which more than half the voters choose every time they get a chance. That Rather, his producers and their bosses hate the President and the Republican Party is not news, believe me, which means that much of each episode of the CBS Evening News is not, in fact, spent on news).

But to proceed from there to saying that Jay Stewart would actually make a good television journalist is like saying that when Bill Cosby was playing Dr. Huxtable on his 1980s feel-good prime-time comedy show, he should been licensed to practice medicine in real life on the strength of his performance and ratings.

Or is it?

Journalism is not to comedy as medicine is to comedy.

You don't have to:
- go to college for four years of pre-journalism training in some allied but less rarefied field (which is a good thing, because contrary to popular myth there aren't enough credit hours offered in basket-weaving at most universities to fill up a four-year degree program since the NCAA tightened up its rules);
- then take a special Journalism College Admissions Test and compete against thousands of other would-be journalists for a place in a School of Journalism in which you are worked twelve to sixteen hours a day for four years;
- then compete all over again for an internship and residency, for a total of eight to twelve years of post high-school education... just to work at a local paper or radio station.

You don't have to have one hour of post-baccalaureate/graduate school education in order to work as a journalist.

You don't have to pass a state-administered licensure exam and/or a nationally-standardized journalism board exam in order to practice journalism.

If you got your journalism training overseas, you are not required to pass a Examination for Foreign Journalism Graduates before being allowed to practice journalism in this country.

There are no significant barriers to Jon Stewart's crossing over from playing a journalist on television to being a journalist on television. He is not obliged to make the stereotypical disclaimer from cold medicine ads, "I'm not a journalist, I just play one on TV."

I just can't decide who should be more offended by the breathless buzz that Jon Stewart might make the transition from mediocre comic manque to journalist manque - real journalists or real comedians?

The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Bipartisan Tricks

Useful Phrases for the World of 2015:

That kick in the ribs was wonderful, Sir, may I have another?

That's my last kidney. Please consider not harvesting it.

My home is your home - shall we sign the deed now, Comrade?

 

Of course I'm not resentful because you nuked the West Coast! At least you got Hollywood.

I have just added a new topic category, "Dumb Bipartisan Tricks," to this blog because the White House has really done something dumb, had bipartisan support for it on the Hill, and I just found out about it. I'd feel worse about missing this story when it might have made a difference (a blogger storm during the confirmation hearings, for example), but I made the mistake of thinking that something this heavy would have made the major network news shows. It didn't, that I can tell.

Consider Elaine Chao for a minute. Her father, James S.C. Chao, is chairman and chief executive of Foremost Maritime Corporation of New York. He ships goods to China and buys ships from the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Mr. Chao and Chinese President Jiang Zemin were college classmates in Shanghai and have kept in touch ever since. Chao, his daughter Elaine Chao and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell visited China and met with Jiang in 1994. In 1995, Chao returned to receive an honorary professorship and presidency at the Shanghai Maritime College, and his daughter went with him then, too.

Now, if you were President of the United States, charged by law and obliged under oath to a God with Whom you're supposedly on good terms with defending the Constitution and the People of our country, and you were choosing someone to be Secretary of Labor - to protect American workers and defend them from unfair competition from overseas, and really do it, not just go through the motions - and along with the President, defend the Constitution and the people of the United States, would you pick this lady?

I have never as much as Emailed, much less met Elaine Chao. I confess that I don't know what she would do if placed in a position where the business and political interests of her father and her husband were to conflict with the good of the workers of the United States and its people in general.

The problem is, it doesn't look good, folks. The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates.

Chao has real conflicts of interest and has used her political contacts to get an analyst at the Heritage Foundation (which used to be a conservative think tank, but should be registered as an agent of the Chinese government) fired for saying that the United States should hold up on approval of enhanced trade relations with China until national security issues relating to China were resolved.

Why? Apart from this guy's reports being a large part of the supporting documentation for the Cox Report (which, you may recall, blew the covers all the way off the stories about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, the transfer of ICBM design information by Loral Hughes to the Chinese Army, and the sale of supercomputers with nuclear weapons design information still on them to China).

It must be hard to see a family friend like Jiang Zemin have his most favored nation trading status and World Trade Organization membership held up because he turns out to have authorized massive spying against our country - spying which had as its object improving Red China's ability to kill Americans. But she got her revenge on that Heritage analyst. And now she's in the Cabinet.

It could also have something to do with Heritage donor Hank Greenberg (who gave Heritage $180,000 in 1998 and at least $100,000 a year for more than a decade) communicating his displeasure with the analyst's reports. Greenberg does a lot of business with Chinese clients through his insurance company AIG (American International Group), and presumably would have to keep Chinese regulators happy to continue doing so. Greenberg and AIG have also been good to Chao's husband Mitch McConnell's Senate campaigns through their PAC. AIG also does a lot of business with Henry Kissinger, who (through Kissinger Associates) has been a tireless hired gun for American companies wanting better access to Chinese markets, and for huge Communist dictatorships wanting better control of Congress. Conversely, Greenberg, who has been a staunch lobbyist for China on the Hill through his US-China Business Council in the past, is rumored to be a prime source of funding for Kissinger's firm.

I don't know who I'm angrier with:

- Bush for nominating someone with a number of clear conflicts of interest (as Secretary of Labor, Chao automatically gets a Top Secret clearance, something someone with her family connections might otherwise have trouble getting, being family friends with the leader of a major military threat to the United States whose generals have threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on Los Angeles if we defend Taiwan independence) or

- Congress for rolling over on her nomination, or

- the mainstream media, who should have been squawking about this incredibly bone-headed move from the word go, drumming the facts I have just outlined into our brains, as they tried to do with those faked Air National Guard memos.

