MORE LOOTING:

The decision to make the cafeterias into “no pay zones” spread through the 40-acre complex like wildfire. Soon, the hungry patrons came running. “It was chaos, wild, something out of a war scene,” said one Aramark executive who was present. “They took everything, even the silverware,” she said. Another witness from U.N. security said the cafeteria was “stripped bare.” And another told TIME that the cafeteria raid was “unbelievable, crowds of people just taking everything in sight; they stripped the place bare.” And yet another astonished witness said that “chickens, turkeys, souffles, casseroles all went out the door (unpaid).”

The mob then moved on to the Viennese Café, a popular snack bar in the U.N.’s conference room facility. It was also stripped bare. The takers included some well-known diplomats who finished off the raid with free drinks at the lounge for delegates. When asked how much liquor was lifted from the U.N. bar, one U.S. diplomat responded: “I stopped counting the bottles.” He then excused himself and headed towards the men’s room.

An Aramark executive estimated the food “removed” from the U.N.’s main cafeteria at between $7,000 and $9,000 not including the staff restaurant, the Viennese Café or the Delegate’s Bar. The value of the missing silverware has yet to be estimated.

Obviously, the problem is that there weren’t enough U.S. Marines to maintain order.

ROGER SIMON HAS SOME THOUGHTS on how to deal with Iraqi war criminals.

HOMELAND SECURITY: Here’s a guy who was never charged with a crime, but who lost his job because of a call from law enforcement telling his employer that he was on a Homeland Security memo naming suspicious persons.

Who will speak out against this resurgence of McCarthyism?

Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent John Lang, who was assigned as a threat analyst to the Department of Homeland Security, saw the memo and decided making note of the information was not enough. He called the gun shop owner and told him about the memo concerning his employee. Wynn was fired.

Wynn, who has been mostly unemployed since he was laid off from Lucent Technologies in late 2001, did not know why he lost his job until last week when he was told by a reporter. He said he has never advocated violence against the police or government officials.

He was angry when he learned why he was fired. He said he “was done plain dirty and the system is still trying to set me up in order to make their blunders look as though they have some semblance of truth.”

Funny that we haven’t heard more about this case, while we’ve heard so many cries of “McCarthyism” when all that was involved was criticism of Tim Robbins.

You don’t think it’s all political, do you?

STEVEN DEN BESTE HAS THOUGHTS on network effects, blogrolls, and Rolls-Royces.

I DON’T REALLY HAVE MUCH TO SAY about this plagiarism scandal at the New York Times. In general, I’m slower to call things plagiarism than some people, but this seems to be a classic case. I’ll just note that this sort of thing happens both in the blogosphere, and in Big Media, which at any rate is evidence that having editors isn’t any guarantee that it won’t happen.

UPDATE: Susanna Cornett and Laurence Simon blame affirmative action. Well, maybe — but I seem to recall seeing a post somewhere to the effect that Johnny Apple had an even higher percentage of corrections. So maybe the problem goes deeper.

THE ROAD OF THE BONES: David Carr reports.

EVERYBODY’S LOOKING FOR PROBLEMS IN IRAQ, but what might things be like if the U.N. were in charge? Hmm, let’s see:

Despite the arrival of UN peacekeepers, there are new reports of tribal killings in northeastern Congo. Uganda reports a surge of refugees entering the Ugandan district of Bundibugyo (DRC border area). One source says Lendu tribal warriors attacked a refugee group near the Semliki River, and killed 60 to 100 civilians. One Ugandan official as reported that 10,000 refugees are inside the DRC, just across the border from the Ugandan town of Paidha (West Nile province).

Funny how these killings aren’t getting as much attention.

BAD REPORTING IN BAGHDAD: Jonathan Foreman reports that most reporters there are missing the story:

There are frequent small demonstrations in the blocks outside the Palestine and Sheraton hotels–partly because that is where the press corps is congregated, but also because it’s an area that many Baath party officials fled to after the war began. Anyone who assumes that the atmosphere of that downtown area is in any way representative of the city would be gravely mistaken. However, many reporters have chosen to do just that rather than venture further out to places where they would have seen that far more typical and frequent “demonstrations” involve hundreds or even thousands of Iraqis gathering to cheer U.S. troops. Admittedly, some of those crowds include people begging for money, desperate for aid, or just curious about these strange-looking foreigners. “Most children here have never seen a foreigner” one Iraqi civilian explained to me, “that is why they are so excited.” Another told me with a smile, “Everyone here wanted to go to America; now America has come here!”

