Saturday, 22 September 2007
A Modest Proposal to the New York Times: moveon.org's Ad
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
Dear Editor,
When may we expect a declaration to the Federal Elections Commission of the discount extended to moveon.org for their recent full-page advertisement in your newspaper as a political contribution? Or does your advertising department see a change in its policy under which identical discounts will be extended to, say, The Committee on the Present Danger?
Vance P. Frickey
vfrickey@ricochet.com
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 4:25 PM MDT
Review of an assassination - Russia's back up to its old tricks
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
We haven't heard much about the assassination of former Russian agent Aleksandr Litvinenko at the hands of persons unknown who just happen to have had ready access to a fast-decaying radioactive byproduct of a major national nuclear weapons program. Well, it's an old story, and Gospodin Litvinenko is still dead.
But in the meantime, the Russians have been burning up press time with denunciations of the United States of America of a tenor unheard of since Communism in Europe self-destructed and the Russian state effectively went on international welfare.
Ok, you might be forgiven for thinking "Money talks, bullshit walks" - that this stuff is for home consumption, in order to make the Russian voter think his best chance is still with a paranoid murderer who pines for the good old days of the Soviet Union.
This is obviously why
- Russia has resumed long-range reconnaissance patrols of the North Atlantic - a Russian "Bear" recon bomber was recently intercepted by Royal Air Force fighters near British airspace, and
- why they're running exercises simulating nuclear cruise missile attacks on the continental United States, and
- why Russia and China are running joint military exercises simulating action against... well, against us.
(that was a sarcastic remark, folks.)
So I've decided to try to fill in the background on a disturbing trend where Russia has decided to resume its old role as an active military threat to the national security of the United States of America with a page from my Weapons of Mass Destruction Web site.
Perhaps it's time to consider which is the greater threat - Al-Qaeda with NO nuclear weapons as of yet (though the Russian-provided Iranian nuclear program may change this), or Russia, with over 6,000 nuclear weapons, most of them which can be re-targeted to strike us in a matter of minutes, and which is now holding exercises to simulate nuclear strikes on the US mainland and indulging in some of the most provocative and threatening rhetoric against the US since the Khrushchev regime.
Then it's time to consider cutting off the flow of American tax money to Russia via such pointless programs as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program. While we're pissing money away helping the Russians clean up their antiquated nuclear weapons program, the closed cities have never stopped making new nuclear weapons, and whole new units of Topaz-M ICBMs are coming on line, at the behest of Putin, who has all but promised to aim them at us.
We really do have better uses for the money. Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, Russia is becoming part of the problem, not the solution.
Polonium-210 and other Assassination Poisons
The practice of assassination spans the gap between individual deaths and use of weapons of mass destruction; while assassins normally murder one or two people at a time, they sometimes use chemical, biological and radiological warfare agents (by definition, a poison is a chemical or biotoxic agent, even though the point is not often made).
In December of 2006, former Russian intelligence operative Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered by what proved to be ingestion of polonium-210, (Table of the Nuclides entry on Polonium-210 (courtesy Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute), showing the particles it emits during radioactive decay and other pertinent information) a costly and rare radioactive isotope normally available only in lethal quantities in nations with heavy water reactors (with only a few exceptions, these would be nations with nuclear weapons production facilities because of polonium 210's usefulness in manufacture of nuclear weapons). Scientists familiar with his case estimate from the time it took Litvinenko to die after onset of symptoms and the amounts of the isotope detected that he absorbed a microgram (1/1,000,000 of a gram) of polonium-210.
Polonium-210 emits alpha radiation, which is not dangerous unless taken internally. Once inside the body, though, polonium-210 seeks out the spleen and liver. Depending on how large a dose is taken in, polonium-210 can kill within days to years by causing various cancers. Irene Joliot-Curie is thought to be the first person to die from the radiation effects of polonium. She died in the 1950s, ten years after a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench. Between 1957 and 1969, several laboratory workers also died in Israel after exposure to trace quantities of polonium-210 from leaks at the Weizmann Institute laboratory in 1957.
The problem with polonium-210 is that it emits a LOT of alpha radiation, and each alpha particle emitted by polonium-210 decay is expelled with a very high energy - which can cause even tiny amounts of the substance to disperse throughout its surroundings, eventually entering the air bystanders breathe and the surfaces that they touch.
Polonium-210 is infamously difficult to contain safely in the laboratory environment, probably explaining how the material which killed Litvinenko also managed to contaminate locations throughout London and multiple aircraft. Adequate precautions against dispersal of polonium-210 into the environment after a poisoning would have been impossible to take without immediately arousing suspicion.
Finally, as polonium concentrates in liver and spleen rather than being distributed more evenly throughout the human body, a little of it goes a long way. The comments in the news media about "a large amount" of polonium being necessary to kill someone are somewhat misleading - as I stated earlier, British medical authorities and scientists estimate that only a millionth of a gram was required to kill Litvinenko.
While this is a lot of polonium-210 by commercial standards (United Nuclear here in the United States sells safe, fairly innocuous "exempt quantities" of polonium-210 to anyone with US$69 for 0.1 microcuries of activity - which is about 0.18 trillionths of a gram of the isotope), one suspects that the stuff doesn't cost anywhere near as much to make as it sells for. And the Russians are getting it wholesale. Anyway, nobody's going to tell the President of the Russian Republic "Volodya, do you have any idea how much a lethal dose of that stuff COSTS? Why can't we just put a .22 bullet in his brain pan?"
Then again, Russia exports about 8 grams of polonium-210 a month to the US, or eight MILLION times the amount that killed Litvinenko. It is not difficult to imagine how, with a flow of that much material, a microgram or two could be diverted without tripping too many alarms - especially since the Russian mafiya has a very large and influential presence in the "closed cities" which comprise the Russian nuclear industry. It would not be particularly surprising if the security system which was so expensively procured for the Russian nuclear program by the United States has largely or even completely been infiltrated and co-opted by the mafiya to allow profitable diversions of many special nuclear materials.
Why?
Aleksandr Litvinenko was a vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, having accused Putin of complicity in the murder of a Russian woman journalist and assorted other mopery and dopery. He had met with another former Russian security operative just before falling ill - a man who is now himself contaminated with polonium-210, as is Mrs. Litvinenko. While neither of the latter two is probably going to die soon, their chances of expiring from cancer ten years from now are, unfortunately, excellent.
Another prominent Russian critic of Putin's, politician and economist Yegor Gaidar, also fell ill in Ireland not long after Litvinenko and is in hospital in Russia at this time. Mr. Gaidar is not thought to have ingested polonium-210. He and his daughter have publicly stated their belief that opponents of the Putin administration are responsible for his poisoning. I will discuss that theory later.
Poison is a traditional means for the Russian government to deal with people that it finds troublesome. Among several other methods tried in desperation, cyanide crystals sprinkled on the frosting of a cake were used in an attempt to kill the cultist monk Grigori Rasputin during the reign of Tsar Nikolai II just before the Revolution.
