Category: Politics

I just clued into the other thing that bugs me about the Annie Jacobsen story. Michelle Malkin, among others, writes smugly that this event highlights the stupidity of a policy against secondary questioning of more than two Arabs per flight. See also Ann Coulter’s racist whine, which Annie Jacobsen cited in her original article.

But Annie Jacobsen also noted that the 14 Syrians on her flight were… pulled aside and questioned in LA. This was confirmed by government officials. So, ah, doesn’t that kind of undercut the concept that the airlines have a policy against questioning groups of Arabs?

A lot of people aren’t thinking that one through. Or, more to the point, they’re assuming that a policy restricting “secondary questioning” means that airlines can never under any circumstances pull aside more than two Arabs per flight.

It’s also worth noting that the original source for the information about this policy, John Lehman, never said that he knew the policy was in effect. He said he thought it was still in effect; which, of course, was reported without the element of uncertainty inherent in “I think.” Paying attention is hard! And why should Mr. Lehman worry about getting the details right in something so important as the 9/11 hearings, anyhow? They seem like a fine forum to promulgate unverified beliefs about our security.

I am eternally grateful for the presence of sane people on this planet.

A summary: Annie Jacobsen got worried because she was on a flight with a number of Middle Eastern men acting in a manner which she found suspicious. Cue blogosphere firestorm. Some people pointed out that no responsible flight attendant would act as described. But, you know, evil Muslims are a better story.

And the aforelinked sane person said “You know… that’s what devout Muslims do on long flights. They pray, because they need to pray five times per day.”

The governor of Mosul, Mashaan al-Juburi, was just assassinated. This follows massive car bombings in Mosul a couple of weeks ago.

Mosul is a key city because it’s a key point of friction between the Kurds and the Sunnis. Juburi’s appointment was not without controversy and violence, to say the least; his early speeches resulted in a demonstration during which US troops fired on demonstraters. The details of the event are unclear: the US claimed that the demonstrations were violent and the demonstraters claimed they weren’t, which is as you’d expect in any case for both sides of the story.

This means that Mosul’s had two governors leave office in the last few months, by the by. Not exactly a model of stability.

The cynical may enjoy being proven right by thirty-odd Fox News memos. It is blatantly clear that Fox News thinks of itself as the conservative defender of truth against the marauding liberal news media.

We have good perp walk video of Eric Rudolph which we should use. We should NOT assume that anyone who supported or helped Eric Rudolph is a racist. No one’s in favor of murder or bombing of public places. But feelings in North Carolina may just be more complicated than the NY Times can conceive.

There’s a not really that subtle difference between saying that Rudolph’s supporters had complex motivations and saying that they made a mistake. One excuses supporting a terrorist, and one does not. Consider this statement: “No one’s in favor of murder or bombing of public places. But feelings in Palestine may just be more complicated than Fox News can conceive.” Somehow I can’t imagine Fox News taking that tack.

Newsweek reports that the Department of Homeland Security is looking into ways to postpone the November Presidential election in the case of an Al Qaeda attack.

But the success of March’s Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections—as well as intercepted “chatter” among Qaeda operatives—has led analysts to conclude “they want to interfere with the elections,” says one official.

Forcing a delay in elections is every bit as much interference, if not more so, as an attack which causes people to change their vote. This is so obvious that I have trouble believing that it’s escaped the Bush administration.

Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack.

Contingency plans are good. Legislation that could delay the election is bad. Sure, if something happens to LA the day of the election, it would be good to hold the results until the voters of Los Angeles can vote — but it does not make sense to keep the entire country from voting in a situation where they could reasonably get to the polls.

Gosh, that’s unfortunate. Some of Bush’s service records were destroyed in 1996 and 1997. By accident.

This should be easy enough to resolve; since Bush wasn’t the only guy whose records were lost, one assumes that there’d be an official record of the accident. Perhaps even a postmortem. Memos. That sort of thing.

Except that I can’t help noticing that Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett said, in February of this year, that members of George Bush’s staff purged the National Guard files in 1997. Damned confluence of dates. Now, the records that Burkett says were destroyed were not the records that the Defense Department just admitted to destroying accidentally, so this is not exactly a smoking gun. I think the time period is still suggestive, however. If you believe Burkett, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the Texas Air National Guard was not the only organization willing to clean up Bush’s records.

Anyhow, the next step is getting a look at the memos from 1997 which discuss the accident.

Then, in Rwanda. Now, in Sudan. This is pretty much for me so that I don’t forget to read these regularly.

On a semi-detached, attempting dispassionate note, the Rwanda blog is a new twist on the Pepys and Sei Shonagon blogs: historical events retold in the blog — dare I say it? — medium. I think it works.

On the Fourth of July, I choose to commemorate the holiday with the words of one of the very first Harvard intellectual leftists, a moonbat and a traitor if there ever was one; a man whose reputation among the ruling classes was far worse than any Moore or Chomsky. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one of the most important men of the American Revolution, the loud-mouthed angry revolutionary, Samuel Adams.

“In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

Thank you, and enjoy the fireworks.

I’m not so sure about this new Democrat talking point.

“The Republican National Convention is going to feature at least three guys who aren’t exactly in lock-step with the Bushies. John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rudolph Giuliani are all set to get a prime time speaking slot. That’s John McCain who opposed Bush’s tax cut and has been critical on the administration’s disastrous record in Iraq, and the pro-choice Arnold and Rudy.”

You know, if I were a Republican campaign operative, I’d look confused and say “What, you have something against being inclusive? These guys disagree with Bush on some issues, true — but they’ve found common ground and they believe that despite their differences Bush is the better choice.”

Once again, it turns out that newly discovered WMD aren’t actually WMD after all. However, Poland and the US agree that the chaos in Iraq has resulted in a great opportunity for Al Qaeda to get access to previously unavailable Iraqi scientists with WMD know-how.

Well, OK, they don’t put it precisely like that.

Sixteen rocket warheads found last week in south-central Iraq by Polish troops did not contain deadly chemicals, a coalition spokesman said yesterday, but U.S. and Polish officials agreed that insurgents loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorist fighters are trying to buy such old weapons or purchase the services of Iraqi scientists who know how to make them.

Still — Hussein, a very bad man who mistreated his country but who had not used WMD in almost a decade and who might not have had any significant stocks of WMD at all, vs. Osama Bin Laden, also a very bad man who would almost certainly use WMD the moment he got his hands on them. Hm.

If Bush had said “this war is going to make our lives more dangerous, but it’s a good thing to take out Saddam,” OK. Alas, that’s not what he said. He said we were going to be safer. I don’t think that turned out to be true.