Mark Steyn:

…we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Bombay is a crime scene, so let’s surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the DA to file charges. There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.” The photo of the “suspected gunman” showed a man holding a gun. We don’t know much about him — he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change — but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a “suspected gunman” but a gunman. “This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services world-wide,” wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. “They think they’re being scrupulous — the man hasn’t been convicted of being a gunman yet! — when in fact they’re just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.”

Just so. This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

Victor Davis Hanson:

I think the terrible news from India, coupled with intelligence reports of the al-Qaeda desire to do something similar here, may well prompt Obama et al. to think very carefully about repealing the FISA accords, elements of the Patriot Act, immediately closing Guantanamo, and other homeland-security measures.

Those around Obama have already dropped most of the campaign nonsense of Bush shredding the Constitution, and will come to appreciate, once they have the responsibility of governance, that there may well be a reason other than chance that we have not had here the periodic attacks post-9/11 that we’ve seen abroad—coupled with the politically incorrect view that we have attrited a lot of insurgents and terrorists abroad on the borders of Pakistan, as well as those who flocked to Iraq, and met there a bad end.

They know that the public is volatile and amnesiac, and that, while in the last seven years of quiet at home many of influence developed the luxury of talking loosely about the Bush people as some sort of anti-constitutional monsters (cf. the Washington State Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders shouts of “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” before the AG Mukasey collapsed), these same critics, should we be hit again and thousands of innocents murdered, will turn on a dime, and suddenly even louder damn any in responsibility for criminal laxity. The media will be worse—in a few hours it can go from abstract lamentations about the Patriot Act and radical loss of civil liberties to “He’s criminally negligent about our safety!”

The Xtreme Left has been making excuses for Al Qaida ever since 9/11, but this will be the final straw. It’s one thing to murder 3000 civilians, it’s quite another to call the Messiah dirty names.

Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites. The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies.

Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is “the direct opposite of honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama’s victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect - along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - “house Negroes.”

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term “abeed al-beit,” which literally translates as “house slaves.” But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as “house Negroes.”

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters’ house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

Let’s see…when Obama moves into the White House, he will be top dog, head honcho, leader of the free world etc. Ayman al-Zawahri will still be a dusty crackpot with a 7th century outlook.

The New York Times discovers dangerous people at Gitmo.

They were called the Dirty 30 — bodyguards for Osama bin Laden captured early in the Afghanistan war — and many of them are still being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Others still at the much-criticized detention camp there include prisoners who the government says were trained in assassination and the use of poisons and disguises.

One detainee is said to have been schooled in making detonators out of Sega game cartridges. A Yemeni who has received little public attention was originally selected by Mr. bin Laden as a potential Sept. 11 hijacker, intelligence officials say.

As the Bush administration enters its final months with no apparent plan to close the Guantánamo Bay camp, an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would close the detention camp, but the review of the government’s public files underscores the challenges of fulfilling that promise. The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees.

“It would be very difficult for a new president to come in and say, ‘I don’t believe what the C.I.A. is saying about these guys,’ ” said Daniel Marcus, a Democrat who was general counsel of the 9/11 Commission and held senior positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations.

The strength of the evidence is difficult to assess, because the government has kept much of it secret and because of questions about whether some was gathered through torture.

When the administration has had to defend its accusations in court, government lawyers in several cases have retreated from the most serious claims. As a result, critics have raised doubts about the danger of Guantánamo’s prisoners beyond a handful of the camp’s most notorious ones.

But as a new administration begins to sort through the government’s dossiers on the men, the analysis shows, officials are likely to face tough choices in deciding how many of Guantánamo’s hard cases should be sent home, how many should be charged and what to do with the rest.

Read it all.

The Pentagon has declined to provide a list of the detainees now being held or even to specify how many there are beyond offering a figure of “about 255.” But by reviewing thousands of pages of government documents released in recent years, as well as court records and news reports from around the world, The New York Times was able to compile its own list and construct a picture of the population still held at Guantánamo Bay.

Much of the analysis is based on records of Guantánamo hearings for individual detainees, which have been made public since 2006 as a result of a lawsuit by The Associated Press. The Times has posted those documents on its Web site arranged by detainee name.

The analysis shows that about 34 of the remaining detainees were seized in raids in Pakistan that netted three men the government calls major Qaeda operatives: Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Al Hajj Abdu Ali Sharqawi. Sixteen detainees are accused of some of the most significant terrorist attacks in the last decade, including the 1998 bombings at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, and the Sept. 11 attacks. Twenty others were called Mr. bin Laden’s bodyguards.

The analysis also shows that 13 of the original 23 detainees who arrived at Guantánamo on Jan. 11, 2002, remain there nearly seven years later. Of the roughly 255 men now being held, more than 60 have been cleared for release or transfer, according to the Pentagon, but remain at Guantánamo because of difficulties negotiating transfer agreements between the United States and other countries.