After the revolution and throughout the history of the Soviet Union, Soviet security services used poison to murder dissidents and defectors when more direct methods were not practical.
The US Central Intelligence Agency has also used poison in assassination attempts, at least twice to try to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Also, CIA pilots and other spies were sometimes given extremely rapid-acting poison darts to allow them to commit suicide rather than be captured in enemy territory - the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had to warn his KGB captors to be careful in handling a hollowed-out coin containing a lethally-poisoned needle which was confiscated from him shortly after he was shot down by Soviet anti-air missiles.
The range of these poisons is impressive - from relatively simple inorganic poisons such as arsenic and thallium to highly-toxic biotoxins extracted from the glands of puffer fish, and at least two types of radioactive material chosen for their rapid decay, intense radioactivity, rapid concentration in vital organs, and elimination from the body, making a diagnosis of poisoning very difficult unless the use of radioactives was suspected.
Did Putin order the assassination? Is it a red herring (no pun intended)?
Litvinenko's death seems a very cruel and cynical act, since polonium-210 is so expensive and difficult to obtain in lethal quantities that it virtually amounts to a "signature hit" pointing to Russia (or another country with an active nuclear weapons program). Who besides the Russians would want to see Litvinenko dead badly enough to use a million dollars' worth of a highly specialized radioisotope to kill him? We in the US might peel that much money off the roll to kill Osama bin Laden, and getting Zawahiri may have cost somewhere in that neighborhood when you figure in the airstrikes, the intelligence operation, the cost of overrunning his compound... but even if we were in the business of killing overseas dissidents, we probably wouldn't go to that expense to do it.
Was Litvinenko's murder authorized by Vladimir Putin - or are we seeing an impressively realistic campaign to destabilize Russia and destroy relations between the Putin administration and the West?
The simplest and most plausible explanation is that this assassination and the ones that came before it were and are official acts of the Russian state. Their unsubtlety and arrogance may reflect basic differences in power psychology between Russia and the West, or even stability issues within the Russian leadership.
Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that the fall of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." We must assume that he is interested in returning Russia to the status quo ante 1990 - if not Communist by ideology, certainly an authoritarian government with what we would consider an expansionist foreign policy (as demonstrated by the attempted assassination in 2004 of the democratically-elected president of the Ukraine in an apparent attempt to prevent that country from moving away from Russian hegemony).
Certainly, the public utterances of leadership figures in Russia are veering away from conciliation with the West lately. An increasingly anti-Western and anti-American bias in the Russian print and electronic media is troubling. Much more troubling than what Putin and company are saying, though, is what they are doing. Despite assurances to the contrary, Russia seems to be supplying Iran with an increasing flow of nuclear technology. Without Russian assistance, Iran would never have gotten as far as it has already toward a fully-functional nuclear weapons production program.
The ugly truth is that assassination may be one of the signs that the world is sliding into another worldwide conflict - it may be up to the historians to decide exactly when World War III began.
A short and sketchy list of poisons used in assassination and other covert operations:
KGB/FSB (Russian spy and secret police agencies)
cyanide (Lev Rebet, 1957)
radiothallium (Nikolay Khokhlov, 1955)
Polonium-210 (Litvinenko, 2006)
2,3,7,8-TCDD (Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin with alpha-fetoprotein) (Viktor Yuschenko, pres. Ukraine, 2004; Yury Shchekochikin, ed. Novaya Gazeta, 2003?)
ricin (Georgi Markov, 1978, London; another Bulgarian defector in Paris)
atropine (Radio Free Europe - placed in salt shakers on cafeteria tables, 1960s)
US Central Intelligence Agency
tetrodotoxin/fugu toxin (suicide devices for secret agents and spy pilots)
nicotine (Castro assassination attempt)
thallium powder inside wet suit (Castro assassination attempt)
ipecac (OSS, against Japanese Army during World War II)
criminals
antimony
arsenic (traditional)
thallium (movie:"Handbook for Young Poisoners," after British serial poisoner '60s and '70s, and a more recent Florida case)
hydrazine (late 1970s, a cancer research lab technician's murder attempt on family)
cyanide (Tylenol tampering case, 1980s)
salmonella (the Rajneeshi cult's attempt to sway a local election in Washington state by lowering the turnout among people who didn't belong to the cult - the idea was to give everyone in town food poisoning)
insulin overdose (a favorite of serial killers in intensive care units and long-term care facilities)
succinylcholine (a drug normally used by anesthetists to suppress muscle spasm during surgery and other medical procedures)
terrorists
anthrax (biological terror by mail campaign, fall 2001, US)
sarin nerve gas (Aum Shinrikyo Supreme Truth cult subway attack, Tokyo, 1992; Iraqi terrorists, 2005)
Carey Sublette, author of the Nuclear Weapon Archive, has published an interesting analysis of the Litvinenko murder: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html
Since Mr. Sublette has researched nuclear weapons and related issues extensively (and polonium-210 is used for, among other things, neutron sources to increase the efficiency of nuclear weapons) his views on the origin and quantity of the polonium-210 used in the Litvinenko hit are worth reading.
Mr. Sublette estimated in a post to the USENET newsgroup alt.war.nuclear that far from the million-dollar plus figure mentioned for the quantity of polonium-210 needed to induce Mr. Litvinenko's rapid death, the necessary quantity would have been contained in about $4,000 worth of consumer-grade "Staticmaster" antistatic brushes made for cleaning of phonograph records. (see http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml for corroborative details)
Mr. Sublette's post:
"Chris wrote:
'http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/12/18/poloniumprice.shtml
$10 Million Worth of Polonium Used to Poison Former Russian Agent Litvinenko - Paper
Created: 18.12.2006 13:26 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:26 MSK, 4 hours 28 minutes ago...
British investigators on Litvinenko`s case believe the radioactive substance used to poison former FSB agent cost in excess of 10 million U.S. Dollars, The Times newspaper reported on Monday.
Preliminary results from the post mortem on Litvinenko's body have discovered he was given more than ten times the lethal dose of polonium 210. Large quantities of the radioactive substance were found in his urine.
"You can't buy this much off the internet or steal it from a laboratory without raising an alarm, so the only two plausible explanations for the source are that it was obtained from a nuclear reactor or very well-connected black market smugglers," said an anonymous British security source.'
On Nov. 24, the day the polonium poisoning was announced, I estimated in my post to this newsgroup (Fri, Nov 24 2006 6:29 pm): "I think that 50 millicuries is about the right dose for the observed effect (there are 4490 curies/g for Po-210), this would be 11 micrograms. This about 200 times the amount in a Staticmaster® Brushes: http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml"
Anyone reading this post, and following the Staticmaster link would find that the real cost was more like $4000. Or if they had read William Broad's Dec. 3 article in the New York Times, they would have seen his estimate of $212 (he was estimating for a single lethal dose, not the 10X dose I was using).
