WILL JOHN KERRY DEMAND KOFI’S RESIGNATION?

The human rights organization slammed the United Nations and NATO for not doing more to punish its people for contributing to what has become a flourishing sex industry in the Balkan country.

Since 1999, when international peacekeepers entered the country after negotiating an end to the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia, the number of institutions where women and girls are being exploited has mushroomed from 18 to 200 in 2003, according to the report. Girls as young as 11 have been lured under false pretenses from places like Moldova, the Ukraine and Bulgaria to work in the sex trade.

Then there’s this:

Eritrea broadcast a statement on Thursday alleging a string of offences committed by Unmee, including housing criminals, paedophilia, making pornography and even using the national currency as toilet paper.

An Unmee report last June quoted Eritrean women as saying Irish peacekeepers on the mission had used prostitutes as young as 15.

The Eritrean government said: “The fact that Unmee has to date not taken any concrete actions and shown no co-operation to correct its modus operandi and clean up its activities, exposes to grave danger the peace and stability of the people and government of Eritrea, as well as the security and stability of our region.”

(And don’t forget this report and this one.) No doubt Charles Rangel will be outraged.

UPDATE: James Somers has good advice for Kerry:

It would, I think, be a very clever political move for Kerry to deliver an address skewering Kofi and the U.N. on the Oil for Food scandal. In fact, Karl Rove would probably wet his pants if Kerry did so. People talk about Kerry needing a “Sister Souljah” moment. This would do it. It would give him credibility with the broad swath of Americans who feel that the Bush Administration has been incompetent in handling Iraq, but find Kerry’s platitudes about “rejoining the international community” and “bringing the U.N. into Iraq” to be so naive and Euro-centric as to suggest that he will not put America’s interests above those of other nations. Put another way, it would play well in Peoria. And the best part, from the Kerry campaign’s view, is that the Administration can’t respond in kind, because it needs to suck up to the U.N. so as to get whatever help it can in stabilizing Iraq sufficiently to take it off the table as a political liability.

Interesting.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Chair Michael K. Young will join Senator Susan M. Collins and Representative Dan Burton at an on-the-record press conference on Capitol Hill on May 13 to announce the decision of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Government Reform Committee to request that the General Accounting office (GAO) undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. oversight of Saudi support for an ideology promoting violence and intolerance globally. In conducting the study, the GAO will seek information from relevant U.S. government agencies and will consult with outside experts on Saudi promotion of religious extremism, including the USCIRF. The findings of the study will be presented in a public report, although some of the information obtained may be classified.

Stay tuned. I have a pretty good idea what they’ll find, but this is still worth doing. (Emph. added).

RAMESH PONNURU on the panic of the hawks:

How much the impact of Abu Ghraib hurts the mission in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region, remains to be seen, but there are some reasons for thinking that we may be overestimating that impact. The chief source of justified alarm that I can see is the panic itself: the possibility that it will lead to dumb moves in Washington.

Yes, I’m not sure why a lot of people people are suddenly panicking either, except perhaps that months of slanted news may have had a cumulative effect, somehow breaking down people’s resistance. Things actually seem to be going better than anyone would have expected a month ago: As Andrew Sullivan notes, the isolation of Sadr looks to have been handled rather shrewdly, as is the military response. And the turnover of sovereignty, as Patrick Belton notes below, seems to be going well, too.

It’s a war, people, which means good news and bad news — and no single piece of news tends to mean nearly as much as it seems to at the moment.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston says he’s not depressed by what’s going on abroad, but by treasonous opportunism at home.

PATRICK BELTON:

JUST IN THE OFF CHANCE THAT THE EVENT doesn’t attract much attention from the print media, sovereignty passed today from the CPA to Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This makes the Foreign Ministry the eighth Iraqi ministry to quietly, and successfully, assume autonomy in the hands of the Iraqi

So noted.

TED KENNEDY, “OXYGEN THIEF:” The Kerry Campaign certainly won’t like hearing Kennedy in anti-Kerry commercials, as seems likely.

GEN-X IN THE GREEN ZONE: An interesting report.

HOWARD STERN IS DISSING CATHY SEIPP: Knowing her as I do, that strikes me as unwise.