It’s a dangerous world out there.

On August 21st, 2008, the MV Iran Deyant, 44,458 dead weight bulk carrier was heading towards the Suez Canal. As it was passing the Horn of Africa, about 80 miles southeast of al-Makalla in Yemen, the ship was surrounded by speedboats filled with members of a gang of Somalian pirates who grab suitable commercial ships and hold them and their cargos and crews for ransom. The captain was defenseless against the 40 pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades blocking his passage. He had little choice other than to turn his ship over to them. What the pirates were not banking on, however, was that this was no ordinary ship.

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) - a state-owned company [that] regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent [UN] weapons proliferation [regulations].

[The hijacked ship] was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates - 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up…. the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ….

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore… …At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.

[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

That’s an NYU student talking as she videotapes shadowy figures falling from the first tower on 9/11, in that brief period when people still thought it might have been an accident.

Video here.

This is one of nine amateur videos on the History Channel’s “102 Minutes that Changed America.”

Excellent, but haunting.

Ralph Peters:

THE facts about your security are being torn to shreds by activist liars. And they think that you’re too stupid to know the difference.

Let’s lay out the worst current examples of media make-believe and election-year truth-trashing:

Whopper No. 1: America is less safe today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Oh, really? Where’s the evidence? The Clinton years saw New York City attacked and Americans slaughtered by terrorists around the globe. Nothing was done to protect us.

And the true end of the Clinton era came on 9/11.

A record to be proud of.

Countless aspects of the Bush-Cheney administration deserve merciless criticism. But fair is fair: Since 9/11, we haven’t suffered a single successful terrorist attack on our homeland. Not one.

Explain to me, please, how this shows we’re less safe. What factual measurement applies, other than the absence of attacks?

God knows, the terrorists desperately wanted to strike our homeland. And they couldn’t. Are we supposed to believe that was an accident?

Whopper No. 2: Al Qaeda is stronger than ever. Al Qaeda just suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq that may prove decisive. It can’t launch attacks beyond its regional lairs. The cowardly Osama bin Laden can’t show his face (remember his Clinton-era pep rallies?).

Yes, terrorists can still murder innocents on their home court. I personally prefer that to them killing Americans in Manhattan and Washington. Even in Iraq, al Qaeda’s been beaten down to violent-fugitive status.

By what objective measurement is al Qaeda stronger today than it was when it had an entire country for its base and its tentacles reached all the way to Florida and the Midwest?

Whopper No. 3: Success in Iraq is an illusion - the surge failed. Folks, this is something only a New York Times columnist could believe.

Every single significant indicator, from Iraqi government progress through the performance of Iraqi security forces to the plummeting level of violence, has changed for the better - remarkably so.

If current trend-lines continue, it may not be long before Baghdad is safer for Iraqi citizens than the Washington-Baltimore metroplex is for US citizens. Iraq’s government is working, its economy is booming - and its military has driven the concentrations of terrorists and militia from every one of Iraq’s major cities.

And our troops are coming home. Where’s the failure?

Powerline:

Today the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held yet another hearing on the subject of terrorist interrogations. It is not clear to me why the Democrats are obsessed with this subject. The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Trent Franks of Arizona, noted that “detainee treatment has been the subject of over 60 hearings, markups and briefings during the last Congress in the House Armed Services Committee alone, of which I am a member.” And that is only a drop in the bucket, since any number of Democrat-controlled committees and subcommittees are eager to declare their solidarity with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda terrorists who have been interrogated over the last six years.

Franks lent an air of sanity to the proceedings. His opening statement is worth reading in its entirety, but we’ll have to settle for a brief extract:

[F]inally, I’d like to note that the dangers of moving back toward the failed model of treating terrorists like ordinary criminals was made perfectly clear in a recently written article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.The article appeared last Sunday in the “New York Times” and it makes clear how we can expect terrorists to react when they are granted the rights of criminal defendants.

According to the “New York Times,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met his captors at first with a cocky defiance, telling one veteran CIA officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer.

Of course, this was the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Yousef’s arrest in 1995.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States has taken steps to grant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s wish, and I hope the Congress does not make the same mistake.

The subcommittee summoned three witnesses to serve as its foils: David Addington, Chief of Staff and former Counsel to Vice-President Cheney, John Yoo–no introduction necessary–and Chris Schroeder, a former official of the Department of Justice who was there to parrot the Dems’ line. The hearing, like dozens of others on the same theme, was a bad joke.

The Democrats sought to advance the view that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a crime on a par with the Holocaust, whereas I, for one, think that waterboarding is exactly the right technique for interrogating terrorists: it takes only two or three minutes, is almost always effective, and does no harm to the terrorist.