What gives? Bush puts a family friend of someone who had his finger on the button controlling a nuke aimed at L.A. (among other places he is sworn to defend) in the Cabinet and Congress and Big Media give him a pass on it?  I had to get this information from World Net Daily, which is very far from being part of the mainstream media.

Weeeellll, part of the problem is that China has been very bipartisan in how it doles out political contributions.

We all know about how good the Chinese Army (whose Second Artillery Division would be in charge of vaporizing the greater Los Angeles area in the event that we decide to make the Taiwan War a contest) were to Clinton and Gore's campaigns. We aren't as hip to the fact that (for example) Senator Feinstein's (D, Calif) husband is on the board of COSCO [The Chinese Army's Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and has other investments in China. Because of this, Feinstein, who is energetic in drawing attention to Bush foibles that pale in comparison to this, has remained mum. By contrast, the late Paul Wellstone, Senator, renowned liberal Democrat and all-around good guy apparently either didn't drink from the Chinese cup or didn't let it affect him, because he was one of the people who was instrumental in getting Chinese labor camp survivor Harry Wu before Congressional subcommittees to testify about the people we were about to give "normal" trade status to.

I think if it were any other country in the world, except possibly for Russia, the very fact that they have what can only be described as a gulag more horrible than the Soviets' - Stalin, at least, never made side money by harvesting his prisoners organs - would have derailed their chances of getting any trade status with us. Instead, we (and I'm just as guilty here as anyone else) buy tons and tons of things which, for all we know, may have been made by those very prisoners while they wait to die from hunger, disease, or... one organ harvest too many. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign state, they would be China's fifth largest trading partner. How many other Senators, Republican, Democrat or Jim Jeffords, are in China's deep pocket? And why aren't we, the voters aware of this?

When Big Media wants us to know something, we bloody well know it - not only through the news, but what is loosely called the entertainment media. David Letterman has taken the at times lonely position (say, during the Oscars or when the weather's nice in Malibu) of Bush-Hater of the Night, while Jay Leno (who at least is somewhat bipartisan with his jokes and has Dennis Miller over to do stand-up dissections of the Left) also manages to get the Democratic party line out there in his jokes - but they're not plausible jabs at Bush, just the sort of stuff you might expect to get if you're mildly dyslexic or whatever the President is.

Why don't we know about the hijacking of our Government by the Communist Chinese from these guys, or one of the always politically-aware prime-time shows, like Law & Order, whose screenwriters managed to call the President a liar on WMD in Iraq in dialogue between the detectives on the show, or ER, which basically insinuates the Democratic Party's platform into their plot a plank at a time? Oops, I forgot - their advertisers might want to sell stuff in China, too. Isn't the subornment of BOTH major political parties in this country by a foreign power that spies on us intensively, has forced an aircraft of ours down over international waters, and declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons on American cities, AND is in the midst of the greatest military build-up (for any country) since World War II a story for the big mainstream media?

Why haven't even Frontline or Bill Moyers' show NOW run features on this? I always thought the virtue of PBS was its independence from corporate funding (that's baloney - they depend on money from corporate charitable foundations, which means a corporation - ExxonMobil, for example - offended by something they saw on PBS would have to make a phone call to someone else who would make a phone call to PBS.... ) but it seems that even they don't see this elephant pacing around the room - which, again, says loads about the priorities of the foundations which prop PBS up.

The Eleventh Commandment of PBS must be "Thou shalt not make a liberal Democrat look like a unprincipled crook." Especially Senator Hillary Clinton (D, NY), who sits on Wal-Mart's board of directors and whose husband Bill Clinton made sure the Chinese got up-to-date nuclear weapon and ICBM designs in the 1990s, or Senator Barbara Boxer, (D, CA) or Senator Diane Feinstein, both of whom have gotten much more than fortune cookies from the People's Republic of China.

I guess THAT'S where Hitler and Tojo screwed up - they didn't buy the major political parties and the press of England and America off with trade and bribes while they were re-arming for Round Two. The Nazis could have pretty well ridden the Channel ferries into England unopposed. Meanwhile, the Western Continental Divide might have had new significance as the postwar border between Japan and Nazi Germany.

But Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, William Shirer and Andy Rooney wouldn't have been able to say anything to the people had they wanted to, because their bosses, or their bosses' bosses would have been afraid of offending those famous contributors to both parties' political campaigns, Krupp and Mitsubishi.

How's your Chinese, everybody?

WILL SOMEONE INVOLVED WITH THIS MESS GROW A CONSCIENCE, PLEASE? OR A BRAIN, A BRAIN WOULD BE NICE, TOO.

From an editorial page in Romania...
Mood:  surprised
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Lately, and especially during the election, we were force-fed information by our news media about how the rest of the world despises us because of things like the war in Iraq. To hear them talk, no one over there ever disagrees with the people who have nothing to do but show up at street rallies to burn the President in effigy and trample and spit on our flag.

Well, this came in my Email the other day. It's an editorial in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei (which translates to "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day"). A fellow over there named Cornel Nistorescu sent in a letter and the paper ran it. So much for European opinion being solidly against us. Then again, the Romanians can probably remember being oppressed by Muslims recently enough that they aren't interested in having it happen again.

"God Bless America
We rarely get a chance to see another country's editorial about the USA.
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper.

The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title "C"ntarea Americii, meaning "Ode To America") in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day".

An Ode to America~

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color!
They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, and the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!" I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours.

Listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being?

Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion...Only freedom can work such miracles.

Cornel Nistorescu"

Thanks, Mr. Nistorescu. And good luck with your country's own democracy. We appreciate the help your people are giving us in the Coalition of the Willing, and appearances to the contrary, we don't forget our friends.