I guess the "anonymous British security source" does not read the New York Times.
Note that the description of symptoms from the initial news reports in November allowed one to conclude that the dose administered was about 10 times the lethal dose (the approx. 50 millicuries I estimated on Nov. 24, above), which is what the autopsy results just reported.
I put a page up on my website last week walking the interested reader through the analysis that supports this conclusion: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html
Carey Sublette"
Note: The US$1 million figure was obtained by multiplying the price per exempt quantity - 0.1 microcurie - source from the United Nuclear Web site by the number of such sources required to make up the estimated dose given to Litvinenko - which resulted in a grossly inflated estimate of the cost of the Litvinenko hit.
It would be much easier, economical and probably safer for someone wanting to have access to useful quantities of polonium-210 to grind down the source containers from inside several Staticmaster® brushes than to get it from United Nuclear's line of exempt quantity sources. As an added bonus, Staticmaster® brushes are probably not as tightly monitored as United Nuclear's product line.
The recent public assurances that polonium-210 is essentially unavailable to the public in lethal quantities are empty.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 2:36 PM MDT
Friday, 3 August 2007
GOT IT IN ONE!!!!!
Topic: Dumb Congressional Tricks
This is what happens when fools step in front of open mikes. Barack Obama has just shown us what kind of jackass is liable to be the front runner for the Democratic Party's nomination for President.
PLEASE, PLEASE, Democrats, don't nominate Barack Obama! Why, he's so electable, and so credible, and so well-respected overseas (effect: raucous, uncontrollable laughter).
Pakistan slams 'ignorant' Obama threat
From correspondents in Islamabad
August 02, 2007 08:57pm
Article from: Agence France-Presse
PAKISTAN accused Democratic US presidential candidate Barack Obama of "sheer ignorance" today for threatening to launch US military strikes against al-Qaeda on Pakistani soil.
Mr Obama warned today that if he is elected president, he would order US forces to hit extremist targets on Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan if embattled military ruler President Pervez Musharraf failed to act.
"Such statements are being made out of sheer ignorance," Pakistan's Minister of State for Information, Tariq Azeem, said.
"They are not fully apprised about the ground realities and not aware of the efforts by Pakistan."
Islamabad has bristled against a string of similar threats in recent weeks by the administration of US President George W. Bush, whose top counter-terror official in July refused to rule out US strikes in Pakistan.
Mr Musharraf, struggling to contain a wave of Islamist violence unleashed by the army's bloody storming of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad three weeks ago, himself firmly rejected any US action last week.
"We have said before that we will not allow anyone to infringe our sovereignty," Mr Azeem said.
"If there is any actionable intelligence they should tell us and only our forces will take action on it and they are quite capable of it."
The minister suggested that Mr Obama's comments were prompted by Washington's inability to curb the ongoing Taliban insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan, where US-led forces toppled the hardline regime in late 2001.
"This seems to be a reaction to their own failure in Afghanistan to control the US casualties and instead of addressing the situation there, they are finding scapegoats and damaging their own cause," Mr Azeem added.
Pakistan foreign ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam today warned against "point-scoring" by US presidential candidates on vital security issues.
Mr Musharraf abandoned Islamabad's support for the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US.
He has said that a top US official warned that Pakistan would be bombed back to the "stone age" if it failed to join Washington's "war on terror".
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 6:13 PM MDT
Sunday, 29 July 2007
Screwed-up value judgments at CNN...
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
A sports anchor at Cable News Network (CNN) was accused by a Headline News commentator of saying that dogfighting is worse than rape.
Aren't you glad they cleared that up, folks?
In a CNN Headline News segment about Atlanta Falcons' Michael Vick (recently arrested for running a dogfighting ring), commentator Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith (one of CNN's sports anchors) of saying that the dogfighting-related crimes were worse than rape.
I'm not so sure he said that, reading the transcript. The feminist blogs have, of course, hit the ground running to portray this as a relative endorsement of rape when it may well have been more a case of hoof-in-mouth disease. It wouldn't be the first time a well-meaning sports announcer simply got tangled up in the English language.
The remarks in question followed a short bite of Kobe Bryant denying the rape charges (probably intended as an example of how Vick should respond to the allegations in the media):
"SMITH: Yes, well, that’s — he’s been in a lot of trouble lately, when you think about all the other incidents, and this is just the worst one of all.
Keep in mind, too, that while Kobe Bryant is a situation we can sort of compare this to, this really is much worse. Not only can you argue that the crimes are much worse in terms of, you know, killing dogs and that kind of thing, but as an NFL starting quarterback, you are the most visible face in that city. I’ve said all along, in fact, you know, if you go through and, you know, very quickly name 10 mayors of major cities in the country…
GRACE: Larry Smith, did I just hear you say…
SMITH: … you could have a harder time doing that…
GRACE: … mistreatment of…
SMITH: … than naming 10 NFL starting quarterbacks.
GRACE: Did I just hear Larry Smith, CNN sports correspondent and anchor, state that crimes on a dog are much worse than crimes on a woman? Did I hear that?"
OK. I didn't see how Larry Smith could reasonably be accused of saying what Nancy Grace says he said.
What I saw was a compound-complex sentence whose diagram would look like a map of the London Underground.
Smith was obviously (to me, anyway) trying to say that Vick's position as starting QB of the Falcons made him more visible than Kobe Bryant AND the mayors of many major American cities, and that he should have conducted his private life accordingly. (Of course, that analogy gets all snarled up when you consider the sterling examples of Rudy Giuliani, Marion Barry, Ray Nagin and other mayors of large US cities, but.... )
You really (again, in my humble opinion) had to be anticipating, even wishing, that Mr. Smith would say something that could be taken as diminishing the seriousness of rape.
You can't get to what Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith of saying without some help along the way - she jumped on remarks which barely managed to convey their intended meaning, much less what she accused him of saying, and carried the ball all the way for a touchback - 180 degrees away from where the sentence was going.
(Also, last time I checked, Bryant had formally been cleared of rape in a Colorado court, despite echoes of the O.J. Simpson trial which seemed to confirm that if you want to get away with hurting a woman, you should bring your national championship ring, your checkbook and some of the Dream Team to court with you.)
I think the worst Larry Smith can be accused of is minimizing Michael Vick's offenses to "doing the wrong thing, at the worst time, from the most visible public forum possible."
That's true, but Vick also provided the place, time and physical resources for incredible cruelty against dogs - a species whose main defect is trusting humans too much for their own good. And Vick's attempt to say that all of this was happening on his property without his knowledge over that long period of time is crap, pure and simple.
By comparison, Nancy Grace committed a much graver offense - against both Larry Smith personally and against journalistic ethics in general. She either carelessly or knowingly impugned a colleague's character on camera, accusing him of saying something that he never intended to say.
There's plenty of callousness toward female victims of crime in the press, in popular music and other public forums, without falsely accusing people of the act - a reciprocal callousness toward those who mis-speak with no intent to harm anyone, simply because an opportunity to make easy rhetorical points presents itself.