It is clear, however, that some, at least, of the Democrats who engage in these witch-hunts now identify with members of al Qaeda and unapologetically represent their interests. One such member of Congress is Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. In this exchange with David Addington, Delahunt expresses his pleasure at siding with al Qaeda members who are watching the proceedings on CSpan against a member of the Bush administration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j2uvxsCU_M

In a sane world, this would be a scandal that would call into question whether any member of Delahunt’s party should be elected to Congress in November.

Ann Coulter: 

In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.

I generally don’t write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I’ll consider downgrading Bush from “Great” to “Really Good.”

Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: “We’re the Rape Room People!”) constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did — and I’m including remembering Monica’s name on the sixth sexual encounter.

But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.

It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That’s 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK — or a landmark building, for that matter.

We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan — the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible.

The Iraq war has been a stunning success. The Iraqi army is “standing up” (as they say), fat Muqtada al-Sadr –the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — has waddled off in retreat to Iran, and Sadr City and Basra are no longer war zones. Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country.

…

Just this week, The New York Times reported that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Southeast Asia have all but disappeared, starved of money and support. The U.S. and Australia have been working closely with the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, sending them counterterrorism equipment and personnel.

But no one notices when 9/11 doesn’t happen. Indeed, if we had somehow stopped the 9/11 attack, we’d all be watching Mohammed Atta being interviewed on MSNBC, explaining his lawsuit against the Bush administration. Maureen Dowd would be writing columns describing Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a “wannabe” terrorist being treated like Genghis Khan by an excitable Bush administration.

We begin to forget what it was like to turn on the TV, see a tornado, a car chase or another Pamela Anderson marriage and think: Good — another day without a terrorist attack.

But liberals have only blind hatred for Bush — and for those brute American interrogators who do not supply extra helpings of béarnaise sauce to the little darlings at Guantanamo with sufficient alacrity.

The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush’s rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant — if that’s not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush’s third term. Then he might have a chance.

Fred Thompson writes about the Supreme Court’s decision to grant habeas corpus rights to terrorists:

Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there. The trip was not a pretty one. How could it be when the justices seemingly wrote a map based on ideas cherry picked from over 400 years of established law and backfilled with justifications to create a new right for alien combatants that Americans themselves do not enjoy?

They could have saved us all a lot of time if they’d told us what was clearly on their minds.

They don’t trust military tribunals to deal with those accused of being enemy combatants, even if the tribunals are following guidelines established by Congress.

That the government has probably detained some prisoners at Guantanamo for longer than they should have.

And that Guantanamo should just be closed.

Though they are willing to give it lip service, they don’t really believe we are at war … at least not a “real” war.

Therefore, they should create a new right for our nation’s enemies commiserate with the displeasure that they and the rest of the “enlightened” people have with this “war,” Guantanamo and the Bush Administration.

At least this approach would have been an honest one and based upon about as much legal justification as the approach they took.

But, instead – as Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissent – they for the first time in our nation’s history, conferred a Constitutional right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war – a broader right than has been given to our own citizens. The court majority did so acknowledging that they could find no precedent to confer such a right to alien enemies not within sovereign U.S. territory. (more…)

Victor Davis Hanson writes about Success Being an Orphan.

Recent studies showing a decline in global incidents of Islamic terror have been interpreted as solely a Middle-East intramural affair. Sometimes the good news is said to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. We are supposed to believe that American policies of counter-terrorism at home have been of little value, if not McCarthyesque. Beefed-up security, the fight against the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the cultural creation of a repugnance — and penalty — for jihadism (as in contrast to the 1990s), have likewise supposedly played no role.

But surely the catalyst for the decline in terrorist incidents worldwide was the radically different response of the U.S. to terrorism and 9/11 that finally brought jihadism into an open-shooting war against the West (e.g., cf. the Left’s “creating terrorists”), in which the terrorists are losing the battle-space, along with the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East — as their own websites and cries of anguish attest.

The successful toppling of Saddam was followed in short order by the shutdown of Dr. Khan’s atomic shop, the surrender of WMDs by the Libyans, and the supposed sidetracking of the Iranian nuclear bomb program (at least according to the National Intelligence Estimate) — and yet no one thought the timing of all these events was odd (even when Ghaddafi himself reportedly connected his decision to abandon a weapons of mass destruction program to Saddam’s fate).

By the same token, the rise of governments that are sympathetic to the U.S. in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe is never associated with a shared and growing worry over Islamic radicalism — or a grudging, often private acknowledgment of the U.S. role abroad in beating back jihadism. How surreal to see a constitutional government in Iraq, with broad popular support, fighting and defeating terrorists and insurgents of both the Wahhabi and Iranian brand — at a time when the consensus is that Iraq only made terrorism much worse. As we’ve seen from recent events, there are many governments abroad that deserve criticism, whether in China, the Sudan, or Burma, but Iraq is not one of them.

