Export problems?

Don't worry -- just an oversight...

Spock takes on Wretchard's pessimism. I think he mostly comes out on top. But the next few years will be quite interesting...

Brother, can you spare a code? (Hat tip Glenn)

Progress seen near Iran. (Hat tip Glenn)

Analyzing the grant application.

The election on the rules of engagement.

Somehow, I forgot about my second Marxist indoctrination...

The Heinz 57?

In a surprising last-minute upset, all seven Democratic presidential hopefuls somehow lost the Democratic primaries Tuesday...

Most people who were abused are child abusers? WHOOPS!

What's going on in Iraq?

On not staying up late...

Unexpected celebrations at the FBI?

Only a handful?

If we do it, it rules! And a new German word ;)

On the intelligence of Iraqis and journalists... and Zarqawi goes to work.

The Second Conjecture Fulfilled

We will save our fingertips at the cost of delivering ourselves entire into the pit.

Not enough flies? Spin good news until you're dizzy with CNN and crew ...

Not to say there isn't bad news as well... (Hat tip Doug.)

Texans *do* play poker ;)

HUMOROUS INTERLUDE: The Cartoon Laws of Physics

A doom fisking and lots of discussion...

Reconsidering Intelligence

David Warren points out the sad truth about intelligence:

There is also too little appreciation of what e.g. the military historian John Keegan has been stressing in his recent journalism. Reliable intelligence has rarely been available to any power in the world's history. It is by messing in with sheer brute force that one soon finds what is going on. And this is the Bush administration's greatest success: messing in. They have not waited for an American or European city to go up in radioactive smoke before doing something.

No pederasty here ... just move along now...

They have learned nothing...

and they have forgotten nothing.

The analogy of the shell game distracting from the pick-pocket pretty well puts our current disastrous mess in context...

Now, even ElBaradei gets it...

This man can write: about T.J. Hooker and roman candle balls.

Wretchard Rocks

I continue to grow more impressed with Wretchard. His most recent entries on the Occidental roots of the clacker escape and where Einstein was mistaken (but not wrong) are works of compact beauty and insight.

A little humor ;)

And, yes, I've heard the one about the Spirit being willing but the flash is weak...

Melancholy net of doom?

Patronizing, 1 of N, the series...

They pretend to rule, and we pretend to obey.

Intel stupidity -- just as it always was...

You knew you were stupid all along... (Hat tip Keith)

You find neo-cons in the darndest places...

Did I just link to the Arab News?

Buds. Luckily, it wasn't toooooo obvious...

UPDATE: ABCNews weighs in...

You need a friendly drink ... and more reconsideration ...

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Unknown Unknowns Coming Into Focus -- Blinding Flash Countdown Begins

Wretchard pokes further into the giant ring:

The liberal sneering at the American failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq is like making fun of a man who, having been tested for diabetes, receives a negative result but is told that what he really has is cancer. The US rightly feared that rogue states were developing weapons of mass destruction but did not have the breadth of imagination to conceive of the extraordinary web of cooperation between Pakistan, North Korea, European arms dealers and the Arabian states, who contributing according to their abilities, solved the problem of the atomic bomb. We went looking for an Iraqi bomb and found an international one.

The race to prevent rogue nations from acquiring WMDs has already been lost, and the race to keep them from falling into private hands is all but. The most horrifying thing about David Kay's report is his finding that Saddam's weapons were never under his control at all, but in the actual keeping of his minions, who misled him at every turn. The componentry may now be in Syria, where, if Iraq is any guide, they are under even looser custody. If the Saudis have made no secret of their desire to buy nuclear weapons, it is only because they know that these are for sale. It is safe to predict that the next mass attack on America will involve fission weapon of Pakistani design with a 40Kt yield, charged with uranium purified by Malaysian manufactured centrifuges from a design originally developed by Urenco in the Netherlands and probably paid for by Saudi Arabia. The World Bomb.

BTW, even the U.N. stooge El Baradei has admitted in recent comments about how amazed he is at what has been uncovered via Wacky G's cave in...

Confused by sweat? This will help clear it up...

Breathless. I'd say more but I'm, well, what more can be said...

Perhaps having Libya chair the U.N. human rights commission wasn't enough. Perhaps Iran can chair the U.N.'s commission on feminism.

He Meant What He Said

Charles hits a home run posting this one on Hitler's second book. But this comment is just beautiful:

Better yet: read Churchill's multi-volume history of WW II.

