MISSING TOURIST UPDATE: StrategyPage reports:

The 31 lost Europeans are now thought to be held by a group of Islamic rebels fearful of a government crackdown. The Europeans were grabbed for use as human shields. The Europeans are thought to be held outside the town of Illizi, 1,700 kilometers southeast of the capital.

There’s some weird stuff going on in the Saharan region, all across Africa. Someone should pay attention. Or perhaps someone already is, and that’s what’s prompting this behavior in response.

ANDREW SULLIVAN on the Galloway case: “When I first mentioned the possibility of a fifth column, I presumed it would be fueled by ideological fervor. I didn’t contemplate it could be fueled by the mighty dollar. You’ve got to love these Marxists, don’t you?”

IRAQ SANCTIONS WATCH: Tony Adragna’s on the ball, and he’s noticed an interesting slip-up by Kofi Annan.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why Rupert Murdoch has been outperformed by Matthew Hoy’s weblog.

Read this article, too.

And here’s a good story from NPR on the mass resignations at the formerly accommodationist Cuba Policy Foundation in response to Castro’s latest depredations.

It’s kind of lame when Rupert Murdoch is outperformed by NPR on something like this. Good God, there are even French protests over Castro’s actions, while Murdoch’s empire remains silent. How embarrassing is that? Bill O’Reilly, call your office!

UPDATE: A friend at Fox tells me that Brit Hume did cover this issue last night on “Special Report,” and that they want to send reporters but that Castro isn’t letting them into the country. I guess he doesn’t feel he can trust them the way he can trust CNN, whose reliability in such matters was so recently demonstrated in prewar Iraq.

THE TENNESSEE TAILGATE PARTY is kind of like the Carnival of the Vanities only, well, different. Check it out.

MORE LOOTING?

BERNADETTE Chirac, wife of the French president, Jacques Chirac, has been accused in court of illegally taking a 17th century rug from Paris’ city hall to the Elysée Palace.

The accusation was made by the Association of Jews Despoiled during the War which brought a lawsuit against Mrs Chirac, saying she illegally removed the rug from the city hall, where her husband was mayor, and took it with her when he became president.

The association said Mrs Chirac should face thousands of euros in fines. The organisation says the rug was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish family during the occupation of France during the Second World War.

Maybe we’d better get the 82d Airborne in there pronto and put a stop to this.

TACITUS IS BACK!

NOW ISN’T THIS INTERESTING: A Turkish special forces team caught by U.S. troops in Kurdistan.

The Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. “They did not come here with a pure heart,” says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville. “Their objective is to create an environment that can be used by Turkey to send a large peacekeeping force into Kirkuk.”

Is it just me, or does it seem like nobody in the region actually wants to see a free, prosperous Iraq?

(Via The Command Post).

JAY FITZGERALD REPORTS that the Christian Science Monitor is set to release a big story on anti-war MP and Iraq, er, “sympathizer” George Galloway. No fair asking how he obtained a copy early.

Josh Chafetz reports that Galloway probably can’t be charged with actual treason under British law. Sounds like Galloway had better hope Chafetz is right.

UPDATE: The story’s up now at this link:

BAGHDAD – A fresh set of documents uncovered in a Baghdad house used by Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay to hide top-secret files detail multimillion dollar payments to an outspoken British member of parliament, George Galloway.

Evidence of Mr. Galloway’s dealings with the regime were first revealed earlier this week by David Blair, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in London, who discovered documents in Iraq’s Foreign Ministry.

The Labour Party MP, who lambasted his party’s prime minister, Tony Blair, in parliamentary debates on the war earlier this year, has denied the allegations. He is now the focus of a preliminary investigation by British law-enforcement officials and is under intense scrutiny in the British press, where the story has been splashed across the front pages. . . .

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership’s strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq.

The Jan. 14, 2003, document, written on Republican Guard stationary with its Iraqi eagle and “Trust in Allah,” calls for the “Manager of the security department, in the name of President Saddam Hussein, to order a gratuity to be issued to Mr. George Galloway of British nationality in the amount of three million dollars only.”

The document states that the money is in return for “his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people….”

Read the whole, damning, thing. I’ll bet there are a lot of people worrying about what else will turn up in those Iraqi files.

And yeah, I guess these could turn out to be fakes. For Galloway’s sake they’d better be, and he’d better be able to prove it. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, here’s a Galloway overview from the New York Times, which offers a broad perspective though it isn’t as up to date as the CSM piece.

UPDATE: Well, Galloway must be guilty. Scott Ritter is defending him. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, but maybe this guy will vouch for him!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: And the Arab News is taking his side!

ONE MORE: Zach Barbera emails with the suggestion that someone match up Galloway’s travels to Iraq with the dates in these documents.

MICHAEL MOORE’S NEXT DOCUMENTARY. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

UPDATE: Personally, though, I favor spotlighting this. (Via NetMarcos).

THE FOX WEBSITE says that Tariq Aziz is now in U.S. custody. No story yet, just a banner.

UPDATE: Here’s a story.

ABBOTT, COSTELLO, AND SARS:

“There has been a humorous side, though. Mr Lastman, in his rage, mistakenly criticised the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC). A doctor, standing beside him during his speech, prompted him with: ‘WHO’. The Mayor repeated: ‘the CDC’. The doctor repeated: ‘WHO’ – trying to correct him. But he kept thinking it was a question. She eventually spelt out: ‘No, the World Health Organisation’. The Mayor said: ‘Yeah them too.’ “

Heh.