So these are upside-down times when facts and events on the ground simply do not support the general pessimism of the Western media, the serial publication of gloomy he-did-it,-not-me memoirs about the post-9/11 supposed failures, and the shrill rhetoric of the Democratic primaries.

When Obama glibly states that the war in Iraq “has not made America safer” he is rarely challenged. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to know because no one, not even Golden Boy, can prove a negative.

Furthermore, there’s much to argue against his point. Fouad Ajami:

…at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America’s grief, taunted its power.

We don’t need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the “charities” that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

As Obama’s followers mock Bush as a dolt, they do so in a nation kept safe under his watch.

IBD:

Take a look at what happened in the global war on terror just over the Memorial Day weekend:

• Iraqi forces ran al-Qaida terrorists out of Mosul, the terror organization’s final urban stronghold. That victory reduces the killers to fringe areas with little public support, and a truncated capacity to recruit and strike terror in Iraq’s cities. Al-Qaida has “never been closer to defeat than they are now,” said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Iraqi troops also cleaned out Basra and Sadr City, reducing any prospect for domestic insurgents to take power by force. Along with al-Qaida, these terrorists may try to continue, but the will is fading as the pressure is ratcheted up.

• In Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos announced that Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, founder of the FARC Marxist terror group, died a hunted man in the jungle on March 26 as bombs rained down on him. Better still, the government knew this because it penetrated FARC. Marulanda died knowing his chosen successor, Raul Reyes, had been blown away, too. Indeed, three of FARC’s seven top leaders have been killed since March, and the rest are headed “for the grave,” Santos said.

Hundreds of FARC foot soldiers are now furtively phoning the government to beg for a deal. Along with fears of their own men turning them in for cash, FARC leaders now work in a poisoned atmosphere, knowing spies are in their midst. They won’t win.

• British forces for the first time drove the Taliban from a southern stronghold in a 96-hour battle this month. It was their first combat operation since new troops arrived in March. The New York Times reported a “palpable” sense of relief among villagers, with the district chief and exiles returning to rebuild. “There has been huge optimism from the people,” an officer was quoted as saying.

• In the south Philippines, Marxist and Muslim terrorists are desperate. A big arsenal belonging to al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf was unearthed in Sulu Saturday, taking 283 sacks of bomb components out of circulation. Meanwhile, Nur Misuari, the top terrorist of the Moro National Liberation Front, on parole in Davao, pleaded with other terrorists to drop arms and sue for peace at a rally Saturday.

• In Egypt’s al-Qaida inner circle, a leading jihad ideologue, using the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl, has now openly questioned terrorism as a tactic, given al-Qaida’s mounting losses. He threatened to renounce violence — a new blow to the jihadists.

Former Defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, author of War and Decision (which the WaPo, New York Times, LA Times etc. will not review) writes in the today’s WSJ how the Bush administration fumbled its message, post Saddam.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam’s record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president’s credibility that had already been caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam’s record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics’ argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That’s a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq’s future, rather than rehash the government’s intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush’s political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration’s mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics’ misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president’s speechwriters. I proposed that the speech “should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place.” It would be useful to “make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism” in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime “had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions.”

In light of 9/11, the “danger that Saddam’s regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great” to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven “unsustainable or inadequate.” I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: “A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism.”

Some of the speech’s rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: “The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there,” I noted. But that implication “is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve ‘democracy.’”

No matter, Bush’s speeches repeatedly failed to stress the strategic reasons for ridding Iraq of Saddam.

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq’s people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq’s future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam’s record, the administration’s record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration’s prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president’s shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president’s words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

Powerline:

On the stump, Barack Obama usually concludes his comments on Iraq by saying, “and it hasn’t made us safer.” It is an article of faith on the left that nothing the Bush administration has done has enhanced our security, and, on the contrary, its various alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us.

Empirically, however, it seems beyond dispute that something has made us safer since 2001. Over the course of the Bush administration, successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have dwindled to virtually nothing.

Some perspective here is required. While most Americans may not have been paying attention, a considerable number of terrorist attacks on America and American interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward, too many of which were successful. What follows is a partial history:

1988
February: Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Higgens, Chief of the U.N. Truce Force, was kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah.

December: Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York was blown up over Scotland, killing 270 people, including 35 from Syracuse University and a number of American military personnel.

1991
November: American University in Beirut bombed.

1993
January: A Pakistani terrorist opened fire outside CIA headquarters, killing two agents and wounding three.

February: World Trade Center bombed, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

1995
January: Operation Bojinka, Osama bin Laden’s plan to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific Ocean, discovered.

November: Five Americans killed in attack on a U.S. Army office in Saudi Arabia.

1996
June: Truck bomb at Khobar Towers kills 19 American servicemen and injures 240.

June: Terrorist opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one.

1997
February: Palestinian opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one and wounding more than a dozen.

November: Terrorists murder four American oil company employees in Pakistan.