PORN PHOTOS PRESENTED AS FROM IRAQ AT THE BOSTON GLOBE? That’s what Bryan Preston is reporting. (Message to Globe editors: Read Fleshbot and you won’t be so easily fooled — tell the boss it’s work-related!) Then there’s this fakery:

Frauds Try to Exploit Iraq Abuse Scandal

Fallujah native Abdul-Qader Abdul-Rahman al-Ani, his left elbow wrapped in bandages, his right forearm bound in a cast, recounted how he was beaten by soldiers who picked him up last month. The soldiers tied him and two others arrested with him to a tree and sodomized them one after the other, he told journalists.

“I ask President Bush,” he said. “Does he agree with this?”

As Ani, 47, repeated his story, he was interrupted by Jabber al-Okaili, a member of one of the human rights groups that organized the gathering. “He’s lying,” al-Okaili shouted. “He’s a liar!”

Al-Ani was rushed to an office, where al-Okaili and others unwound the bandage on his left arm and found the elbow unscarred and healthy.

(Via Tim Blair, who notes that German TV shows the footage without the revealing-the-fake part.) You know, if people keep this stuff up, the Abu Ghraib incidents aren’t going to be taken as seriously as they deserve.

UPDATE: LT Smash has thoughts on perspective.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Kennedy offers background and context on the Globe fiasco. Meanwhile Boston reader Marybeth Hayes emails:

The Boston Globe has really sunk lower than low. Not only does the article (the reporter covered a news conference held by a Boston city coucilor) describe the photographs “showing US soldiers raping Iraqi women,” THERE’S A PICTURE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS !!!

Unbelievable. The picture shows a local activist and the city councilor holding up a posterboard with the photos. They handed out photographs to reporters. The Globe will definitely hear from many angry readers about those ridiculous photos!!

The photos are not on the Globe’s website, but they’re prominently placed in the newspaper.

I don’t know parents manage to explain this stuff to their kids. Yuckkk!!!

Kennedy makes the photos sound less graphic, and less prominent, than Hayes does. Not having seen the print edition, I can’t offer an opinion, except that this is clearly an embarrassment for the Globe regardless. Though as Kennedy notes, it’s a bigger embarrassment for the Boston politician, Chuck Turner, who was distributing the photos. No doubt the Globe will be making that point, too.

I will say that, in general, I’ve found the Globe’s reporting that I’ve followed to be trustworthy and, especially compared to the New York Times, un-slanted.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here, courtesy of Drudge, is a scan of the Globe print edition. It’s not work safe, which I think answers the question above. And the depiction is clear enough that I don’t think the Globe deserves to be let off the hook — this wasn’t accidental.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES IS UP, with blog posts from all sorts of people you may not be reading. Check it out — you may find some new blogs you’ll want to read regularly.

BELMONT CLUB IS STRESSING THE IMPORTANCE OF FACTS OVER EMOTION:

And the final fact is this. The only exit from war’s inhumanity is through the doorway of victory. For while it may be mitigated, controlled and reduced to a certain extent fundamentally “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it”, though victory can end it. While it continues, as many in the Left who long for a 21st century Vietnam hope, it will unleash unpredictable forces which no one can control. Those who delighted in discovering the photographs at Abu Ghraib little imagined Nick Berg’s video. And while we can safely grant Andrew Sullivan’s plea and publish both, for reasons the media imagine are laudable, it is what comes next that I am afraid of.

Me, too. Read the whole thing. And read this post by Donald Sensing, too.

UPDATE: The Guardian is surveying Arab reaction to the Nick Berg murder:

“This shows how base and vile those who wear the robe of Islam have become,” said Abdullah Sahar, a political scientist at Kuwait University.

The video was released on the internet yesterday, but appeared too late for columnists in the Middle East to comment. But many Arabs said today that the grisly execution, attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group, surpassed the US military’s abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, which has been the top story for the past 10 days in the Middle East.

“We were winning international sympathy because of what happened at Abu Ghraib, but they come and waste it all,” Mr Sahar said of the militants responsible.

Read the whole thing.

THIS EMAIL FROM A SOLDIER IN IRAQ is worth reading. I won’t excerpt it — just go read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Another letter here.

TAXPROF HAS MORE ON THE TERESA HEINZ KERRY TAX RETURN STORY and notes that the New York Times misses something:

Today’s New York Times gets a crucial bit of the story wrong: it says that “in the past 30 years, all major-party presidential and vice-presidential nominees have made their tax returns public. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Kerry have done so this year.” Not entirely true. President Bush and Vice-President Cheney themselves broke with this 30-year tradition and released only partial returns in prior years as Ms. Heinz Kerry proposes doing this year. Bush and Cheney reversed course in 2003 and released their full returns. One has to wonder if they suddenly became fans of increased transparanecy or instead did so in order to take advantage of Ms. Heinz Kerry’s unwillingness to do so (abetted by incomplete reports like that in today’s New York Times).