SPEAKING OF READY TO “ROOMBA” — Meryl Yourish got some porn spam aimed at women and has, er, Fisked it.

EUGENE VOLOKH IS READY TO ROOMBA: Actually, he’s Roomba-ing right now, and reporting on the results. I bought one of those automated vacuum-cleaners and returned it after a week. We have a lot of hardwood floors with pretty thick oriental rugs on them, and the Roomba seemed to have trouble with the transition. It was also pretty noisy. The result: you couldn’t leave it to clean in your absence, and it was no fun having it clean in your presence. I think they’ll eventually solve these problems, but this model didn’t do the job for me. It did seem to clean quite well in the spots it could get to.

LILEKS IS BACK, (at least, this link works for me) after what was apparently a domain-renewal problem.

I was afraid he was off having a beer with Salam Pax.

F.I.R.E., THE FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION is launching a massive assault on campus speech codes:

A civil liberties group has filed a lawsuit challenging the speech code at Pennsylvania’s Shippensburg University, the first move in what the group says will be an all-out assault on speech codes at public universities nationwide.

The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Harrisburg. It alleges that the school’s speech code violates students’ rights by, among other things, outlawing speech that is “inflammatory, demeaning or harmful toward others.”

“It is time for somebody to say to public colleges and universities that the First Amendment is the law of the land,” said Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and president of FIRE.

The codes, which FIRE said are in place at two-thirds of U.S. colleges, gained popularity in the 1980s and are intended to foster diversity and civil debate.

I suspect that external pressure over antiwar statements from faculty members will produce a new enthusiasm for the First Amendment and academic freedom at many campuses.

ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: Yesterday I posted an update to this post on that controversial NAS gun study, with an email from a then-insider who said that his proposals to add balance to the panel were sneered at. Well, though they were sneered at, he notes in a new email that I’ve added to the post that they were also followed up on later, something he hadn’t realized at the time he emailed me. That suggests a laudable degree of open-mindedness in deed, if not in word. (“In sneer?” Whatever).

OIL FOR FOOD: THE U.N.’S ENRON? No, I think it’s bigger than that:

The oil-for-food program is no ordinary relief effort. Not only does it involve astronomical amounts of money, it also operates with alarming secrecy. Intended to ease the human cost of economic sanctions by letting Iraq sell oil and use the profits for staples like milk and medicine, the program has morphed into big business. Since its inception, the program has overseen more than $100 billion in contracts for oil exports and relief imports combined. . . .

Initially, all contracts were to be approved by the Security Council. Nonetheless, the program facilitated a string of business deals tilted heavily toward Saddam Hussein’s preferred trading partners, like Russia, France and, to a lesser extent, Syria. About a year ago, in the name of expediency, Mr. Annan was given direct authority to sign off on all goods not itemized on a special watch list. Yet shipments with Mr. Annan’s go-ahead have included so-called relief items such as “boats” and boat “accessories” from France and “sport supplies” from Lebanon (sports in Iraq having been the domain of Saddam’s Hussein’s sadistic elder son, Uday). . . .

And then there is this menacing list of countries that supplied “detergent”: Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Sudan. Maybe all that multisourced soap was just a terrific bargain for doing the laundry. But there is no way for any independent parties — including the citizens of Iraq, whose money was actually spent on the goods — to know.

Maybe we’ll find out more, from those Iraqi documents.

THE FARMER WHO SHOT DOWN THE APACHE HELICOPTER? Turns out it was a hoax, according to the BBC:

“A large number of [Ba’ath] party members and security men came with me to investigate. They told me that it was an American Apache aircraft and made me stay with them until someone who they said was a senior official arrived. I didn’t know who he was.

“They asked me to say what you have heard on the TV satellite channels – that I shot down the plane with an old gun, a Brno.”

What? Lies from the Iraqi Information Ministry?

THOSE BOXES: Jim Miller has an interesting observation regarding the Telegraph’s document find.

DANIEL DREZNER IS WORRIED ABOUT AFGHANISTAN, and presents some reasons why other people ought to be, too.

HAS AL QAEDA BEEN BROKEN? That’s what this story suggests:

Analysts who track al Qaeda for the intelligence community believe that evidence is mounting that the terrorist organization may lack the command and control, the resources and coordination to conduct an operation of the same magnitude as 9/11. . . .

There is little question that the network has the capacity to conduct low-level operations involving one, or possibly two suicide bombers, but analysts are increasingly dubious that it can commit large scale, coordinated, high-impact attacks that would cause mass casualties such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Not everybody agrees with this analysis — and the story also says that Osama bin Laden is still alive and is communicating his displeasure to subordinates. I remain deeply skeptical that bin Laden remains alive and uncaptured, and it almost seems as if the U.S. government is going out of its way to tell people that he is. But hey, I’m just a guy with a blog, what do I know?

(Via Timatollah, who also asks this very penetrating question: “Sure there are and always will be new and remaining challenges, but does the Patriot Act II address any of them?”)

INTERESTED IN NANOTECHNOLOGY? Then read this. Larry Lessig will be there, and so will I.

UH-HUH: Now that journalists are doing it, it’s not so bad:

Whether it is called souvenir hunting or looting, bringing back items from a war is a time-honored practice. . . . Reporters also have a long tradition of carrying back mementos from overseas assignments.

Yeah, when reporters do it, it’s a time-honored tradition! But when it’s impoverished Iraqis claiming back a bit from the tyranny that has oppressed them for decades it’s anarchy!

MSNBC’S WILL FEMIA has more about the arrest of Iranian blogger and journalist Sina Motallebi. I wish they’d do a TV news story on it, too.