1998
January: U.S. Embassy in Peru bombed.

August: Simultaneous bomb attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 300 people and injured over 5,000.

1999
October: Egypt Air flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts, killing 100 Americans among the more than 200 on board; the pilot yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he steered the airplane into the ocean.

2000
October: A suicide boat exploded next to the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American sailors and injuring 39.

2001
September: Terrorists with four hijacked airplanes kill around 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

December: Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” tries to blow up a transatlantic flight, but is stopped by passengers.

The September 11 attack was a propaganda triumph for al Qaeda, celebrated by a dismaying number of Muslims around the world. Everyone expected that it would draw more Muslims to bin Laden’s cause and that more such attacks would follow. In fact, though, what happened was quite different: the pace of successful jihadist attacks against the United States slowed, decelerated further after the onset of the Iraq war, and has now dwindled to essentially zero. Here is the record:

2002
October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam’s government.

Keep reading.

From a comment at Megan McArdles blog:

The WoT was an existential war, for about two weeks after 9/11. My most shocking post-9/11 moment was hearing a generally anti-war and anti-American German acquaintance rage about how the world needed to band together and nuke Afghanistan into glass, “put an end to these guys once and for all.”

Problem was, when the shock war off, the memories wore off with them, because there wasn’t a series of consecutive events to remind people that this wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the first time the self-proclaimed enemy had managed to work out all the details into the butter zone. And would happily do it again, and did…Bali, Madrid, 3/11. (Unsurprisingly, das German was complaining bitterly about the Afghan war as little as three months later.)

So rather than finding a united willingness to work out a measured and effective response to the threats of global terror, even though it would mean difficult and tragic decisions, we get wild and vascillating policy preferences ranging from “stupid and ruinous war set up by lying Bush…” to “invade Iran”.

In WWII, they didn’t have that, especially in Europe. In the offchance the average Londonite was prone to make a “if you think about it, less people have died in incident X than have died in car accidents” argument, the whine of a V2 would quickly refocus the thought processes.

You may have noticed that Youtube was not functioning for a while last week. Things happen.

But this was no glitch, it was cyber terrorists in Pakistan angry over some perceived slight to their prophet.

Is the threat of terror overblown? The Left says yes. The Right says no.

Shrinkwrapped weighs in with a thoughtful analysis.

The message from the piece is that it is time for us to relax a bit, take stock, and stop doing those things that arouse and outrage Muslims; our provocations only breed more terrorists.  This is a comforting message, suggesting nothing so much as that Islamic terrorism is akin to Yellow Jacket stings, painful but ultimately harmless.  There are problems with that formulation. 

I am not a fan of Yellow Jackets.  While their sting is rarely dangerous, when they attack en masse they can, in fact, kill.  Worse, for susceptible individuals who have been primed, they can evoke an anaphylactic reaction, a catastrophic allergic response in which the person’s own immune system goes into overdrive and ultimately leads to death.  This is instructive for Islamic terror.

First, most people will do anything they can to avoid Yellow Jackets.  That means that when possible, an area will be ceded to the Yellow Jackets based on the threat of unpleasantness.  The relation to speech codes which aim to circumscribe our ability to provoke the anger of the super-sensitive Islamists should be obvious.

Second, no one can know if he is susceptible to anaphylaxis until it happens.  The analogy to Islamic terror is clear.  Until a nuclear weapon explodes in an American city we will not be able to tell whether or not we are susceptible to a catastrophic attack.  There is literally no way to compute the odds.  We do know that our enemies, which include Iranian supported terrorists (mostly Shia), as well as the al Qaeda Sunni terrorists, are constrained only by their lack of capability rather than their lack of intent.  Additionally, there are credible reports that the Sunni leadership  of al Qaeda has been reconstituted and rebuilt in their current safe havens, a development that would bring Sageman’s conclusions into question.

Third, just as a swarm of Yellow Jackets can kill innocents (children are most susceptible to Yellow Jacket venom), allowing Islamic terrorists a respite in which they can add and train new recruits, replenish their supplies, develop new plans and instruments, and spread their message, is a dangerous plan.  Our adversaries are intelligent and deadly, constantly evolving in response to our efforts and constantly looking for new ways to kill innocents.  Allowing them to plan in peace and relative comfort risks additional Beslans as well as additional 9/11s, not to mention London underground and Madrid train attacks. 

There is one more element akin to anaphylaxis that is germane.  While it may be true that minor terrorist attacks, with a small number of casualties (the beltway snipers, for example) are not likely to trigger an inappropriate reaction from the body politic, there is an unknown and unknowable threshold above which the public reaction may dwarf the actual insult.  Americans have become used to living near risk-free lives.  We take great efforts, under pain of lawsuit, to protect our children from bumps and bruises on the playground.  We loudly accuse the government of dereliction of duty when they fail to protect us from the vicissitudes of life.  We demand perfection from the Medical and Pharmaceutical industries, have not built a new gasoline refinery or nuclear power plant in 30 years because of the often near infinitesimal risk of disaster and our refusal to tolerate risk. 