Shame on you, Ms. Grace. Shame on you.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 7:10 PM MDT
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
How the Democrats' Way Worked Out.... Appeasement 101
Mood:
irritated
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=04&d=24&a=6
The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson
Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian
terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran’s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.
When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran’s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy.
The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979—and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.
The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler’s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness.”
So too did Western excuses for the Russians’ violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence — not the United Nations—and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan’s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter’s accommodation or Richard Nixon’s détente.
As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty—and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.
Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement — perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval—was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.
What went wrong with the West—and with the United States in particular—when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it.
That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of
Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war. Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter’s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.
But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate — a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.
Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see
particularly critical turning points that reflected this now - institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant’s dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the “coalition” would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might be murdered abroad.
Throughout this tragic quarter-century of appeasement, our response usually consisted of a stern lecture by a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton about “never giving in to terrorist blackmail” and “not negotiating with terrorists.” Even Ronald Reagan’s saber-rattling “You can run but not hide” did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the horrific Hezbollah attack.
Sometimes a half-baked failed rescue mission, or a battleship salvo, cruise missile, or air strike followed—but always accompanied by a weeklong debate by conservatives over “exit strategies” and “mission creep,” while liberals fretted about “consultations with our allies and the United Nations.”
And remember: these pathetic military responses were the hawkish actions that earned us the resignation of a furious Cyrus Vance, the abrogation of overflight rights by concerned “allies” such as France, and a national debate about what we did to cause such animosity in the first place.
Our enemies and Middle Eastern “friends” alike sneered at our self-flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Hussein—only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans—indeed the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America’s purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a prime cause of their dislike of us.
In the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the problem may not be real differences over the West Bank, much less that “we are not getting the message out”; rather, in the decade since 1991 the Middle East saw us as a great power that neither could nor would use its strength to advance its ideas—that lacked even the intellectual confidence to argue for our civilization before the likes of a tenth-century monarchy. The autocratic Arab world neither respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it rightly senses that we often talk in principled terms but rarely are willing to invest the time, blood, and treasure to match such rhetoric with concrete
action. That’s why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the reconstruction and cement the achievement of our three-week victory over Saddam.
It is easy to cite post-Vietnam guilt and shame as the likely culprit for
our paralysis. After all, Jimmy Carter came in when memories of capsizing boat people and of American helicopters lifting swarms of panicked diplomats off the roof of the Saigon embassy were fresh. In 1980, he exited in greater shame: his effusive protestations that Soviet communism wasn’t something to fear all that much won him the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while his heralded “human rights” campaign was answered by the Ortegas in Nicaragua and the creation of a murderous theocracy in Iran. Yet perhaps President Carter was not taking the American people anywhere they didn’t want to go.
After over a decade of prior social unrest and national humiliation in
Vietnam, many Americans believed that the United States either could not or should not do much about things beyond its shores.
As time wore on and the nightmare of Vietnam began to fade, fear of the Soviet Union kept us from crushing the terrorists who killed our diplomats and blew up our citizens. These were no idle fears, given the Russians’ record of butchering 30 million of their own, stationing 300 divisions on Europe’s borders, and pointing 7,000 nukes at the United States. And fear of their malevolence made eminent sense in the volatile Middle East, where the Russians made direct threats to the Israelis in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, when the Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi militaries—trained, supplied, and advised by Russians—were on the verge of annihilation. Russian support for Nasser’s Pan-Arabism and for Baathism in Iraq and Syria rightly worried cold warriors, who sensed that the Soviets had their geopolitical eyes on Middle East oil and a stranglehold over Persian Gulf commerce.
Indeed, these twin pillars of the old American Middle East policy — worry over oil and fear of communists—reigned for nearly half a century, between 1945 and 1991. Such realism, however understandable, was counterproductive in the long run, since our tacit support for odious anti-communist governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and North Africa did not address the failure of such autocracies to provide prosperity and hope for exploding populations of increasingly poor and angry citizens. We kept Russians out of the oil fields and ensured safe exports of petroleum to Europe, Japan, and the United States—but at what proved to be the steep price of allowing awful regimes to deflect popular discontent against us.
Nor was realpolitik always effective. Such illegitimate Arab regimes as the Saudi royal family initiated several oil embargoes, after all. And
meanwhile, such a policy did not deter the Soviets from busily selling
high-tech weaponry to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, while the KGB helped to train and fund almost every Arab terrorist group. And indeed, immediately after the 1991 Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officers discovered that Soviet-trained Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu Ibrahim had flocked to Baghdad on the invitation of the Baathist Saddam Hussein: though the Soviet Union did not interrupt Western petroleum commerce, its well-supplied surrogates did their fair share of murdering.
Neither thirst for petroleum nor fear of communists, then, adequately
explains our inaction for most of the tumultuous late 1980s and 1990s, when groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaida came on to the world scene. Gorbachev’s tottering empire had little inclination to object too strenuously when the United States hit Libya in 1986, recall, and thanks to the growing diversity and fungibility of the global oil supply, we haven’t had a full-fledged Arab embargo since 1979.
Instead, the primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events leading up to September 11 lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had a propensity for complacency because of our wealth and freedom; and Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four presidential administrations, laxity about danger on the horizon seems to have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United States sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.
Americans never viewed terrorist outlaw states with the suspicion they once had toward Soviet communism; they put little pressure on their leaders to crack down on Middle Eastern autocracy and theocracy as a threat to security. At first this indifference was understandable, given the stealthy nature of our enemies and the post–cold war relief that, having toppled the Soviet Union and freed millions in Eastern Europe, we might be at the end of history. Even the bloodcurdling anti-American shouts from the Beirut street did not seem as scary as a procession of intercontinental missiles and tanks on an average May Day parade in Moscow.
Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the PLO were more like fleas on a sleeping dog: bothersome rather than lethal; to be flicked away occasionally rather than systematically eradicated. Few paid attention to Usama bin Ladin’s infamous February 1998 fatwa: “The rule to kill Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is a sacred duty for any Muslim.” Those who noticed thought it just impotent craziness, akin to Sartre’s fatuous quip during the Vietnam War that he wished for a nuclear strike against the United States to end its imperial aspirations. No one thought that a raving maniac in an Afghan cave could kill more Americans in a single day than the planes of the Japanese imperial fleet off Pearl Harbor.
But still, how did things as odious to liberal sensibilities as Pan-Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Middle Eastern dictatorship — which squashed dissent, mocked religious tolerance, and treated women as chattel—become reinvented into “alternate discourses” deserving a sympathetic pass from the righteous anger of the United States when Americans were murdered overseas?
Was it that spokesmen for terrorist regimes mimicked the American Left—in everything from dress, vocabulary, and appearances on the lecture circuit—and so packaged their extremism in a manner palatable to Americans?