Then there’s this:

To an amazing degree, the Baghdad-based press corps avoids writing about or filming the friendly dealings between U.S. forces here and the local population–most likely because to do so would require them to report the extravagant expressions of gratitude that accompany every such encounter. Instead you read story after story about the supposed fury of Baghdadis at the Americans for allowing the breakdown of law and order in their city.

Well, I’ve met hundreds of Iraqis as I accompanied army patrols all over the city during the past two weeks and I’ve never encountered any such fury (even in areas that were formerly controlled by the Marines, who as the premier warrior force were never expected to carry out peacekeeping or policing functions). There is understandable frustration about the continuing failure of the Americans to get the water supply and the electricity turned back on, though the ubiquity of generators indicates that the latter was always a problem. And there are appeals for more protection (difficult to provide with only 12,000 troops in a city of 6 million that has not been placed under strict martial law). But there is no fury.

Given that a large proportion of the city’s poorest residents have taken part in looting the Baathist elite’s ministries, homes, and institutions, that should tell you something about the sources preferred by the denizens of the Palestine Hotel (the preferred home of the press corps). Indeed it’s striking that while many of the troops I’ve accompanied find themselves feeling some sympathy for the inhabitants of “Typhoid Alley” and other destitute neighborhoods and their attempts to obtain fans, furniture, TVs, etc., the press corps often seems solidly on the side of those who grew fat under the Saddam regime. (That said, imagine the press hysteria that would have greeted a decision by U.S. troops to use deadly force against the looters and defend the property of the city’s elite.) Even in the wealthiest neighborhoods–places like the Mansoor district, where you still see intact pictures of Saddam Hussein–people seem to be a lot more pro-American than you could ever imagine from reading the wires.

Foreman names names and, in some cases, pretty much calls some big-time correspondents liars. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I’m watching CNN’s Rym Brahimi, who’s going on about the difficulties Iraqis are facing getting passports and drivers’ licenses. Drivers’ licenses?

ANOTHER UPDATE: By the end of her report, Brahimi actually got to some real complaints about water, etc. But her tone was, frankly, hysterical: astonishingly high-pitched and breathless in her delivery, and saying things that are entirely at odds with what Foreman reports above. Who’s right? I can’t know firsthand, of course, but CNN’s track record in Iraq doesn’t exactly build confidence.

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING LIKE DR. JOSH MARSHALL, I have to wonder “What the Hell is CNN doing flacking for Mark Geragos?” I’ve had the TV on here in the palatial InstaSuite at the hotel, and they keep mentioning that he’s representing Scott Peterson.

So what? That’s not news. Certainly not this kind of news. Is CNN pulling an Eason Jordan in exchange for access?

Back later. In the meantime, read the many Iranian updates over at Jeff Jarvis’s blog.

WELL, I ACTUALLY DID VISIT THE WHITE HOUSE IN 1974, but I don’t remember anyone taking this picture. But I was there with the National Spelling Bee, so I guess I was just too hyped for the competition to notice. . . .

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON writes about the future of Europe.

WHEN IRAQIS RIOT, it’s supposed to be a sign that the United States is blowing it, and doesn’t know how to operate in that part of the world.

The alternative explanation, of course, is that it’s the critics who don’t understand how things tend to work out in that part of the world:

BINGOL, Turkey, May 2 — Security forces clashed with earthquake victims protesting the government’s relief response today, but an uneasy quiet hung over a flattened boarding school on the outskirts of this regional capital as rescuers continued poring through the rubble for surviving students.

Gunfire filled the air outside the governor’s office as heavily armed troops tried to disperse rampaging protesters, upset at what they said was inadequate assistance for quake-affected residents.