Many are willing to cripple our economy in order to stave off the highly speculative threat of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (despite last year being so cold that it undid all the warming of the last 100 years!)  In short we are not a society that responds well to risk or disaster.  It has always seemed likely to me that another 9/11, and even perhaps an atrocity on a much smaller scale than 9/11, would lead to significant erosions in our civil liberties that would dwarf our current concerns over FISA and the idiocy we endure at the airports whenever we fly.  In such a case it would truly be our own overreaction that would constitute the disaster, societal anaphylaxis. 

Hugh Hewitt:

The convictions in London of would-be terrorists are accompanied by warnings against minimizing the early attempts by terrorists-in-the-making to get organized:

A senior counter-terrorism source said: “There has always been the danger of trivialising what these people were doing. They were engaged in paramilitary training for terrorism, they talked repeatedly of fighting and killing non-believers and they rejected Muslims who did not follow their path.

“They posed a huge danger to young impressionable people who could have been lured into terrorism.”

This sort of trivialising of the threat has happened repeatedly in the U.S. by people intent on making a political case against the Bush Adminstration.

The refusal of the Obama-Pelosi Democrats to reauthorize FISA surveillance authorities is the ultimate trivialization of terror.  The fall campaign will largely turn on whether a majority of Americans are willing to listen to Obama, Pelosi Reid and the rest who want us to believe that the ’90s are back, and 9/11 a distant, one-time tragedy.

No good deed goes unpunished in the warped world of liberal thinking. Witness the failure of the House to pass a bill allowing surveillance of foreign calls into the US.

Let’s review what brought us to this impasse. Back in December 2005, the New York Times reported that, “months after the Sept. 11 attacks,” President Bush “secretly authorized” the National Security Agency (NSA) to “eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States” in order to gather intelligence “without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” Now, the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program wasn’t so secret, it turns out; select members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, had been informed of its existence long before the Times’s blockbuster report, and none of them seemed to have had a problem with it.

It turns out, further, that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans willy-nilly. Most of the warrantless surveillance targets were foreign nationals located overseas, though the program also surveilled the 500-odd people in the United States with whom those overseas targets were communicating. Nor was it at all clear whether or not FISA superseded the president’s plenary, constitutional authority to “protect and defend” the United States from attack. No court has ever said so. And no administration, including Carter’s and Clinton’s, has ever accepted FISA as determinative of its constitutional power.

But that didn’t matter. Congressional Democrats called the program “illegal.” For a while, the president fought back, but 2005 turned into 2006, the year the Democrats took Congress. The Bush administration was weak. And so, for better or worse–okay, for worse–the president decided he was no longer in a position to engage in a public assertion of executive authority. The process was submitted to the authority of the FISA court and its 11 rotating judges. And it was only a matter of months before the system began to degrade.

The FISA court decided that calls or emails merely routed through the United States were, in fact, domestic communications falling under the “probable cause” evidentiary standard. It didn’t matter that the target and the recipient of his communications might both be abroad–if the electrons zipped across the United States, as they often do in a globally networked world, then a warrant was required to listen in. By the miracle of technology, Abu Omar and Mullah Mohamed in Pakistan could both be “U.S. persons.”

Meanwhile, the ACLU and the tort bar filed lawsuits against the telecommunication companies that had cooperated with the U.S. government in the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Naturally, the telecoms, fearing that they soon would be paying damages, grew wary of cooperation with the government. And some of the FISA judges–the same folks often accused of “rubberstamping” the executive’s wishes–raised the bar that needed to be met before counterterrorist surveillance could begin. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell recently told Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace that by summer 2007, “We were in extremis, because we had lost .  .  . about two-thirds of our [surveillance] capability.”

Putting tort lawyers before national security.

A bipartisan, two-to-one majority in the Senate voted for a new law that would renew the act’s provisions, provide retroactive immunity to the telecoms that had participated in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and even extend FISA warrant requirements for overseas targets who are Americans, evidence of the Bush administration’s willingness to bend over backwards in search of a compromise. A bipartisan majority in the House is ready to vote for this law. No one disputes that these surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorist attacks upon the United States.

At issue is the so-called “retroactive immunity.” The House Democratic leadership doesn’t like it. Most of their arguments against retroactive immunity aren’t any more sophisticated than Senator Edward Kennedy’s disgusting assertion that President Bush is “willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.” But the crux of the anti-immunity Democrats’ argument seems to be that because the original Terrorist Surveillance Program was “illegal” and the phone companies were complicit in its “illegality,” they therefore should be liable for damages resulting from such “illegal” invasions of privacy.

This is wrong on all counts. The Terrorist Surveillance Program was not illegal. And the telecoms were engaged in a good-faith effort to help the federal government protect the United States from attack. Isn’t that how we should want corporations to behave in a time of war?