Why, after all, were Americans patient with remonstrations from University of Virginia alumna Hanan Ashrawi, rather than asking precisely how such a wealthy Christian PLO apparatchik really felt about the Palestinian Authority’s endemic corruption, the spendthrift Parisian Mrs. Arafat, the terrorists around Arafat himself, the spate of “honor killings” of women in the West Bank, the censorship of the Palestinian press, suicide murdering by Arafat affiliates, and the lynching of suspects by Palestinian police?
Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived from a new sort of anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the 1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled economy or mouth the old romance about a workers’ paradise—not with scenes of East German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or political terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment against prosperous capitalists. Far from it.
If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States.
The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and
liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from charges of fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism’s demise likewise freed these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something better, as witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches proclaiming: “I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.”
>From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed Khomeini “a kind of mystic saint” who would usher in a new “political spirituality” that would “transfigure” the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (“to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”), there filtered down a vague notion that the United States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural condescension—all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.
There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed—a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.
Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed up a “noble savage,” who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart in a pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better world—whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad,
whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.
An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah—a Western-supported anti-communist, after all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.
Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk
anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini’s gulag to be “independent nationalism,” reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those “committed to social change,” when no universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to the doctrine of cultural relativism, “oppressed” peoples either could not be judged by our biased and “constructed” values (“false universals,” in Edward Said’s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by the evils of Western capitalism.
Who were we to gainsay Khomeini’s butchery and oppression? We had no way of understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and “nationalist” Islam. Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an alternate path, a different “discourse” about how to organize a society that emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit.
So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments about the relative value of different cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elites—coupled with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World roguery—explained tolerance for early unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more.
This nonjudgmentalism—essentially a form of nihilism—deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West Bank merely “different” rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to us prepped in high schools not to make “value judgments” about “other” peoples who are often “victims” of American “oppression.” Thus, before female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have deconstructed Atta’s promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration.
It was not for nothing that on November 17, 1979—less than two weeks after the militants stormed the American embassy in Teheran — the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black hostages, singling them out as part of the brotherhood of those oppressed by the United States and cloaking his ongoing slaughter of Iranian opponents and attacks on United States sovereignty in a self-righteous anti-Americanism. Twenty-five years later, during the anti-war protests of last spring, a group called “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism” sang the same foolish chorus in its call for demonstrations: “Members of the Muslim Community, Antiwar Activists, Latin-American Solidarity Groups and People From All Over the United States Unite to Say: ‘We Are All Palestinians!’ ”
The new cult of romantic victimhood became gospel in most Middle East departments in American universities. Except for the courageous Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami, few scholars offered any analysis that might confirm more astute Americans in their vague sense that in the Middle East, political autocracy, statism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and gender apartheid accounted for poverty and failure. And if few wished to take on Islamofascism in the 1990s — indeed, Steven Emerson’s chilling 1994 documentary Jihad in America set off a storm of protest from U.S. Muslim-rights groups and prompted death threats to the producer—almost no one but Samuel Huntington dared even to broach the taboo subject that there might be elements within doctrinaire Islam itself that could easily lead to intolerance and violence and were therefore at the root of any “clash of civilizations.”
Instead, most experts explained why violent fanatics might have some half-legitimate grievance behind their deadly harvest each year of a few Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. These experts cautioned that, instead of bombing and shooting killers abroad who otherwise would eventually reach us at home, Americans should take care not to disturb Iranian terrorists during Ramadan — rather than to remember that Muslims attacked Israel precisely during that holy period. Instead of condemning Wahhabis for the fascists that they were, we were instead apprised that such holy men of the desert and tent provided a rapidly changing and often
Western-corrupted Saudi Arabia with a vital tether to the stability of its romantic nomadic past. Rather than recognizing that Yasser Arafat’s Tunisia-based Fatah organization was a crime syndicate, expert opinion persuaded us to empower it as an indigenous liberation movement on the West Bank—only to destroy nearly two decades’ worth of steady Palestinian economic improvement.
Neither oil-concerned Republicans nor multicultural Democrats were ready to expose the corrupt American relationship with Saudi Arabia. No country is more culpable than that kingdom in funding extremist madrassas and subsidizing terror, or more antithetical to liberal American values from free speech to religious tolerance. But Saudi propagandists learned from the Palestinians the value of constructing their own victimhood as a long-oppressed colonial people. Call a Saudi fundamentalist mullah a fascist, and you can be sure you’ll be tarred as an Islamophobe.
Even when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton
administration, unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood, transformed Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying America into wayward individual criminals who did not spring from a pathological culture. Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a criminal justice matter—which of course allowed the United States to avoid confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly unpopular business the Bush administration has been engaged in since September 11. Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to Yemen and Saudi Arabia after the attacks on the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat,
responsible in the 1970s for the murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan, turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Oval Office.
If the Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep-seated
tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to wake comfortable Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive about the threat of Islamic fascism. Especially culpable was the Democratic Party at large, whose post-Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use of American armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia.
Indeed, the recent Democratic primaries reveal just how far this disturbing trend has evolved: the foreign-policy positions of John Kerry and Howard Dean on Iraq and the Middle East were far closer to those of extremists like Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich than to current American policy under George W. Bush. Indeed, buffoons or conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Al Franken often turned up on the same stage as would-be presidents. When Moore, while endorsing Wesley Clark, called an American president at a time of war a “deserter,” when the mendacious Sharpton lectured his smiling fellow candidates on the Bush administration’s “lies” about Iraq, and when Al Gore labeled the president’s action in Iraq a “betrayal” of America, the surrender of the mainstream Democrats to the sirens of extremism was complete. Again, past decorum and moderation go out the window when the pretext is saving indigenous peoples from American oppression.
The consensus for appeasement that led to September 11, albeit suppressed for nearly two years by outrage over the murder of 3,000, has reemerged in criticism over the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq and George Bush’s prosecution of the War on Terror.
The tired voices that predicted a litany of horrors in October 2001—the impassable peaks of Afghanistan, millions of refugees, endemic starvation, revolution in the Arab street, and violations of Ramadan—now complain, incorrectly, that 150,000 looted art treasures were the cost of guarding the Iraqi oil ministry, that Halliburton pipelines and refineries were the sole reason to remove Saddam Hussein, and that Christian fundamentalists and fifth-columnist neoconservatives have fomented a senseless revenge plot against Muslims and Arabs. Whether they complained before March 2003 that America faced death and ruin against Saddam’s Republican Guard, or two months later that in bullying fashion we had walked over a suddenly impotent enemy, or three months later still that, through incompetence, we were taking casualties and failing to get the power back on, leftist critics’ only constant was their predictable dislike of America.
Military historians might argue that, given the enormity of our task in
Iraq—liberating 26 million from a tyrant and implanting democracy in the region—the tragic loss of more than 500 Americans in a year’s war and peace was a remarkable sign of our care and expertise in minimizing deaths.