Maybe the Turks just don’t have enough troops. As for the notion that Iraqi Shiites are turning against the United States, Amir Taheri begs to differ:

Throughout Arba’in, small bands of militants, some freshly arrived from Iran, were posted at the entrance of streets leading to the two main shrines. They carried placards and posters calling for an Islamic republic and shouted anti-American slogans. But it soon became clear that few pilgrims were prepared to join them.

All the pilgrims that this reporter could talk to expressed their “gratitude and appreciation” to the US and its British allies for having freed them from the most brutal regime Iraq had seen since its creation in 1921.

Needless to say, however, most television cameras were focused on the small number of militants who had something “hot” – that is to say, anti-American – to say.

After days of talking to Shiites in Karbala and Najaf, it is clear that there is virtually no undercurrent of anti-Americanism in the heartland of Iraqi Shiaism. Even some clerics who have just returned from exile in Iran were keen to advertise their goodwill towards the US. All that, however, could quickly change.

That last warning is something we need to take to heart, of course, but it’s hardly a harbinger of disaster, or a sign of bungling. Meanwhile, both Hossein Derakshan and Charles Paul Freund argue that a Khomeinist Iraq isn’t in the cards.

OKAY, SO BLOGGING WAS LIGHT ALL DAY: My flights — Knoxville to lovely Minneapolis, Minneapolis to San Jose — were both comfy and on time, with minimal security hassle. As luck would have it, the weather in Minneapolis was better than the weather is in California at the moment. But air travel does seem to be getting its act together. That may just be because fewer people are flying — neither plane was close to full — or it may be that they’ve moved up the learning curve. Either way, I’m grateful.

BLOGGING WILL BE LIGHT FOR THE MORNING: As this ungodly hour demonstrates, I’m catching an early flight for the West Coast, and the Foresight Institute’s nanotechnology conference. I’m taking the laptop, but sadly inflight blogging isn’t yet feasible.

Scroll down as several posts have been updated. And go read Lileks, whose enthusiasm for the Macintosh is so crazed that he doesn’t mind traumatizing small children while in the throes of ecstatically worshipping his machine god. (Am I trolling? You betcha! And boy are people snapping at the bait.)

SURPRISE:

The two British suicide bombers who blew up a seafront bar in Tel Aviv, killing three people, had posed earlier as peace activists, acting as “human shields” for Palestinians, sources in the Gaza Strip said yesterday. . . .

A Western pro-Palestinian activist said the two later took part in a protest march in Rafah to commemorate Rachel Corrie, an American “human shield” killed by an Israeli bulldozer last March.

At least the story says “pro-Palestinian activist” instead of the manifestly-untrue “peace activist.” And the Israelis have noticed:

Israel will from now on bar pro-Palestinian activists from entering the country and will try to expel at least some of the dozens of activists who are already here, according a new plan drafted by the Israel Defense Forces and the foreign and defense ministries.

Most of the activists, who come from Europe, Canada and the United States, belong to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

Yes, and they’re not “peace” activists, they’re just on the other side.

SURPRISE:

RAGEH OMAAR, the BBC’s star correspondent in Baghdad during the Iraq war, developed a close and potentially embarrassing relationship with the director of Iraq’s Ministry of Information, who was responsible for controlling foreign correspondents.

Documents retrieved by The Times from the ministry show that Mr Omaar wrote effusive letters to Uday al-Taie, who was close to Saddam Hussein and once expelled from France for spying. . . .

Mr Omaar, who was nicknamed the “Scud Stud” for his vivid reports, declined to comment on the letters, but the BBC said that they showed him behaving in an entirely professional manner.

“These are the kind of letters that a journalist sends when he is building up a relationship with an individual who controls the access to allow him to report,” a spokesman said. “He is asking for something and doing so in an entirely professional manner.”

So there.

CLAYTON CRAMER POINTS to a story of FBI Crime Lab incompetence in the McVeigh case, and notes that it makes him skeptical of the death penalty.

LOOTING UPDATE: Ken Layne explains math to the New York Times. But what’s 169,975 out of 170,000 among friends?

UPDATE: Rand Simberg suggests that the ever-shrinking toll from the Baghdad looting incident resembles the bogus Jenin “massacre.”

