THE NEW YORK TIMES profiles Wafa Sultan:

Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

Of course, that they’re afraid to say it proves her point about barbarism. Bless her for realizing — as so many of our leaders do not — that appeasing the barbarians is a mistake.

And there’s irony, if not novelty, in the headline: “For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats.”

A TENNESSEE STATE SENATOR wants to ban violent videogames.

Doesn’t he realize that would endanger national security?

MAX BOOT does more reporting from Iraq.

BARCEPUNDIT OBSERVES the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings.

MARS UPDATE: This is good news:

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, on a two-year mission to study the Martian atmosphere and surface, and search for water, pulled off a dangerous and tricky maneuver known as “orbit insertion” and began circling the red planet Friday.

I’ve just been reading Boundary, a Mars-exploration novel by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor. (Not bad, not up to Flint’s usual standards though). Any Mars news is good for someone with a Mars novel, I suppose, but I wonder if the new discoveries will undercut their story. I’m pretty sure that more stories about Mars have been rendered scientifically obsolete than just about any other variety of science fiction.

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC IS DEAD, and Austin Bay has thoughts.

MATT S. has a report, with pictures, from the pro-Danish free speech rally in San Francisco today.

I hope that the Danes are noticing.

And not just the Danes.

ZARQAWI WAS HERE: Michael Totten reports from Iraq. “The PUK’s Minister of the Interior ordered 20 heavily armed Peshmerga soldiers to go with me to the borderland mountain village of Biara. For years the village was occupied by Ansar Al Islam, the Kurdish-Arab-Persian branch of Al Qaeda in Northern Iraq. Biara wasn’t the only village seized by the Taliban of Mesopotamia, but it was perhaps the most important. It is there that the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had his last stand in Iraqi Kurdistan before the 2003 US-led invasion forced him out.”

And don’t miss the postscript.

EUGENE VOLOKH: ” One shocking thing about the Mohammed cartoon controversy is how tame many of the cartoons are — and therefore just how much the cartoons’ critics are demanding by arguing that the cartoons ought not be published, or even ought to be outlawed.”

A SECRET DOCKET IN D.C. COURTS?

A prominent news media group is reporting that about 18 percent of the federal criminal docket in the District of Columbia is shielded from the public through a dual or “secret” docketing system.

The 11th and 2nd U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals have ruled that secret docketing is unconstitutional. But the system has remained unchallenged in the nation’s capital.

In a study released this week, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says that, over a five-year period, D.C. defendants in more than 450 out of 2,600 criminal cases were indicted, tried, prosecuted and sentenced to jail in complete secrecy.

“I’m just flabbergasted with the numbers,” says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the reporters committee, which is based in Arlington, Va.

On the civil side, only 65 cases out of around 12,700 were found to have been removed from the docket. Many of those cases are presumed to be citizen whistle-blower suits, which are filed under seal for 60 days while the government investigates whether it should intervene as a plaintiff. Such filings are kept secret to make sure the defendant company is not alerted.

Dalglish and others suspect the undocketed criminal cases mainly involve drugs and gangs, with the government seeking to protect cooperating witnesses and negotiate plea deals.

Demonstrating once again that the War on Terror is less of a threat to civil liberties and justice than the War on Drugs. Or at least, if Bush were doing the same thing in the War on Terror, it would be a huge national scandal, while it gets very little attention since it’s just part of the Drug War.

DANNY GLOVER looks at Al Jazeera’s outreach to bloggers. My invitation must have been lost in the mail . . . .

CATHY SEIPP on Big Love:

I don’t think the show glamorizes or even sanitizes polygamy, except that of course actual polygamists never look as fit and attractive as the Big Love family. When you see the real-life versions on talk shows, they all seem dumpy, pasty-faced and on the dole.

I’ve noticed that, too.

HEH.

UPDATE: And heh, again.

IN THE MAIL: Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu’s Who Controls the Internet? : Illusions of a Borderless World. It looks very interesting, and certainly very timely. I look forward to reading it.

BILL FRIST: “Yesterday, I filed the Online Freedom of Speech Act as an amendment to the lobbying reform bill.”

He continues:

From the earliest days of our republic, freedom of speech and freedom of the press – be they anonymous pamphlets, celebrated essays, or local newspapers – were understood to be fundamental to the practice and defense of liberty.

Without the ability to convey ideas, debate, dispute, and persuade, we may never have fought for and achieved our independence.

Ordinary citizens – farmers, ministers, local shop owners – published and circulated their views, often anonymously, to challenge the conventional order, and call their fellow citizens to action.

Indeed, as Boston University journalism professor Chris Daly points out, “What we think of as reporting – the pursuit, on a full time basis of verifiable facts and verbatim quotations – was not a significant part of journalism in the time of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine… In historical terms, today’s bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers.”