Diplomats might argue that our past efforts at humanitarian reconstruction, with some idealistic commitment to consensual government, have a far better track record in Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Serbia than our strategy of exiting Germany after World War I, of leaving Iraq to Saddam after 1991, of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban once the Russians were stopped, of skipping out from Haiti or of fleeing Somalia. Realist students of arms control might argue that the recent confessions of Pakistan’s nuclear roguery, the surrender of the Libyan arsenal, and the invitation of the UN inspectors into Iran were the dividends of resolute American action in Iraq. Colonel Khadafy surely came clean not because of Jimmy Carter’s peace missions, UN resolutions, or EU diplomats.
But don’t expect any sober discussion of these contentions from the Left. Their gloom and doom about Iraq arises precisely from the anti-Americanism and romanticization of the Third World that once led to our appeasement and now seeks its return. When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says, pray for his election in hopes of ending George Bush’s Iraqi nightmare, perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission president Romano Prodi, who said in the wake of the recent mass murder in Spain: “Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone.” Perhaps he has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes it can find security from al-Qaida terrorism by refuting all its past support for America’s role in the Middle East. But of course if the terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve, they will find such
appeasement a mere 48 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously resolute Western democracies—Italy, Poland, Britain, and the United States—should expect the terrorists to murder their citizens on the election eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style capitulation.
In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a mere two and a half years, reversed the perilous course of a
quarter-century. Since September 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic “charities,” scattered al-Qaida, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran, and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another September 11—and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America—alone if need be—will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.
As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a difference.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 9:26 PM MDT
Updated: Saturday, 22 September 2007 7:43 PM MDT
Friday, 29 June 2007
Texas Teen Has to Be Restrained After Being Sentenced to Death
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Carjacking remains a problem of national importance, yet only one national television news network seems to care about it. Care to guess which one?
Since the left is still making excuses for criminals such as carjackers by saying that social factors explain their conduct, this conduct qualifies as political terrorism. And we should treat it in the same way.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Fox News, Houston TX
"A teen found guilty of murder in a deadly crime spree in Fort Bend County lunges towards one of the murder victim's family after he was sentenced to death, MyFoxHouston.com reported Wednesday.
Immediately after the verdict was read, 19-year-old Dexter Johnson knocked over a computer monitor on the defense table and he lunged toward the victim's family. Harris County court deputies tackled him to the ground and he was dragged out of court.
Johnson's mother started crying out after the verdict was read and members of his family tried to approach him and the deputies. Johnson's family was escorted out of the courtroom.
The victims' families remained inside the courtroom following the incident.
Jurors took about four hours to reach the verdict.
Johnson was found guilty last week for his part in a string of crimes during Father's Day weekend of 2006.
Investigators found the bodies of Maria Aparece and Huy Ngo in a field near the 10400 block of Gateway Drive in northeast Houston on June 23, 2006. Police believed Aparece and Ngo were carjacked and murdered.
Several suspects, including Johnson, were arrested."
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 11:31 PM MDT
Updated: Friday, 29 June 2007 11:34 PM MDT
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Democrats Censor Talk Radio
Topic: Democrat Thought Control
The "Fairness Doctrine" has been receiving a lot of publicity these days.
The liberal press is selling it as a panacea for the nation's political ills, even though if it had been strictly and evenly enforced from its inception, the Democratic party would be one with Wendell Willkie and Lyndon LaRouche (speaking of prominent Democrats) as people ignored the leftist extremists who have hitchhiked on the free air time provided by the Fairness Doctrine - or if they had had to share the spotlight with people who disagreed with them.
But the Fairness Doctrine was never intended to be enforced fairly. From its inception by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it has been used as a stick to beat conservative broadcast commentators.
Its first victim, er, application was Father Joseph Coughlin, who today would be called an extremist conservative, and undeniably an anti-Semite. Having no legal pretext to push Father Coughlin out of broadcasting, Roosevelt's Federal Communications Commission, several appointed - not elected - "commissioners" who regulate broadcasting gave the owners of radio stations who carried Coughlin's popular show a choice - give away free air time to people who disagree with Coughlin or lose your broadcast license.
That's a lot of power for people who are "selected, not elected" (to use a favorite tune sung by radical leftists in this country).
Since then, whenever the Left has managed to get even a strong minority among the membership of the FCC, they have tried to pervert the FCC into the Federal government's censorship agency.
It took the Reagan administration to rub FCC's nose in the First Amendment to the Constitution - the one which the "Fairness Doctrine" violates with exceptional force.
But this discredited "Fairness Doctrine" may well come back to bite us on the butt.
You see, in the "marketplace of ideas" many leftist Democrats instinctively know that their ideas are junk merchandise. Anything is more appealing in a free market. So they're going to force their views down our throats, and use the FCC as the plunger to do the forcing.
The conservative Insight Web site, www.insightmag.com, recently said in
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/talkradio.htm "Democrats push bill to silence conservative talk radio,"
"Democratic allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have drafted legislation that would impose the "Fairness Doctrine," which could throw off the air such conservative radio hosts as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, as well as thousands of smaller broadcasters.
Conservatives said the Democrats have been encouraged by the removal of Don Imus from his radio and television shows, and warn that liberals could use the Federal Communications Commission to re-impose a Fairness Doctrine without congressional approval.
"It is a strategy that is intended to silence voices with whom the left disagrees," said Ken Blackwell, a leading conservative.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey, New York Democrat, has introduced legislation, entitled the "Media Ownership Reform Act." The bill would empower the FCC to monitor and alter radio and television content."
"Monitor and alter radio and television content" was the same thing the Gestapo did under Hitler, and the KGB in its various incarnations in the Soviet Union.
Censorship.
The government deciding what we hear on radio and see on television.
I'd add "pure and simple," but nothing the Democratic leadership does is ever pure or ever simple.
If that were the case, then we'd be calling it the "Censorship Doctrine," not the "Fairness Doctrine."
Think about it. All the Democrats say they want to do is make sure all political viewpoints are "fairly" represented. But do they?
If privately-owned radio stations are making money presenting overwhelmingly conservative (or at least non-leftist) political comment, who's buying?
It sounds to me as though the radio listening public is.
Otherwise, all those radios would be tuned in to the less-than-overwhelmingly popular, tax-supported "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," and Al Franken's fiscally (and morally) bankrupt "Air America" network.
They wouldn't need to revive Federally-enforced censorship of the airwaves.
"The Media Ownership Reform Act also stipulates that all views be given equal time on radio in a return of the "Fairness Doctrine" passed in the 1940s. In 1987, the FCC, saying it was unconstitutional, decided to no longer enforce the Fairness Doctrine."
All views?
David Duke's and Lyndon LaRouche's? Osama bin Laden's? Kim Jong-Il's? The Reverend Sun Myung Moon's?
Because "All" means "All." Not just "the viewpoints we like." That is what the liberals are thinking - "what we think is reasonable should be represented on the air, even if we must engage in political censorship to make it happen."