Learn how decent people fail to stand up to Evil when there's a chance of stopping it before it gets going.

Learn how decent people don't really fight until it's almost too late.

Learn how real leaders who clearly see what's happening are demonized and accused of being extremists and fearmongerers.

Learn how the appeasers dropped the whole mess in Churchill's lap and cried "If you are so smart, you fix it!"

Bingo.

The threat of jihad. What's that? You didn't realize that Thailand wasn't an imperialist superpower? Shame on you for such obvious ignorance!

More on Bush the simpleton. Advised by the simpletons Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell and Cheney. UmmmHmmm.

Pollack strikes again...

Oh Kay, what happened? Meanwhile, Tenet remains director at CIA? Why? (Hat tip Glenn.)

New roadmaps in development?

Huge Ring, Part 2 of Infinity...

WaPo has the guts to run the story that explains the war:

Libya's quest for atomic weapons was aided by a sophisticated nuclear black market that offered weapons designs, real-time technical advice and thousands of sensitive parts -- some of them apparently manufactured in secret factories, according to diplomats and experts familiar with the probe of Libya's weapons program.

The scale of the black-market operation -- described by one expert as an "international supermarket" for nuclear parts -- exceeds anything seen before, and it was undetected by Western intelligence agencies until recent months, the officials said. The same operation also is believed to have aided Iran, they said.

The smuggling enterprise supplied Libya with thousands of parts for gas centrifuges -- machines that enrich uranium for nuclear weapons -- as well as machine tools for making additional centrifuges, the sources said. It also provided Libya with designs for making a nuclear bomb, officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed yesterday.

Investigators believe some of the centrifuge parts came from factories built expressly to manufacture nuclear components for the black market -- a development that would represent a new and problematic milestone in nuclear proliferation. U.S. and IAEA officials are investigating one possible manufacturing site in Malaysia, with the help of that country's government, well-placed officials said. The site has been visited by U.S. officials in the past two weeks, the sources said.

The identities of the people behind the smuggling operation have not been revealed, but investigators say the centrifuges provided to Libya are of the same design as machines used in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. In recent weeks, Pakistan's government has begun investigating whether its nuclear scientists sold sensitive information to Iran and possibly others.

No comment from the left's echo chambers yet. Will this story be buried do you think???

And luckily enough, there was no chance that Saddam would have take advantage of this when the sanctions came off. Absolutely no chance whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. LOL

You'll catch a cold! And other lunacy ;)

How 'bout those German prosecutors and their witnesses? After reading this piece, it's hard to tell who most wants to suppress these goings on -- the U.S. press or the Bush administration...

Plan 9 for Appeasing WMD

"I'll bet we haven't seen the last of these weirdies." NON-OPTIONAL READING I'M VERY SORRY TO INFORM YOU.

You might as well turn around and walk back into the gas chambers...

Were those the Winchester Silver Tips?

The odd couple and the huge ring.

EEEEAAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One Dem is clearly unhinged -- but we thankfully did get some evidence that not all the Iowa Dems are...

Clinton finds his niche?

WHOOPS!

Space may be waxed into waxing... (Hat tip Glenn.)

More liberal hawks.

Racing for help ;)

Move Along, Pay No Attention

"She is not going to be the last (attacker) because the march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only over the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe." -- Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar

The libs will have you believe that we should pay no attention -- and they will even match the rhetoric of the loony right and say that they're just a bunch of stupid Arabs who can't be changed. So pay no attention.

Reprise the holocaust survivor's quote about what he learned from his experience: "When a man says he wants to kill you ... you should believe him."

Hat tip Hawkins for the pointer to the Zahar quote.

As a long-time seafood lover, I find this more than a little interesting as an object lesson in public health demagogery.

Shouting fire? Nope. Nada. Not. But don't you worry, it's really John Ashcroft who's going to get us. Yessiree. Not.

Trouble.

On avoiding ugliness.

Plus ca change.

Did Joseph Wilson drink enough tea?

Four Hundred and Fifty Miles

Check out this little gem:

From: Paul Berman
To: Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Hitler, Stalin, Hussein
Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 1:21 PM PT
A final footnote on the arcane topic of Hitler and Stalin. I do think we have reason to keep these historical figures in mind. Saddam's Baath was founded in 1943 under a Nazi influence. (This ought to give the Germans a reason to ensure Baathism's final defeat in Iraq, even if Bush has treated Germany with arrogance.) Later on, Saddam added an influence of Stalin to the Baathist idea. Fred Halliday has pointed out that Saddam's birthplace in Tikrit is a mere 450 miles from Stalin's birthplace. (This might give the Russians a reason to help out, too.) Saddam has the unusual quality of being able to claim descent from Hitler and Stalin both. He is himself the Hitler-Stalin pact.