And, today, it’s bloggers whom we now have to protect.

There are some who, out of fear or shortsightedness, wish to restrict the ability of our modern day-Thomas Paines to express political views on the World Wide Web.

They seek to monitor and regulate political speech under the guise of “campaign finance reform.” They argue that unfettered political expression on the Internet is dangerous, especially during the highly charged, election season.

Needless to say, I stand firmly against these efforts to hamstring the Internet and squarely with the champions of free speech – whether that expression takes place in the actual, or virtual, town square.

Free speech is the core of our First Amendment. And the Internet represents the most participatory form of mass speech in human history.

Read the whole thing. I’m gratified to see such support for free speech.

MORE BAD PRESS FOR C.A.I.R., which gets better press than it deserves usually. This, for example, is kind of embarrassing: “Perhaps the most obvious problem with CAIR is the fact that at least five of its employees and board members have been arrested, convicted, deported, or otherwise linked to terrorism-related charges and activities.”

A right-wing group similarly linked to, say, white-supremacist criminals, would never hear the end of it. And it would never, ever, be mentioned in the media without that fact being brought up.

STEVEN GROOPMAN writes that HPV vaccine should be mandatory:

Since the disease is so common, many fail to bring it up with their partners. Those who refrain from intercourse can still get HPV from other sexual activities. And even those who remain fully abstinent until marriage could contract it from their spouses. In short, HPV is a significant public health threat. It therefore isn’t enough to back the vaccine’s “availability”; one has to support the strongest possible steps to inoculate the entire population.

Ramesh Ponnuru says he “makes a strong case.” I agree. It’s appalling that some people would oppose this simply because they’re afraid that it might encourage people to have more sex.

VIDEO GAMES CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE:

The U.S. Army has discovered a remote control gun turret that works, and cannot get enough of them. The army wants over 9,000 CROWS (common remotely operated weapon stations), but is only getting 15 a month. There should be about a thousand CROWS in service by the end of the year. . . .

But there’s another reason, not often talked about, for the success of CROWS. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger.

Some earlier thoughts on this phenomenon here.

XENI JARDIN has more on U.S. firms’ complicity in Internet censorship. “One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship.”

ACCORDING TO A NEW HARRIS POLL, the military is the most trusted institution in American life, followed up by small business. Bringing up the rear:

law firms at 10 percent, Congress at 10 percent, organized labor at 12 percent, major companies at 13 percent and the press at 14 percent.

Anchoring the middle was organized religion at 30 percent, the White House at 25 percent, public schools at 22, the courts and justice system at 21, and television news at 19.

Make of it what you will.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire emails that the poll question actually asks how much “confidence” people have in the institutions, and suggests that’s not quite the same as trust. In context, I think it is pretty much the same, but Tom’s quibbles are always worth noting.

THERE WILL BE A RALLY IN SUPPORT OF FREE SPEECH outside the Danish Consulate in San Francisco today. Follow the link for details.

MARC COOPER:

How quickly America is, apparently, going to hell. Not more than a month or so ago we were a “plantation.” Now, it seems, we’re on the verge of becoming a “police state.”

I could use this bandwidth now to muse over the Dubai Doo Doo. Or over the prolongation of the Patriot Act. Or a million other worthy subjects. But, instead, I want to focus –yes—on Hillary.

After what she said the other day – that some GOP immigration proposals would create a “police state” – I simply have no choice. Too outrageous. Can’t let it pass. Someone, somewhere has to take five minutes to underscore the gross and rather macabre hypocrisy that’s involved here.

So let me start with the lede: While our current immigration mess has bi-partisan roots, it was precisely the Clinton administration that is most responsible for our contemporary border nightmares.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN EDWARDS has a new blog. (Via the Hotline Blog.)

WATER ON ENCELADUS?

The surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is composed mostly of water ice and there may be a cold ocean beneath that holds some form of life, according to studies of images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last year.

“Any life that existed could not be luxuriant and would have to deal with low temperatures, feeble metabolic energy and perhaps a severe chemical environment,” said Jeffrey Kargel of the hydrology and water resources department at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Nevertheless we cannot discount the possibility that Enceladus might be life’s distant outpost.”

Images show a plume of gases and water spouting from the moon’s southern pole, similar to the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park in the western U.S., said Andrew Ingersoll, a member of the Cassini imaging team and an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology. . . .

Other moons, such as Jupiter’s Europa, have oceans covered by ice more than a kilometer thick. On Enceladus, pockets of liquid water may be as close as 10 meters below the surface, Ingersoll said.

The underground reservoirs may hold some extreme form of life, Kargel said.

Very cool.

THE ONLINE FREEDOM ACT, H.R. 1606, WAS PASSED OUT of the House Administration Committee today and is headed to the House floor. That’s a good thing. Free speech is for all of us.