Here’s a theoretical for Senator Diane Feinstein, who this week introduced a bill to make waterboarding illegal:

Suppose, Diane, a kidnapper snatches your husband and stashes him a chamber with only a 90-minute oxygen supply. By luck, the kidnapper has been captured and admits to the crime. Only 30 minutes are left before your husband will smother. The kidnapper will not reveal your husband’s location. Defiantely he says: “Let the Jew die.”

What do you do? Surrender your husband to his fate? Or do you trick the kidnapper into thinking he’s being drowned, scaring him so severely he coughs up the life saving information? Just how moral are you, DiFi?

The men and women we charge to protect American lives face these moments for real. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 was captured, he was waterboarded and provided valuable, life-saving intelligence. Why would we want to give up that option?

Why even give him the pretense of moral superiority?

On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.

The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.

KSM himself has made plain the extent and ambition of his world war. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he admitted during a hearing in March last year. He planned the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 2002 bombings of the Bali nightclubs and the Kenya hotel, among 31 actual attacks. KSM was an architect of the Bojinka plot in 1995; by his own confession he drew up plans for strikes in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, Israel, Brussels and London, plus a “new wave” of post-9/11 attacks on L.A., Seattle, Chicago and New York.

These are not ordinary crimes. “For sure, I’m American enemies,” said KSM in his broken English. “When we made any war against America we are jackals fighting in the nights. . . . the language of the war are killing.” The proper venue to address his mass crimes against humanity is not some civilian jurisdiction. Terror cases committed as acts of war, by their very nature, require a separate judicial process.

The U.S. effort to bring it about was long delayed by legal challenges. Yet with the Constitutional guidance of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, Congress and the President established a deliberate framework for prosecuting “unlawful enemy combatants” in the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

Yet now anti-antiterror activists are attempting to make the process a referendum on the Bush Presidency or “torture” or whatever. Purportedly the tribunals are illegitimate because they do not afford every last Miranda right or due-process safeguard of the civilian courts. The key and appropriate distinction is that foreign terrorists are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution. They also violated the laws of war — for example, by deliberately targeting civilians. International law has always held that such people deserve fewer legal protections, much less those of civilian defendants.

After all the posturing about “domestic spying” and demogoguery about Big Brother Bush, the Senate:

…handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers after giving legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

The Senate rejected a series of amendments that would have restricted the government’s surveillance powers and eliminated immunity for the phone carriers, and it voted in convincing fashion — 69 to 29 — to end debate and bring the issue to a final vote. That vote on the overall billwas an almost identical 68 to 29.

Of course, the New York Times defines this as a victory for the White House, not the safety of the nation. And some key Democrats are unhappy.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who spoke on the Senate floor for more than 20 hours in an unsuccessful effort to stall the wiretapping bill, said the vote would be remembered by future generations as a test of whether the country heeds “the rule of law or the rule of men.”

But with Democrats defecting to the White House plan, he acknowledged that the national security issue had won the day in the Senate, even among many of his Democratic colleagues. “Unfortunately, those who are advocating this notion that you have to give up liberties to be more secure are apparently prevailing,” Mr. Dodd said. “They’re convincing people that we’re at risk either politically, or at risk as a nation.”

Well, yeah, there’s that.

AL Qaeda terrorists posing as TV crews planned to blow up the Queen by smuggling explosives into last year’s Commonwealth summit.

Two huge outside broadcast vans belonging to the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation were seized after a tip-off from intelligence agents.

As a result, UBC was unable to transmit live pictures of key summit events, including the Queen’s historic address to the Ugandan parliament on November 22.

Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, the Uganda Minister of Internal Affairs, said: “We received information that a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, the Allied Democratic Forces, was planning to carry out terrorist activities at the Commonwealth meeting. The security services in Uganda neutralised these threats.”

Actor Ron Silver:

After the Second World War, with Truman’s approval rating in national polls falling more than 50 points, the president and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, called in Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and explained to him how the Communists were establishing a beachhead in Greece that would threaten all of Western Europe. According to Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: “The U.S. was going to have to find a way to save the free world-and Congress would have to pay the bill.” Senator Vandenberg replied ”Mr. President, the only way you are going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.”

On March 12, 1947 the president made that speech to a joint session of Congress. He argued that money needed to be sent to Greece, because they “were threatened by the terrorist activities of thousands of armed men.” Thus the president’s decision with Congressional approval led to one of the early battles against Soviet domination. These cold and not so cold wars would last for more than 50 years, culminating in the Soviet Empire’s defeat. Fear was the lubricant. At times there was domestic overreaction as the rise of politicians like McCarthy and Nixon took advantage of the fear. And grievous mistakes were made that scarred many of my generation and I daresay our nation. But our nation survived the excesses and survived the Soviet threat.

