TOM MAGUIRE salutes The New York Times.
Archive for 2007
February 22, 2007
DO UNIONS improve productivity?
Now, “If you talk to these sheiks, they’ll tell you that they’re in no hurry to see the Americans leave al-Anbar,” he said.
“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping … put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they’re still living in poverty.”
Heh. Indeed.
TERROR CHARGES:
Zubair and Khaleed Ahmed came to the conference and met with a man who promised to train them to kill American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.
Zubair Ahmed, 27, and Khaleed Ahmed, 26, were charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts against Americans overseas. They were arrested Wednesday in Chicago and are scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court there Monday.
Hard to know how much to make of this, but stay tuned.
THE MAD PONY BLOG is back, after a long absence. I hadn’t noticed, but that’s why I have readers.
A FACEBOOK STALKER: Now that’s just pathetic.
“BECLOWNED” — shockingly, not a neologism.
An Alexandria court sentenced former law student Abdel Karim Suleiman for eight articles he wrote in 2004. He had been in custody since November last year over the polemical outpourings which included one claiming that “al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the most prominent seats of Sunni Muslim learning, was promoting extreme ideas”.
Another ill-advised musing – headlined The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it – reportedly “accused Muslims of savagery during clashes between Muslims and Christians in Alexandria in 2005”.
Regarding Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Suleiman “likened him to the dictatorial pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt”.
Well, this will put paid to that idea! Jeez.
IN THE MAIL: Another Ball of Whacks. Actually, two. I gave one to my secretary, who reported that it produced hours of amusement at home.
Why did I get sent another? I don’t know. But they’re fun.
A ONE-MAN COUNTERPROTEST in San Diego.
SHEILA JACKSON LEE is boosting Hugo Chavez.
GOOGLE TARGETS MICROSOFT:
Google Apps Premier Edition, to be unveiled Thursday, features online e-mail, calendaring, messaging and talk applications as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet. The launch follows Google’s introduction of a similar suite aimed at consumers last August. The new Premier Edition, however, offers enhancements aimed squarely at corporate environments.
I’ve used Google Documents quite a bit, and it’s not bad – if it just supported footnoting, it would be awesome. I’ve used the spreadsheet program a couple of times, too, and it seems fine. If I were a company, though, I think I’d worry about having all my important documents on someone else’s servers.
TONY BLAIR ON IRAQ:
Critics of the Iraq war have painted Tony Blair’s decision to draw down the British troop levels as a repudiation of the war and an end to the Coalition in Iraq. Democrats wasted no time in pointing out the supposed incongruity of a British withdrawal in the south and an American surge in the west and center of Iraq. However, the man who made the decision to draw down the British contingent said today that he would send them back if the situation warranted higher troop levels.
Read the whole thing.
HOWARD KURTZ HAS A BIG ROUNDUP on the Obama / Hillary / Geffen / MoDo dustup. Excerpt:
Man, if this keeps up, Hillary and Barack will both be bloody long before they get to Iowa. The MSM can’t get enough.
In the words of Derek Smalls, Hillary and Obama are two distinct types of visionaries. Obama is like fire. Hillary is like ice. And Edwards, come to think of it, is kind of like lukewarm water. . . .
And Ann Althouse has further thoughts.
The 9/11 Commission relied on information derived from two captured al Qaeda perpetrators for much of its picture of the conspiracy leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The interrogations of these men–Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or “KSM,” who masterminded the plot and got Osama bin Laden to finance it, and Ramzi Binalshibh, who acted as KSM’s liaison with lead suicide terrorist Mohamed Atta–were performed by the CIA at secret locations.
KSM claimed that he left almost all the tactical details to Atta, and therefore could not say where Atta went, or whom he visited, in the final months of the plot. Binalshibh claimed he was Atta’s only contact with al Qaeda during this period and that, other than himself, Atta never met with anyone on his trips abroad in 2001.
If these accounts are true, it follows that the conspiracy was a contained one, and the 9/11 Commission could preclude outside collaborators, including the participation of foreign countries. Thus, although the CIA was unable to trace the origin of the money supplied to Atta, the commission deemed this gap “of little practical significance” since the CIA’s prisoners established that no one else was involved in the plot. Thus, too, when the CIA found that Iran had “apparently facilitated” the travel of eight of the 9/11 muscle hijackers in flights to and from Afghanistan (by not putting the required stamps on their passports, and by having a top Hezbollah official accompany their flights in and out of Iran), the commission could nevertheless rule out the possibility Iran or Hezbollah were “aware of the planning.” The basis for this conclusion was the information provided by KSM and Binalshibh.
But what if these CIA prisoners–who after all are diehard jihadists–were lying? . . .
Yet if Mr. Garzon is correct about the Spanish connection to 9/11, it is not only the effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation of its al Qaeda prisoners that is called into question. The information from Binalshibh, KSM and other detainees was used to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw, and those gaps concerned the contacts the 9/11 conspirators might have had with others wishing to harm America. By saying that no one else was involved–not in Spain, Iran, Hezbollah, Malaysia, Iraq, the Czech Republic or Pakistan–these detainees allowed the 9/11 Commission to complete its picture of al Qaeda as a solitary entity.
Yet to come to its conclusion on this most fundamental issue, the commission was prohibited from seeing any of the detainees whose accounts it relied on. Nor was it allowed even to question the CIA interrogators to determine the way that information was obtained. The commission’s joint chairmen themselves later acknowledged that they “had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information.” So when Judge Garzon comes up with evidence that runs counter to detainees’ claims, cracks begin to emerge in the entire picture.
Read the whole thing.
A PROTEST GOES AWRY in Australia.
TARGETING ELLEN TAUSCHER: Thomas Barnett is not impressed with the latest “netroots” effort: “I swore I’d never see that sort of dogmatic nonsense on my side like I saw it emerge–almost insanely–on the Right during the Clinton years (what I assumed would be the never-again-scaled heights of sputtering irrational rage), but I was wrong.” (Bumped).
UNARMED AND DANGEROUS: A look at the increase in gun crime since Britain’s gun ban. (Yes, I’m skeptical of this analysis.)
Meanwhile, in Arizona, a different sort of gun law:
Arizonans are on the verge of finally getting some legal protection against having their guns seized by the government. Sen. Jay Tibshraeny, R-Chandler, said representatives of Gov. Janet Napolitano and the National Rifle Association have agreed to a change in state law that would restrict the power of any governor to confiscate weapons and ammunition in time of emergency.
These laws seem to be springing up in a lot of places.
HMM. THIS SOUNDS LIKE BAD NEWS: “A leading economist this week warned that the world’s two leading carbon trading schemes are failing to deliver the expected benefits due to a collapse in the price of carbon credits – and the situation is likely to get far worse before it gets better.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to George Washington.
MARC COOPER REPORTS from the Democratic candidates’ debate in Nevada. Presidential debates already? It’s going to be a lonnnggg couple of years. . . .
But Cooper reports that John Edwards isn’t worried about “candidate fatigue.”
DOUBLE STANDARDS at Duke.
UPDATE: More from LaShawn Barber.
ILYA SOMIN HAS THOUGHTS on property rights in space.
Plus, a look at plans for a return to the Moon.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Why did a majority of Democratic senators — such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, and Chuck Schumer — vote to authorize a war with Iraq on Oct. 11, 2002? And why is this war now supposedly George Bush’s misfortune and not theirs?”