You’d think that the Kerry campaign would be on top of this.

A CONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSE TO MURDER, from The Command Post.

LILEKS has thoughts on the West and Islam. “But where are the rallies and marches outside the Saudi embassies demanding an end to funding extremism?”

BLOWBACK: Now these folks have done a Kerry/Rumsfeld radio commercial. It’ll be airing soon.

UPDATE: More here. And there’s this: “Running against Dick Cheney wasn’t going too well for John Kerry, so now he’s reduced to running against Donald Rumsfeld.” I don’t think this will work.

THE NATIONAL DEBATE is proclaiming a double standard on graphic images among American media: Publishing images that might inflame Arabs against Americans is responsible journalism. So is not publishing images that might inflame Americans against Arabs. And, TND notes, “media squeamishness has now extended beyond images to the written word.”

Well, not everywhere. But there does seem to be a double standard here.

UPDATE: Howard Kurtz thinks the networks broadcast too much of the Berg video:

Suddenly, everything was put into perspective.

(Did the networks have to play the gruesome video, except for the final act, thus handing the terrorists the propaganda victory they wanted? A still shot, a snippet, and a description wouldn’t have been enough?)

If this was an old-fashioned propaganda war, this sickening decapitation tape would never have been released, since it trumps a story that was making the United States look very bad. But these killers don’t care about that, or apparently about human life itself. So they’ve succeeded in making the American abuses–for which the president has apologized, and which is being investigated, and courts-martial convened–small by comparison.

Yes. Bush’s greatest asset is the tendency of his enemies to overplay their hands at crucial junctures.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some people are angry. More thoughts here.

HOMELAND SECURITY: My TechCentralStation column looks at problems, and solutions.

MICKEY KAUS sides with Jonah Goldberg in the Goldberg v. Kurtz photo debate.

UPDATE: But some people are really upset:

Berg’s execution is “a particularly gruesome and graphic way” for terrorists to “get their point across that they will kill any American they can find,” says Gregory Gause, director of Middle East studies at the University of Vermont. “My fear is that this awful act will lend credence to people in this country who say that whatever we do, others do worse.”

Yeah, we wouldn’t want anyone to get that idea.

TOM MAGUIRE is fact-checking Ted Kennedy, with predictable, but nonetheless interesting, results.

A MISERABLE FAILURE IN PRIORITY-SETTING by the Bush Administration:

At a time when federal officials should focus obsessively on crushing terrorists, they are expanding the disastrous war on drugs into an even more pointless war on substances. From old bogeymen like marijuana to new “hazards” like Oxycontin, Washington busybodies are knocking themselves out combating compounds that, by themselves, do not threaten public safety.

Don’t these people realize that there’s a war on? A real one?

UPDATE: Steve Sturm says that I’m too hard on the Bush Administration here. I don’t think so, but you can make up your own mind.

MATTHEW HOY answers Aaron Brown.

HUGH HEWITT is giving airtime to Ted Kennedy and wonders why the Big Media aren’t doing the same thing. Well, he doesn’t wonder, exactly. He also has comments for the L.A. Times’ John Carroll, and some other media folks.

MORE GRAPHIC IMAGES FROM IRAQ, just released to the public after being kept under wraps for nearly a year.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE is running a Taguba Spin Watch with some interesting results.

UPDATE: It’s the case of the missing headlines! “If you have any information as to the whereabouts of these headlines, please contact the ombudsmen of the media outlets who are missing them. Do not attempt to apprehend the copy editors yourself, as they are highly volatile, and subject to wild hormonal swings when “in heat” over a story.”

THE X-PRIZE COMPETITION will launch from New Mexico:

SANTA FE (AP) — New Mexico has been selected to host a competition to achieve the first privately funded manned spaceflight, Gov. Bill Richardson announced Monday.

The governor said the state won over Florida, California and Oklahoma to host the X Prize Cup. The contest calls for launching a manned craft to 62.5 miles above the Earth, which is generally considered the edge of space, twice within two weeks. The craft must be able to carry three people.

The X Prize competition will give $10 million to the first company or person to successfully launch the craft.

Launches are expected early this summer.

UPDATE: This is the X-Prize Cup, which is different from the Ansari X-Prize. It’s all explained in this story by Leonard David.