In Oliver Twist, Dickens' Mr. Bumble said "the law is a ass." And once the government gets involved in telling radio and TV stations which political content they can put on the air, the law has no way of sorting out "reasonable" from "unreasonable" - as the Supreme Court-approved Nazi marches through Skokie, Illinois showed.
Quoting from the Insight article again, "Conservatives said Democrats in Congress, pressed by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have sought to exploit the Fairness Doctrine to intimidate and silence conservative broadcasters on radio and television. They said liberal Democrats were specifically targeting Savage, Limbaugh, Hannity and O'Reilly.
"Make no mistake about it, this campaign is all about censorship," said Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media Report. "Led by Sharpton, the new hero of this media-reform movement, the political left has tasted blood in the Imus affair."
In an address to the Free Congress Foundation on April 13, Kincaid envisioned that conservative broadcasters would be subpoenaed by Congress. He said these broadcasters would be accused of racism, sexism and homophobia.
"It's an emergency issue in our view," said Bill Lind, a leading member of the Free Congress Foundation. "This is a move to very directly kill conservative radio and leave us voiceless to the American people."
Hinchey and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-styled social democrat and Vermont independent, have called on the new Congress to use the Fairness Doctrine to target conservative voices on television and radio. The two liberal members of Congress outlined their intentions during the recent National Conference for Media Reform, sponsored by Free Press, a Massachusetts-based organization that is subsidized by leftist billionaire George Soros."
George Soros, we should remember, ponied up billions of dollars in a vain attempt to get John Kerry into the White House. Most of that money went to buy those endearing TV ads which made the period between August and November 2004 so memorable. He also is known for engineering leftist takeovers in several former Soviet republics by pumping money into various pockets.
Soros' "Open Society Initiative" openly advocates such things as giving convicts the right to vote (and "volunteers" here in Colorado who were paid partially by Soros tried to jump the gun by registering convicted felons still serving time in our prisons to vote in the 2004 Presidential election).
"Now is the time to begin asking that if networks provide their listeners with 99 percent of talk shows being with right-wing extremists, whether that really is what public trust is about," Sanders said in an address in January. "Now is the time to open the question of the Fairness Doctrine again."
Apparently Sen. Sanders doesn't trust the American public to listen to the political programs of its own choice. The "Fairness Doctrine" would require our privately-owned radio stations to give free air time to people we don't want to hear on the radio.
Real fairness would involve letting the free market (another thing that activist Democrats seem to hate) determine what privately-owned radio stations, their advertisers, and their listeners decide between them is broadcast on our airwaves.
But real fairness and the Fairness Doctrine couldn't be farther apart.
During the conference, Hinchey said Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts were responsible for the war in Iraq and preparing to attack Iran and Syria. He said these talk shows endangered the United States and would be terminated under his legislation.
"All of that stuff will end," Hinchey said.
Two Democrats on the FCC have already suggested that the commission could sabotage conservative broadcasters. FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein said this could be assured should a Democrat be elected president in 2008.
"We tried for more, but could only get you just two years to try to make equal access permanent," Adelstein said.
Supporters of the bill said conservatives have dominated talk radio while left-wing public broadcasting has been starved of funds. Sanders, who has led the Senate drive for the return of the Fairness Doctrine, said the legislation would restrict conservative broadcasters, particularly in discussing the Islamic threat to the United States."
This, it appears, is one of the places where radical Islamist lobbies like CAIR are getting their political money's worth from their support of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Once again, the taxpayer gets to stand behind all the lobbyists for influence in Congress.
The Democrats, it seems, have found someone NEW to sell their country out to. If we can't talk about the threat Islamic terror poses to the United States, we can't build a consensus on how to manage the threat posed when Iranian nuclear weapons fall into the hands of Muslim terrorists.
And 9/11 will be thrust in the shadows by what happens then.
The Democrats won't have the character or honesty to admit what they helped happen, any more than they now admit to what they did by neglecting the threat posed by Al-Qaeda up to 2000. (Remember all those lawsuits against ABC's documentary on how Clinton mishandled the hunt for Osama bin Laden? All the howling and screaming by the Left?)
"I happen to believe that we are reaching a moment where critical mass is kicking in," Sanders said. "Not only in the House is there a media caucus where it is reaching a higher level than ever before. I can only tell you that it will happen in the Senate as well."
Another bill, entitled the "Fairness in Broadcasting Act," has been sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter, the chairman of the House Rules Committee. The legislation is similar to that introduced by Hinchey.
Under the Democratic-controlled Congress, the FCC has already sought to regulate programming. On April 25, the FCC said in a report that Congress could regulate violence on cable, satellite and broadcast television without violating the First Amendment.
"Congress could provide parents more tools to limit their children's exposure to violent programming in a constitutional way," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said."
And provide the Democrats more tools with which to muzzle free political discussion in this country. If there were a real market for the Democrats' ideas, people would listen to them on the radio without being forced to. Wouldn't you think so?
What the Democrats want is to use the United States Government to force privately-owned radio stations to present their ideas for free.
Conservatives don't have to resort to such measures, apparently. Advertisers pay for time on conservative talk radio because they know people are listening when conservative leaders speak.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 7:29 PM MDT
Updated: Tuesday, 26 June 2007 8:08 PM MDT
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
NBC discovers buyouts
Mood:
irritated
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
Tonight, the NBC Nightly News is going to ask us the rhetorical question - what would you do if your employer offered you money to leave?
Well, you'd probably thank God that you didn't work for NBC's parent company General Electric when they moved half the manufacturing jobs in Indiana south of the border to Mexico or sold them off to Thomson Consumer Electronics (same difference, it just happened through a layer of Frenchmen).
Does anyone seriously think that anyone at GE besides Neutron Jack Welch or his buddies in the executive suite were offered money before they were laid off?
Just when you think NBC couldn't get more hypocritical....
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 12:05 PM MDT
Updated: Friday, 29 June 2007 11:36 PM MDT
What if JFK were still alive? What a load.
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams interviewed famous historian and academic plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin on the ponderous question – how would we be different if JFK were still alive? (A verbatim quote - hey, I couldn't make crap like this up.)
Apart from all the clichéd references to JFK’s vitality (code for the fact that “little JFK” kept making public appearances with the “interns” who for some reason clutter up the West Wing when insecure forty-something morons get elected), Professor Goodwin informed us that we were deprived of the sense that there were no limits to what we could achieve, of the boundless optimism… of, indeed, all the benefits of an academe which is endlessly willing to prostitute itself to the Democratic Party.
I mean, come on – JFK was the proto-Bill Clinton. His vitality, we now know, came out of hypodermic syringes wielded by a full-time, 24/7 on-the-staff Doctor Feelgood, and the vacillation which was the true hallmark of his abbreviated career nearly plunged the world into a nuclear holocaust. His personal conduct as President, including his sexual misbehavior, stands as a shining example of What Not to Do in The White House. (Dan Quayle can take comfort in the fact that when he was told he was no Jack Kennedy, it was actually a compliment.)