This arcane fact goes to the heart of our modern predicament—the reality that large political forces exist that have demonized entire countries and populations and have worked up a cult of mass killing. The war against these political forces has been bungled by the strategists in Washington. But, as George and other journalists have shown, many heroic people are doing everything they can do to undo those blunders on the ground in Iraq. What should liberals and Democrats do at home in the United States? Everything we can to help those people. Their success and our safety are one and the same.

Bush isn't perfect. Duh-oh! Anyone home? But Bush is NOT Hitler -- but Saddam DEFINITELY is the heir to BOTH Hitler and Stalin's throne. Period. Paragraph. End of Story.

Fanatic mistake. Nice, Michael. And those pesky facts need to be ignored as quick as we can...

The masquerade...

Wall Nuts Meet the NutsHell

Totten makes Iraq simpler:

The reason we are fighting this war is not because nineteen hijackers crashed into a burning building and a handful of others cheered, but because the entire Muslim world not only cheered, but then turned around, pointed at "The Jews" and said that it was their fault, denied they ever did it, denied that it ever could be them, screamed that they hated us anyway, danced in the streets, printed up posters about the heroes who did the deed all while denying they ever really did, and then increased their threats to tell us that if they didn't get more capitulations that it would happen yet again.

A RIGHT FOUND IN NO ISLAMIC CONTROLLED NATION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD

The ordinary is completely out of reach.

On the importance of bike paths. It turns out their relevance may have been underestimated ;)

No progress here. Move along. Nothing to see....

Fool Me Thrice

Read. This. Article.

UPDATE: And. This. Panel. Bubbles.

Friedman:

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Hitchens:

Pollack may have been led to overstate the immediate danger from WMD, but he did so on persuasive evidence that was supported by a long history of exorbitant behavior by the Baathists, and on a long history of culpable underreaction by Washington. (There was no comparable inquisition, as I recall, when the intelligence "community" failed to predict, and very nearly failed to report, the invasion of Kuwait. And the antiwar forces cling to their taunt on WMD because every other part of their propaganda and prediction has been utterly exploded.) That's if WMD ever were much of an argument in that quarter. I myself had a different experience from Pollack, in the run-up to the war. I had to debate, every week and sometimes every day, with anti-interventionists who said that Saddam's possession of WMD was a reason NOT to attack or attempt to depose him. I said that the threat was latent not blatant, and that the main "immediate" danger was an off-the-shelf purchase by Iraq from North Korea, and by the way I think I was right. But I was not an elected officeholder in a democratic government in a post-9/11 atmosphere. If I had been, I would certainly have decided to make the worst assumption about any report on Saddam's capacity for lethality, and I would have been operating at all times on the presumption of guilt. As a civilian, I would have wanted to criticize any Western government that did not err deliberately on this side.

Another way of phrasing this is to remember the line taken by the late Dr. David Kelly, sad subject of the Hutton inquiry in Britain. In an article written just before his death, this experienced inspector stated that you could have genuine inspections only by way of regime change. This essentially commonsensical view, which has been seconded by other veteran inspectors such as Rolf Ekeus and David Kay, takes account of the notorious Iraqi deception and concealment programs; the failure to comply at any point with U.N. resolutions; the sequestration of Iraqi scientists; and the preservation of secret funds, documents, and resources in Baghdad against the day when sanctions might be lifted and another bid for superpowerdom be made. Taken together with the secret bargaining (now exposed) with North Korea, this entitles us to speak of a Permanent Threat if not precisely an Imminent One. "Imminence" might have come when Saddam gave way to the Odai/Qusai regime: a prospect that need no longer concern us but that did not concern the antiwar forces even when it was a possibility.

Thus, we now can account more or less for Iraq's lunatic mixture of missing and undeclared weapons, and that in itself is an achievement. Moreover, the Iraqi economy and military are no longer at the disposal of a crime family with well-attested links to piracy and gangsterism, and that too is a gain. Dr. Howard Dean now tells that al-Qaida is in Iraq after all, but only because of President Bush. He is entitled as a private citizen to his touching belief that the connection began only a few months ago: One would not want a president to have been so insouciant if he had had to take the actual decision at the time, and once again I applaud the presumption of guilt, which was equally well-merited.