JUST WATCHED BUSH’S SPEECH FROM THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN: I’m not crazy about it. The speech was actually good, stressing the changes in warfare that technology has brought (“the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent” was a good line, and so was “men and women need liberty like they need food and air”), and the setting was fine: he was telling these guys what they’ve been fighting for, which is a President’s job. Overall, a better-than-average performance.

The jet-pilot arrival, on the other hand, rang false. The whole leader-who-flies-jets thing seems, somehow, Third World to me. People say that it’ll make great campaign footage in 2004, but I actually doubt it — or at least, I think it will backfire if they do too much of this. The President is commander-in-chief, but he’s a civilian leader, and Americans want him to be one.

UPDATE: A lot of email in response to this post already. Most readers seem to disagree with me:

The jet landing didn’t ring hollow at all to me. On the contrary: if a 33-year-old man may be permitted to use this phrase, it was cool.

Why? Well, why not? There was nothing false about it, because a carrier landing is no walk in the park. But I don’t think it was a stunt. Bush is a piolt, and I’m sure he loved getting behind the controls for a brief moment – it was an expression of who Bush is, not a PR stunt.

Well, that’s not my impression. I’ll be interested to see how it shakes out. Donald Sensing has a transcript of the speech.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, Jeff Jarvis thinks I’m wrong, too. Well, hell, maybe I am. But I still didn’t like the jet-pilot thing. But reader Gavin Kirk says:

I read your analysis of Bush landing on the U.S.S Lincoln opining it was “too third world”. I think you miss what I saw. I saw a guy having some fun after what must have been 3 hellish months of tension as he navigated our country through war. My initial reaction was not all that different from yours, but as I saw him eagerly walk the flight deck shaking hands and having his photo taken I saw a smile on him that I had not seen for a while. That made me feel good.

I’m getting a lot of mail like this, for whatever it’s worth. And another reader suggests that it was sending a message:

The landing thing was supposed to be third world, its for Al Jazeera and Co. Bush is remembering to talk to the rest of the world here, its his bit for those that don’t dig the nuances of 1st world foreign policy. Quick translation: I’m the “swingingest” alpha male on the block, all that stuff about American cowardice by Al Queda, et al was as accurate as Bagdad Bob’s press conferences.

Interesting take.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Sheesh, everybody so far thinks I’m wrong about this. I still say that this is right out, though.

MORE: Well, Andrew Sullivan agrees. So does N.Z. Bear. Bill Quick, though, thinks I’ve got things backwards.

YET MORE: Now Sullivan says he’s getting hatemail over agreeing with me from people who call him anti-Bush and anti-American. I didn’t really get any email that took quite that harsh a tone (the closest was “you don’t get it because you’re a professor,” which is dumb, but not terribly mean).

Nick Denton emails that this is the kind of thing you can expect from a country that elects ex-generals as President. But that’s actually my point: when Eisenhower was President, he made it very clear that he was an ex-General. I don’t object to Bush’s taking a ride on a jet, which I’d do too if I could. And I’m sure that the troops love it. It’s the blurring of the lines that bothers me here. The President is the civilian commander-in-chief of the military, not a part of the military himself. (Clinton, you may recall, tried to argue otherwise in order to use the Soldiers and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act to stall off the Paula Jones suit, and was quite properly laughed out of court.) Yeah, it’s not a big deal — but it will be if he does it very often.

CINCINNATI IS DROPPING ITS LAWSUIT against gun manufacturers:

Lawyer Stanley M. Chesley told Cincinnati City Council on Tuesday that he could not justify moving forward with the city’s 4-year-old lawsuit against the gun industry, dealing a major disappointment to gun control advocates across the nation.

Cincinnati’s lawsuit accused 25 gun makers, distributors and trade groups of marketing guns in such a way that they were destined for children and criminals.

The case, City of Cincinnati v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., was at the forefront of about a dozen similar lawsuits from across the country. It survived an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, several City Council resolutions to kill it, and even a taxpayer attempt to block the lawsuit.

But Tuesday, Chesley told City Council that it should concede defeat and drop the case.

Interesting.