A close examination of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis show that JFK was his own worst enemy – as well as the worst enemy of the poor guys on the sharp end of the stick who were counting on him for air support, for timely decisions, for moral support – for some of that courage profiled in a book long, long ago. A photo-recon pilot died because JFK wouldn’t act decisively in the face of clear photographic evidence that the Soviets were infesting the island of Cuba with nuclear weapons – instead of trusting the U-2 imagery and giving the Russians the bad news that they’d have to pick up their toys and leave - or filling the Turkish Caucasus range of mountains with Titan and Minuteman ICBM silos.
Prof. Goodwin also told us that JFK wouldn’t have pursued Vietnam with the ambition that LBJ did. Come again? What happened to that famous vitality? Would JFK’s finest contribution to American history be marked by the broad yellow streak down the middle of his back as he turned South Vietnam over to the murderous Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh?
Anyway, who got us into Vietnam in a big way in the first place? Who gave a nod and a wink to South Vietnam’s military junta to bump Ngo Dinh Diem off with the CIA’s connivance? Who turned Robert MacNamara and his systems analysts loose to mismanage and alienate their way through the Pentagon? JFK.
No, the cult of JFK-nostalgia ignores the fact that Americans went on to achieve every one of the promises that Kennedy’s flacks held out to them – without JFK.
The greatest libel perpetrated on the American people is that somehow it was necessary for someone to steal the 1960 Presidential election so they could proceed in the direction in which they were already moving – away from Jim Crow, toward scientific and cultural greatness, and eventually in a decisive triumph over Communism. All it took was for JFK’s party to lose the 1980 Presidential election.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 9:38 AM MDT
Updated: Friday, 29 June 2007 11:37 PM MDT
Thursday, 5 April 2007
Are our schools next? Al-Qaeda claims right to murder 2,000,000 American children.
Mood:
sad
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
HOMELAND INSECURITY
Terrorists - coming to a school near you
US police are ill-equipped to defend against a repeat of the school massacre in Beslan, Russia
_____
Copyright 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Authorities fear the school massacre that shook Russia a few years ago may be a dress rehearsal for what al-Qaida plans to do in America - only on a grander scale, launching multiple school attacks simultaneously across the country.
In 2004, Chechen terrorists associated with al-Qaida seized a school building in Beslan, Russia, and slaughtered 338, including 172 children.
Three years later, schools and local police in this country are still unprepared to deal with such an assault, experts warn. Most don't have response plans for handling a single active shooter, let alone a cell of trained terrorists launching a large-scale attack.
Yet terror cells secreted inside America may be planning to use buses, as well as other vehicles and methods, as a Trojan horse to infiltrate school campuses and massacre students and teachers.
The FBI and Homeland Security Department last month distributed a bulletin to law enforcement across the country warning that Muslims with "ties to extremist groups" are signing up to be school bus drivers. They also noted "recent suspicious activity" by foreigners who either drive school buses or are licensed to drive them.
"The enemy is infiltrating us at all levels, and certainly school bus drivers are one area to look at," warned retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, president of Killology Research Group, an anti-terror consultancy that trains the FBI and other law enforcement. "And how about high school, middle school and elementary school cafeteria workers? Janitors? Delivery people?"<http://www.wnd.com/redir/r.asp?http://www.killology.com/>
Grossman says some school district security officials he works with have expressed concerns about some of the Muslim employees schools are hiring.
"But no one dares profile them," he told WND.
"Islamic terrorists are already in place in the U.S. and, yes, that includes bus drivers, cafeteria workers and also airport workers," added Grossman, a former Army Ranger and West Point professor.
Floor plans for schools in Virginia, Texas and New Jersey have been recovered from terrorist hands in Iraq, he notes.
<http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31428>
Videotapes confiscated in Afghanistan show al-Qaida terrorists practicing the takeover of a school.
Simultaneous attacks on schools in multiple states would follow Osama bin Laden's goal of crippling the U.S. economy. If multiple schools were hit, Grossman says, parents would drop out of the work force en masse to protect their children. A prolonged labor disruption would cost businesses billions of dollars in lost revenue.
The 9/11 mastermind now in custody at Gitmo recently suggested al-Qaida may be targeting school children. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said in his confession before a military tribunal that while he may not like killing kids, they're fair game in jihad. He claims U.S. forces bombed and killed the children of bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and arrested and "abused" his own children.
<http://www.wnd.com/redir/r.asp?http://www.memri.org/>
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an al-Qaida spokesman has claimed Muslims have the right to kill up to 2 million American children in retaliation for Muslim children killed in Muslim lands.
"Osama bin Laden has promised that what has happened in (Beslan) Russia will happen to us many times over," Grossman said. "And Osama tries very hard never to lie to us."
Experts say terrorist cells are aided by many facilitators inside American cities who canvass targets and perform other logistics for such attacks.
"They are in the U.S., in all aspects of life, including the schools - and not just as bus drivers," Grossman said. "And American school children may pay the price," if schools and local law enforcement fail to implement counterterror plans.
Recent events come on top of several other school bus-related incidents involving Mideast men that raise suspicion of terror activity.
They include last year's surprise boarding of a school bus in Tampa, Fla., by two Saudi men dressed in trench coats.
Authorities suspect they were making a dry run to see how easy it would be to hijack or blow up a school bus filled with innocent American students.
Previously, an Arab man from Detroit was caught trying to obtain a job as a school bus driver in New York using fake Social Security documents.
Experts also worry about terrorists operating independently of al-Qaida.
"There are many lone wolves and self-starters out there who could attack at any time," Grossman warned.
<http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54286>
Muslim gunman Sulejman Talovic was loaded for bear in February when he opened fire on shoppers in a Salt Lake City mall. He was armed with a shotgun, a .38 pistol and a backpack full of ammunition. He killed five and would have kept killing if an alert off-duty police officer hadn't returned fire and helped stop him.
If the 18-year-old Bosnian immigrant had targeted his old high school in a similar rampage, the number of body bags would have been horrific, experts say. Such a scenario is local law enforcement's worst nightmare, because school resource officers, or SROs, are ill-equipped to handle such assaults.
Homeland security consultants recommend arming all SROs and training them in SWAT tactics to repel such attackers.
"The time may come when that one cop will have to keep several adults at bay, preventing them from prosecuting their assault plan on our kids until support arrives," said John Giduck, president of Archangel Group , an antiterror training service.
Recent attacks on children in schools in Athens, Ga., Bailey, Co., Red Lake, Minn., and Nickel Mines, Penn., occurred in the absence of armed SROs.
"We can't think that Columbine will be the worst tactical circumstances our SROs will face," warned Giduck, author of "Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools."
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 11:11 AM MDT
Updated: Friday, 29 June 2007 11:45 PM MDT
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