I love Hitchens writing not to speak of his content...

The perfect anti-Bush???

The attack of the retards.

Read "Wall Nuts" ...

... and get a very, very queasy feeling:

There's a quiet scandal at the heart of Sept. 11; one that for different reasons neither the government nor the privacy lobby really wants to talk about. It's this: For two and a half weeks before the attacks, the U.S. government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaida killers and that they were already in the United States. In fact, the two were living openly under their own names, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles, and to procure a California identity card.

Despite this paper trail, and despite having two and a half weeks to follow the scent, the FBI couldn't locate either man—at least not until Sept. 11, when they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. If we had found them, there is a real possibility that most or all of the hijackings would have been prevented. The two shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, who flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who flew into the South Tower. They were linked to most of the other hijackers as well. So August 2001 offered our last chance to foil the attacks. And if we want to stop the next attack, we need to know what went wrong in August 2001. Despite all the resources of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, we did not find two known terrorists living openly. How could we have failed so badly in such a simple, desperate task?

We couldn't find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001 because we had imposed too many rules designed to protect against privacy abuses that were mainly theoretical. We missed our best chance to save the lives of 3,000 Americans because we spent more effort and imagination guarding against these theoretical privacy abuses than against terrorism.

I feel some responsibility for sending the government down that road.

In August 2001, the New York FBI intelligence agent looking for al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi didn't have the computer access needed to do the job alone. He requested help from the bureau's criminal investigators and was turned down. Acting on legal advice, FBI headquarters had refused to involve its criminal agents. In an e-mail to the New York agent, headquarters staff said: "If al-Midhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel[ligence] agent. A criminal agent CAN NOT be present at the interview. This case, in its entirety, is based on intel[ligence]. If at such time as information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up criminal investigation."

In a reply message, the New York agent protested the ban on using law enforcement resources for intelligence investigations in eerily prescient terms: "[S]ome day someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama Bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.' "

It breaks my heart to read this exchange. That "wall"—between intelligence and law enforcement—was put in place to protect against a hypothetical risk to civil liberties that might arise if domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence missions were allowed to mix. It was a post-Watergate fix meant to protect Americans, not kill them. In fact, in 1994, after I left my job as general counsel to the National Security Agency, I argued that the wall should be left in place because I accepted the broad assumption that foreign intelligence-gathering tolerates a degree of intrusiveness, harshness, and deceit that Americans do not want applied against themselves. I recognized at the time that these privacy risks were just abstract worries, but I accepted the conventional wisdom: "However theoretical the risks to civil liberties may be, they cannot be ignored." I foresaw many practical problems as well if the wall came down, and I argued for an approach that "preserves, perhaps even raises, the wall between the two communities."

I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks. In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable. In 2000 and 2001, the FBI office that handled al-Qaida wiretaps in the United States was thrown into turmoil because of the heights to which the wall had been raised. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the body that oversees national security wiretaps, had ordered strict procedures to ensure that such wiretaps were not contaminated by law enforcement purposes. And when those procedures were not followed strictly, the court barred an FBI agent from the court because his affidavits did not fully list all contacts with law enforcement. This mushroomed into a privacy scandal that set the stage for 9/11.

In the spring and summer of 2001, with al-Qaida's preparations growing even more intense, the turmoil grew so bad that national security wiretaps were allowed to lapse—something that had never happened before. It isn't clear what intelligence we missed, but the loss of those wiretaps was treated as less troubling than the privacy scandal that now hung over the antiterrorism effort. The lesson was not lost on the rest of the bureau. According to a declassified Joint Intelligence Committee report on Sept. 11, "FBI personnel involved in FISA matters feared the fate of the agent who had been barred and began to avoid even the most pedestrian contact with personnel in criminal components of the Bureau or DOJ because it could result in intensive scrutiny by the Justice Department office that reviewed national security wiretaps and the FISA Court." [Emphasis added.]

So is Ashcroft a Nazi? Or are you the one who's actually uninformed and should be ashamed of yourself?

And this story isn't all over the front pages exactly why? I'm sure you have a perfectly good explanation that doesn't include the mainstream press being completely uninterested in the truth ...

ANOTHER CLASSIC JUST GOT ADDED OVER TO THE RIGHT. I QUOTED A LARGE PART OF THE ARTICLE BUT THAT DOESN'T EXCUSE YOU FROM READING THE WHOLE THING MULTIPLE TIMES LIKE I HAVE...