…

After September 11, with the emerging threat of Islamic terrorism becoming more manifest in the public mind (many of us took this threat more seriously than others prior to this atrocity), what sticks out most immediately is how, again according to Edward Rothstein, there were “[s]o few examples of graphic American propaganda and none using ethnic or racial caricatures. Yet beginning with Al Gore, who delivered the keynote address at the Conference, the former vice president asserted again and again that the American government is preoccupied with instilling fear.” The conference was essentially about fear being encouraged by our government and exacerbated by the media. It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism.”

The goal of the conference promoters was clear to me. Indeed we now all have reason to be afraid. But apparently we’re afraid of different things. Some factions are less concerned with the folks who have declared war on us and who are determined to kill us, our children and our civilization. These factions have chosen our elected government, chosen by us to secure and defend us, to be their adversary. Evidently my fear was rational. I just had the wrong enemy in my sights. To which my grandfather would have responded, had he been born elsewhere and not in a shtetl, “poppycock.”

 From the AP:

New details emerged Tuesday about the CIA’s waterboarding of a top al-Qaida figure as the agency’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden, prepared for questioning by congressional panels about the destruction of CIA videotapes of terror suspect interrogations.

According to a former CIA agent, waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, a major al-Qaida figure, got him to talk in less than 35 seconds, a technique he asserted had the approval of high-ranking U.S. officials. He said he thought the technique, which critics say is torture, probably disrupted “dozens” of planned al-Qaida attacks.

The former agent, John Kiriakou, a leader of the team that captured Zubaydah, did not explain how he knew who approved the interrogation technique but said such approval comes from top officials.

“This isn’t something done willy nilly. This isn’t something where an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner,” he said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department.”

Each time CIA agents wished to use waterboarding or any other harsh interrogation technique, they had to present a “well-laid out, well-thought out reason” to top government officials, Kiriakou said. In Zubaydah’s case, Kiriakou said the waterboarding had immediate effect.

“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” Kiriakou said in an interview first broadcast Monday evening on ABC News’ World News. “From that day on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

This is excellent.

Imagine yourself sitting in the big chair in the Oval Office, receiving intelligence briefs from all over.

Read here.

Shelby Steele’s column, excerpted and linked below, makes a case for opening a dialog with the mullahs in Iran, an idea advanced by Barak Obama.

If Mr. Obama’s idea was born of mushy idealism, it could work far better as a hard-nosed moral brinkmanship. Were an American president (or a secretary of state for the less daring) to land in Tehran, the risk to American prestige would be enormous.

The mullahs would make us characters in a tale of their own grandeur. Yet moral authority would redound to us precisely for making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation. The world would witness not the stereotype of American bullying, but the reality of American selflessness, courage and moral confidence.

Steele speaks of “the world” as if there exists some unbiased audience of fair minded people who recognize right and wrong. This, in itself, is mushy idealism.

One must ask, who are we seeking to impress with our moral authority?

• Europe? In the 1990s, it stood by and watched the Balkans descend into genocide, leaving the USA to clean up the mess. The anti-Americanism extant in European media is laughable. Alas, much of Europe is a collection of spoiled ingrates whose freedom was paid for by American blood and treasure. Apart from any tactical reasons, why should we care what they think?
• WWII is known as the “good war.” If England had heeded Winston Churchill’s warning about Hitler and took military action to prevent Germany from rearming, it would have been a better war, but one that lacked moral authority.
• Bill Clinton and the UN have never been called to account for standing by as 800,000 Rwandans were macheted to death. Presumably Clinton, by doing nothing, maintained his moral authority — just look at the adoring crowds he attracts.
• In Iraq and Afghanistan, we liberated 51 million people from tyrany and midwifed democracies. Yes, both are fragile. Both cost innocent lives. Both saw our troops misbehave in certain circumstances. But the big picture is positive, yet “the world” affords virtually no moral authority to the endeavor. So what?

In world where Michael Moore can invent dark motives and sell them to a gullible public, where media savvy terrorists can influence the narrative in the US and world media, where conspiracy theories are swallowed whole, exactly what’s the point?

Once Iraq was liberated, Osama bin Laden declared Iraq as the primary front in the war against the west. Because of a stalwart president and our exceptional military, Al Qaeda is suffering a humiliation before the whole world. That defeat will redound to the whole world’s benefit in ways we will never fully know.

And we’ll never get so much as a thank you.

We’ve had a long presidential campaign already with debate after debate after debate. But they’re not really debates, but a phony hybrid that provides little insight about a candidate, but plenty of fodder for pundits to proclaim winners and losers.

That’s especially true with you have CNN playing political games with their most recent debate.

By contrast, here is Fred Thompson in an extended interview on a single subject, the war on terrorism, provided by Pajamas Media.

This is the first in a series of interviews with leading candidates on this same topic.

Watch here.