DANIEL DREZNER says that the war on terror is going well, but that things are deteriorating in Afghanistan.

StrategyPage has a more optimistic assessment of the Afghanistan situation. I don’t know which assessment is right, but I suspect that Afghanistan has been a relatively low priority, given the holding-action treatment in light of the run-up to war in Iraq. That’s okay, I guess, but now that the war in Iraq’s over, we can’t be giving it the holding-action treatment again on the basis that now we’re busy with the reconstruction of Iraq.

WHY TECHNOLOGY IS A LIFESAVER:

Thank goodness that SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) broke out in the Genomics Age. The malady has already infected 5,000 people and killed 327 since it broke out in China last year. A decade ago, scientists would likely not have a clue yet as to what was causing the deadly disease.

We may be lucky in another way. SARS is serious enough to get attention, but, as best I can tell, probably not a major plague. It will thus encourage people to get public-health systems (and information sharing) in better shape, something that we’ll need if, or more likely when, something worse comes along.

Austin Bay has some thoughts on how the tendency of dictatorships (which China, as some are remembering, is) to hide bad news has cost the region, and the world, dearly. Ralph Peters has some thoughts on that, too.

ERIC MCERLAIN PUBLISHES a letter from Iraq. Interesting stuff.

STILL MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: VIA EUGENE VOLOKH, I discover that The University of Tennessee is violating the First Amendment. Looks like it to me, too.

What can I say, I’m embarrassed. I don’t hire the administrators across the street, and I can’t fire ’em, either. But I think that this will produce more bad publicity for the University, which is the opposite, presumably of what they intend. And, more importantly, it’s just plain wrong for a public university to punish people for speech that it dislikes.

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE LOOKS AT GERMAN PREDICTIONS regarding the war and concludes that in hindsight they look like an anti-American feeding frenzy:

POLNot so long ago, prominent German politicians were outdoing each other forecasting worst-case scenarios for the Iraq conflict. The predictions ranged from “millions of victims of U.S. rockets” to “millions of Iraqi refugees desperately fleeing the country.”

While few are willing yet to eat their words publicly, the media is having a field day with the wildly inaccurate pronouncements.

“They were all wrong with their horror scenarios,” snorted the Bildzeitung, Germany’s largest nationally distributed newspaper. Under the heading “The embarrassing predictions on the war by our politicians,” the paper recently listed some of the most erroneous ones.

On March 21, Social Democratic parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, one of the country’s most influential leaders, told a Cologne newspaper, “Millions of people in Baghdad will be victims of bombs and rockets.”

Environmental Minister Juergen Trittin of the Green Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s coalition, grandly declared on Feb. 26, “The German government possesses various studies expecting up to 200,000 victims of military operations in Iraq. And it is feared that another 200,000 persons will die from indirect results of the war.”

Greens Co-chair Angelike Beer predicted that “U.S. aggression in Iraq will result in the explosion of the Near and Middle East.”

The ZDF TV network, considered one of the prime practitioners of anti- American war coverage, is also playing the postwar blame game.

“All the so-called experts were wide of the mark with their forecasts,” noted Theo Koll, moderator of the prime time news feature show “Frontel.” Among the footage shown to prove his point was Development Minister Heidemarie Wielczorek-Zeul, a Social Democrat, emotionally predicting on a talk show that “3 million Iraqi refugees will be flooding neighboring countries.” . . .

Television’s role in molding public opinion was underscored by a recent survey of youngsters at a Meunster high school who had taken part in anti- American peace marches.

None knew where Iraq is located geographically. Nor did any of them know anything about Hussein’s brutal regime. All said they got their information about “the American barbarity” from German media reports — chiefly those of ARD and ZDF.

One of Germany’s great literary figures, author-playwright Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 73, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “The great compassion shown by the media for the relatively few victims of the Iraq war stands in bizarre contrast to its lack of interest for the victims of 30 other and often far crueler wars currently being fought all over the world.”

And we’re always hearing how ignorant Americans are. Heh. On the other hand, while they drastically overestimated the consequences of the war to the United States and Iraq, they drastically underestimated the hostility among Americans that their behavior caused. And I think they still do.