UPDATE: I don't think I linked to this -- rather relevant n'set pas? I'll give away the punchline: "You got some of us, but you didn't get all of us."

altermondialistes???

An update on the "so-called free world" and where the truth is...

More on the "if they can bury whole MIG fighters" so we have a hard time finding them problem. If this one pans out, I can predict the reaction now: these were just "lost" from all the stuff he used in the Iranian war and weren't an "imminent threat". Never mind that if you have so many WMD that you misplace them there just might be a problem worth noticing? Duh-oh!

That H.R. 4655 has turned out to be pretty darned inconvenient, hasn't it?

French dhimmi watch update: you know that French jetliner that went down in Egypt?

Everyone will understand ...

but by then it will be too late. UPDATE: You could have clicked thru from Totten below but I wasn't willing to take the risk of having you miss it anymore...

Needless to say, this just got added to the classics page. INCREDIBLY POWERFUL AND AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ. 'NUFF SAID.

Are you sincere?

No problem here -- just move along now, look away, no problem, it's definitely not a war, just a "police action" you see...

Susan Block, foaming rocket scientist.

How Hugh Shelton developed a taste for vodka.

... or excreted by ... and you won't be able to stop laughing.

Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?

(Hat tip Darren.)

There are no Americans in Baghdad?

My boys are fascinated with dinosaurs. This may have been how they left us -- and how we may leave us. Mine the links -- very thought provoking...

A Kuru-like Plague?

Yeooouch! Check out Austin Bay:

Mad Howard's frantic, peptic rise to top dog in the Democratic pack exhibits similar symptoms, from his "unsteady" (retracted) crack about rebel flags to his hideous conspiratorial "hint" that President Bush knew in advance of 9-11, to his demand we deal with the Soviet Union (it's Russia now, Howard), to his huff that America is no safer with Saddam Hussein incarcerated, followed by his startling revelation that Job is his favorite book in the New Testament.

Imagine the monthlong jihad Maureen Dowd and other smirky national press pooh-bahs would have waged had Bush done a similar job on Job. [Emphasis added.]

Definitely a RTWT! Smiles abound...

WHOOPS? More Clinton lies?

We must explore the universe in order to reject it!

This is just outstanding -- just as Bush prepares to announce a return to space! Lileks rocks... Read it -- you need a good laugh.

Who are the Slovaks again?

Splitters! (Hat tip Glenn.)

Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness . .

The Wall: Prelude.

It's finally bad enough that even Benny Morris is becoming conflicted.

Gurgling and gassing in the Baath tub...

The Bush tax cut made him do it...

I knew the day would come. I now have incontrovertible proof that Dennis Kucinich is smarter than everybody else.

Nuanced Dominoes

A nice job critiquing the Bush administration on Iraq by Ken Pollack. This is what reasoned critique based on historical perspective and unblinkered analysis looks like. I can't resist quoting his swing at the leftist's race-based arguments about democracy being impossible in the MidEast because they're just stupid Arabs:

It's not a matter of dominoes falling, it's something somewhat different. For the first time ever Arabs will be able to look at Iraq and see an Arab democracy. Often when we say democracy, Arabs hear Britney Spears, sex on TV, same-sex marriages and hip-hugger blue jeans. They know they don't want any of that. But once you get that first democracy formed in a region, it has a remarkable transformative effect. This is what the East Asian historians say about Japan. Fifteen, twenty years after the occupation of Japan was over, when there was a functional democracy in Japan, it changed a lot of perceptions throughout East Asia. For the first time East Asians could look at Japan and say "That's the kind of state that I could imagine living in."

Before Japan, East Asians thought about democracy the same way that Arabs do now. They thought of it as being an American or a European thing. Those were the only examples they had, and they knew they didn't want that. But then Japan came along and proved that you could build a democracy that was very different from a Western-style democracy. To me, Japan is more dissimilar from our form of democracy than Hosni Mubarak's Egypt is from our democracy. But it is a functional democracy that is consistent with Japan's values, traditions and history. And if we get it right in Iraq, for the first time there will be a democratic Arab state with a free-market economic system that will be consistent with Arab values, traditions and history.

He also says a number of critical things but does so in a level-headed and insightful way (Pollack served under Clinton BTW.) When I see one of the Dem candidates actually paying attention to someone like Pollack, then we'll have a race for the White House. Right now Lieberman is the only one with a clue. Otherwise the Dems are toast this go-round...